MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eszed | 2025-08-30 13:16:47+00:00
I changed careers. Wrote a bit about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699388

I never met a professional with a conceptual category of "selling out" within the industry. Scraping together any kind of living in the arts is a massive struggle, so everyone takes "money jobs" when they can get them. During my 10 or 12 years as a working actor I had two consecutive years during which my sole income was from performing, and maybe a couple of other other five or six month periods where I was able to drop restaurant (or whatever other) gigs for a tour. This was in the early-'oughts, and I'd have to look at my social security records to be sure, but my income during those years was somewhere around $30k. I was single, and really, really good at being poor.

By the way, that's like a 98th percentile result for an actor. Most people never come close to making a living, however meagre.

There's an old, old interview (maybe Michael Parkinson? Don't remember) with Joss Ackland - a wonderful mid-twentieth century British character actor, on stage and screen - where the interviewer asks him why the hell he did some crappy science fiction film, and Ackland says something like "that was 1962? Oh, yes. Well, my mother needed a new kitchen." No actor will ever fault him for that!

What does disappoint me is seeing actors with tremendous talent who take nothing but money jobs. I get why they do it - especially for the ones at the top of the commercial heap it'd be awfully hard to say 'no' to an easy gig that comes with a boatload of cash - but I can't help but feel sad that I'll never get to see them working at their best.

Even so, my response when I see a truly bad film is generally a shrug: "a lot of actors [and associated professionals / craft services] got paid." The artists among them will learn from even that experience, and many (many many) among them will invest that income back into doing work that they believe in.
by canonistically | 2025-08-30 13:17:14+00:00
I think it's more like lottery winners giving "buy lottery tickets" as financial advice.

It is clear at this point that any meaning found in LLM outputs is projected there by the user. Some people by virtue of several intertwined factors can get some acceleration out of them, but most can't. It becomes like a football fan convinced that their rituals are essential for the team's victory.

Add the general very low understanding of machine learning (or even basic formal logic) and people go from a realistic emulation of conversations to magical thinking about having a mind in a box.

Either that or I am taking crazy pills. Because sometimes it feels like that.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-30 13:17:33+00:00
My personal blog? Analytics would be an ego thing only.

To be clear, my ego would love to know that people are flocking to read my brilliant prose! Alas, though, I don't even have what we used to call analytics: a number of visitors counter.

So my blog is, as someone on HN pointed out to me, "useless".
by barrkel | 2025-08-30 13:17:45+00:00
I don't agree. When you implement some new code and want to cover it in testing, you have a choice where you call into the system from your tests. Calling at the lowest level is not always the right choice, but it's the way the testing pyramid will bias you.

Instead - instead, there really is an instead here - you can call at a higher level which is less brittle to refactoring, has less complex setup, doesn't involve mocks that may not behave like the real thing, but still runs quickly due to fakes stubbing out expensive dependencies.
by gck1 | 2025-08-30 13:18:03+00:00
And god forbid you live in an authoritarian country and must use VPN to protect your freedom. Internet becomes captcha hell run by 2-3 companies.

I've had far fewer issues with my own bots that access cloudflare protected websites, than during my regular browsing with privacy respecting browsers and a VPN.

As a side note: I'm at least thankful Microsoft isn't behind web gatekeeping. Try and solve any microsoft captcha behind a VPN - its like writing a thesis, you gotta dedicate like 5 minutes, full attention.
by rikafurude21 | 2025-08-30 13:18:23+00:00
It seems that this is another one of those things where the lowest common denominator sets the rules for everyone. Most people arent tech savvy programmers so giving them the freedom to do 'whatever they want' will lead them to hurt themselves in some way. Of course this is not an excuse for locking down your hardware. Smartphones just came into being as a consumer-first product and didnt require many of the freedoms that programmers needed, which is why computers are fundamentally more open than smartphones. Apple of course is trying to change that with their Macs
Show HN: OpenAnimation – KMP app for exploring and editing Lottie animations
by orispok | 2025-08-30 13:18:53+00:00
I’ve been building OpenAnimation, a Kotlin Multiplatform app that lets you discover, view, and edit Lottie animations.

You can try it live here: https://openanimation.web.app

Source code is available here: https://github.com/orispok/OpenAnimationApp

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
by fleshmonad | 2025-08-30 13:19:01+00:00
>Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?

Why is this a question of _allow_? Who is my hardware provider that he is somehow my guardian and must _allow_ me to install software that I want to install?

>Is it possible to allow people to do sports and keep them safe?

>Is it possible to allow people to roam freely and keep them safe?

>Is it possible to allow people to not be locked up in a padded cell and keep them safe?

People are responsible for what they are doing, and teaching them about technology is the best way to do deal with this example here, as it doesn't infringe anyone's human rights and would give anyone the resources to check their sources.
by simion314 | 2025-08-30 13:19:26+00:00
>People have been trained to tap through those prompts without really reading them, and it’s unreasonable to expect a less technical user to know what the implications of granting a permission are.

Can you please explain why there is no big push from the Google and Apple to remove microphone and camera access from the browsers? You claim that most users are "less skilled" and will allow anything , so for the grater good why not pushing to remove microphone, camera and file upload permissions? Why do we trust this users with reading a popup for permissions ?

Or maybe if the popups are not clear or good enough maybe is not the users fault ?
by steveBK123 | 2025-08-30 13:19:36+00:00
Disappointing & unsurprising to see the "law & order" as well as libertarian right types so supportive of stripping due process here.

The ability of government to hold you indefinitely, punish, deport you, etc without going thru courts simply by declaring you a criminal is how you get gulags.

Yes maybe this time they don't look like you and their last names end in z which yours doesn't, but wait until the next time.
by sfn42 | 2025-08-30 13:20:08+00:00
If you had security cameras at your home, a judge could issue a warrant for that footage.

Seems to me that smart car data is similar - in the event of a crash, a judge could issue a warrant for that data if it is deemed relevant to the case.

And either way, honestly, just don't drive like an idiot and this will never be a problem for you.
by perihelions | 2025-08-30 13:20:24+00:00
What's the moral valence differentiating a "local business" from a local drop-shipper? What really *is* a business selling imported goods—if not a drop-shipper with a storefront?

Bold to hold contempt for free-market capitalism, when it's made your society so staggeringly wealthy, your concern of the day is literally worrying about landfills filling up with surplus wealth. Find some perspective.
by microtonal | 2025-08-30 13:20:37+00:00
So, put a toggle somewhere. When the toggle is toggled, put up a big fat warning sheet and say if somebody on the phone or mail asks you to do that, 99.9% it's a scammer.

If people still go for it, then it is their responsibility. A lot of things in life require responsibility because otherwise the results can be disastrous. But we don't forbid them, because it would be a huge violation of freedoms.
by rafram | 2025-08-30 13:20:42+00:00
Scammers can operate from literally any country in the world, in any location where they have access to the internet. The idea of the military busting into a Bin Laden-style scammer compound is very romantic, but plenty of these operate from regular offices or homes, and it’s trivial for someone new to get into the scamming business if a big scammer is taken down.
by diggan | 2025-08-30 13:20:53+00:00
Don't you have rate-limits? And how much are you paying for the instance where you're hosting it? I've run/helped run projects with something like ~10 req/s easily on $10 VPSs, surely hosting HTML can't cost you that much?

Of course it won't be free, but you can get pretty close to free but employing the typical things you'd put in place to restrict the amount of resources used, like rate-limits, caches and so on.
by torginus | 2025-08-30 13:20:54+00:00
It's insane how VR has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams on the hardware front (all that hardware that goes into a VR headset either sounded like science fiction or seemed like would be exotic stuff costing tens of thousands of dollars), and the software also had standout successes, but it kinda just petered out both in the entertainment and professional realms.
by davidcbc | 2025-08-30 13:20:56+00:00
It's amazing how this catchphrase has reversed meanings for some people. It was previously used against walled gardens and paywalls, but these corporate LLMs are the ultimate walled garden for information because in most cases you can't even find out who created the information in the first place.

"Information wants to be free! That's why I support hiding it behind a chatbot paywall that makes a few people billionaires"
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-30 13:21:11+00:00
I just bought ePubs for your Raja Yoga Revisted (I usually study SRF material, but alternatives are good!) and Scheme 9 for Empty Space. Your web site is very nice, I loved the ‘Who am I?’ page. I have been using Lisp languages since 1978 but except for studying Peter Norvig’s Lisp in Python, I have never dropped below the abstraction layer into a Lisp implementation so I am looking forward to that.

EDIT: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/
by rootsudo | 2025-08-30 13:21:14+00:00
Many Americans such as myself had Nokia cell phones.. they were ubiqitious in USA culture... so I don't get the American jab at all, the only real competitor between 95-2005'ish was Motorola. Blackberry came from that time, and then android around 2010'ish but I would say yes - Nokia was the main phone for over a decade IMO.
by gumby271 | 2025-08-30 13:22:06+00:00
Then why not lock down their devices. Why aren't people using the parental controls on their parents phones to lock it down and own in on their behalf? I don't understand this idea that because there are some people vulnerable to scams that we all have to give up control to Apple and Google. The option to move the trust and ownership to another party is useful, but it doesn't have to be just those two parties as options.
by righthand | 2025-08-30 13:22:48+00:00
How do you find Search Console useful and how is that relative to collecting analytics? Just curious, I've only used Search Console in the manner of validating how pages are returned when searching and validating page metadata is correct.

I realize that Google may require you to drain data into Search Console to use it or something, but I'm not sure how the data may be useful for the Search Console functionality.
by Mordisquitos | 2025-08-30 13:22:49+00:00
> There are, I think, two small cracks in that argument.

> The first is that a user has no right to run anyone else's code, if the code owner doesn't want to make it available to them. Consider a bank which has an app. When customers are scammed, the bank is often liable. The bank wants to reduce its liability so it says "you can't run our app on a rooted phone".

> Is that fair? Probably not. Rooting allows a user to fully control and customise their device. But rooting also allows malware to intercept communications, send commands, and perform unwanted actions. I think the bank has the right to say "your machine is too risky - we don't want our code to run on it."

> The same is true of video games with strong "anti-cheat" protection. It is disruptive to other players - and to the business model - if untrustworthy clients can disrupt the game. Again, it probably isn't fair to ban users who run on permissive software, but it is a rational choice by the manufacturer. And, yet again, I think software authors probably should be able to restrict things which cause them harm.

It's not clear to me whether in this fragment the author is stating the two alleged cracks in the argument or rather only the first one — the second one being Google's ostensible justification for the change. Either way, neither of these examples are generalisable arguments supporting that 'a user has no right to run anyone else's code, if the code owner doesn't want to make it available to them'.

With regards to banking apps, the key point has been glossed over, which is that that when customers are scammed the bank is 'often' liable. Are banks really liable for scams caused by customer negligence on their devices? If they're not, this 'crack' can be thrown out of the window; if they are, then it is not an argument for "you can't run our app on a rooted phone", but rather "we are not liable for scams which are only possible on a rooted phone".

As for the second example, anti-cheat protection in gaming, the ultimate motivation of game companies is not to prevent 'untrustworthy clients' from 'running their code'. The ability of these clients to be 'disruptive to other players' is not ultimately contingent on their ability to run the code, but rather to connect to the multiplayer servers run by the gaming company or their partners. The game company's legitimate right 'to ban users who run on permissive software' is not a legitimate argument in favour of users not having full control over their system.
by echoangle | 2025-08-30 13:23:08+00:00
I don’t think server side analytics are surveillance at all.

It’s like if a shop is doing inventory and knows which product is bought how often. There’s no information for the visitor to volunteer, because every visitor should know that the shop/webserver knows when a visitor visits.

> The other reason you might put analytics on your site is to know when someone links to your writing. Again, if the linker doesn’t intend to tell you, then you’re surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned.

Assuming this is done with the referrer header, I also don’t see how this is bad. That’s the whole point of the thing, if you don’t want that as a user, disable it in your browser.
by martin-t | 2025-08-30 13:23:10+00:00
> Here's the story of a bank literally telling a man he was being scammed and he still proceeded to transfer funds to a fraudster.

> The bank blocked a number of transactions, it spoke to James on the phone to warn him and even called him into a branch to speak to him face-to-face.

Y'know, at some point the cost of protecting the dumbest people is too much to be worth it. I am perfectly fine with some people getting hacked, doxxed and scammed out of their life savings if the alternative is everyone losing their freedoms.

Freedoms are important because without them people with power go unchecked more and more. It's a slow process but it culminates in 1) dictatorship at the state level 2) exploitation at the corporate level.
by chongli | 2025-08-30 13:23:10+00:00
Pretty much everyone on Hacker News is writing comments for one another without the benefit of analytics. We're having discussion about topics we care about without delving into each other's personal details.

If you care about a topic you're going to care about a community you build and participate in around that topic. You don't need marketing-focused analytics to do that. You just need to keep writing and engaging with people in the comments.
by fleshmonad | 2025-08-30 13:23:27+00:00
How is this overly simplistic? It is pretty simple. You buy some hardware, and some company wants to force you to use their telemetry ridden, data collecting software under the guise of stupid people being unable to do a google search and comparing a string. I can safely say I don't want to live in your technocratic techbro wet dream.
by edent | 2025-08-30 13:24:40+00:00
Every sporting body that I know of has rules to keep people safe. Even dangerous sports like boxing and American Football pit some effort into keeping participants reasonably safe.

Similarly, every modern society has rules to keep people safe when roaming. That might be as simple as warning signs it as complex as a coastguard.

We've had decades of warning people about online scams and I don't see any slowdown in the volume of scammy emails that I receive. Education clearly isnt working - and that imposes a cost on all of us.
by diggan | 2025-08-30 13:24:50+00:00
> And? Paying Cloudflare or someone else to block bad actors is required these days unless you have the scale and expertise to do it yourself.

Where are people getting this from? No, Cloudflare or any other CDN is not required for you to host your own stuff. Sure, it's easy, and probably the best way to go if you just wanna focus on shipping, but lets not pretend it's a requirement today.

> Why are bots or any other user entitled to unlimited visits to my website? The entitlement is kind of unreal at this point

I don't think they are, that's why we have rate limiters, right? :) I think the point is that if you're allowing a user to access some content in one way, why not allow that same user to access the content in the same way, but using a different user-agent? That's the original purpose of that header after all, to signal what the user used as an agent on their behalf. Commonly, I use Firefox as my agent for browsing, but I should be free to use any user-agent, if we want the web to remain open and free.
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-30 13:24:59+00:00
> its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing

> it only went down after you know who passed away.

I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc.

So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-30 13:25:24+00:00
> That does leaves the validity of defining continuity of constructible functions over constructible reals intact.

What I think you're getting at is that even though my function f breaks what we think of as continuity of functions over the constructible reals, f is clearly un-constructible. So if we only do analysis using constructible functions, all is well.

I was thinking about how this works and trying to think of an example proof that doesn't work with only constructible reals, but actually the same proof basically works, so I'll just share that instead:

Intermediate value theorem: if f is continuous, f(a) is negative and f(b) is positive, then there is some c such that f(c)=0.

Proof for real functions: Define S = { x ∈ [a,b] : f(x) ≤ 0 }.

S is nonempty because a ∈ S (f(a) < 0).

S is bounded above by b, so S has a least upper bound c = sup S with c ∈ [a,b].

We claim f(c) = 0.

Suppose first that f(c) > 0. By continuity at c there is δ > 0 such that for all x with |x−c| < δ we have |f(x)−f(c)| < f(c). In particular for such x we get f(x) > 0 (since f(c) − |f(x)−f(c)| > 0). But then every x in (c−δ, c+δ)∩[a,b] is not in S, so there is no point of S greater than or equal to c−δ/2. That contradicts c being the least upper bound of S because then c−δ/2 would be an upper bound smaller than c. Hence f(c) ≤ 0.

Now suppose f(c) < 0. By continuity at c there is ε > 0 such that for all x with |x−c| < ε we have |f(x)−f(c)| < −f(c) (note −f(c) > 0). Then for such x we get f(x) < 0, so every x in (c, c+ε)∩[a,b] also satisfies f(x) ≤ 0 and hence belongs to S. But that gives points of S strictly greater than c, contradicting that c is an upper bound of S. Thus f(c) < 0 is impossible.

If we instead talk about constructible functions, note that f is constructible, so S is constructible, so c = sup S is constructible. We know that c is in the domain of f, and using the proof above we can show f(c)=0.

So maybe if we limit ourselves to constructible functions analysis works out. There are still two reasons why you might not want to do this. Adding a line at the end of every proof explaining why all the numbers you're talking about are constructible feels unnecessary when you can just talk about the reals. Secondly, (as far as I understand) its impossible to actually formalize our idea of constructible.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-30 13:26:17+00:00
By now, I seriously doubt any "readily interpretable" claims.

Nothing about human brain is "readily interpretable", and artificial neural networks - which, unlike brains, can be instrumented and experimented on easily - tend to resist interpretation nonetheless.

If there was an easy to reduce ML to "readily interpretable" representations, someone would have done so already. If there were architectures that perform similarly but are orders of magnitude more interpretable, they will be used, because interpretability is desirable. Instead, we get what we get.
by barrkel | 2025-08-30 13:26:30+00:00
What if, instead of a bank account, it's FooSystemFrobnicationPreparer? Something which is necessary today, but probably should be refactored within the next year or two?

Maybe FooSystem will be redesigned to take different inputs,maybe the upstream will change to provide different outputs, maybe responsibility will shift around due to changes in the number of dependencies and it makes sense to vertically integrate some prep to upstream to share it.

Unit tests in these circumstances - and they're the majority of unit tests, IME - can act as a drag on the quality of the system. It's better to test things like this at a component level instead of units.
by gck1 | 2025-08-30 13:26:32+00:00
> Not to mention the big cloud providers are unhinged with their egress pricing.

I always wonder why this status quo persisted even after Cloudflare. Their pricing is indeed so unhinged, that they're not even in consideration for me for things where egress is a variable.

Why is egress seemingly free for Cloudflare or Hetzner but feels like they launch spaceships at AWS and GCP every time you send a data packet to the outside world?
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-30 13:26:39+00:00
I think with all economic policy it's good to weigh the pros and cons and have a serious discussion of them.

What I object to is that in practice people just side with their politics "team" like in sports and create post-hoc justifications for policy created for unrelated reasons.

I'm in favor of evidence-based trade policy, but this isn't that unfortunately. The closest thing we have to evidence-based policy is the economic consensus, and the current administration is making a big show of disagreeing with the consensus for non-evidence-based reasons.