MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:02:38+00:00
I'm not 'screwing' anyone. I'm saying - the same way people don't want to have their data used, I DO want my data used. I'm not saying they use YOUR data. I'm saying they use MY data.

Likewise, I'm not telling you what you publish. In the same manner, I dislike it you telling me that I publish. So on

> name, home address, work, government-issued ID, financial transactions, chats, browser history, location history, surveillance footage of your home, all for free.

It's up to me, not you, what I decided to publish or not. Fwiw, I already publish

> name, home address, work,

willingly. My name is public (how can it be otherwise?) and home address is in the electoral register that is public. My work info is in the UK companies register, available for reading to all, on the web

I publish to selected parties

> government-issued ID

even if I don't want it. (we don't have specific 'government-issued ID' for ID purposes like in the Continent; my driving licence is used for that) I did it yesterday, because UK gov requires companies to collect that information. Yesterday I had to give two photos of myself to an online pharmacy shop because UK gov mandates that they collect that info - and I disliked that very much. The online pharmacy is not the one pushing for that data, its the UK gov forcing that one them via regulation of how that particular medication is to be sold online.

I don't want to publish and don't publish

> financial transactions, chats, browser history, location history, surveillance footage of your home

...and don't understand where this gale to tell perfect strangers what they should do with their lives comes from?? I don't tell you what you should or should not publish? Ditto for the pricing

> all for free.

Up to me to decide. I don't tell you what you do - so you don't tell me what I do, pretty please.

I am not waiting on "privacy maximalists." I try to share my data for some purpose I need. I loathe 'privacy maximalist' in the UK for having influenced the current laws of the land in a way to cater for their obsessions and ignore my desires. I think I'm in majority, not minority. Our current predicament seems to me the case of "public lies, private truths." A small cadre of vocal proponents of a particular view, established "the ground truth to what is desirable". (in this case - maximum privacy, ideally zero information sharing) The public goes with it in words, pays lip service, while in deeds, the revealed preferences show that we value our data privacy very little - almost zero. Even one click extra to share our data less, is one click too many, an effort too high for most people. Again - these are revealed preferences, for people keep lying when asked. It's not even the case of "you are lying to me" - no, it's more like "you are lying to yourself."
by ksimukka | 2025-08-30 08:03:50+00:00
From my experience, living in the US was dystopian compared to what I have experienced in Oslo. I have only been here for 6 years, so given a long enough timeframe that could change.

I think it comes down to mindset. For example You have what you need to live, but the things you want are expensive.

Housing is a problem, but it seems that is a problem almost everywhere. That said, it is not always “easy” to obtain what you want, but I think that is good for society. For example the second hand market is strong.

I’m not sure if that answers your question.
by number6 | 2025-08-30 08:04:00+00:00
While most people may not see breaking the speed limit as the primary purpose of their car, the way cars are designed, especially marketed and used in everyday life normalizes and even encourages exceeding posted speeds. This makes speeding not an edge case, but a central, majority use case in practice.

Ok, that's not actually what I believe, I don't even know if you could make this argument. This is just for the arguments sake, sorry.
by squiffsquiff | 2025-08-30 08:04:02+00:00
Appears that our author was present whilst either he gave a talk with no questions or a tame interviewer asked Werner soft questions with no follow-ups. Absolutely no pushback or challenge to anything he's reported as saying. Nothing along the lines of 'I keep reading AWS customers describing the quality of support and support staff declining over the last year or so. This seems to correlate closely with AWS push to full time RTO. How do you respond to this data?'
by kristopolous | 2025-08-30 08:05:00+00:00
so the 3.2GWh battery grid storage array, in operation, this is still 1/100th what is needed?

https://www.energy-storage.news/edwards-sanborn-california-s...

You want a 320 GWh installation?

You do realize HVDC grids can do 3,000km energy travel, right? That's basically anywhere to anywhere, continental US. There's already installs like the PDCI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie that take 3GW from north oregon to LA.

There's even transcontinental energy links in the works like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:05:10+00:00
>We need protocols, not gatekeepers

The funny thing is that this blog post is complaining about a proposed protocol from Cloudflare (one which will identify bots so that good bots can be permitted). The signup form is just a method to ask Cloudflare (or any other website owner/CDN) to be categorized as a good bot.

It's not a great protocol if you're in the business of scraping websites or selling people bots to access websites for them, but it's a great protocol for people who just want their website to work without being overwhelmed by the bad side of the internet.

The whitelist approach Cloudflare takes isn't good for the internet, but for website owners who are already behind Cloudflare, it's better than the alternative. Someone will need to come up with a better protocol that also serves the website owners' needs if they want Cloudflare to fail here. The AI industry simply doesn't want to cooperate, so their hand must be forced, and only companies like Cloudflare are powerful enough to accomplish that.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-30 08:05:52+00:00
This might be enforced in some trivial way, e.g. by requiring AI models to answer with at least a sentence. The constraints may not be fully published and the obscurity might make it more efficient, if only temporarily.

Printer tracking dots[1] is one prior solution like this; annoying, largely unknown, workarounds exist, still - surprisingly efficient.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
by somenameforme | 2025-08-30 08:06:24+00:00
The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting/engaging teachers and tutors imaginable, and they're still just not going to excel.

And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.

And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.

---

I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.

---

Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou...
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-30 08:06:52+00:00
When chatgpt launched there was a rush of "solutions" to catch llm generated text. The problem was not their terrible accuracy, but their even more terrible false positive rates. The classic example was pasting the declaration of independence, and getting 100% AI generated. What's even more sad is that some of those solutions are still used today, and for a while they were used against students, with chilling repercussions for them.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-30 08:07:31+00:00
Because in many companies that isn't a 5 second job changing a csproj file.

It requires clearance from management to spend actual money, measured in the amount of hours of work of everyone involved doing this times the hourly rate, to update every single configuration file, CI/CD build scripts, do a QA round on staging environment to validate everything is working as it was already before, to finally to production delivery, and tell everyone the new version is now greenlight for development.

Naturally having a security assessment that an upgrade is required is a good way to have that budget come to fruition.
by simonask | 2025-08-30 08:07:46+00:00
I want to question the assumption here that "pioneer mindset" is an inherited trait, and generally whether we can say anything useful about people living today based on the choices of their ancestors several generations back.

People emigrated from Europe to America because they were out of options. It was not a case of throwing away all of your possessions to go on an adventure. Rather, the vast majority emigrated because it was literally the only way to move up in a world where land ownership was the key to wealth, and your older brother already inherited the farm, or your family did not own any land in the first place. Or perhaps you couldn't even find an apprenticeship.

Keep in mind that all of Europe existed in an extremely rigid social hierarchy with practically zero mobility. Most people in Europe lived in abject poverty. America offered some social mobility, at least to those who came there by choice.
by sulam | 2025-08-30 08:08:16+00:00
Late 2019 I had a short conversation with Abrash about a new OS for the next set of glasses and my immediate reaction was “why?” He was adamant that there was a security need which Linux could not fill (his big concern was too much surface area for exploits in the context of untrusted 3rd party code). I remember thinking that this would be a surprise to cloud engineers at the big hosters, but chose not to continue the argument. He didn’t get where he is by being dramatically wrong very often, after all, but it still struck me as a waste. Note I did not work at Meta so he may have had stronger justifications he chose not to expose.
by MrJohz | 2025-08-30 08:09:15+00:00
In general, fast tests are a must-have, but I find that means figuring out how to write fast integration tests as well so that they can also be run as part of a TDD-like cycle. In my experience, integration tests can generally be written to be very quick, but maybe my definition of an integration test is different from yours?

For me, heavy tests implies end-to-end tests, because at that point you're interacting with the whole system including potentially a browser, and that's just going to be slow whichever way you look at it. But just accessing a database, or parsing and sending http requests doesn't have to be particularly slow, at least not compared to the speed at which I develop. I'd expect to be able to run hundreds of those sorts of tests in less than a second, which is fast enough for me.
by finaard | 2025-08-30 08:09:42+00:00
Unfortunately most of the people out there don't care about that - majority of the links I've set on my site over the decades are dead nowadays. If I ever get bored I'll write a script that'll check if there's an archive copy, and link to that.

I also went through quite a bit of effort to make sure _my_ links don't break. There are a handful of tools (like a dig wrapper for DNS lookups) which still can be reached as /cgi-bin/dig.cgi, even though they haven't been a standalone CGI script for two decades now. It's still technically CGI (just running as fastcgi nowadays), and the code base is just as good as you'd expect from what started as an experiment to see how much of a text markup parser I can write using perl regexp only.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-08-30 08:10:26+00:00
> but in what world would the drives, and not the NAS itself, be stolen?

Not to defend Synology, but popping a drive out of the NAS so that it won't be noticed (or noticed much later) is a much easier way to steal data than carrying off the whole NAS. I assume they're guarding against the kind of scenario where an employee steals steals drives rather than ski-masked thieves breaching the office and making off with the NAS.
by creesch | 2025-08-30 08:11:25+00:00
> I find testing terminology very confusing and inconsistent.

That's because it is both confusing and inconsistent. In my experience, every company uses slightly different names for different types of tests. Unit tests are generally fairly well understood as testing the single unit (a method/function) but after that things get murky fast.

For example, integration tests as reflected by the confused conversation in this thread already has wildly different definitions depending on who you ask.

For example, someone might interpret them as "unit integration tests" where it reflects a test that tests a class, builder, etc. Basically something where a few units are combined. But, in some companies I have seen these being called "component tests".

Then there is the word "functional tests" which in some companies means the same as "manual tests done by QA" but for others simply means automated front-end tests. But in yet other companies those automated tests are called end 2 end tests.

What's interesting to me when viewing these online discussions is the complete lack of awareness people display about this.

You will see people very confidently say that "test X should by done in such and such way" in response to someone where it is very clear they are actually talking about different types of tests.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-30 08:11:27+00:00
I think with future technology designers almost always overshoot on capabilities and undershoot with UX. The former is very easy to get pie-in-the-sky about and ignore limitations, while the latter you often only can improve with experience. Honestly even if you are designing couch cushions I think it is hard to hit 'different' and 'looks good on camera' without dipping into 'wildly impractical'.

If you consider a TNG tricorder, it is a magical device with 600 different functions, but to use it looks more awkward than even a 1st gen iphone. Definitely designed for the camera's eye first.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-30 08:11:36+00:00
Much of this begins with the customers. If they were better at identifying their real needs and specify the most simple possible tools they need, we would not have to deliver bizarrely complex does-everything bloated monster solutions and they could have much more stable, and cheaper, software.

Of course marketing and sales working hard to convince customers that they need more of everything, all the time, doesn't help.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-30 08:11:51+00:00
When Netbooks were popular, laptops were expensive and heavy, and smartphones weren’t anything like what they are today.

Netbooks were the ultimate portable productivity tool. Journalists would write about how they could take them on site and write about things while it happened. Students could type notes in class. I even saw a face painter at a kids party using an EeePC as part of their workflow.

Cheap laptops these days do now exist, but they suffer from drawbacks like weight, terrible battery life and poor performance. All problems that the EeePC didn’t have. And smartphones are fine for videos, but the lack of physical keyboard makes them impractical for typical productivity suits. The nearest modern competition to EeePCs are devices like MacBook Air and similar Windows devices. But they’re not cheap.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:12:03+00:00
I'm worried, it's not like I don't care. For example, I'm worried that Google is such a huge ginormous target, that at some point their Gmail will be broken. At the same time, there are benefits to sharing data. There are benefits to me, in Google using the information it has on my, to make my life easier. In this case, I judge that Gemini using my data to train, is a low extra risk for me. Compared to all other risks I take, for doing things in public. Including writing this on public forums, as you do too.

In general, I find the ongoing public scare about sharing data, to be anti-thesis to the original spirit of the Net, that was all about sharing data. Originally, we were delighted to connect to perfect strangers on the other side of the world. That we would never have gotten to communicate with otherwise. I accept there might have been an element of self-selection there, that aided that view: people one'd communicate with, although maybe from a different culture, would be from similar niche sub-culture of people messing with computers and looking forward to communication, having a favourable view of that.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-30 08:12:19+00:00
I'm not sure how this idea makes coherent sense. Best practices are going to be determined by users, so even in a language where there's a BDFL or some ludicrous committee flying to Hawaii to discuss everything in person a central "Best practice" document is not actually best practices it's just somebody's opinion but with a rubber stamp.

A central dogma approach just means you need more doublethink, the "best practices" still gradually change but now you're pretending they've always been this way even as they shift beneath your feet.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:12:24+00:00
What problem does this solve that a basic API key doesn't solve already? The issue with that approach is that you will require accounts/keys/certificates for all hosts you intend to visit, and malicious bots can create as many accounts as they need. You're just adding a registration step to the crawling process.

Your suggested approach works for websites that want to offer AI access as a service to their customers, but the problem Cloudflare is trying to solve is that most AI bots are doing things that website owners don't want them to do. The goal is to identify and block bad actors, not to make things easier for good actors.

Using mTLS/client certificates also exposes people (that don't use AI bots) to the awful UI that browsers have for this kind of authentication. We'll need to get that sorted before an X509-based solution makes any sense.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-30 08:13:02+00:00
> But sometimes it IS better to think a few steps ahead, rather than building a new system from scratch every time things scale up.

The problem is knowing when to do it and when not to do it.

If you're even the slightest bit unsure, err on the side of not thinking a few steps ahead because it is highly unlikely that you can see what complexities and hurdles lie in the future.

In short, it's easier to unfuck an under engineered system than an over engineered one.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-30 08:13:23+00:00
In my experience, a bug that causes a unit test to fail also causes an integration or E2E test to fail. Also, it’s relatively easy to determine the cause of the problem given a change and a failing integration/E2E test. Unit tests are usually much quicker to run, but you also need a lot more of them. I think when you combine these things, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that unit tests are redundant.
by wenbin | 2025-08-30 08:13:50+00:00
I really hope SynthID becomes a widely adopted standard - at the very least, Google should implement it across its own products like NotebookLM.

The problem is becoming urgent: more and more so-called “podcasts” are entirely fake, generated by NotebookLM and pushed to every major platform purely to farm backlinks and run blackhat SEO campaigns.

Beyond SynthID or similar watermarking standards, we also need models trained specifically [0] to detect AI-generated audio. Otherwise, the damage compounds - people might waste 30 minutes listening to a meaningless AI-generated podcast, or worse, absorb and believe misleading or outright harmful information.

[0] 15,000+ ai generated fake podcasts https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
by b112 | 2025-08-30 08:14:51+00:00
My only beef with Foundation, is calling it Foundation.

When I watched the LOTRs movies, I recalled several saying that it diverged from the books. And sure, it did. It had to. You cannot convert mediums and not have change. Yet the easy way to conceptualize it, is that you're listening to two different people's telling of the same tale.

Both people will perceive the world as a different place, will even be standing in different places during events, may not have been at all events, and so on. Once that's in the pocket, a movie such as LOTR does quite well I think. It captures what it should.

But move to Foundation, and I really have no idea what book anyone read. I feel that someone read the books, and wrote a 1000 word summary of it... then someone used that to write the scripts, which was heavily edited. Massive, vastly important concepts are completely dropped from Foundation. It's not even remotely the same story.

Again, it's not bad. I just hate they stole the name, and character names.

The reason I'm on about this, is that the people designing sets are typically "touchy feely" types, which is of course fine. However often these types have a really hard time with static, unchanging facts or things, very specific details, and caring about function over form. This of course can extend to world building by an artist, as opposed to a sci-fi author.

Here's one example... in the books the Empire had 25 million planets. In the series it's under 10k galaxy wide. There's no real reason for the change, other than "don't care" or "Oooh, that's a confusing number". Even the size of the galaxy was off in series 1.

So when it comes to sets? Bear in mind these people think "Ooooh, space!" and go into a flutter of excited re-design. They're not approaching it from an intellectual perspective, but instead from emotion. And space is strange, and cold, and blah blah.

Perhaps I'm unkind, I've met artist types which were more cognitive of their art. Sometimes. When they were drunk.
by vasco | 2025-08-30 08:15:52+00:00
Two materials (often n-type and p-type semiconductors) are joined at two junctions, one junction is heated and the other cooled. The temperature difference makes charge diffuse from the hot side toward the cold side, and this charge is what turns into the seebeck voltage they describe. It was just very hard to get anything meaningful out of this because you can't easily get such a temperature difference. If you've read of the peltier effect, it's the same thing as this, just in reverse.