MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-08-25 10:07:38+00:00
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.

- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff

- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.

- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat

- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.

- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.

Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.

Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
by grafmax | 2025-08-25 10:09:59+00:00
> The rents didn't drop that significantly. The city is growing fairly fast it was 4% in 2024

This is my point. YIMBY laws are only one part of a larger picture of causation. They do not have a significant enough effect on housing to be the basis for sound housing policy.

Similarly looking at regulations in blue vs red cities (ignoring the presence of higher paid workers in blue cities for example) or looking at public housing as a percentage of housing in Japan - public housing needs to meet the housing demand needs not sit at a portion of supply. We need more public housing in the US.

You acknowledge the role of wealth redistribution programs. That is my argument - these programs should be expanded, and financed by taxes on the wealthy. We should provide direct assistance to those who need it, rather than tweaking NIMBY laws and hoping for the best.
by nr378 | 2025-08-25 10:10:11+00:00
> money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things

That's true, but the thing that's lost is the economic/productive capacity that the money was spent on, that could have been used for other (better) purposes.

For example, if I raise $100mn in a frothy market, and spend it on employing 100 Engineers on $1mn/yr salaries for 1 year before ultimately going bankrupt, it's true that the money doesn't disappear, as it was simply transferred from the VCs to the Engineers, but what's spent/consumed is the Engineers' time. Society can never get those 100 person-years back, and the VCs have to write their capital investment to 0.

The other comments are separately true - money is created by bank borrowing and destroyed by loans being repaid or going bad. Periods of speculation often result in increasing leverage (e.g. borrowing to buy stocks/houses), which does result in the destruction of money when it unwinds (as well as damage to bank's balance sheets, which can become problematic when it happens at a large enough scale - see 2008).
by pjc50 | 2025-08-25 10:10:22+00:00
This whole thread reminds me of the Edinburgh tramworks; despite there having been 19th-century trams on the same street, the modern trams are heavier. So the tram building project turned into a saga of underground "technical debt": sewers had to be rebuilt to take higher weight overhead, which meant digging up everything buried in the road, all the pipes and wires, plus extra bits of archaeology. Hence massive cost overruns.
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-08-25 10:10:34+00:00
Totally fair — and thank you for the honest feedback.

I’m actually Japanese, and while I try my best, English isn’t my strongest skill. I do rely on AI to help write and translate at times.

Ideally, I’d work with someone fluent to help polish things. But for now, OS Yamato is a side project I build in the margins of a full-time job — so I’m doing what I can solo.

If the project grows, I’d love to team up with others who can help shape the language and communication more clearly. Really appreciate your understanding!
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-25 10:11:02+00:00
jep, good tip! for ppl that do this be sure to make it case insensitive and only capture few distinct parts, not too specific. especially if u only expect browsers this can mitigate a lot.

u can also filter for allowing but this gives a risk of allowing the wrong thing as headers are easy to set, so its better to do it via blocking (sadly)
by pen2l | 2025-08-25 10:12:19+00:00
I think a switch happened inside me roughly 5 years ago, that I went from eschewing walled gardens to now valuing them more and more. Too much of my life has been wasted fighting through dark patterns, finding cancel screens, or being had by manipulative subscription arrangements wherein there are cancelation fees or complex terms of service that somehow make cancelation difficult.

When I paid 1k-something dollars for an iPhone 16 a few months ago, I did not pay for a general purpose computing device, no, I paid for a device that can take pictures, and has certain apps that I like which I know how much I'm paying for, and I know that with ease I will be able to active/deactivate its subscription with zero struggle. That's what I paid for, a device made by a company whose discretion I trust and support, and I pray it continues being this way.
by avar | 2025-08-25 10:12:21+00:00
Thanks, also not-so-relevant, for the reasons I noted in a comment in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44922405

I.e. annex is really in a different problem space than "big files in git", despite the obvious overlap.

A good way to think about it is that git-annex is sort of a git-native and distributed solution to the storage problem at the "other side" ("server side") of something like LFS, and to reason about it from there.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-25 10:12:44+00:00
Anyone thumbing their nose at the feds or sticking their dick in a 16yo knows what the risks are.

Now, that's not to say I wouldn't welcome with open arms the "errors" of the legal system (or tax system, or municipal code enforcement, or pretty much anything else where government really screws people by messing up) being concentrated upon the demographics that make up places like HN. After all, the ignorance of said demographics do the bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to providing the political will to perpetuate unjust systems, for they themselves rarely find themselves targeted by them and when they do they can usually pay the problem away. But I do agree with the person you're replying to, the demographics that make up HN find themselves subject to the kind of law enforcement scrutiny that puts you in prison less than the population average.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-25 10:13:09+00:00
> has no capability other than mass death

A 30-kiloton nuclear explosion was used by the USSR to extinguish a large natural gas fire:

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

They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion
by QuesnayJr | 2025-08-25 10:13:14+00:00
There isn't really anything better. The Notices of the AMS has one feature article each issue, but those are sometimes too technical.

Anyway, this article seems fine to me. The "exponentiation" comment seems like a bizarre misreading. The article is just trying to explain how big BB(6) is. Before that, it explains what BB(n) is. To think it's solely about exponentiation you have to skip that entire section.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-25 10:14:29+00:00
i think there is an opportunity to train an neural network on browser user agent s(they are catalogued but vary and change a lot). then u can block everything not matching.

it will work better than regex. a lot of these companies rely on 'but we are clearly recognizable' via fornexample these user agents, as excuse to put burden on sysadmins to maintains blocklists instead of otherway round (keep list of scrapables..)

maybe someone mathy can unburden them ?

you could also look who ask for nonexisting resources, and block anyone who asks for more than X (large enough not to let config issue or so kill regular clients). block might be just a minute so u dont have too many risk when an FP occurs. it will be enough likely to make the scraper turn away.

there are many things to do depending on context, app complexity, load etc. , problem is there's no really easy way to do these things.

ML should be able to help a lot in such a space??
by Evanmo666 | 2025-08-25 10:14:34+00:00
That's a fantastic point, and thank you for bringing it up. You're absolutely right, I should have made this clear from the start.

To be clear: I do not store any of the text you submit. Everything is processed on the server and immediately discarded after the result is sent back to you. Your privacy is a top priority, and no input data is logged or saved.

Your feedback is super helpful. I'll add a clear note about this on the homepage and create a proper privacy policy page this week.

And yes, the irony is definitely not lost on me! It's been a fun challenge to essentially fight AI with AI. Thanks again for the great comment.
by specproc | 2025-08-25 10:14:50+00:00
I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction.

Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:

- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.

- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.

- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]

People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.

[^1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
by simion314 | 2025-08-25 10:15:45+00:00
>They would get fined.

Right, so my local TV gets fined if they published something fake, like for example they had a news about some bullshit happening in Romania but they were showing a video from a different country, the TV claimed it was stupidity and not manipulation, they got fined.

So I want RT and other media to respect the exact same laws, if they do not want to respect our laws and continue to publish fake shit we block them until they pay their fines and start respecting the laws.

And trust me there is no communism censorship here in Romania, the TV is terrible still , you get tons of commercial to shitty suppliments and gambling, you get politicians presenting their bullshit conspiracies, you get the hosts claiming that Soros is doing everything that is wrong in the country and this days also Macron and France are big villains (because they upset Putin and the Zeds are super, duper butt hurt )), you can see ladies presenting themselves as "doctors in energy-shit-karma-bullshit" and claiming the vaccines caused a giant number of allergies and other crap that she and her company with ehr supplements will sell.

We still let people to be idiots but we need to not be idiots like a society and let paid and organized attacks on our population to continue, and we need to do more against this state organized attacks. (as I mentioned previously but maybe in other comment faked documents were sent by mail to people, this is clearly a state sponsored action, they had names and addresses, they falsified documents and then paid for physical mail delivery to make it look more authentic )
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 10:16:15+00:00
I mean, it’s hard to verify this, and that seems to be the main aspect of reporting on Gaza that makes me question the veracity of this information, given the source of it. I can believe that it’s true, but I think it’s fair to trust, but verify. If only there were some independent journalists in Gaza they could have worked with to give this project more legitimacy.
by qwertox | 2025-08-25 10:17:01+00:00
> Caution: The current release (0.6.0) is considered alpha / early beta. It is not production-ready and should only be used for local development, testing, or experimentation. Features, APIs, and behaviors are subject to change without notice. Do not deploy in production environments without thorough security review, validation and additional security mechanisms. Many of the features required for secure, large-scale, or multi-tenant production deployments are still on the project roadmap - which is itself evolving.

IBM posting as if it were a solo open-source developer.
by hulitu | 2025-08-25 10:17:43+00:00
> I want to write a systemd haters handbook.

Why ? Systemd really fits the Unix haters handbook. It is anti unix as much as it can be ( one command to rule them all, binary logs, etc).

In the end it realy seems that the mantra: GNU is not UNIX is true. Just look at the GNU/Linux: pulseaudio, systemd, polkit, wayland, the big, fat linux kernel
by avar | 2025-08-25 10:17:47+00:00
Annex isn't slow because it's written in Haskell, it tends to be slow because of I/O and paranoia that's warranted as the default behavior in a distributed backup tool.

E.g. if you drop something it'll by default check the remotes it has access to for that content in real time, it can be many orders of magnitude faster to use --fast etc., to (somewhat unsafely) skip all that and trust whatever metadata you have a local copy of.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-25 10:18:28+00:00
This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people.

For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.

It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.

This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
by rvnx | 2025-08-25 10:19:29+00:00
They will not stop Letsencrypt abroad, it is clearly an asset for the US gov, the same way that Cloudflare is a worldwide MITM, it would be absurd to shut it down.

If you are a letsencrypt user, then it is nearly impossible to see (even with CT logs) that there was a malicious interception. From a website operator it looks like a pretty standard renewal as Letsencrypt has a short validity duration anyway.

Add on top of that in the US they have access to easy and non-BGP entry points to reroute traffic (Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS).

They can intercept in practice all Cloudflare and all Letsencrypt sites (except the Letsencrypt they also need cooperation of a friendly DNS and have a very theoretical little risk to get caught in CT logs).

Big sites like Meta or Google or Amazon already have to cooperate and intercept internally so in practice almost all western internet is interceptable rather easily.

There is zero world where US gov would want to stop that.

The tech guys working for the NSA are from being idiots, and it would be insulting to even consider that. They would fight to protect Letsencrypt
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-25 10:19:31+00:00
I remember many moons ago, like the Netscape era, when companies that paid for EV certs got special icons and a green address and all sorts of browser indications of trustworthiness.

I just tried my (large, international) bank website in the latest Safari, and I can't even figure out how to view the cert. There's an assumption that every site will have some cert, but no special treatment for EV certs at all.
by blitzar | 2025-08-25 10:19:36+00:00
Yes, MCPs are just APIs but with a few extra steps and I hope it (or something like it) persists for a long time into the future. If all you want from an Ai assistant is content they scrapped a year ago then you dont need these things, otherwise you need a way to get live data or to take real time actions.

API's, even simple JSON data requests from websites and services were becoming increasing blocked behind cloudflare or hidden as a paid feature, MPC has revived (some of) the open data standards of the internet.
by nailer | 2025-08-25 10:19:40+00:00
> Tell the politicians that "everyone can get a basic cert these days", and that the really important stuff (like banking, hospitals, power grids) should be forced to buy EV certs.

Google removed all the verification markers from chrome in September 2019 - because they investigated them and nobody understands a green box means verification.

Yes, the obvious answer is: make the verification UI look like every other verification UI, but they didn’t did test that. The chrome team, specially ryan sleevi, thinks regular people should understand DNS. You know - apple.com.store/ipad isn’t Apple, and that withgoogle.com is actually Google.
by luke727 | 2025-08-25 10:20:20+00:00
I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-25 10:20:27+00:00
At this point, the stuff I'd want to remove:

- auto-dubbing

- auto-translation

- shorts (they're fine in a separate space, just not in the timeline)

- member only streams (if I'm not a member, which is 100% of them)

The only viable interface for that is the web and plenty of browser extensions.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-25 10:20:37+00:00
Yes the idea it's newfangled is odd. It's only newfangled if you ignore the existence of database engines that are better than the open source ones.

Oracle's implementation scales horizontally and can do incremental view maintenance using commit logs:

https://oracle-base.com/articles/misc/materialized-views

But it may not even be necessary because Oracle also supports query caching both server and client side. By default you have to opt-in on the query level:

SELECT /*+ RESULT_CACHE */ .... FROM .....

but if you do then queries might not even hit the database at all, the results are cached by the drivers. The main limitation of that feature is that it's meant for read-mostly tables and cache keys are invalidated on any write to the table. So for aggregating counts in a large multi-tenant table the hit rate would be low and a materialized view is more appropriate.

It's a bit unclear why the author of the article ignores triggers as not "in vogue" though. That's supported by every DB and will work fine for this use case. You do have to learn how to use these features but it can save a lot of work, especially when introducing non-consistent data sources like a Redis cache. Consistency is so valuable.

Disclosure: work for Oracle, opinions are my own (albeit in this case, presumably highly aligned).
by concinds | 2025-08-25 10:20:48+00:00
Okay. Now flip this free-enterprise metaphor.

Apple is dictating the behavior of every business operating in the digital market (Apple itself brags that this amounts to over $1 trillion, with a T, in economic activity), with the App Store, which has 70-80% profit margins, and numerous dev horror stories. Rejecting your update over something they previously approved, or something they let all your competitors do. Forcing their IAP system on you. Dictating what links you can put in your app, how you present prices (don't call out the Apple tax), what you can tell consumers in emails. Forcing their direct competitors to have an inferior user experiences (can't subscribe in Spotify, can't buy books in Kindle; oh, and bundling Apple Music/Books/TV with the OS, and advertising them throughout the OS). Threatening retaliation if you complain publicly ("If you run to the press, it never helps.") Blocking VPNs or secure messaging in authoritarian countries, and you can't sideload. Sabotaging the web to keep their monopoly (even trying to kill PWAs recently).

Apple feels entitled to a higher profit margin on your business than your business will ever achieve for itself! That's nuts!
by iammjm | 2025-08-25 10:21:27+00:00
The Cambrian Explosion happened because of the environmental changes, such as the amount of free oxygen available, while innovations such as eyes were the result of the Cambrian Explosion with life becoming more diversified and complex. So I guess its more accurate to think of stuff that empowers AI, such as cheaper and better GPUs and machine learning, as cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen for organisms to feed and grow upon.
by b112 | 2025-08-25 10:23:58+00:00
The inconsistency comes from the author thinking "All this init stuff is ancient, and filled with absurd work arounds, hacks, and inconsistencies. I'll fix that!". Then as time passes discovering that "Oh wait, I should add a hack for this special case, and this one, and this one, guess these were really needed!" as bug reports come in over the years.

To be fair, this could happen to any of us, especially early in career. But the real hubris is presuming that things are, as they are, without cause or reason. Along with never really knowing how things actually worked. Or why.

I envision a layperson (which is sort of understanding the author had of modern init systems, when starting on systemd). Said person walks up to a complex series of gears, and thinks a peg is just there for no reason, looks unused, and pulls it out. Only to have the whole mess go bananas. You can follow this logic with all of the half baked, partially implemented services like timekeeping, DNS, and others that barely work correctly, and go sideways if looked at funny.

I think if the author took their current knowledge, and this time wrote it from scratch, it could be far better.

However there still seems to be a chip on their shoulder, with an idea that "I'll fix Linux!" still, when in reality these fixes are just creating immense complication with very minimal upside. So any re-write would likely still be an over-complicated contraption.
by epolanski | 2025-08-25 10:24:42+00:00
> Most people in the US seem to not realize that a social healthcare system is better for all of them due to all of them sharing the bill.

As a high-income earner I used to be in favor of privatizing healthcare here in Italy/Europe.

I've always seen the public healthcare system wasteful and inefficient. Our healthcare system really is in a terrible spot.

Then few years ago, a very close friend of mine, had to give birth to her child. She had chosen one of the most expensive hospitals in the region, where there would be a huge staff all for her, not that crappy public service she would get.

Then tragedy struck: in all the luxury and care she was receiving, her newborn had huge problems staying alive, and died of respiratory issues few minutes after birth.

A very preventable death the autopsy stated moreover if she was in an appropriate public hospital.

Why? Because larger public hospitals have all a newborn reanimation unit with trained staff exactly for these kind of emergencies. Private ones? They are virtually non existent, doesn't matter the country or budget, no private hospital can afford such an expensive unit that requires extremely specific training and equipment but gets to act rarely if ever. So they don't exist in those contextes.

Since then I realized how naive I was: private healthcare just cannot justify investing in a huge amount of treatments that are a financial disaster for the private clinic/hospital. They just can't.

Thus, at the end of the day, you don't really want private healthcare that has to choose what to provide on a $ basis, you just don't. You want a as comprehensive and available public service that needs the right amount of money and incentives to work properly.

I don't know how can it be achieved, but you really don't want to be that father/mother, sister, friend or patient that cannot access an important procedure because it makes no financial sense to offer it.