MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucumo | 2025-08-25 06:27:52+00:00
> I think their point was that for everything the US congress makes available through client-rendered XSLT, they already also do the transformation on their side and serve the HTML under another page.

More or less. I wasn't really about that argument, it was about the intellectual dishonesty of ignoring that it exists.

The original GitHub issue contained that link and was almost immediately answered. Everyone reading the issue report could have, should have and probably did read the answer.

The blog post doesn't mention the argument exists. To be fair to that author, it sounds like it was mostly "oh cool, this exists post", which doesn't need to go into pros and cons.

We can't extend that goodwill to sunaookami. They used it as an example that it's "widely used". Willfully ignoring that this example is pretty minor. (If this is the best example, it's not a good sign, BTW...)

I don't really care about XSLT support in browsers, but I do care about intellectual honesty in these debates. Nobody needs to agree with the argument. AFAIC, it's perfectly okay to believe that this page is of vital importance to the world. But that argument should then be made. That's how we go forward. How we get better decisions. That's how everybody learns.

If on the other hand people only repeat each other's most impressive sounding examples, then everybody gets dumber. We're no longer working to take a good decision through good arguments, but we'd be working to justify a made decision through bad arguments.
by gorgoiler | 2025-08-25 06:28:32+00:00
The IFS part is misguided. If the author used double quotes around the array reference then words are kept intact:

vs=("a b" "c d") for v in "${vs[@]}" do #^♥ ♥^ echo "$v" done #= a b #= c d

Whereas in their (counter-)example, with missing quotes:

vs=("a b" "c d") for v in ${vs[@]} do #^! !^ echo "$v" done #= a #= b #= c #= d

To paraphrase the manual: Any element of an array may be referenced using ${name[subscript]}. If subscript is @ the word expands to all members of name. If the word is double-quoted, "${name[@]}" expands each element of name to a separate word.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-25 06:29:19+00:00
That’s one gimmick and it was weaved throughout the show. It was also used to further the story telling.

HCF created drama in places it wasn’t earned. And did so just so that episodes could have cliffhangers.

Think of it like a shower scene in a movie. More often than not, it has literally no relevance to the movie. It doesn’t further the plot. It’s not even part of the story. It’s just there so that it can be used as a clip in the movie trailer.

Well HCF was full of stuff that, admittedly wasn’t there for trailers (or at least I don’t think they were), but they also added nothing to the story. They were just there to artificially add some drama. But that drama wasn’t earned.

For example, the suicide was very poorly handled. It was used as vehicle for discussing open source vs proprietary code. But you could have easily done that without the death. Instead you ended up with interesting plot themes being overshadowed by this one lazy plot device.

The show was absolutely full of stuff like that. Things that were completely out of the blue and if it made it to the cutting room flow then the show would have flowed just the same without it.
by mort96 | 2025-08-25 06:30:14+00:00
The percentage of US trips abroad which are to China must be minuscule, and I bet nobody in the US regularly uses a VPN to get a Chinese IP address. So blocking Chinese IP addresses is probably going to have a small impact on US customers. Blocking all abroad IP addresses, on the other hand, would impact people who just travel abroad or use VPNs. Not sure what your point is or why you're comparing these two things.
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-25 06:30:23+00:00
FAFO from both sides. Not defending this bot at all. That said, the shenanigans some rogue or clueless webmasters are up to blocking legitimate and non intrusive or load causing M2M trafic is driving some projects into the arms of 'scrape services' that use far less considerate nor ethical means to get to the data you pay them for.

IP blocking is useless if your sources are hundreds of thousands of people worldwide just playing a "free" game on their phone that once in a while on wifi fetches some webpages in the background for the game publisher's scraping as a service side revenue deal.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-25 06:31:07+00:00
I have a Core 2 Quad machine around from 2008 for nostalgia reasons and retro computing, and even with a modern lightweight Linux on it, it's definitely not enough for modern computing unless what you consider modern computing is writing text documents and viewing websites ... slowly, and for that it's extremely wasteful since it has a 95W TDP while a 2W modern smartphone/tablet can do that even faster and more efficient, plus it's also portable.

Having to do any kind of 2025 type of work on it would be testing my patience to the extremes because all SW and media has grown in size and/or complexity(AV1 encoding, etc) requiring faster CPU, GPU, storage and RAM for the optimum experience. The only things that run fast on it are period accurate Linux 2.6 and Windows XP with websites form 2008, but I wouldn't call that modern computing.

Computers have gotten night and day faster and especially more efficient since 2008, pretending otherwise would be in bad faith.
by habinero | 2025-08-25 06:31:52+00:00
That's not a good way to think about it.

Plenty of things could theoretically exist that aren't possible and likely will never be possible.

Like, sure, a Dyson sphere would solve our energy needs. We can't build one now and we almost certainly never will lol

"AGI" is theoretically feasible, sure. Our brains are just matter. But they're also an insanely complex and complicated system that came out of a billion years of evolution.

A little rinky dink statistical model doesn't even scratch the surface of it, and I don't understand why people think it does.
by hnhg | 2025-08-25 06:32:57+00:00
Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
by labcomputer | 2025-08-25 06:33:01+00:00
But, like, why fight your tools?

Why not just accept that iOS has coddling, and that your preferences are better served by the competition? As you said, Android has permission prompts. They have folding phones. Android phones regularly beat iPhones in camera quality measurements, for example.

What does Apple have that you actually want?

For me, I liked the walled garden and I put up with the rest because of it. If you don’t like the walled garden, I can’t understand wanting an iPhone.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-08-25 06:33:44+00:00
People are resistant because:

1. There's this huge misconception that LLMs are literally just memorizing stuff and repeating patterns from their training data 2. People glamorize math and feel like advancements in it would "be AGI"

They don't realize that having it generate "new math" is not much harder than having it generate "new programs." Instead of writing something in Python, it's writing something in Lean.
by ehnto | 2025-08-25 06:34:09+00:00
I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans.

If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, in all degrees of motion a human has etc.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-25 06:34:22+00:00
I mean “pyrotechnics” in the metaphorical sense. A big flash of drama from nowhere and then nothing afterwards. But that was a poor choice of words on my part. (It was late and I was tired, sorry).

I’ve discussed my thinking in the other responses so won’t go in-depth here. But to summarise:

The general story had real potential but was marred (in my opinion at least) with cliffhangers that felt jarring and unnecessary to the underlying story.
by yapyap | 2025-08-25 06:34:23+00:00
You ate the “save the children” koolaid.

Children can also be groomed over text messages, should we let the government read all our text messages now?

Children can also be depicted wrong in photos, should we let the governments of the world have access to our photos so they can check for themselves if that is happening or not?

(both are hypothetical questions, the answer is no of course not. This is the responsibility of the caretaker in their life to guide them safely through the world.)
by seanhunter | 2025-08-25 06:34:57+00:00
The Seychelles has a sweetheart tax deal with India such that a lot of corporations who have an India part and a non-India part will set up a Seychelles corp to funnel cash between the two entities. Through the magic of "Transfer Pricing"[1] they use this to reduce the amount of tax they need to pay.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is related somehow. Like maybe these are Indian corporations using a Seychelles offshore entity to do their scanning because then they can offset the costs against their tax or something. It may be that Cyprus has similar reasons. Istr that Cyprus was revealed to be important in providing a storefront to Russia and Putin-related companies and oligarchs.[2]

So Seychelles may be India-related bots and Cyprus Russia-related bots.

[1] https://taxjustice.net/faq/what-is-transfer-pricing/#:~:text...

[2] Yup. My memory originated in the "Panama Papers" leaks https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/cypr...
by sema4hacker | 2025-08-25 06:35:39+00:00
I agree with the article that this is the wrong question to ask. I think the best way to teach programming is to start with the most basic concepts, independent of any language, such as the idea that computer memory consists of cells that can store data like text or numbers, and that we label these cells with names so we can tell the cells apart, just like mailboxes on a street.

Then there's the idea that we can move data between cells and input and output that data.

Then that we can do simple operations between cells, such as arithmetic and comparing and swapping.

At that point we know enough to write a simple program, such as inputting two numbers from the keyboard and outputting the largest on the display, using some trivial made-up language.

Then introduce looping, and solve the problem of inputting numbers until zero is input, and reporting the largest number found.

Then maybe simple structures such as arrays or lists or strings, then more complicated flow control such as nested loops and callable procedures or functions, persistent storage, and so on. At each stage, require solving simple "real world" problems such as a trivial billing program, or sales tax calculation, or a toy text editor, or simple histogram output.

Turns out most programs need and use very few programming concepts. A good introductory language would be as simple as possible, just sufficient enough to demonstrate and allow the writing of programs covering all the desired concepts in a 101 course. If the language being used can allow more than what's being taught in the 101 course, then it will have features and syntactic sugar that will invariably confuse and misdirect the student. Let a more powerful language wait until the next course, because the most important thing to teach initially are CONCEPTS such as named memory, operators, if-then-else, simple I/O, simple structures, looping, and so on, NOT the arcane syntax of some particular language.

The written material should include as many small but "useful" program examples as possible, first with each concept individually demonstrated, then combining concepts into more sophisticated less-toy-like examples. I've also found that a particularly powerful instruction method is to present a very short piece of code along with five supposed outputs by that code but for which only one output is correct, and make the student determine which output is the answer.
by willvarfar | 2025-08-25 06:35:44+00:00
Yes the thing that might be missed in the point about how the big buildout of GPU compute is going to be the backbone of the future etc is that, unlike railroads and dark fibre, the GPU compute gets obsolete really really quickly. So it's not the same.

I had a friend who got a Sun cluster for basically free when the 2000 dot com bubble burst. And when we were doing recreational math contests a couple of years later it was slower than our laptops.

So it is very likely that a load of today's GPU compute is very competitive next year or the year after?

The AI bubble bursting will kill investment in the next gen hardware in the west.

But china will come to market with its first gen that it is currently building to replace its dependency on the west and will leapfrog the west etc. China isn't really completely dependent on competing in our AI bubble, its using AI for its own things and will plough on even when the west bubble bursts. Seems obvious?

Still, there has been so much talk about the AI bubble bursting last week and this is the the best writeup.
by Munksgaard | 2025-08-25 06:35:59+00:00
Git-Annex is a cool piece of technology, but my impression is that it works best for single-user repositories. So for instance, as @nolist_policy described in a sibling comment, managing all your personal files, documents, music, etc. across many different devices.

I tried using it for syncing large files in a collaborative repository, and the use of "magic" branches didn't seem to scale well.
by friendzis | 2025-08-25 06:36:13+00:00
It's never either/or: you don't have to choose between white and black lists exclusively and most of the traffic is going to come from grey areas anyway.

Say you whitelist an address/range and some systems detect "bad things". Now what? You remove that address/range from whitelist? Doo you distribute the removal to your peers? Do you communicate removal to the owner of unwhitelisted address/range? How does owner communicate dealing with the issue back? What if the owner of the range is hosting provider where they don't proactively control the content hosted, yet have robust anti-abuse mechanisms in place? And so on.

Whitelist-only is a huge can of worms and whitelists works best with trusted partner you can maintain out-of-band communication with. Similarly blacklists work best with trusted partners, however to determine addresses/ranges that are more trouble than they are worth. And somewhere in the middle are grey zone addresses, e.g. ranges assigned to ISPs with CGNATs: you just cannot reliably label an individual address or even a range of addresses as strictly troublesome or strictly trustworthy by default.

Implement blacklists on known bad actors, e.g. the whole of China and Russia, maybe even cloud providers. Implement whitelists for ranges you explicitly trust to have robust anti-abuse mechanisms, e.g. corporations with strictly internal hosts.
by MindSpunk | 2025-08-25 06:36:28+00:00
Let's run the numbers for indie development.

Say you're a team of 3. Your game takes 2 years to develop. You spend on salary for 3x2 years. You've spent ~$600,000 so far. Let's assume you haven't had any other sources of operational costs like software licenses for your art tools (3D modelling, 2D drawing, music production, sound production, game engine), marketing expenditure, development hardware, outside contracting, and a number of other things.

If you pull $800,000 in the first year Apple will take $120,000. Your net profit is $80,000. Apple has taken over half your profit.

If you pull $1,200,000 in the first year Apple will take $210,000. I'm going to assume that Apple still only takes 15% on the first $1million. Your net profit is $390,000. About a third of your profit has gone to Apple now.

The carve-out for small revenues is not some panacea. Fixed cost overheads for small teams will swallow the platitude very fast. Video games is a high risk, hits based industry. Apple's tax adds the most risk to small ventures, the kind of ventures that are going to produce innovative high risk content, making them even more risky adding more difficulty to acquiring finance.

So if we want to talk about Apple's 15% it's actually worse.
by dlenski | 2025-08-25 06:36:34+00:00
> Crawlers can still start an arbitrary number of parallel crawls, but each one costs to start and needs to stay below some rate limit.

This is a nice explanation. It's much clearer than anything I've seen offered by Anubis’s authors, in terms of why or how it could be effective at preventing a site from being ravaged by hordes of ill-behaved bots.
by sayamqazi | 2025-08-25 06:37:14+00:00
> Why? We learn about the past by looking at the present all the time. We also learn about the future by looking at the present.

The original comment's was in a differnt spirit or at least how I interpreted it. It was more implying by looking at a very small slice of reality you should in theory be able to re-construct the whole universe because every particle and space quantum is being influenced (to tiniest degrees) by every other particle in the universe, which will not work if you dont know all the rules, no determinism and T_zero.
by degamad | 2025-08-25 06:37:20+00:00
The author addresses that in footnote 2:

> [2] Another approach: instead of altering IFS, begin the loop with for arg in "$@" - double quoting the iteration variable. This changes loop semantics to produces the nicer behavior, and even handles a few edge cases better. The big problem is maintainability. It's easy for even experienced developers to forget to put in the double quotes. Even if the original author has managed to impeccably ingrain the habit, it's foolish to expect that all future maintainers will. In short, relying on quotes has a high risk of introducing subtle time-bomb bugs. Setting IFS renders this impossible.
by omnicognate | 2025-08-25 06:37:25+00:00
I don't really know what's meant by "exciting" here, but there's plenty of choral music that's upbeat, joyful and rhythmical. For me the most enjoyable form of musical "excitement" is frisson, which choral music has in great abundance. Nothing can give you goosebumps like a good choir.

I disagree with the premise. I don't think there's anything inherently "harder to appreciate" about choral music. It's just a personal, and no doubt culturally influenced, preference. I struggle to enjoy opera and hip-hop, but that's on me. I don't go around writing articles about how hard they are to appreciate.
by hahahacorn | 2025-08-25 06:37:37+00:00
I recently gave an unprompted tirade about bubbles creating pockets of fake economic activity with no “real” economic output or value creation tied to them, and how sometimes, the circulatory systems in those bubbles feed into themselves.

E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property.

Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
by dijit | 2025-08-25 06:37:56+00:00
The half-life of iron is pretty low too, the advantage of the rail system is what it allowed us to do when it was cheap enough.

All the investment in AI should help bring infrastructure up to a higher level, power distribution and cooling for example are at a much higher level than would have otherwise been.

Who knows what use that might have if it suddenly becomes incredibly cheap.

(this is my silver lining thinking)
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-25 06:38:40+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.

Now only companies are left to pick up the bill, because a republican administration won't ever consider doing it.

I still wonder when CEOs will realize that lack of education and lack of healthcare will eventually land at their doorsteps because they won't have immigrant workforces anymore that can compensate for it.
by jampa | 2025-08-25 06:39:25+00:00
The Pokémon Go company tried that shortly after launch to block scraping. I remember they had three categories of IPs:

- Blacklisted IP (Google Cloud, AWS, etc), those were always blocked

- Untrusted IPs (residential IPs) were given some leeway, but quickly got to 429 if they started querying too much

- Whitelisted IPs (IPV4 addresses are used legitimately by many people), for example, my current data plan tells me my IP is from 5 states over, so anything behind a CGNAT.

You can probably guess what happens next. Most scrapers were thrown out, but the largest ones just got a modem device farm and ate the cost. They successfully prevented most users from scraping locally, but were quickly beaten by companies profiting from scraping.

I think this was one of many bad decisions Pokémon Go made. Some casual players dropped because they didn't want to play without a map, while the hardcore players started paying for scraping, which hammered their servers even more.
by vintermann | 2025-08-25 06:40:39+00:00
I think it's a lot about economics, too. Choirs of any significant size have to be amateur. It's hard enough to do a 4 person band playing popular music full-time, with 20-30 people performing more niche music it just doesn't happen.

Small group a capella is slightly more viable, but it's very "amateur coded": even very good a capella groups perform a lot of covers, and rarely stick with one genre. They perform whatever they want, which is often also things with commercial appeal, but isn't ideal for long-term musical identity building.

Take Rajaton for instance. Extremely technically brilliant, but their own compositions are a relatively small part of their repertoire (and still more than most a capella groups!). Pop music covers and Christmas music are obviously a big part of what makes them commercially viable, in addition they perform commissioned work from acknowledged choral composers (Mia Marakoff, Michael McGlynn). When they do the occasional album with good stylistic coherence and their own compositions (like 2016 Salaisuus) it doesn't look like a commerical success.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-08-25 06:41:09+00:00
Some music is only 'exciting' for performers ... and that's OK! Watch a performance of a late Schubert string quintet or Beethoven string quartet for example ... see how much fun they're having. My high-school chorus teacher put together a group to sing madrigals; it sure was fun, and whether there was an audience made no matter.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-08-25 06:41:16+00:00
I think this is directionally correct. But we tend to remember the technologies which became mainstream after the bubble burst and forget those that fizzled or found a much less world-changing niche.

Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.