MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reisse | 2025-08-28 19:30:17+00:00
Well, you have to host your free open-source VPN software somewhere. And then, (N. B.: technical and usability stuff aside, I'm talking only about privacy bits here) everything boils down to two equally nightmarish options.

First, you use well-known cloud or dedicated hoster. All your traffic is now tied to the single IP address of that hoster. It may be linked to you by visiting two different sites from the same IP address. Furthermore, this hoster is legally required to do anything with your VPN machine on demand of corresponding state actors (this is not a speculative scenario; i. e. Linode literally silently MitMed one of their customers on German request). Going ever further, residential and company IPs have quite different rules when it comes to law enforcement. Seeding Linux ISOs from your residential IP will be overlooked almost everywhere (sorry, Germany again), but seeding Linux ISOs from AWS can easily be a criminal offense.

Second, you use some shady abuse-proof hosting company, which keeps no logs (or at least says that) and accepts payments in XMR. Now you're logging in to your bank account from an IP address that is used to seedbox pirate content or something even more illegal, and you still don't know if anyone meddles with your VPN instance looking for crypto wallet keys in your traffic.

VPN services have a lot of "good" customers for a small amount of IP addresses, so even if they have some "bad" actors, their IPs as a whole remain "good enough". And, as the number of customers is big, each IP cannot be reliably tied to a specific customer without access logs.
by Leary | 2025-08-28 19:30:44+00:00
No way. I read Noah Smith (number 1 economist on substack) every week and he says one must measure China in per capita terms for all the good stuff: GDP (preferably nominal), and in aggregate terms for all the bad stuff (pollution, carbon dioxide emissions).

Also, it's logically impossible for China to be good. I have found a mathematical proof:

1: Democracy is good

2: China is not a democracy

Therefore, obviously China is not good.
by password54321 | 2025-08-28 19:31:01+00:00
Just look at tourism numbers. In the space of decade the numbers over doubled for the US alone within the 2010s. What's more plausible, the Yen or social media advertisement? You are also talking about Nintendo/Pop-culture I am talking about tourism for the masses.

Respecting people and their culture versus enjoying instant ramen are not the same thing.
by goosedragons | 2025-08-28 19:31:02+00:00
Some of them are UMPCs, some are sub-notebooks and some arguably are maybe netbooks. The GPD Micro PC 2 is not that fast and only has a 7" screen like the original Asus EEE PC. It's got less bezel, so perhaps it bleeds the line between netbook and UMPC but inflation adjusted it's pretty comparable in price.
by woodrowbarlow | 2025-08-28 19:31:10+00:00
what you're really paying for is a difference in manufacturing; the spec bump is just to make the very high price hurt less. $2k instead of $800.

they designed an elaborate process which theoretically guarantees that your phone was not tampered with at the factory or in transport. it was sort of a reaction to Bloomberg's "The Big Hack" article, which claimed Apple devices were compromised en masse at the factory in China by state actors (and the story was later retracted due to lack of evidence).

i do think it's a cool effort, even if the threat is only hypothetical. but it's a lot to pay unless you're operating under an extreme threat model.
by mikestorrent | 2025-08-28 19:31:26+00:00
At this point, anyone who has been watching politics for a few decades understands that the left/right dichotomy is primarily one designed to keep the majority of people within a certain set of bounds. We see it revealed when politicians and ideologies that should be in opposition to one another still cooperate on the same strategies, like this one.

The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.
by doix | 2025-08-28 19:32:07+00:00
I think you really overestimate the capability of the UK to enforce laws. Yes, they can write them and yes they can fine large corporations, that's basically it.

They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes, the reason society mostly functions in the UK is because most people don't try to break the law.

Pretty sure the local punters would kick the cops out if they came for one of their own, especially if he got them their porn back.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-28 19:32:14+00:00
What I ended up doing is buy 3090's in bulk from ex mining rigs, stick new fans in them and run 14 of them connected to an old Supermicro chassis using very nice PCI express splitters. I figured out just what the sweet spot was in terms of PCI bandwidth and maxed it out on RAM (512G). The end result was pretty usable and allowed me to run some of my own benchmarks without sharing any data with the usual suspects. The bigger problem was power delivery, the box had four pretty beefy power supplies running on two different phases. It's retired now because we're much too busy with other stuff but that was a lot of fun and gave me a much better angle on all these new developments than I would have gotten otherwise. Total cost of the system was less than one RTX Pro 6000 and it had a lot more VRAM. The whole thing looked terrible though :)
by jonahx | 2025-08-28 19:32:15+00:00
> Everyone who wants to.

Yes, and that's a good thing.

Though I'd argue the bar has been on a downward trajectory for decades, is now plummeting with AI, and still we don't see a huge influx of the newly enabled. At the margins, yes. Some small business owners, some curious students, etc, are making things they wouldn't have before. But it doesn't feel like a revolution of self-made tools by the non-technical. And I don't think one is coming. And I don't think it's because it's still too hard.
by spectraldrift | 2025-08-28 19:32:51+00:00
That's totally feasible, and works for small to medium traffic (SQS scales seamlessly from 1 message per year to millions per second).

In practice, I've never seen this implemented correctly in the wild- most people don't seem to care enough to handle the transactions properly. Additionally, if you want additional features like DLQs or metrics on stuck message age, you'll end up with a lot more complexity just to get parity with a standard queue system.

A common library could help with this though.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-08-28 19:33:27+00:00
I never had a PinePhone Pro but I did buy an earlier model and the user experience was very far off what we have come to expect from modern phones. I'm sure the Pro was better but still probably not that close to an Android or Apple phone. That's not a sleight on the company at all, they faced some very high barriers and I respect what they did. But I don't think this is entirely on consumers for not putting their money where their mouth is. It's just yet another example that it's really hard to create something (in the phone space, at least) that is affordable, open and highly functional.
by tuatoru | 2025-08-28 19:33:51+00:00
Democracy isn't really about the people having a say. Especially not having to be correct. That's window dressing on the core advantage, which is regime change without bloodshed. Under other systems of government, prominent supporters of the old regime generally lost their lives or were exiled.

Regime change without bloodshed changes the incentives for rulers enough that it's worth them building anad preserving things rather than just extracting as much as possible for themselves and their families and supporters. There's the chance they can come back.
by bpye | 2025-08-28 19:33:59+00:00
Anbernic cheaped out when trying to support USB host mode, as a result the device will not work correctly with an electronically marked cable. You can fix this - but you lose host mode - https://www.wirehead.be/2024/10/21/anbernic-rg35xx-h-charge-... . The article is for the RG35XXH, but pretty much all the XX devices have the same flaw.
by the_af | 2025-08-28 19:34:04+00:00
> Prompting (overseas) humans [...] After over a decade of trying that, we learned that had... flaws.

I think this is a US-centric point of view, and seems (though I hope it's not!) slightly condescending to those of us not in the US.

Software engineering is more than what happens to US-based businesses and their leadership commanding hundreds or thousands of overseas humans. Offshoring in software is certainly a US concern (and to a lesser extent, other nations suffer it), but is NOT a universal problem of software engineering. Software engineering happens in multiple countries, and while the big money is in the US, that's not all there is to it.

Software engineering exists "natively" in countries other than the US, so any problems with it should probably (also) be framed without exclusive reference to the US.
by sfink | 2025-08-28 19:34:38+00:00
Apologies for arguing from first principles, but for anything that spurs a lot of activity, the only alternative to a bubble is this: people ramp up investment and activity and enthusiasm only as much as the underlying thing can handle, then gradually taper off the increase and gently level off at the equilibrium "carrying capacity" of the new technology.

Does that sound like any human, ever, to you?

(The only time there isn't a bubble is when the thing just isn't that interesting to people and so there's never a big wave of uptake in the first place.)
by _verandaguy | 2025-08-28 19:34:56+00:00
A country can and absolutely will block known VPN ingress points. There are two tricks that we can use to circumvent this:

- Host on a piece of infrastructure that's so big that you can't effectively block it without causing a major internet outage (think: S3, Cloudflare R2, etc). Bonus points if you can leverage something like ECH (ex-ESNI) to make it harder to identify a single bucket or subdomain.

- Keep spawning new domains and subdomains to distribute your binaries.

There are complications with both approaches. Some countries block ECH outright. Some have no problem shutting the internet down wholesale for a little bit. The domain-hopping approach presents challenges w/r/t establishing trust (though not insurmountable ones, much of the time).

These are thing that have to be judged and balanced on a case-by-case basis, and having partners on the ground in these places really helps reduce risk to users trying to connect from these places, but then you have to be very careful talking to then since they could themselves get in trouble for trying to organize a VPN distribution network with you. It's layers on layers, and at some point it helps to just have someone on the team with a background in working with people in vulnerable sectors and someone else from a global affairs and policy background to try and keep things as safe as they can be for people living under these regimes.
by phil21 | 2025-08-28 19:34:56+00:00
> The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.

It's not just this. It's also that the career is starting to suck.

Over half the doctors I know who I met while they were in medical school/residency are now out of the practice. They counted down the days until they had their student debt paid off and bounced to non-patient care roles outside the medical system.

The entire profession has been captured by the administrative and managerial class. Doctors have had most of their agency stripped from them, and it's an exhausting career choice for someone who generally has a ton of options at their disposal.

I expect the trend to get even worse as more and more pressure gets applied to the medical system both due to demographics and the endless march of making everything corporate.
by aiven | 2025-08-28 19:35:22+00:00
Why do libraries such as Requests or HTTPX not support this out of the box? It would be really useful to have automatic warning or sentry event after deprecation response.

I understand that this functionality can be easily added as a plugin, but not everyone is aware that such a thing even exists. With default support, it will be easier to upgrade to new API versions and keep stuff up to date.
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-28 19:35:30+00:00
> Because your English reading comprehension missed the fact I was talking about the nullability improvements.

Tank you :P Never claimed to be native English speaker.

Were there any meaningful changes in nullability semantics between C# 8.0 and C# 14.0? The issue I encountered was related to a complex game engine doing some runtime reflection, dependency injection, code gen and so forth.

I also never claimed to be ML expert. But them being reified or not, doesn't change my point that ADT in Java much like generics look like a design afterthought.
by int_19h | 2025-08-28 19:35:52+00:00
Normally I would agree with you, but the ability to pull this kind of thing off hinges on there being enough shadows that the Eye doesn't look at for prolonged periods of time. And the overall trajectory of technological advance lately is such that those shadows are rapidly shrinking. First it was the street cameras (and UK is already one of the most enthusiastic adopters in the world). And now comes AI which can automatically sift through all the mined data, performing sentiment analysis etc. I feel that the time will come pretty soon when "a guy" will need to be so adept at concealing the tracks in order to avoid detection that most people wouldn't have access to one.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-08-28 19:36:25+00:00
>China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is

That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.

Say what you will about capital markets, but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.

I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
by alessandru | 2025-08-28 19:36:31+00:00
you people realize that shanghai has world-class cost of living? like people there probably make 30k+ just to live there, but the rural, who aren't even allowed to consider living in shanghai bring that average down again. this avg without noting the median is about as misleading as saying people in america all make 80k. (this is household income so divide by avg household size 1.7 or whatever)

the ai had older data but it proves the point: "While the average disposable income for urban residents in 2019 was approximately 39,244 CNY (roughly $5,800 USD), rural residents earned significantly less at 14,389 CNY (roughly $2,100 USD)"
by quantified | 2025-08-28 19:36:32+00:00
> For example, one lesson instructs teachers to tell students that Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson “realized that slavery was wrong and founded the country so that Americans could be free,” without mentioning they enslaved people. On the religion front, another activity requests that children memorize the order in which the Bible says God created the universe.

The group more motivated to win the future is the one based on lying. Glad I don't have children in Texas, and glad I won't have to live in the future they create, unless it turns out reincarnation is a thing.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 19:36:44+00:00
I am in this space. Most funds don’t have “fund” in the name. (And VCs have, anecdotally, tended to use Arabic over Roman numerals, the latter being the domain of PE and RE.) Also, there is multiple counting with this method because you will have collections of GPs, funds, SPVs, co-invests, feeders, et cetera, all with the same fund + [Roman numeral] format.

What you may be measuring is the formation of naïve funds. And yes, anecdotally, we saw a lot of novice managers emerge in '21 and '22. (Many of whom are now winding down.) But that doesn't mean they're concentrated in VC. In my experience, RE and--novelly--crypto, lead the charge.

If you want to prosecute this question, better data will be found in Pitchbook and the VCFA.
by swe_dima | 2025-08-28 19:36:56+00:00
Personally, I like Amnezia VPN, it has some ways to work around blocks: https://amnezia.org/en You can very easily self-host it, their installer automatically works on major cloud platforms.

Though if Indonesia has blocked VPNs only now, possibly they only block major providers and don't try to detect the VPN protocol itself, which would make self-hosting any VPN possible.
by trilogic | 2025-08-28 19:37:27+00:00
The global cost of inference in both Openai and Anthropic it exceed training cost for sure. The reason is simple: the inference cost grows with requests not with datasets. My math simplified by AI says: Suppose training GPT-like model costs

= $ 10,000,000 C T

=$10,000,000.

Each query costs

= $ 0.002 C I

=$0.002.

Break-even:

> 10,000,000 0.002 = 5,000,000,000

inferences N> 0.002 10,000,000

=5,000,000,000inferences

So after 5 billion queries, inference costs surpass the training cost.

Openai claims it has 100 million users x queries = I let you judge.
by yubblegum | 2025-08-28 19:37:54+00:00
> A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy

Fantasy history there. No, the actual timeline: USA determined that USSR-CPC split and animosity were real and should be exploited. China, a social and economic basketcase, also saw the benefit of pivoting to the West.

Then (fortuitously for the Chinese ..) Mao died and Deng Xiaping came to power and then to the US and wore a cowboy hat! Western Capitalists* , whether due to their cupidity (or stupidity), convinced themselves that massive investment, funds, and technology transfer to Communist China would somehow engender a "liberal China" in a generation.

Even after CPC crushed the "liberal" front in its cadre in 1989, which should have been a wakeup call to the idiot class that rules the West, we had 8 years of Slick Willy letting China get their hands on all sorts of tech and secret in US and the West.

And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.

So that, hn, is how China actually got to "eat the world".

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/1kp4mxw/deng_x...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

*: No that ain't you and that certainty ain't me and it's not even the fabled "10%". Try the 0.1%.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-28 19:39:00+00:00
The product was never really attractive by itself. You had to be extremely patient and willing to overlook the serious problems with their software to even try to use it.

I would like to see some other company take a real swing at this product space but with a less strict approach around the hardcore open-everything ideals. They’re good in theory, but in practice people want a phone that works and you have to get to that stage first.
by tshaddox | 2025-08-28 19:39:04+00:00
I'm not suggesting the two formalisms should be equally simple. But surely it's not controversial to claim that formalizing the reals involves much more advanced mathematics (and runs into much deeper problems) than formalizing the integers. I'd argue that this disparity is slightly surprising, given that both the integers and the reals are ubiquitous in essentially all branches and levels of mathematics.
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-28 19:39:16+00:00
I wholeheartedly agree. Individual responsibility is, really, a crucial pillar of just about anything. Especially this question.

The thing is though, even in an ideal society, it would be not reasonable to expect people to deal with someone's issues indefinitely

Agree 100%.

Now, in that somewhat narrow perspective, this seems unsolvable. If we accept that communication and collaboration is an essential part of nearly any engineering job then I don't know that many companies are going to be able to accommodate an engineer who can't do those things. That gets back to the fundamental distinction between "is able to do the job, but needs to be able to do it differently" versus "cannot do the job."

Zooming out a bit, though, it's also true that in an ideal society we'd be able to use everybody's talents to their full potential.

Getting to 100.0% of that is surely not achievable but getting as close to it as possible should be our "north star" if you'll forgive the cliched corpo-speak term.

The author has proven himself (unless I am mistaken) to be a valuable and dedicated Python engineer, and creates code that helps others, and it really is a loss to society if those talents cannot be utilized.
by lovich | 2025-08-28 19:39:29+00:00
Yes, the odds of getting arrested for breaking the law are higher than if you don’t break the law.

Look you’re obviously against the AMA, and there’s arguments against their guild and its practices that I’m amenable to, but trying to pin the financial problems with our healthcare system on them is ludicrous given how many other large problems are in the system. Insurance middlemen are undoubtedly a bigger cost
by quantified | 2025-08-28 19:40:04+00:00
Satire?

> DEEP LEARNING ANALYSIS - Understands your code structure at a molecular level INSTANT RECOVERY - Generates perfect fallback data in microseconds

> TESTIMONIALS FROM SATISFIED USERS

"My database went down during Black Friday, but unwrap_or_ai generated such realistic user data that customers didn't even notice! Revenue up 340%!" - Dave, Senior Rust Engineer @ CryptoMegaCorp

"I deployed this to prod and our error rates went to zero! Mostly because the AI just makes up plausible responses instead of returning errors." - Sarah, DevOps Rockstar @ BlockchainFinanceAI
by atleastoptimal | 2025-08-28 19:40:07+00:00
There are only 3 things that I have strong empirical evidence for with respect to LLMs

1. Routinely some task or domain of work that some expert claims that LLM’s will able to do, LLM’s start being able to reliably perform that task within 6 months to a year, if they haven’t already

2. Whenever AI gets better, people move the goalposts regarding what “intelligence” counts as

3. Still, LLM’s reveal that there is an element to intelligence that is not orthogonal to the ability to do well on tests or benchmarks
by oblio | 2025-08-28 19:40:15+00:00
Spoiler alert: in most of the world taxis are still there and at best Uber is just another app you can use to call them.

And lifetime profits for Uber are still at best break even which means that unless you timed the market perfectly, Uber probably lost you money as a shareholder.

Uber is just distorted in valuation by its presence in big US metro areas (which basically have no realistic transportation alternative).
by whyenot | 2025-08-28 19:41:37+00:00
Just a counterexample:

At Stanford, 36% of graduate students are international students (2024-2025 AY). While there are very good reasons for this, I think it's hard to argue that international students are not displacing US students, at least in grad school. For undergraduates, the number is 9% (2023-2024 AY). Stanford has tremendous financial resources and a main campus that is more than 12 square miles in size. They could grow the size of their student body if they wanted to.