MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matesz | 2025-09-13 08:33:48+00:00
> FB is a ghost town

I've done surveys in cities about what social media people use and came to the same conclusion. However, I was completely wrong.

Facebook is so alive and well it's hard to believe. Besides that they skillfully connected two ecosystems together and there is much more people having FB than IG. Stories show up in messenger and quietly lead back to facebook just as links to fb videos people send to each other frequently.

It's just that people simply lie in their actual usage patterns because it's really uncool.

Primary people's identity online is still their Facebook profile.
by 3form | 2025-09-13 08:34:05+00:00
> These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. ...

I feel like the core problem is that the platform just die out in time on their own. It was Facebook's issue for years and years now, and such a fate will come to others, too - if only because people who used these platforms eventually statistically grow up and realize they have better stuff to do, and influx of new generations is limited.

Then the generation and promotion of trash is just a symptom in order to hide the fester underneath for as long as possible.

What it doesn't mean is that social media will necessarily die in time; I expect that new platforms and methods will take over, as Discord and federated blogs mentioned in the post do. The reason being that the youngest generations still have attention to spare and social needs to be met. Further, as my generation is the last one to experience the wonders of digital disconnect in their childhood, the ones to come are already born into world where certain phenomenons outlined here are normalized.
Ask HN: Claude Sonnet 4 API returning model with April 2024 knowledge cutoff
by opwizardx | 2025-09-13 08:34:31+00:00
Testing the claude-sonnet-4-20250514 endpoint, I'm getting a model that identifies as Claude 3.5 Sonnet with April 2024 knowledge cutoff. It doesn't know about 2024 election results or events after April 2024.

Reproducible test: https://console.anthropic.com/workbench/56d29701-4dc0-4789-a9b8-0935032b44b7

Anyone else experiencing this? More importantly, what could cause this technically? Model routing issue? A/B testing? Gradual rollout?

Looking for technical explanations more than complaints. My app depends on Sonnet 4's capabilities and this is causing issues.
by simonask | 2025-09-13 08:34:52+00:00
All of Europe outside of the UK and Enligh-speaking Ireland need characters outside of ASCII, but most letters are ASCII. For example, the string "blåbærgrød" in Danish (blueberry porridge) has about the densest occurrence of non-ASCII characters, but that's still only 30%. It takes 13 bytes in UTF-8, but 20 bytes in UTF-16.

Spanish has generally at most one accented vowel (á, ó, ü, é, ...) per word, and generally at most one ñ per word. German rarely has more than two umlauts per word, and almost never more than one ß.

UTF-16 is a wild pessimization for European languages, and UTF-8 is only slightly wasteful in Asian languages.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-13 08:36:05+00:00
Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.

And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
by neobrain | 2025-09-13 08:36:25+00:00
> err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.

Is the lobby trying? Last I checked the head of RWE himself said that going back to nuclear in Germany was infeasible. It seems to be conservative politicians who had been keen on it before winning the election and before the industry pointed out that it's a bad idea actually.
by rcxdude | 2025-09-13 08:36:34+00:00
Security guarantees for Ukraine, basically. Ideally full NATO membership. Then Russia will be extremely hard pressed to try again. This is what Ukraine is fighting for, they are practically screaming it at anyone who will listen, and pretty much the only situation in which they will stop fighting (in fact, they would potentially allow some territory to remain occupied if there was a strong guarantee (not just a promise from Russia) that Russia could advance no further.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-13 08:37:39+00:00
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.

That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)

There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars

I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
by b112 | 2025-09-13 08:37:44+00:00
But it can be, that's my point. It can be!

In another post, I spoke of a leasing model. Now to be clear, I am 100% against a leasing model of ownership foisted upon us all, for everything we own.

However fridges are a good example, as when they break food spoils. Potentially some expensive food, such a frozen meat. If they were leased, and if it was mandated that under leasing models the company was responsible for replacement food costs?

Then I firmly believe, under that failure cost, that in under a decade fridges would last 100+ years without maintenance.

Products used to last longer, they really and truly did. That's why that law was passed in Quebec, and it's not the only place. We had products which lasted longer in the 60s in some cases, "over-engineered", yet our manufacturing capabilities and tolerances and quality control were not on par, not even close with our capabilities now.

I am literally more than doubling down on my statement, my 100+ years compared to 40 years. The motive isn't there, it isn't a lack of capability.

Anyhow, I suspect you still don't agree. But I do believe you'd agree that there isn't a profit motive in many aspects of our market for tireless improvements? And that, even if you think my statements are fantastical, you still may agree that we could do better?
by tripletao | 2025-09-13 08:38:20+00:00
> But I wouldn't at all be surprised if some no-name subcontractor decided to play fast and loose with the visa rules to win a contract with a low bid.

I feel like "subcontractor" here could mean "staffing agency used by Hyundai to shed liability", but could also mean "equipment vendor". The latter seems much less likely to be noncompliant, since they get the special benefit of the policy we're discussing and since customer-site labor is a smaller share of their cost (since their primary business is building the machines in Korea).

A lawyer for some equipment vendor staff seems to be alleging that their B-1 applications had been drafted specifically to comply with this policy:

> Kuck said letters included with visa applications that he reviewed spelled out the scope of the work and appeared to meet requirements.

> "It was more detailed than some of the letters that I've written for clients in similar situations," he said. "The vast majority of folks, including the ones I represent, should never have been detained."

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/lawyer-says...

I guess it's likely that at least one person detained was unlawfully present, and at least one person detained was lawfully present. The actual ratio is still unknown, but the reputational damage is done--"we took you away in chains, imprisoned you for a week, and deported you, but that's okay because a different worker at your site was noncompliant" is not a great message.
by lenkite | 2025-09-13 08:39:20+00:00
Beyond a certain project size, GraalVM compiles to the same binary size as Go. Many k8s projects produce binary sizes of >100MB. I think this is because LOC in Go scales poorly.

Go's real edge over Java is in memory consumption, not in performance or binary size. Yet, this is also mostly true at the small-scale level. The edge again disappears for large projects needing large heaps.
by wongarsu | 2025-09-13 08:39:59+00:00
With that approach you could no longer look at a single code point and decide if it's e.g. a space. You would always have to look back at the previous code point to see if you are now in the emoji set. That would bring its own set of issues for tools like grep.

But what if instead of emojis we take the CJK set and make it more compositional. Instead of >100k characters with different glyphs we could have defined a number of brush stroke characters and compositional characters (like "three of the previous character in a triangle formation). We could still make distinct code points for the most common couple thousand characters, just like ä can be encoded as one code point or two (umlaut dots plus a).

Alas, in the 90s this would have been seen as too much complexity
by bubblethink | 2025-09-13 08:40:24+00:00
Companies are always going to lay people off, because they can and it is in their financial interest to do so when the shareholders or investors demand cutbacks. AFAIK, Amazon even has a formalized stack ranking system where a certain percentage will be laid off every year to make room for new talent. This has nothing to do with visas or immigrants. If you want to stop that, you need better worker protections, but that's a separate discussion.
Show HN: Circuit Bot – The AI powered co‑engineer for embedded systems
by ibrahimdanish | 2025-09-13 08:40:50+00:00
Circuit Bot lets you ask natural questions about semiconductor devices like: “How do I configure ADC1 for continuous conversion?” “How many I2C channels are available?” "How to put device into low power mode"

Device documents such as datasheets, technical reference and user manuals are dense. We’ve all spent hours digging through registers and peripheral descriptions.

Circuit Bot cuts that time down by: Reducing time to prototype Helping you understand devices faster Generating code snippets based on datasheets, technical references, and sample code

Current status MVP is live New devices are added regularly.

We need your feedback Would this help in your day-to-day embedded work? Which chips or peripherals should we support next? Would you prefer Circuit Bot as a standalone tool, or integrated directly into your IDE/docs portal?
by srean | 2025-09-13 08:41:30+00:00
I highly recommend the movie, Born into Brothels [0]. It's set in Sonagachi, in some sense the analogue of Kamathipura in Calcutta.

Crumbling concrete congestion aside Sonagachi is quite different. Here sex workers are self organized, have a political voice and are unionised. The latest form of which is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbar_Mahila_Samanwaya_Comm...

[0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0388789/
by AdrianB1 | 2025-09-13 08:41:58+00:00
I work (in Europe) for an American company. All the people in IT we hire in USA are foreigners, they are cheaper. You cannot say it is discrimination on wages because everyone is paid low. The visa system allows the company to pay low wages and hiring foreigners is just a small detail in the scheme.

Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.

It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
by hdjrudni | 2025-09-13 08:42:00+00:00
> I try pretty hard to keep it organized but if I am listening to music in YouTube it should be trivial to find the browser tab involved to close it and it’s not.

If you use Chrome, there should be a music note icon in the top right, just to the left of your avatar, that shows when media is playing. You can control the media from there or click it to find the tab.

I don't think Vivaldi (what I use) has that exact feature, but the favicon switches to an animated speaker so its much easier to spot.

But I like to create shortcut-apps out of any apps (like YT Music) I use frequently, so they get their own OS-level window. It has other benefits too.
by t0lo | 2025-09-13 08:43:16+00:00
If you're talking about that person experiencing a mental episode- i think we are about to see a shattering of composure and an end to the social arms race as image and reality become increasingly difficult to connect. I'm quietly excited. These animalised (through social media) sociopaths might just deserve what is coming for them. The ego economy can only huff its farts for so long.
by neobrain | 2025-09-13 08:43:50+00:00
> Proton dropped from the top spot on my list of “user-first email platforms” when they announced they’ll be deleting accounts that haven’t logged into their service in some arbitrary amount of time.

... for free accounts only, after 12-24 months of not having logged in at all.

> And if they require payment in exchange for providing that service, then it better accept privacy-preserving payment, but even then, I’m probably not going to use it.

They allow you to physically send in cash.

> I’m not even asking for something unreasonable

I don't disagree in principle, but the way you're asking for these things does in fact make you come across as an unreasonable customer.
by atoav | 2025-09-13 08:44:32+00:00
When I was a teenager social media just started becoming a thing in my country and it has been a life saver, maybe even literally. I grew up in an incredibly dull countryside village where nearly everybody towed the same line (opinions, usually unsupported by reality). These people always made the same mean "jokes" at the cost of anybody that differed just in the slightest. Dumb, racist and a bit hill-billy, proud of not knowing things, with some cunning neo nazis and a hand full of more creative or outcast people that either found their way of dealing with it or just wanted to get out. The latter was me.

This environment to me felt like a slow agonizing mental deathdeath, every day. I wasn't particularly hated by my environment, I wasn't bullied, but watching it drained every will to keep going out of my soul.

The internet was a real blessing. Not to meet likeminded people, but to find something, anything more than this bullshit. And how wonderfully weird things were, it was the peak of myspace and ICQ. I met one of my best friends online in a totally niché musician board about music composition and have been in nearly daily contact with him before I met him for the first time after 4 years. To this day, nearly 20 years later we are still in regular contact and listen to each others music.

The internet was a place for people like me, weirdos who felt they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were what felt like the dominant forces in the Internet.

Nowadays the very people I tried to get away from as a teenager are the dominant forces. The ones that constantly voiced the same shitty jokes about people who are different, only now they additionally complain that they aren't allowed to say that (while saying that). The ones that are so afraid of not being a "real" man/woman, that they lash out at everybody who lives in a way that questions their ideals. The bullies who thrive at punching down, because they think it propels them up somehow. The mean spirited idiots, who want you to stay dumb too so they look smarter. The whole depressing team.

Add a metric ton of corporate enshittification, professionalization of commentators and other actors on the net and you have it. The reason why the internet sucks more than it once did.

I wish more people started to embrace and publish the weird small things again, while ignoring that fake solipsist social media world of isolation.
by smarm52 | 2025-09-13 08:44:38+00:00
Well of course it does, "Quantitative easing" is common practice.

> a central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other financial institutions, thus raising the prices of those financial assets and lowering their yield, while simultaneously increasing the money supply.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

At least one cause of inflation is "increasing the money supply".

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
by pndy | 2025-09-13 08:45:02+00:00
The early days of social media were indeed fun and 'innocent' - people shared stuff they liked with no ill intent but that didn't last long.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222562 - this was posted yesterday; people back then hyped this "information superhighway" and from today's perspective it was adorably naive. What they couldn't predict or know was the malice we got some 15 years ago - hell, neither we could see that coming. We got social media that manipulate opinions and behavior, predatory ad industry that tracks us all around, and mobile devices that turns us into zombies. People often call for Orwell's 1984, less frequently for Huxley's Brave New World but we're living in a dystopian world right now and we're quite content with it.

Subscribe and hit that bell notification button for more content.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-13 08:45:25+00:00
So, firstly, this won't actually help them which is why they won't try it. GitHub is aware that passwords are crap and since I have a Security Key it will ask to see my Security Key, "But I know tialaramex's password" doesn't help you.

But also you presented no evidence they can somehow detect their problem and try to ask for the password even if it would help them.
by hdjrudni | 2025-09-13 08:49:00+00:00
> I have no doubt there is a subset of features here that could be implemented as a single page app.

Is this a joke? Posthog sells an app, sure, but their product site shouldn't be an "app" it all. It's an SEO funnel. No one should spend any amount of time on there except to figure out what the heck Posthog is and how much it costs.
by Tor3 | 2025-09-13 08:49:19+00:00
Some simple mental models: Think of the gravity connecting the moon and the earth as a string, and both bodies are rotated around its gravitational midpoint (which is afaik actually slightly inside the earth, but this still works), and you'll see that this will make the ocean bulge on both sides. But then we have the earth's own rotation to think about. The earth turns faster than the moon orbits the earth, and the bulges will drag behind, and the moon is affected by that, like the lure at the end of a string when you swing a fishing rod.

As for the Bernoulli explanation for lift.. try holding a sheet of paper in front of you, it's not solid so it'll bow down, with a nice wing-shaped form. Then blow gently over it, see what happens.
by panstromek | 2025-09-13 08:50:04+00:00
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:

https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/

I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.
by rmunn | 2025-09-13 08:50:20+00:00
The fact that you advocate using a BOM with UTF-8 tells me that you run Windows. Any long-term Unix user has probably seen this error message before (copy and pasted from an issue report I filed just 3 days ago):

bash: line 1: #!/bin/bash: No such file or directory

If you've got any experience with Linux, you probably suspect the problem already. If your only experience is with Windows, you might not realize the issue. There's an invisible U+FEFF lurking before the `#!`. So instead of that shell script starting with the `#!` character pair that tells the Linux kernel "The application after the `#!` is the application that should parse and run this file", it actually starts with `<FEFF>#!`, which has no meaning to the kernel. The way this script was invoked meant that Bash did end up running the script, with only one error message (because the line did not start with `#` and therefore it was not interpreted as a Bash comment) that didn't matter to the actual script logic.

This is one of the more common problems caused by putting a BOM in UTF-8 files, but there are others. The issue is that adding a BOM, as can be seen here, *breaks the promise of UTF-8*: that a UTF-8 file that contains only codepoints below U+007F can be processed as-is, and legacy logic that assumes ASCII will parse it correctly. The Linux kernel is perfectly aware of UTF-8, of course, as is Bash. But the kernel logic that looks for `#!`, and the Bash logic that look for a leading `#` as a comment indicator to ignore the line, do *not* assume a leading U+FEFF can be ignored, nor should they (for many reasons).

What should happen is that these days, every application should assume UTF-8 if it isn't informed of the format of the file, unless and until something happens to make it believe it's a different format (such as reading a UTF-16 BOM in the first two bytes of the file). If a file fails to parse as UTF-8 but there are clues that make another encoding sensible, reparsing it as something else (like Windows-1252) might be sensible.

But putting a BOM in UTF-8 causes more problems than it solves, because it *breaks* the fundamental promise of UTF-8: ASCII compatibility with Unicode-unaware logic.
by bubblethink | 2025-09-13 08:50:41+00:00
You're reading too much into it. It's a case of bad UX. The jobs do not exist. The actual job application/interview etc. happened years ago, when it did exist, and everyone, including locals, had the same shot at it. When the job existed, someone was hired for it, and it happened to be someone on a visa. In order to keep that person employed in this job and get them a green card, the government requires that the job be advertised again afresh. It's a non-sensical requirement that was added because some politican or lobbyist asked for it. The natural way to add protectionism to this model would have been to add it at the outset, but that clearly wouldn't work for the economy. So a compromise was engineered. Companies can hire anyone generally as long as they are, in principle, temporary. When it comes to keeping them permanently, the government requires that they do this charade of posting ads again and doing a market test etc.
by weinzierl | 2025-09-13 08:52:16+00:00
"exhaustion" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think about social media.

At first I was not sure if the article really means exhaustion of the user, but then it says things like

"people scroll not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t know how to stop".

Sure, social media is a big waste of time, like gambling is a waste of money and drugs are a waste of health (and money), but do any of these feel "exhausting" to to user?

"Regret" comes to mind, maybe "shame". I think if platforms were exhausting to a significant number of people they were not that successful.
by Jedd | 2025-09-13 08:54:16+00:00
'Apart from terrorism ... or war, seismic activity, etc.'

I'm not sure where you're getting cheap from, or low-maintenance.

The above-ground stuff is locking future generations in for on-going maintenance for several centuries, perhaps longer. There's been think-tanks trying to work out how you just signpost such a place, given storage may exceed the expected lifetime of languages, and we'd want to be polite and at least contend with societal collapse.

It is hubris to observe that the many locations chosen now will remain 'distant from civilisation' for many centuries.