MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DannyBee | 2025-08-11 14:04:44+00:00
Lawyer here - It varies whether there is monetary punishment, but sure, i'd say 75% of cases at leaset there is.

However, the damages are likely hard to calculate here - since it involves calculating and arguing about prevailing rental rates in a competitive market vs the actual market due to realpage, in a huge number of places. Greystar would have argued about every single finding you made, too.

Because of the novelty and complexity involved, Greystar could have tied this up for a decade arguing about that and appealing any results, i'm sure. On top of that, Greystar would argue all they did is share data with realpage and use realpage's results, so any loss is really attributable to realpage, not to them.

Greystar may also not have tons of money. Most of their deals are debt deals. The company is private, and while revenue is roughly known, profit isn't publicly known (AFAIK). So it's hard to say what fine they could afford. The DOJ knows, of course, just we don't know.

Finally, being a private firm that does what they do, my guess is they would play games and other things with any real fine to avoid having to pay it (bankruptcy, et al).

Overall - getting their cooperation is probably more valuable than arguing about damages for a decade and then watching greystar play games while losing the ability to go meaningfully after RealPage.

Obviously, i'm not trying to state any of this is ethically okay or that folks who were overcharged don't deserve their money back. I'm just trying to give you a dispassionate view of some of the decision making involved and why they may have chosen what they did.

Or at least, what would normally be involved. With the trump administration, who knows.
by ben_w | 2025-08-11 14:04:48+00:00
If it's done right, "millions" of users is something you can serve on racks of machines specced from the late 00s with all the commensurate sysadmin tools.

It's just that "done right" means the web pages are actually crafted to be what they need, and there's none of the modern extras like 1850 ad tracking agencies all being copied in, nor an ad server injecting just about anything…
by willyt | 2025-08-11 14:04:55+00:00
But you would have your essay corrected if you wrote “go put” in any British school (and possibly other ‘commonwealth’ countries) but it’s fine to say it in informal speech; sometimes we hint at ‘and’ by saying the ‘n’ and sometimes we don’t in regional dialects. In the US you would have “go and put” corrected if you wrote it in an essay. So there is a meaningful difference.
by tantalor | 2025-08-11 14:05:05+00:00
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNo8Ve-Ej6U

Deferred Prosecution Agreements: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). 4 August 2025

Basically, these agreements and settlements let companies get away with crimes without incurring any meaningful penalties, and in many cases they are allowed to continue with their existing practices, or regulate themselves.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-08-11 14:05:07+00:00
Yet this looks nothing like their reaction to SOPA and PIPA. They even explicitly state that Wikimedia is not against the legislation on the whole.

> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.

---

I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
by jadamson | 2025-08-11 14:05:13+00:00
It's not that simple. The law the BBC article is referring to[1] was a regulation, i.e. secondary legislation, passed by resolution. Had it been primary legislation, the courts wouldn't have been able to overturn it (Parliament is sovereign).

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2014/9780111112700
by ximu | 2025-08-11 14:05:22+00:00
We’ve made a few updates to Halotool, a directory for discovering and exploring AI tools:

Added semantic search — you can now search in natural language, like “I want to make a PPT,” and see relevant tools.

Added a submission page for developers to share their tools.

Added quick access — pin your favorite tools to the sidebar for one-click access.

Restructured the feed to focus more on AI tools, with news moved to a smaller section.

Fixed and improved some parts of the site.

Feedback is welcome — we’d like to keep improving the tool discovery experience.
by supportengineer | 2025-08-11 14:05:41+00:00
I don’t understand which part of this is illegal. They are landlords and so they can set the rent. Why does it matter if they use an algorithm or a random number generator? If the price is too high people simply won’t pay it. I don’t think it’s really possible to charge more than the market will bear. Because they simply won’t pay it then.
by cft | 2025-08-11 14:06:20+00:00
why would they? This is great for the large media corps:

- Increases barrier to entry for smaller competitors

- Reliable user data (age, race, who knows what else) derived from video age verification

Anecdote:

My mom recently visited Spain. The process of buying a local SIM card was as follows:

• Show your US passport at a major local cellular provider’s store (Movistar) to have its number associated with the SIM.

• During SIM activation, open a browser page that accesses the phone’s camera.

• Scan the first page of your passport.

• Point the selfie camera at your face, then close your eyes and smile when prompted.
by chubot | 2025-08-11 14:07:15+00:00
Just to add a small example of what I mean, I stumbled across this video yesterday:

How New Jersey Turned Into A Giant Suburb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKgK7Z-yu-4

Talking about how NJ is one of the wealthiest states in the nation, but also has striking poverty

I'm not sure what exactly could have changed, and of course plans are different than outcomes. But to me it's clear there is huge leverage around certain choices, especially regarding automobiles, and they are worth being thoughtful about

---

There's also the question of why public transportation from Manhattan to the 3 neighboring airports is surprisingly thin ... I'm pretty sure that a large part of the answer is lobbying by taxi companies that stood to profit
by ordinaryradical | 2025-08-11 14:08:24+00:00
Why does the company get to keep on existing? Why are its owners not financially annihilated (as in, all their assets seized, etc.)?

It seems to me that if the end result of exploiting a million families/individuals for cartel rents is you get told, “Don’t do it again,” but no one who did it suffers any consequences… this is going to keep happening.

The participants in this scheme should be facing jail time and a financial reset. Oppression of the vulnerable should blow up underneath any who try it. Otherwise this country is going to explode.
by parpfish | 2025-08-11 14:08:42+00:00
literally the first two sentences of the article:

> TeaOnHer, an app designed for men to share photos and information about women they have supposedly dated, has exposed users’ personal information, including government IDs and selfies, TechCrunch can confirm.

> The app, which launched on the Apple App Store earlier this week, is a response to another viral app Tea that allows women to post about the men they date.
by adregan | 2025-08-11 14:08:48+00:00
There are a couple of patterns for accomplishing this in Elixir.

One is to build multiple function heads that pattern match on the arguments. If it’s an error tuple, pass it along. Build up your pipeline and handle any errors at the end.

Another is to use the `with else`[0] expression for building up a railroad. This has the benefit of not having to teach your functions how to pass along errors. Error handling in the else block can be a little gnarly.

I find it a little more manual than languages that have a `runEffect` or compose operator. In large part that’s due to the :ok, :error tuples being more of a convention than a primitive like Either/Result.

0: https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/basics/control_structure...
by LostJourneyman | 2025-08-11 14:09:05+00:00
Even a dog that doesn't bark makes a lot of noise, and that's just part of living in an apartment. In my last place, my upstairs neighbor had 2 dogs and whenever they wagged their tails when sitting, they would knock on the floor in a way that sounded exactly like someone knocking on my door. They also ran around and crashed into furniture fairly often, but it was hard to tell when it was the dogs or the children. I would counter that if you're not willing to live with a little noise, you shouldn't be living in an apartment building in the first place.
by tptacek | 2025-08-11 14:09:10+00:00
First, it's not "black market" vs. "non-black market"; most remunerative sales outside of bounty programs are grey-market --- mostly lawful, but all under the table, largely because they're to agencies that are protective of their sources and methods.

The mechanism grey-market buyers have to protect their interests against over-selling bugs is tranched payments. Sellers make much of their returns from bugs on the back end through "maintenance agreements", which both require the seller to keep e.g. the offsets in their exploits current and reliable against new patch levels of the target, and also serve to cut off payment once the vendor kills the bug.

If you sell to both sides, you quickly kill the back end business from the grey market buyers. If you sell to too many or too sketchy grey market buyers, the bug leaks --- vendors see it exploited "in the wild", capture samples, kill the bug; same outcome: tranched payments stop.

This is one reason it can make sense to take a bounty payment that is substantially smaller than what a bug might be worth on the market: you get certainty of payment. Another reason is that the bounty program will only want POC code (perhaps proof of reliability in addition to just exploitability), while the market will want a complete enablement package, which is a lot of work.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-08-11 14:09:14+00:00
The fascinating thing to me about _The Expanse_ is the disparity between the Novels and the TV Show. It's the same content, but in a different medium and environment.

I would call the novels well executed, enjoyable and very readable action adventures, using well-worn tropes. There is nothing ground-breaking in them. It's not what's currently at the edges of the genre in the written form - It's not Greg Egan, it aint Ted Chiang or Adrian Tchaikovsky. M. John Harrison does not make an appearance. It's not even Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds or Iain M. Banks.

The TV show however, is quite something, it is one of the flagship sci-fi TV series. And it does indicate that written and visual sci-fi might be different stages of development , with the TV version lagging by decades.
by moi2388 | 2025-08-11 14:10:22+00:00
No, that is not an option. Entra External ID creates user objects in your external tenant.

For various reasons, we are not allowed to store personal information like that.

I need to be able to accept users from tenant A and from tenant B. I need to know to which tenant they belong, but NOT any other information such as name or email address.

This is currently not possible at all in Entra ID. The only option is allowing all tenants and manually roll auth to whitelist certain ones to actually continue calling APIs.

It’s completely moronic of Microsoft

To make things even worse, users of DIFFERENT tenants get stored TOGETHER in your external ID tenant.

In various situations it’s illegal or against contracts to have data of different companies in the same database.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-11 14:10:29+00:00
1) There are multiple posters on this site, they sometimes have contradictory opinions.

2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously bad thing. I guess you’ve made a happy discovery: it turns out the underlying principle was something about what the companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some reflexive “American companies are bad” silliness.
by ben_w | 2025-08-11 14:10:30+00:00
I also think they made a mistake, but it doesn't look like a huge one?

4 MB ~= 4000 kB, (4000 kB - 450 kB) * $100,000/kB/year = $355,000,000/year

(With a bit of fiddling to get the same answer as them, I think they may have done this: (4000 kB + 350 kB) * $100,000/kB, though I wouldn't want to guess why this error happened).
by obayesshelton | 2025-08-11 14:10:44+00:00
I am waiting for all these "vibe-coded" startups to ultimately fail or need a total rewrite and in we come.

No-Code Low-Code Vibe-Code

I have seen it all before

Great for 0 to 0.1

Soon as you have real domain problems to solve and any complexity the mess that is being created to create a solution is going to need fixing.
by sgarland | 2025-08-11 14:11:01+00:00
They cosplay as architecting them that way. IMO, one of the largest negative consequences to EverythingAsAService is that it allows people with little to no experience administering and tuning systems to run complex pieces of software. Sure, you can go spin up a managed Kafka cluster with a few clicks, but that means you can skip reading the docs, which means that you likely have no idea how to use it (or even when you should use it). Case in point for that: the number of people who think Kafka is a message queue.

This is also a huge contributor to the curse of Full Stack Engineering. “Full Stack” should mean that you have significant experience with and knowledge of every system and language you’re interacting with (I’ll give systems administration a pass for the sake of argument). For most web apps, that means frontend and backend, as well as some flavor of RDBMS, some flavor of caching, and likely a message queue. It likely also means you need to understand distributed systems. The number of developers I’ve met who tick all of those boxes is zero. Honestly, as soon as you include an RDBMS, it’s game over for most. Yes, you can get away with horrible things via ORMs, but as soon as you start hitting scaling limits, you’ll discover what people have known for decades: databases are tricky, and chucking everything into JSON columns with UUID PKs isn’t a good idea.
by navi0 | 2025-08-11 14:11:19+00:00
Another reply already addresses your question about speed limits, which is another great example through which to examine these questions.

"Reasonable" is a completely subjective standard and not a good way to run a complex economy with an infinite combination of job seekers and providers.

Who gets to decide what is reasonable has big real world implications for millions of people. Get it wrong, and as we see in California here, people lose their jobs and businesses close all because some politician or bureaucrat (or misinformed voter) thinks they know better than workers and employers what the correct price for labor should be.
by John23832 | 2025-08-11 14:11:23+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.
by extraisland | 2025-08-11 14:11:50+00:00
Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably.

A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI.

So even if you are a craftsmen, your colleagues aren't. They will never care, they have no incentive to, because management doesn't care.

I've totally given up with it and I can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
by handelaar | 2025-08-11 14:11:54+00:00
Your claim that Ofcom is in any way a "self-regulation body" is untrue. And frankly also a straight-up insane thing to say, sorry.

Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.

You appear to be confused about what being a "quango" actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is not one. Ofcom's at arm's length because the majority of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not put judicial functions inside government departments.
by kalleboo | 2025-08-11 14:12:01+00:00
> It's possible that she copy-pastes her own signature

I've been continually using Preview.app's feature to easily insert your signature from a menu using the same signature I scanned in using the camera on my MacBook back when they first added that feature literally 15 years ago. Is this considered weird? I just assumed at this point that other PDF systems had the same feature instead of people actually printing, signing, and scanning.
by bluGill | 2025-08-11 14:12:06+00:00
Businesses do hire people qualified for the job in general. However they have lots of different jobs with different qualifications needed and so they have lots of different qualifications in play.

I'm not an accountant so if I do something that negatively affects accountants I won't find out - unless what I do shows up in an audit. My company has put things in place so that it is unlikely I would accidentally do something that would show up in an audit (most of them are best practices that every company has). I do have a company credit card, and I can make other purchases on behalf of my company - but if I tried to send my brother in law a million dollars I doubt I could do that (not that I would)

As web engineers what do you have in place so that if someone who competent in a different area does something in the web area and breaks things will will notice and stop them?
by Smeevy | 2025-08-11 14:12:18+00:00
That's not an unfair assessment, but I would pose additional questions:

Why does doing the morally sound thing always have to be easier, better, and cheaper than ruining the world and creating human misery? Why must the morally superior argument be financially unassailable?

I'm getting older and angrier and I've grown tired of meeting greedy, disingenuous adversaries halfway just to have my hand slapped away after they get what they want. Since we've established that conservatives will absolutely put up with pain to harm outgroup bogeymen, I don't listen to their appeals for things that I hope will reduce human misery in the world.

With that in mind: Tax the rich like it's the 1950s, healthcare for all, stop burning fossil fuels, etc. Do it all and see what works, darn it.
Building a Markdown-like language, shaped by community feedback
by Forgret | 2025-08-11 14:12:23+00:00
Hi Hacker News!

I’m planning to create a new markup language, similar to Markdown, but with a more modern, flexible syntax. The goal is to keep it simple to use while making it more powerful and better suited to real user needs.

The key aspect of this project is that it will be shaped entirely by community input and feedback. I want everyone interested to have a say in the syntax design, features, and overall functionality.

If you have ideas, suggestions, or specific features you’d like to see, please share! I’m eager to discuss and incorporate your thoughts into the project.

Let’s build something useful and user-friendly together!
by calibas | 2025-08-11 14:14:34+00:00
From the paper:

> After our successful factorisation using a dog, we were delighted to learn that scientists have now discovered evidence of quantum entanglement in other species of mammals such as sheep [32]. This would open up an entirely new research field of mammal-based quantum factorisation. We hypothesise that the production of fully entangled sheep is easy, given how hard it can be to disentangle their coats in the first place. The logistics of assembling the tens of thousands of sheep necessary to factorise RSA-2048 numbers is left as an open problem.
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-11 14:14:39+00:00
I think there's an easy compromise with `git describe`. `git describe` gives you a mix of tags and commit information to easily describe every commit to a build tool, but not need to setup a "CI tagger". If the commit has (an annotated) tag, `git describe` returns the tag name. If the commit isn't directly tagged, it returns `{nearesttag}-{commit count after that tag}-g{prefix of commit hash}`. Such as `v1.2.3-4-g01abcd`.

You can pass a `git describe` directly to just about any git command that takes a "commitish", so can copy and paste it directly to `git switch` or `git checkout` just as you would with a full hash. Except you also have prefixed human-readable version information that you can update.

About the only complaint with `git describe` is that if you are presenting these version numbers in semver scenarios and want the best semver ordering you want to replace that first "-" with a "+" and the second "-" with a ".", which aligns it better with semver's optional build metadata rather than looking like a semver pre-release.
by VagabundoP | 2025-08-11 14:15:04+00:00
Irish Teletext no mentioned :'(:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT%C3%89_Aertel

I don't have terrestrial TV (saorview) anymore to test, but apparently its still broadcast according to the wiki.

Teletext was very handy pre-internet, weather, news, TV listings, flight times etc, all on a feed.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-11 14:15:42+00:00
So far, my employer is putting zero pressure on devs to use genAI. Their official policy is "use it is you want to, but we're not going to pay for it".

About 10% of the devs in my location are using genAI as a dev tool to some degree, but for most of those devs, that degree is pretty small.

Ironically(?), our primary products are deep learning systems, so this is a very AI-savvy group.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-11 14:16:38+00:00
This ruling has been widely misinterpreted. It does not mean that the president can make an unlawful declaration and that the National Guard, for example, must follow it even though the declaration is inconsistent with the law.

That said, it’s not immediately clear to me that this would be illegal. The National Guard and the District of Columbia is a unique edge case because D.C. is not a state.

To be clear I don’t like this move nor where it is going. I’m not endorsing it, only trying to understand the legal basis.
by sgarland | 2025-08-11 14:16:42+00:00
Because the idea of DX was invented, and devs now clutch to it like it’s the last life preserver on a sinking ship.

“If you normalize your schema, it will be 20x smaller, and you’ll eliminate an entire class of bugs.”

“Hmm, but then we’ll have to write joins in the query, so we’ll pass.”