MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdonis | 2025-08-23 02:44:17+00:00
> it's experts who speak the language well enough to understand what is being said.

What's so hard to understand about "does your smartphone show you where you are accurately"?

> What society do you live in where scientists' expertise is taken on face value and acted on without substantial pushback and criticism?

Um, planet Earth? What you describe is exactly what happened during Covid, for example.

> This happened. Starting over a century ago, and continuing ever since with increasing loudness, urgency, and accuracy.

What are you talking about?

If you're talking about the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, those didn't turn people's lives upside down. Various technologies based on QM eventually did affect people's lives significantly, though I wouldn't say they've turned them upside down, but in any case that had nothing to do with scientists making predictions about them. GPS is the first technology based on relativity that has significantly affected people's lives, but again I wouldn't say it's turned lives upside down.

What has turned people's lives upside down is, for example, the scientific pronouncements about Covid that led to governments imposing lockdowns that did nothing to stop the spread of Covid, but took away countless people's livelihoods.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-23 02:44:23+00:00
I haven't use Go since 2024, but I was going to say something similar--seems like I was pretty happy doing all my Functional style coding in Go. The problem for me was the client didn't want us to use it. We were given the choice between Java (ugh) and Python to build APIs. We chose Python because I cross my arms and bite my lip and refuse to write anymore Java in these days of containers as the portability. I never really liked Java, or maybe I never really like the kinds of jobs you get using Java? <-- that
by autoexec | 2025-08-23 02:44:53+00:00
Recommendations are well and good, but I can't see them having much if any impact on what people do. It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices. Especially those that target children.
by Spivak | 2025-08-23 02:45:05+00:00
I mean anything that circumvents geo-fencing at the IP level is going to be tunneling your traffic through an address that isn't blocked. Your options are all VPNs, the choice is only who's running it—you via a VPS or similar, friends/family/community, a service as you describe, or the public with Tor.

The friends/family option is probably the most broadly effective at circumventing the block since you'll have a residential address but at the cost of a lot of latency and bandwidth. The most performant option will be VPS services but lots of sites will block them as well out of an abundance of caution.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-23 02:45:20+00:00
> if you wrong your employer, for example by failing to do your job well, you are not a criminal to be prosecuted by the state

This is going out of one’s way to abuse the employer’s trust. Moreover, it’s stealing their stuff. If I take cash out of a till, my employer should have the option of pressing charges.

Where I agree with you is that this isn’t computer fraud and abuse. It’s closer to theft. The law used to prosecute should be more banal.
by smitty1e | 2025-08-23 02:46:01+00:00
I run Arch under WSL2 and then in ~/.bashrc:

WINDOWS_IP=$(ip route | awk '/^default/ {print $3}')

DISPLAY="$WINDOWS_IP:0"

Now I can use the mighty mobaxterm from https://www.mobatek.net to just run whatever and pipe it back to Windows.

One caveat is that the $PATH gets polluted with space characters by 'Doze, so I have to do something like this for QGIS:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin qgis -n &
by favflam | 2025-08-23 02:46:21+00:00
Just to add:

what about the part where a single person is dictating taxes on American companies? That does not seem to phase that many people in the tech space...

And what leverage did the administration illegally (without Congressional authorization) apply to get this deal?

At least when the Bush admin did the first part of the financial bailout in 2008, they had Congressional authorization (a bill was passed).
by opello | 2025-08-23 02:47:52+00:00
But the footage isn't "real property" as I understand it. The only thing the theft does is deprive the company from the opportunity to sell the footage themselves, and it's not exactly like selling security camera footage is the business model of many/any(?) company.

If the harm is that the company couldn't sell the footage itself, the remedy should be giving the company the money from the sale.
by inopinatus | 2025-08-23 02:47:52+00:00
I have no quibble with that historical perspective, and I share disappointment in our collective anthropological failings, but I take issue with the moral considerations and the false equivalence between company and corporation. Not all companies are incorporated; companies are a much broader category than simply corporations, since they include associations, trusts, institutions, partnerships and so forth.

Moreover, if corporations are people, then it is not moral to parcel them out as property. No person should be owned, whether wholly or in shares. The legal doublethink sustaining both ideas simultaneously reveals a fundamental contradiction of principles and profound lack of moral clarity.

In the most debased extrapolation of the ownership scenario, the corporation must obey even the most shameless demands of its owners, taking all the blame and liability upon itself, whilst forwarding any gains back to the owners.

Of course, this has already happened.

Consequently, in this era, corporations have become primarily a liability shield for the exploitation and concentration of wealth.
by itsdrewmiller | 2025-08-23 02:47:58+00:00
> “I said, ‘AI is important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week. And if not, I’m hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it and I’d like to meet with you to understand why.’”

They would rather go to a Saturday meeting than do the thing their CEO explicitly asked them to do in the very reasonable timeframe they were asked to do it.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-23 02:48:52+00:00
My criticism of the JVM is that it is no longer useful because we don't do portability using that mechanism anymore. We build applications that run in containers and can be compiled in the exact type of environment they are going to run inside of and we control all of that. The old days of Sun Microsystems and Java needing to run on Solaris, DEC, HP, maybe SGI, and later Linux, are LOOOOOOONG gone. And yet here we still are with portability inside our portability for ancient reasons.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-23 02:49:09+00:00
Looks cool, but I wish there was a section explaining 'here's why it's better than matplotlib or [other popular charting tools]'. I looked through the feature list but I didn't feel like mentally constructing a comparison matrix. I see lots of things to like about it, but I would really appreciate case studies or something to explain why I might want to invest time in learning this new thing.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-23 02:50:52+00:00
>Which state are you in? There are a lot of US states (like, more than 10) where cyclists specifically are permitted to go through red lights in some circumstances.

IIUC, cars are pretty much universally permitted to go through red lights at least 1/3 of the time -- right on red is legal (AFAIK) in all 50 states. In many states, left on red from a one-way street to another one-way street is also legal.
by edge17 | 2025-08-23 02:51:40+00:00
...thats how the US Constitution works. Congress passes laws (CHIPS Act) and the executive branch is empowered to carry them out - in this case the Secretary of Commerce and Commerce Dept. One can argue whether it stretches the intent of the law, nothing wrong with debate. But as of now, I don't think any judge or court has contested in the interpretation of the language.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-23 02:55:41+00:00
"On Meta's fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts, in January, he predicted that 2025 was going to be a "pivotal year for the metaverse". In July's second-quarter earnings call, the metaverse only warranted one solitary mention in passing, in response to an analyst question about the company's "AI glasses".

In contrast, AI was mentioned 62 times, and another 12 times on a follow-up call, according to AlphaSense. "Superintelligence" got 20 shout-outs."

Normally I skip the images but this one is perfect:

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
by lisbbb | 2025-08-23 02:55:57+00:00
I spent untold hours and years mastering inversion of control and late-binding and all those design patterns that were SOOOOO important for interviews only to never really utilize all that stuff because once the apps were built, they rarely, if ever, got reconfigured to do something besides the exact thing they were built for. We might as well have not bothered with any of it and just wrote modular, testable non-OOP code and called it a day. After just about 25 years, I look back at all the time I spent using Spring Framework, Struts, and older products and just kind of shake my head. It was all someone else's money making scheme.

I'm also reminded about the time that Tomcat stopped being an application you deploy to and just being an embedded library in the runtime! It was like the collective light went on that Web containers were just a sham. That didn't prevent employers from forcing me to keep using Websphere/WAS because "they paid for that and by god they're going to use it!" Meanwhile it was totally obsolete as docker containers just swept them all by the wayside.

I wonder what "Webshere admins" are doing these days? That was once a lucrative role to be able to manage those Jython configs, lol.
by cyberax | 2025-08-23 02:57:00+00:00
> Can you imagine raising $288 million from VCs for a software application while delivering so little?

What? You're imagining VCs caring about pizza money? Should I mention, perhaps, the AOL-TimeWarner merger? Or maybe AT&T buying DirecTV for $50B and essentially giving it away for $8B?

Heck, I was a part of an utterly failed project with a $150m budget (in 2005), in a large European company.

> For the main system they're also using COBOL, which has no Date data type, causing issues even in 2025.

And? They haven't missed a single payment day in all their existence, moving data between multiple types of media. While working with staff levels that won't even qualify as "skeleton" in plenty of companies.
by teraflop | 2025-08-23 02:57:36+00:00
Almost.

For one thing, Docker is not really "Linux inside Linux". It uses Linux kernel features to isolate the processes inside a container from those outside. But there is only one Linux kernel which is shared by both the container and its host (within the Linux VM, in this case).

For another, running Linux containers in a Linux VM on Windows is one (common) way that Docker can work. But it also supports running Windows containers on Windows, and in that case, the Windows kernel is shared just like in the Linux case. So Docker is not exactly "Linux tech".
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-23 02:58:37+00:00
Wyoming and South Dakota seem even worse, having passed laws requiring age verification for sites with anything potentially harmful to minors. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/book-bans-internet-ban...

What a shameful era. These fools delegintize the state, delegitimize the legal system. Engaged in absolute foolery.

The suggestion I saw was that residents of these states need to comb through every government site they can and sue the government for anything that could be harmful to youth that they find. Theres really no practical limit no possible implementation that the state has allowed other than to age verify pretty much everything; return-to-sender-ing the paper bag of flaming dog shit seems like a semi necessary step here.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-23 02:58:38+00:00
> So yeah, what's your vision for the future?

The hopeful version:

People get their head out of a phone only to realize life is more than the next dopamine hit.

The dystopian version:

The logical conclusion of what is detailed in the paragraphs above. Where being addicted to a handheld device is not only normal, but expected. Where "what it is that we actually want" is not an individual choice, but a corporate one. Where the idea of technofascism is introduced as "silly to suggest" and then normalized as "but we all know that that's where things should be headed in many cases." (see above)
by fsckboy | 2025-08-23 02:58:46+00:00
>I thought legally intellectual property wasn't "real property."

if you break into your boss's house and copy his latest recordings (your boss is Stevie Wonder) you are not simply guilty of violating his copyrights.

"computer fraud and abuse act", or who knows how many other laws, are focused on various aspects of "you know you are sneaking about", or even if you don't, tuff noogies.
by Razengan | 2025-08-23 03:01:12+00:00
Apple provides an almost-always guaranteed refund process for purchases made through the App Store, usually no questions asked.

No way do I want to trust randoms with my payment info.

Hell I just purchased a Claude.ai Pro Subscription and there's no way to remove my card info afterwards. No way to contact support (the useless chatbot send button is grayed out).

If I recall correctly the major proponents of the push for external payment systems on the App Store were companies like Match.com who own Tinder etc. and indulge in various scummy user-hostile practices (like charging certain demographics higher for the same service). Sure, break the "walled garden" and let the wolves in.
by Kamillaova | 2025-08-23 03:04:19+00:00
I genuinely believe that only such way (regarding "protecting children" from viewing "dangerous/unwanted content") is correct and maximally effective. All others mostly create a theater of security - in other words, they don't actually prevent direct access to "dangerous" content but merely create an illusion of doing so. This ranges from client-side-only checks (like Telegram in the UK) to "privacy-preserving" checks based on ZK or similar technologies, which are currently being promoted in the EU. The first can be bypassed simply by searching for workarounds; the second... well, one person could just verify thousands of others using their own documents, and that's it. Literally a security theater - I hate it, a lot.

And my opinion is that we shouldn't support such ways of doing this, meaning we shouldn't implement or comply with them, but rather protest against them. Either undermine their purpose or create a significant appearance of problems. In other words, either spread methods to bypass them, support such efforts in any way possible, or deny access to services (and so on) in jurisdictions where they're banned by inhumane laws. This is, in a way, a very common practice in the field of "copyright" and I sincerely hope it spreads to everyday matters.

It's deeply sad that nobody addresses the root problem - only its consequences, meaning they try to "hide unwanted content" instead of making it "non-unwanted." And it's even sadder that so few of those who could actually influence the implementation of such "protections" advocate this approach. Off the top of my head, I can only name Finland as one actively promoting educational programs and similar solutions to this problem.
by memonkey | 2025-08-23 03:04:42+00:00
Not the first time Japan has done something like this[1] and I honestly welcome it. It's not a strict rule, gives people flexibility to at least talk about it and disagree with little consequence. Another severely online commenter mentions protecting peoples privacy and exploitative practices but we're wayyy beyond those types of conversations. Limiting online-ness in a gentle way that's not gonna piss off a bunch of people and get the feels for it seems to be a very Japanese thing to do.

https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/17744?phrase=Onaga%...
by tomxor | 2025-08-23 03:05:02+00:00
> What is a videogame cheat? [...] an external program that somehow manipulates the game or reads information from the game to provide you with an advantage over others.

This has always interested me when it comes to the need for anti-cheat to exist... For instance with wallhacking, the way most FPS style game engines have always been written means the server sends all player location information to all clients, so it's all there in memory if you can get to it.

But what if your server engine instead only sent relevant player location data to each client, it would be more work, the server would have to do occlusion tests for each player pair, but a bounding box and some reasonable spatial partitioning should make that reasonably efficient. To prevent occlusion lag, e.g players not smoothly appearing around corners, the server can make reasonable predictions with some error margins based on a combination of current player velocities and latencies.

I know this is just one part of cheating, but it seems like all the other ones (manipulating input) is a losing battle anyway. I mean ultimately you can't stop people hooking up the input and display to a completely independent device with computer vision.
by Springtime | 2025-08-23 03:05:32+00:00
Some of the things that stood out to me about the news:

- The thread by the Chromium dev proposed what was originally a 1MB minified polyfill for the Javascript only XSLT calls that in just the last few days has grown to 3MB minified. XSLT was beneficial in the browser because it was native, while a 3MB polyfill is a rather big ask to suggest as a per-site replacement for anything meant to be snappy on slower connections.

- It seems from various mentions the catalysts for this to surface now were the sole maintainer for the XSLT library used in Chromium expressed having trouble maintaining it some months back and left it to a different sole maintainer, along with a recently disclosed vulnerability in that particular library. Firefox OTOH is said to use a different XSLT library.

- Chromium team routinely awards vulnerability discovery bounties in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just the other week they awarded $250k to an author who discovered a tricky Chromium exploit. I'd be curious if they've funded development of the XSLT library they use in the past as it seems like they'd rather just be rid of it.

- Within days of posting the open question to the working group and a week prior to the PR of the spec removal a Chromium ticket by the author set milestones for XSLT removal in Chromium. It seems it's less a tentative proposal and more leading by example.
by mindslight | 2025-08-23 03:06:26+00:00
That something is one of the foundations of the rot we're dealing with today. Hospitals having to absorb those costs as overhead is a large motivation for the dynamic whereby they send fraudulent bills that you then need an "insurance" company to negotiate down for you.

Politicians love such unfunded mandates because they magically assert the problem is solved while not increasing the budget at all. But they create a humongous drain on the economy (those resources come from somewhere), and are ultimately a form of regulatory capture.
by D13Fd | 2025-08-23 03:06:54+00:00
This article is a pretty lame rant.

I'm no engineer, but I know I need to back up my Mac, just like every other PC. I run Arq and back it up to cloud storage, and I also have a sync program set up to back up my most critical files to secondary locations.

Yes, Notes is proprietary. But why is that a surprise? It basically says it on the tin. That's exactly why I have never used it. I used Notational Velocity, nvAlt, some others, and ultimately Obsidian. All my notes are text files that have followed me for 1.5 decades, through multiple Macs.

As he tells it, Apple support put in the effort to figure out how to restore his Apple notes on his old computer, including walking him through an OS upgrade to do it. And that's supposed to be a bad thing? It sounds like a pretty amazing support experience, honestly.

He says he can't export Notes individually. I don't use Notes at all. But I popped open Apple's Script Editor just now, pulled up the Notes dictionary, and I see AppleScript commands for opening notes and for saving them in particular formats. You can also read the "HTML content of each note." It should be pretty simple to set something up to pull each note and save them in plain text format as he originally thought. I bet this is better than most notetaking apps with proprietary formats.

This whole article basically boils down to "I didn't back up my stuff, Apple bent over backwards to help me recover it, but I don't like the Notes PDF export format or the sharp edges on the hardware so I think Macs suck."
by galaxyLogic | 2025-08-23 03:07:08+00:00
I've found I benefit most from AI when I ask it questions about technical topics, like programming or using a device like a synthesizer or DAW software. There's pshychological effect I get especially when I get an answer that says "that feature is not supported". I get the feeling that it's not my fault that something feels very difficult, I know WHY it is difficult when somebody tells me there is no easy way to do what you want, so I don't waste any more time trying to find the solution. I must look elsewhere then.

So I wonder, trying to learn AI and how to use it, shouldn't the AI itself be the best guide for understanding AI? Maybe not so much with the latest research or latest products, because AI is not yet trained on those, but sooner or later AI should feel as easy a subject as say JavaScript programming.
by mushufasa | 2025-08-23 03:07:15+00:00
"we sync into their systems of record and act as that verification layer"

As long as those 'systems of record' are controlled by the customer, then that is self reporting. If they don't enter a sale into their CRM or tag it differently there's nothing you can do.

The industries where I have seen pay-for-outcomes work are industries where there are regulated legal controls or strong third parties. For example, a lot of financial services have commission payments that are based on the actual invested assets as measured by the bank/custodian, that then get paid out to salespeople or partnerships.
by litmus-pit-git | 2025-08-23 03:07:37+00:00
The trick is in never ever touching the username@paid-main-provider.tld to give out to anyone. It's just for logging in.

My mailbox.org username is literally three random short Engish dict words concatnated by underscores (e.g jet_sit_gill@mailbox.org) just to ensure I'd never share that email with anyone. I only use my domain's email addresses. This way there's ZERO lock, zero fear of them giving my email to someone else and staying with the domain provider for a day longer than I have to.

For email addresses on others' domains here

- icloud.com came with the devices (I honestly have not thought about what happens to these if I have zero Apple device at one point in future :D)

- tutanota(barely ever used; just to support them I paid until they removed the 12/year plan)

- protonmail, and sdf.org (ARPA)

All of these at least let me hold on to the email address even with little resources when I stop paying or have an unpaid a/c. So little risk of email goign to someone else. And I never use these for anything important anyway.

For temp emails - duck.com, HideMyEmail (stopped using this one for new accounts though).