MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-08-11 13:30:58+00:00
>I’m I reading this right that the settlement is just “don’t do that again”? Is it typical in antitrust settlements to not have sort of monetary punishment?

The better question is how strong of a case the government had. Your question implies Greystar was indisputably guilty and the government's case would be a slam dunk, but that's not readily apparent, given the novel concept of "algorithmic price fixing".

>Like if this were a class action settlement, they would have to pay back some amount of money to renters.

This settlement doesn't preclude class action lawsuits on the part of tenants.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-11 13:31:08+00:00
FPS locking is not the right solution (although it is an easy one). Your animations are the ones that should be animated on twos, or threes, or fours, or whatever feels right for your game. That applies to animations, particles, etc. This leaves you the option to let other things run as fast as needed to feel smooth (for example: I do like the leaves falling slowly, the book opening, etc. Camera panning & moving would feel infinitely better at a 60 FPS.)

Unfortunately, playing a game is very different experience to watching a movie: take the example of Ghost of Tsushima, that despite having a Kurosawa mode, still accepts 60FPS and over.
by fxwin | 2025-08-11 13:31:18+00:00
> People claimed all the basics were done, that we "only" needed to scale.

This claim is fundamentally different from what you quoted.

> But who's prepping for unlimited energy today?

It's about tradoffs: It costs almost nothing to switch to PQC methods, but i can't see a way to "prep for unlimited energy" that doesn't come with huge cost/time-waste in the case that doesn't happen
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-11 13:31:24+00:00
And don’t forget that once the engineers are done, a nice thick layer of analytics junk is slathered on, plus whatever layer that allows marketing/sales to make arbitrary changes at will without code. By the time you’re done with all that even the best engineered web app has become a behemoth.

There’s are a few cases where the engineering side isn’t helping things though, like how the Spotify desktop app loads a full redundant set of JS dependencies for each pane since they’re each independent iframes, which they do so the teams responsible for the panes never have to interact.
by RHSeeger | 2025-08-11 13:31:39+00:00
> Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.

That's overly harsh. I use Duolingo for Japanese because

- I thought it would be fun to learn a little about Japanese. And I do learn some, and it is fun.

- I wanted to "understand" a bit of what was being said during subtitled anime I watch. This was _partially_ successful. I understand some words, and I notice some things like "oh, that was a question", and sometimes notice when what was said doesn't match the text. I get enough out of it that it adds to my enjoyment

So, clearly there's a group of people out there that are there to gain some knowledge out of it, and _not_ to rack up some kind of score (and feel superior).
by theturtle | 2025-08-11 13:31:42+00:00
"We will never sell your information!"

Yeah, but whoever buys you or executes your bankruptcy probably will. Much better for you to never have it in the first place.

"You will change your mind, but I won't change mine."

Why I give crap data to everyone unless there is absolutely no other way.

Facebook thinks I live in a ghost town in Utah, and I'm 121 years old.

Also why most of my accounts that want a street address contain an address-line-2 like "JOEBLOW.COM SOLD OUR DATA," so they can't hide.

Piss in the well, y'all.
by garganzol | 2025-08-11 13:32:17+00:00
Every language tries to implement the best in class memory set/search primitives. Maybe we should move them to something called libos, where they will be implemented by every host OS? Then, OS manufacturers can supply libos.so/libos.dll/libos.dylib as part of the official OS distributions.

If the wheels get reinvented again and again, it means that they should be readily available.
by RajT88 | 2025-08-11 13:32:21+00:00
Totally agree. I did a lot of work with an eCom site (a big one; you probably see their brand name daily) for about 5 years and latency mattered a lot to them. Any extra latency was deadly, and they freaked out about latency going up by 100ms.

So then you load their site - unbelievable garbage, tons of pop-up ads for promos, video frames all over the place, high res graphics, megabytes of javascript.

The backend just as messy, with dozens and dozens of layers that made the latency budget by the time you reached the database backend super slim. Think: orders dropping when database request latency hit 10ms at the 99th percentile.

Insanity.
by moomin | 2025-08-11 13:32:34+00:00
Some anecdata for you: I used to work for a price comparison website. We had pretty good metrics on how long pages took to load and what the drop-off from page to page of the process was. It will shock you not in the least that milliseconds translates into percentages lost pretty quickly. Speed up your sign up process and that is money in the bank.
by xscott | 2025-08-11 13:32:37+00:00
How come it's just an "artist" and not an "artist capitalist"? And isn't this "rent seeking" behavior on the part of the artist?

It would be nice if the world used clinical terms to describe what's actually going on instead of using emotional terms to equate "copying" to "stealing" or "pirating", but people would rather confuse the issue than argue it logically in good faith.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-11 13:32:38+00:00
“conservatively $435,000,000 per year”

But how much would it cost to have a few senior engineers fix it, and ensure zero mistakes or missing functionality while doing it?

Even if I were CTO of Kroger… nope. I’m not doing it. I’m not spending months of engineer effort to save $435K, unless there’s proof of greater savings.

EDIT: Yes, I terribly misread that this is million, not thousand, which makes a lot more sense even though I do not believe, even for a second, this actually costs Kroger $435M a year.
by skocznymroczny | 2025-08-11 13:32:39+00:00
Never was much into the winter challenge, although I remember the copy I had also had the broken ice skating segment. I remember that downhill worked, not sure about the others.

Was a big fan of the summer one though. I could get gold medal in every discipline on highest difficulty level except for the horse. I could never figure out the horse one. I think I managed to beat it only once, ever.
by ddingus | 2025-08-11 13:32:43+00:00
A while back, I watched a YT video of someone making a large electret. Reading this makes me really want to make one for myself.

An electret is an item that presents a permanent static charge. It is like a permanent magnet. Has an enduring charge polarity.

The only use of an electret I know of is the electret microphone. And those use a very small electret.

In the video, the author made a large one. Hockey puck sized. He used some type of nylon. (I think I remember it right...)
by jacquesm | 2025-08-11 13:32:47+00:00
If my car's engine dies (which at some point it probably will do, after all, these things don't live forever) I'll just rebuild it again. It's got 200K on it and a relatively fresh engine (40K) so I think I'm good for a long time to come but buying a modern vehicle isn't even on the menu for me. If I really want malware I'll disable my adblocker, I really don't need it in my car.
by Balgair | 2025-08-11 13:32:49+00:00
Aside:

This is during the 'bicycle craze' of the 1890s. The safety bicycle was gaining in popularity at that time. A 'safety' bicycle is what you and I think of as a bicycle with two wheels that are the same size and a chain drive. Bicycles before that would refer to penny-farthings and chainless devices too - that's how ubiquitous the 'safety' bicycle became, we don't even know of the other versions as bicycles today.

Part of that bicycle craze in much of the world was the buildout of paved roads. Before this craze it was all cobblestones and dirt roads, with a little bit of paved ones. Due to many people wanting a smoother ride for their bicycle, many governments began paving roads. Granted it wasn't really well paved, that would take the invention of cars, but towns and cities would pave at all.

And lastly, this safety bicycle craze would lead to the invention of flight. Orville and Wilber Wright were kinda hipster bicycle mechanics that stuck around and became vintage bicycle mechanics (to borrow current terms). With their shop and light weight minded mechanical knowledge they applied themselves to the problem of flight. And wouldn't you know it, they solved it. I also want to shout out Charlie Taylor [0] here. He was the guy who made the engine for the Wright Flyer. He was one of these guys, coming out of the bicycle craze, that you'd find in the Gilded age that could, like, invent anything. Reading history in the period, these geniuses were seemingly everywhere. I don't know what was going on then, but there was something about that time where you get mechanical geniuses in every little town all over the globe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Taylor_(mechanic)
by Apreche | 2025-08-11 13:33:17+00:00
Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line.

If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy looking nobody says “no, that will make the website slow.”

The engineers likely do complain it will make the website slow. I have been that engineer. But they are never in a position of power to overrule other parts of the company. This is especially true if it’s not a tech company. Web performance does now show up on the earnings report.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-08-11 13:33:31+00:00
Tourism is good, and the area is renowned for trail running, gravel biking (UCI World Series), mountain biking and paragliding.

The viaduct has made some villages on the plateaus much more accessible. Small industrial businesses have set up shop.

The only thing that sucks is that the little railway line will probably never reopen.
by jerf | 2025-08-11 13:34:15+00:00
It may seem absurd that the apps is costing Kroger that much but my family's experience backs it up.

In the post-COVID era, my wife has become quite accustomed to digital shopping. We actually live closer to a Meijer, which is basically the Midwest's answer to Walmart, except it's decades older. (You may be able to thank Meijer for Super Walmarts; it's Meijer that proved out the concept of attaching a grocery store to a general superstore for Walmart, and it gave Walmart some difficulty penetrating in to the Midwest so they had to add it to compete.) Of course COVID caused a big app rush and at first everybody's app was pretty crappy, so we just stuck with the closest one.

Over time, Meijer's app slowed down pretty badly, so my wife ended up switching to Kroger. I saw a lot of Kroger bags. One of the biggest problems with the Meijer was that trying to add a second of any item was a synchronous round-trip to a rather busy and slow server, so goodness help you if you wanted, say, 6 bananas. Going from 1 to 6 could literally take 30 seconds on the worst days. And that was just the worst issue, the whole app was generally slow and prone to failure.

But somewhere around two years ago, clearly someone at Meijer got the performance religion and cleaned up their app and website. I still wouldn't call it blazing fast, but I would call it acceptable by modern standards, and it blew away the Kroger app of the time... again, not because it was pushing 120fps with super low latency, but just because it was fairly reasonable to use. Adding five more bananas is now just tapping the button five times, and while I can still kind of see the async requests chasing each other a bit, it pretty much always ends up converging on the correct number in a couple of seconds. So my wife switched back.

I don't know what Kroger's current performance is, because now that we don't have a problem we haven't been seeking solutions. So they've lost thousands of dollars of business over the years to Meijer from us.

An anecdote, of course, but I suspect a common one.

I put this out there in the hope that it will push more people into caring a bit more about performance. I think there's a fairly large range where "normal people" will use a sluggish app or website, and wander away, and if you do manage to rope them into a marketing survey they won't necessarily say it's because it's slow, you'll get other rationalizations, because it isn't a fully-conscious reaction and realization for them... but nevertheless, you'll have a very, very leaky funnel and just reading those surveys may not tell you why.
by stephen_g | 2025-08-11 13:34:33+00:00
We have this issue massively in Australia too - literally almost 100% of the push to implement a social media ban (where ‘social media’ is anything that an unelected bureaucrat called the ‘eSafety commissioner’ feels like, which, for example, wasn’t going to include YouTube until they changed their mind) came from a single Murdoch newspaper campaign. It just wasn’t a thing anybody else was talking about, and then suddenly it was apparently the most important thing the federal Government could be doing that apparently had to be rushed through in about two weeks with almost no oversight (normally here it can take years to get reform that normal people have been long calling for into Parliament) - honestly it was absolutely bizarre.

I have no hesitation saying that the newspaper that pushed it doesn’t give a single damn about the kids - they have a serious hatred of Meta in particular but also Google. The whole thing was concern trolling because they were angry that they are going to get cut off from the last shakedown they lobbied for (called the media bargaining code).
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-11 13:34:56+00:00
It's been "engineering challenges" for 30 years. At some point, "engineering challenges" stops being a good excuse, and that point was about 20 years ago.

At some point, someone may discover some new physics that shows that all of these "engineering challenges" were actually a physics problem, but quantum physics hasn't really advanced in the last 30 years so it's understandable that the physicists are confused about what's wrong.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-11 13:35:33+00:00
Maybe it's culture. Software is hard and the less unknowns you have in development the better. Frontend tools have exploded in complexity[1], but they get the job done. There are great alternatives nowadays, like phoenix liveview, but they would require full rewrites and possibly a change in language and software architecture that most teams just can't do, maybe because they are already heavily invested in whatever framework they are using or they can't afford to shift to elixir (or other languages, paradigms...).

So they stay in this marshlands of bloated UI frameworks, and they need to push updates and new features which makes the problem worse.

We seem to try to explain everything in software in technical terms, but sometimes at the end of the day culture and communication plays a larger role I think. Software is built by humans after all.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218003
by theturtle | 2025-08-11 13:35:40+00:00
...and for decades in IT, I was pretty firm on the topic of "just because we CAN collect that data doesn't mean we should." I imagine the DOGE bros who took over my old agency are still living with that.

"We want to know who asked stupid questions in support so we can fire them!"

I saw you coming 30 years in advance, asshole.
by gertrunde | 2025-08-11 13:35:46+00:00
I've used dropbox for quite a long time (and still use), with a 10Gb free account (bumped up from the base by various deals, and things like the old summer treasure hunt when they still did that).

I still prefer it for automated backups off my phone (which is one reason that Google's incessant, dark-patterns-y, nagging to use Google Photos is so infuriating), before clearing them down to a NAS periodically, usually keeping the most recent couple of months available in dropbox.

Beyond that use, it's just occasional use to share files with people.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-11 13:36:04+00:00
Indeed, I'll expand a bit: Asymmetrical crypto has always been incredibly slow compared to symmetrical crypto which is either HW accelerated (AES) or fast on the CPU (ChaCha20).

But since the symmetrical key is the same for both sides you must either share it ahead of time or use asymmetrical crypto to exchange the symmetrical keys to go brrrrr
by Strilanc | 2025-08-11 13:36:15+00:00
That paper is hilarious, and is correct that there's plenty of shit to make fun of... but there's also progress. I recommend watching Sam Jacques' talk from PQCrypto 2025 [0]. It would be silly to delay PQC adoption because of focusing on the irrelevant bad papers.

In the past ten years, on the theory side, the expected cost of cryptographically relevant quantum factoring has dropped by 1000x [1][2]. On the hardware side, fault tolerance demonstrations have gone from repetition code error rates of 1% error per round [3] to 0.00000001% error per round [fig3a of 4], with full quantum codes being demonstrated with an error rate of 0.2% [fig1d of 4] via a 2x reduction in error each time distance is increased by 2.

If you want to track progress in quantum computing, follow the gradual spinup of fault tolerance. Noise is the main thing blocking factoring of larger and larger numbers. Once the quality problem is turned into a quantity problem, then those benchmarks can start moving.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJxENYdsB6c

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0928

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.7403

[4]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687
by sillysaurusx | 2025-08-11 13:36:39+00:00
At the end of the day, "think of the children" has been an ancient rallying cry that’s used to justify all kinds of bad behavior. Often ironic, as you say.

Also banks were one of the most vulnerable. I’ve often wondered why. My first reaction is "because their code comes from coders who only want to work at a bank," but I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps it’s "from people comfortable with lots of bureaucracy". Either way, when I was a pentester, banks were one of our main types of clients, and their code was often bad. So it’s doubly ironic to claim banks are exemplars of how to do privacy.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-11 13:36:52+00:00
But this is how the law works? Even in the USA, the Supreme Court doesn't act on hypotheticals. They wait until someone brings an actual case.

Ofcom haven't ruled Wikipedia is Category 1. They haven't announced the intention to rule it Category 1. The Category 1 rules are not yet in effect and aren't even finalised. They aren't pointing any gun.

Wikipedia have a case that they shouldn't be Category 1 if that happens. But they went fishing in advance (or to use an alternative metaphor, they got out over their skis).

What else is the court to do but give a reassurance that the process will absolutely be amenable to review if the hypothetical circumstance comes to pass? That is what the section you are quoted says.

First, it's a statutory instrument that ministers will amend if it has unintended, severe consequences.

Second, the rules in question have not been written yet and they are being written in conjunction with industry (which will include Wikipedia). Because Ofcom is an industry self-regulation body.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-11 13:37:52+00:00
If it wasn't security they'd just pick a different pretext. "Oh you violated some comma in the 1k page eula, we gotta ban you now, can't set a precedent of allowing violations ya know" or some crap like that.

Security, safety, liability, risk, equity, inclusion, god, any word or concept that it is not socially unacceptable to consider anything other than an unalloyed good WILL be used in this way.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-11 13:37:54+00:00
Agreed. I used to hate going to funerals and skipped some, telling myself it was because I didn't know what to say, might embarrass myself, etc. After being in the receiving line of a couple, I realized someone else's funeral isn't about me. The truth is no one notices exactly what you say because they're dealing with their own grief, and "I'm sorry for your loss" is perfectly acceptable. So now I just go, pay my respects, and feel better for doing it.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-11 13:38:10+00:00
Because, if there is even one mistake; the profit losses from that mistake, could easily eat up the savings.

Imagine having to tell management your optimization to save $400K cost $100K in engineer time and caused a $700K outage where the “Add to cart” button sometimes didn’t work. Great job. You’re possibly fired.

(Edit: Due to my misreading, add a few digits to the outage cost.)
by torginus | 2025-08-11 13:38:12+00:00
I disagree - it's often engineering's fault. It's been pretty consistent that a decently specced server, running PHP that was written sometime last century, generating static pages, redis cache in front, and serving static content via nginx, beats the everloving pants off whatever fotm microservice SPA monstrosity modern devs tend to come up with.

The most hilarious if you go to pirate sites (for stuff like comics, manga or movies), and it's 100x faster and works better than the official paid for alternative, even though I'm sure the former runs off some dudes former gamer PC in his bedroom.
by jstanley | 2025-08-11 13:38:18+00:00
I'm getting:

> Secure Connection Failed

> An error occurred during a connection to onemillionscreenshots.com. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s).

> Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

Firefox 130 from Snap on Ubuntu. And I don't recall customising any SSL configuration to restrict the set of available ciphers or similar.
by GhostDrift | 2025-08-11 13:38:45+00:00
I’ve released a preprint on a mathematically provable “Meaning-Generation Operating System” for AI — designed to preserve minority viewpoints and prevent bias or censorship at the core of multi-agent systems.

Here’s the challenge: load the paper into GPT-5 (or your favorite LLM) and ask it — could this work as the OS for an AI-mediated society? Could it guide finance? Medicine? Disaster prediction?

PDF: https://zenodo.org/records/16793039

Curious to see what kinds of answers — and critiques — the community comes up with.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-11 13:38:51+00:00
>games have done 24fps for a more cinematic look

One high profile game has done that, The Order 1886, and it was widely agreed upon that it was the worst part of its "cinematic look" (which 99% of it was reached with simply letterboxing, film grain and other effects).

Movies that are 24fps do not have very fast moving cameras like games do. Animations that are done at 12FPS still run at 60FPS: I can move around a given character, and for 5 frames, from all different angles, they'll still be on their own animation frame. I won't, however, be stuck for 80ms waiting to be allowed to change my position.
by jdmoreira | 2025-08-11 13:39:26+00:00
The author addresses it in the text.

> These are our first sizable multimodal models. You might object that this defeats the title of the post ("it's not blind!"), but I suspect current multimodality is so crude that any substantial improvement to the model's unified internal map of the world would be a miracle. Remember, we're asking it about individual coordinates, one at a time.
by perihelions | 2025-08-11 13:39:37+00:00
They did do that once,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ("Wikipedia blackout page (wikipedia.org)" (2012))

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative