MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by extraisland | 2025-08-15 11:55:38+00:00
> You’re analysing things in a vacuum, there are historical and contemporary examples of public protest, pressure campaigns and civil disobedience leading to policy change, and you’re arguing they’re what, all CIA plants or impossible? If not, please make your point clearer.

I am not analysing things in a vaccum. I gave you some reasons why I don't believe these things are productive today.

One of those is an example from my own personal experience of being at a protest that literally had 1000s of people there.

I don't believe that all of it was CIA plants and never said that.

I explained how street movements are infiltrated by malign actors and how some intelligence agencies have used these techniques.

> Have you any proof that these rent a mob thing exists? You used “maybe part”... Please find a specific service for renting a mob, not a single individual or small group. Or proof that this service exists, because this is an awfully convenient way to bend the narrative to your side “they were all faking it” is almost never a valid hypothesis.

It is well documented. Just not commonly known. TBH you could have looked this up yourself.

It isn't really any different than hiring extras for a TV/Movie production (as I previously stated).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rent-a-crowd.asp

Companies and political parties have been doing it for quite a while.

e.g.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-aide-says-paid-actors-...

or some of the sites themselves give you examples of where they have done it.

https://www.rentacrowduk.co.uk/hire-a-crowd-case-studies/

Here are some companies that literally offer it as a service, I found these after doing a two minute google:

https://www.envisagepromotions.co.uk/services/crowd-services...

https://www.rentacrowduk.co.uk/

https://dreamsagency.co.uk/hire-a-crowd/

I am sure there are many others.
by pera | 2025-08-15 11:56:16+00:00
Since this is in relation to "Category 1 services" of the OSA:

> Category 1: should apply to services which meet either of the following conditions:

> Condition 1 – uses a content recommender system; and has more than 34 million UK users on the user-to-user part of its service, representing around 50% of the UK population;

> Condition 2 – allows users to forward or reshare user-generated content; and uses a content recommender system; and has more than 7 million UK users on the user-to-user part of its service, representing c.10% of the UK population.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
by jethkl | 2025-08-15 11:56:56+00:00
There is an analogue of the CLT for extreme values. The Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem is the extreme-values analogue of the CLT: if the properly normalized maximum of an i.i.d. sample converges, it must be Gumbel, Fréchet, or Weibull—unified as the Generalized Extreme Value distribution. Unlike the CLT, whose assumptions (in my experience) rarely hold in practice, this result is extremely general and underpins methods like wavelet thresholding and signal denoising—easy to demonstrate with a quick simulation.
by alias_neo | 2025-08-15 11:57:00+00:00
While I agree with your reaction, and would feel the same myself, they didn't buy the code, they bought the repo, it's stated quite clearly in my opinion.

Typically I would find this kind of PR stunt irksome, but I don't begrudge the little guy doing what they can to get some attention on their product, and it's an interesting read non the less since I hadn't really considered the logistics of buying an open source repo before.

I suppose a better way to put it, would be to say they bought the stars/links/name, which I have mixed feelings about.
by matthewmacleod | 2025-08-15 11:57:30+00:00
No, this isn't baiting – it's an actual thing that's happening, regardless of how much you want to remain in denial about it. And I don't care about whatever weird preconceptions you've imposed – European countries have their own struggles to deal with and equally can do it badly. None of this is interesting discussion, and focusing on these weird "purity tests" around hypothetical freedom when ignoring the actual substantive impacts of the policies is why these people keep getting away with their terrible legislation.
by blauditore | 2025-08-15 11:57:31+00:00
Well, more money flows in one direction in such cases, which might or might not be intended. As long as there's enough influx of money from other places, this can even be long-term sustainable (e.g. a triangle of trade).

It seems that China is currently a "sink" in the global flow of money, which will obviously change the landscape in the long run. How? Hard to tell, probably not in such a bad as many people fear. I think it will eventually drive up prices of Chinese export goods, which will force importers to look for alternatives, which is likely better in many regards than having one country manufacturing everything for everyone in the world. But don't trust me, I'm just a random poster on the internet.
by richwater | 2025-08-15 11:57:45+00:00
> regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter.

They also produce the most renewable power in the country. If you account for externalities prevented by this (fossil fuel induced damage and deaths), who is looking good now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
by Neil44 | 2025-08-15 11:57:46+00:00
For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn.

There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.

One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
by dev0001 | 2025-08-15 11:57:57+00:00
From the GitHub thread (https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...)

> I don't think there's a strong "Open Web" argument to be made here. XML data files being able to be reformatted into HTML is somewhat of an accident of history; we don't have similar functionality for any other data type, despite, for example, JSON files being vastly more common on the web than XML.

Ironically, we would have support for transforming JSON if XSLT in the browser had been kept up-to-date.

Interestingly, "XML data files being able to be reformatted into HTML" was a deliberate choice to support and encourage the separation of content and presentation. CSS was introduced for the same reason but to address a slightly different (but complimentary) aspect of the same ambition and it's flourished. Imagine how widely CSS would be being used if browser support was still stuck at CSS 1.0.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-15 11:58:36+00:00
It seems like the argument is that doing science/tech-development for an organization which both has and adheres to benevolent intents and goals, or even just going on your own is the same as working for a company that is intending from the onset to use the work malevolently. Because, all tech gets abused eventually.

This is a terrible argument and is defeatist in the same was as 'what does anything matter at all if the sun is going to explode'.

If you choose to do work for bad leaders, you are going bad in the same way that 'just following orders' for bad things is also bad. You are responsible for the outcomes in those cases. If you are ok with the resulting bad outcomes because the science was interesting and the pay is good, that's your decision. But there is no absolution just because you can suppose that someone else would have done it so it might as well have been you.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-15 11:58:55+00:00
I would have agreed, but in reality, higher rates haven’t improved affordability.

Instead, high rates plus economic uncertainty has reduced supply significantly because no one wants to sell.

Maybe lower rates will make prices even more unaffordable, which would make this a low period by comparison, but if you look at home price to income numbers, they’re still near record highs.

Maybe it means: if you think the line is always going up and to the right, today is the best day to buy, but that’s a weird way for me to think of a house, which I still kind of see as a consumable good rather than an investment vehicle.
by kcplate | 2025-08-15 11:59:34+00:00
I can assure you as being one of the kids doing the jump and as one of the kids being jumped over in moments from around that time frame…that you did not always clear them.

Those always hurt like hell (both being on the bike and off) but I wouldn’t trade that experience away today. Some of the best times I had as a kid involved crashes, pain, ER trips, and stitches.

Good times!
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-15 11:59:36+00:00
Even more simple is that voters are focused solely on short term gains, so investing in infrastructure that’l take years to build and won’t be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.

The proof is voters keep rewarding the party that has only passed tax cuts for the last 30 years. And started an unnecessary foreign war.

The aging population histograms of pretty much all democracies don’t bode well for democracy.
by II2II | 2025-08-15 12:00:23+00:00
It is both possible and feasible to drive in the old parts of the city. It is a North American city, so old is not that old. It just predates the automobile. Yet virtually all of the roads are plenty wide for two lane traffic, on street parking and sidewalks. What differs most significantly is land use patterns. More stuff (homes, businesses, schools, parks, etc.) are within walking distance. One could argue that parking is problematic, but that is true of the core of every city I've been in. Even the modern car-centric ones. It should also be noted that plenty of people drive in the old parts of the city, it's just that people have an opportunity not to and plenty of people choose not to.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-15 12:00:24+00:00
It is nice of you to do community bond building by being jocular, tgv, but I do not see context nor content.

I do not see context because this is the beginning of "present an ID to access the web", and I do believe in slippery slopes, especially in a world where societies have lost the basics.

And I do not see content because I am not sure you want to suggest anything relevant with that.

For the rest, we can joke whenever we are both here fondly mate, but you have probably picked the worst topic for it.

--

Edit:

> where societies have lost the basics

And that's why I feel your use of "nerd" is so out of current reality (besides its application to the attending). A world of voluntary subjects, and the term for the sieged would be "nerd"?!
by zengineer | 2025-08-15 12:00:51+00:00
I live in Switzerland since 10 years and I am always - not only amazed to read about how the Swiss gov / people tackle things, but experience it first hand in my daily life. Above all the train system is very interesting. From the smooth timetables to even the smallest details (E.g the acronyms sound or music notes in trains is based on the railway abbreviations SBB / CFF / FFE). I even made a post about it when creating a "Swiss train world": https://medium.com/@franzeus/building-an-interactive-colorin...
by corimaith | 2025-08-15 12:00:51+00:00
There's nothing "obvious" in hindsight about the explosion in LLMs in 2023 and thus the increased energy demand, and the China certainly wasn't building for that.

It very much was overcapacity as a way to keep the construction and manufacturing employed even when most profitable opportunities have been realized. Of course, the long cost of that is involution and lack of nicer jobs as capital is malinvested into diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that idea of overcapacity itself is acknowledged by the CCP in their calls to end price wars and involution

I do think there’s is a very interesting dynamic in this meta argument; over the past 5 years or so, the “debunkers” have taken issue with “whistleblowers” arguments towards first zero covid, then local government debt, and now overcapacity and lack of consumer demand and “debunked” these as all being not an issue, only for the central government to turn around and end Zero Covid, rein in LGFV lending, and now the current crackdown on “disorderly competition” and mass dispersal of consumption vouchers. English Pro-China commentators don't appear to be well aligned with the actual views in China!
by taylodl | 2025-08-15 12:00:56+00:00
That's just being silly. We've been using frameworks for over 30 years. I remember the days before frameworks. Software was developed at a pace nobody would tolerate today. They're a productivity boost - a significant productivity boost.

AI? In the hands of a craftsman AI is just another tool that can help boost productivity. In the hands of a junior developer trying to use AI to make it appear that they're a senior developer - no. There are too many downside risks in that scenario because the junior developer doesn't have enough experience to know when the tool is providing bad results.
by ysavir | 2025-08-15 12:01:40+00:00
I agree that the quality went down, but I think it might be part of their strategy.

I think when they first started, they tried the HBO strategy of putting big money into big shows that try to win over broad audiences. But over time shifted to focusing on low budget shows that appeal to specific, smaller audiences. Which makes sense, if your goal isn't to have 70% of the total market as paying users but rather 90% of the market as paying users.
by 7952 | 2025-08-15 12:01:58+00:00
The bribes are looking much worse for overhead lines. Just giving people money (off their bill) for doing no work and making no real sacrifice. People will either be insulted by the low amount or insulted at the bribe. It will change no minds.

Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.
by kz20129087 | 2025-08-15 12:02:30+00:00
yes exactly, cloudflare is just bad tech where the remedy is worse than the disease. I am using a VPN and I get endless loops of please verify you are not a robot, this may take a few second (minutes, hours...)... so basically cloudflare tech must have this primitive code

is_using_vpn? -> bad,abuse,ddos

thanks' cloudflare for saving our internet by destroying it...
by cbeach | 2025-08-15 12:02:34+00:00
Jon Pretty used ChatGPT 5 to perform forensic, neutral analysis of thousands of private messages, in order to counter false claims made against him by two ex-partners, which led to his cancellation from the Scala community in 2021.

https://pretty.direct/truth

Context:

https://pretty.direct/statement

https://pretty.direct/impact

https://pretty.direct/dueprocess
by stareatgoats | 2025-08-15 12:02:48+00:00
Well, first off: it's not my conclusion (I would likely have used some other and more precise term, like "modern authoritarianism", which has enough similarities to historical fascism to cause alarm). Secondly, "fascism is on the rise" is such an ambiguous statement that could mean anything from "the seeds on fascism is forming somewhere" to "the number of fully fledged fascist states are increasing", which just leads to thirdly: I could certainly continue to help you get out of your mental block where you can only see one absurd reason for fascism being on the rise, but I think we can agree that this really isn't necessary.
by nickdothutton | 2025-08-15 12:02:55+00:00
Of course we laugh at this nonsense here, but the general public will swallow it. We should be aware that it is not just in this one area of policy/technology that the governments brightest minds recommend nonsense, it very likely applies to all areas of policy and recommendations. [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
by acomjean | 2025-08-15 12:03:01+00:00
I’ve been a long time iOS user. A fair amount of my purchased software won’t run anymore as it wasn’t updated from 32->63 bit change. I had some Mac software in the same boat. App Stores have some ease of use advantages, but it “just works” till at some point it doesn’t. I’ll angree it’s annoying to have be internet connected to use the software. FWIW the steam deck seems to work with games offline, so maybe they fixed some of those issues?
by Jedd | 2025-08-15 12:03:02+00:00
> To save you a click: no, the author does not provide any source for the headline.

TFA kind of did, with the '20-30 dollars per person, per month, across an organisation' quote / comment - though they didn't do the math for you.

But that range of monthly spend only needs 220-400 ish people to reach the headline figure of $100k.

Whether that's good value, who can say.
by redeyedtreefrog | 2025-08-15 12:04:11+00:00
Yup entirely this. The biggest sign of this is Tommy Robinson, who has blatantly committed outrageous cases of stalking, harassment, and contempt of court, for which he has been convicted. But because his schtick is complaining about Muslims he is then treated as a hero of the US right, gets invited on right-wing talk shows and gets bigged up by Elon Musk. I recently had a guy sit next to me on a plane bring him up as supposed proof of the UK being an authoritarian state.

I go absolutely out of my way to avoid politics nowadays, which makes it all the more frustrating when this nonsense is shoved in my face by idiots on HackerNews or dimwits sitting next to me on the plane.
by LeonardoTolstoy | 2025-08-15 12:04:18+00:00
Tolstoy after my old dog. But also because I think a good language name should be able to be iterated on. E.g. C can become D or E or F. Java can be Mocha or Cappuccino. Etc.

With my new language Tolstoy you'd be able to have a little family of languages all named after classic authors. Tolstoy, Dickens, Melville etc. Plus my dog Tolstoy was the best dog ever so bonus for everyone as well.
by hopelite | 2025-08-15 12:04:44+00:00
That is a very simple perspective. Nothing about the current British government would preclude being underhanded and manipulative, i.e., making sure that not only the current US government, but the next system’s candidate is made to feel discomfort and displeasure in order to manipulate.

People do this kind of underhanded passive aggressive thing all the time, why would it not be the case for the British government to basically “neg” the VP that has on several occasions now dressed them and all the Europeans down and embarrassed them? I could very easily see this being the very kind of manipulative and passive aggressive thing that the British government would facilitate as a spit in the face of the guy who admonished them for their thought/speech control.

You seem to have a “police state” model in your mind that is akin to a North Korea and less what it will most likely be in the west, far more manipulative and sophisticated, as depicted in Orwell’s 1984.
by bombcar | 2025-08-15 12:05:20+00:00
If you find someone who has cataloged and listed what they have, especially of “pre-ISBN” books you’re going to have a certain price floor. And if you want a book, likely others do, too.

But you also can find them and garage and thrift stores, languishing unsold.

Wonder Books has a concept of how to save them: https://booksbythefoot.com/about/

Which perhaps people buying books because how they look on the shelf is bad, but is it worse than the giant recycling grinder machine turning them into pulp to fuel Amazon’s Mordor-esque delivery furnaces?
by graemep | 2025-08-15 12:05:47+00:00
Basically they are acting like the sort of third world country that does grandiose vanity projects.

Having lived in one that went through a phase of that (Sri Lanka) it strikes me that this is yet another way in which the UK is becoming more like Sri Lanka (all bad ways - not the things that are good about the latter). I see it in education too, for example.
by yorwba | 2025-08-15 12:06:43+00:00
The article points to the tension between rapid US data center growth and limited grid capacity, contrasting it with energy oversupply in the Chinese grid, but doesn't really fill in the fourth quadrant with Chinese data center growth. Which is unsurprising, considering that Chinese tech companies aren't investing in data centers anywhere near the scale of their US counterparts: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-323-the-ai-deflation-of...

China has abundant energy because there's insufficient demand to make use of that energy, part of which is that there's insufficient demand for data centers.
by kz20129087 | 2025-08-15 12:06:58+00:00
Cloudflare operates with such biased logic such as "why are we shooting at all men who have a long beard?" really you want the terrorists to kill all your kids then???

"why are we cutting all the trees in the park?" really you want trees to fall on your kid and crushing them to death?? what's wrong with saving kids??

"why are we closing the water in the fountains in the town?" really you want your kids to drown into the fountains or drink contaminated water??
by jmclnx | 2025-08-15 12:07:00+00:00
>just build, build, build. There's no inherent reason why the price of houses should so far exceed income in this vast country

You are right, but there is always a but :)

Seems right now the "good jobs" are only being create around a few mega cities. DC, NY, SF and a few others. DC stalled a bit I think due to DOGE. In a lot of those areas NIMBH is big. So if you build like crazy in many "fly over" states, where is is plenty of land, at best the builders will not make a profit. But probably the houses will stay empty.

As with everything else, politicians will not make the hard decisions due to fear.

I use to be against term-limits, but the last 25 years proved me wrong :(
by 7952 | 2025-08-15 12:07:41+00:00
I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.
by any1 | 2025-08-15 12:08:10+00:00
I've used valgrind proactively as long as I've been programming in C and C++.

The errors that are caught by valgrind (and asan) will very often not cause immediate crashes or any kind of obvious bugs. Instead, they cause intermittent bugs that are very hard to catch otherwise. They may even be security vulnerabilities.

Another good reason for using it proactively is that small memory leaks tend to sneak in over time. They might not cause any issues and most of them aren't accumulative. However, having all those leaks in there makes it much more difficult to find big leaks when they happen because you have to sift through all the insignificant ones before you can fix the one that's causing problems.