MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by plst | 2025-09-13 08:14:08+00:00
Their rights to license stuff they sell should not be unlimited, that's the entire point.

I understand that your second sentence refers to the fact, that the limitation is only in EU. Businesses have to respect local laws. Laws often mentioned in the thread (DMA, GDPR, although we can only suspect that these are the reasons for this lock) apply equally to everyone who wants to do business in Europe. If Apple does not want to respect these laws, they are free to leave. Even better, they can make changes to their devices that work only in EU and leave it as it already is in other countries. Said "competitors" do not necessarily need to be EU citizens, I'm sure many US companies would use that opportunity too.

Local regulations are not foreign to Apple, apparently similar laws are in force in Japan.

As for "some chunks" - interfaces are not protected by copyright, even in the US. Assuming DMA is the problem, nobody is asking for Apple to release details of their implementation, just for them to remove artificial software restrictions that lock apps from other vendors from doing (a small subset!) of stuff only Apple can do.

Smartphones are general computing devices. Apple and Google are a duopoly in the smartphone market, while restricting what users can do with their devices more than Microsoft ever restricted what Windows users can do with Windows. If we continue allowing these companies to go in that direction, we will end up with computers that are as limited as game consoles are, Apple and Google will be the only beneficiaries of that situation.
by matesz | 2025-09-13 08:14:28+00:00
I believe it takes maturity and wisdom to unhook from social media - facebook, youtube, linkedin, instagram etc. Especially reactive use, not the one which comes from internal pause / response.

I tried to unhook pretty much for the past 15 years as I sensed that it basically doesn't serve me. If I would summarize the one primary cause for my inability to do it is the following - the belief that consuming content online is better for my own being than learning to manage my monkey mind.

I mean any content - from scrolling dumb instagram and facebook feeds to factory making process videos on youtube and streamers playing online games, political debates etc.

The problem is not consuming content on social media, but doing it reactively, excessively.

What helps with unhooking is basically wisdom and experience because how to do it when pretty much everybody is doing it?

Realizing that entire social media world is just incredibly fucking corrupt. Like omg corrupt. It's the epitome of corruption, starting with CEOs themselves.

Last week I've had situation where the person I knew who has professional instagram profile with +10k and runs business there just went fucking nuts. Instead of focusing on working on herself she decided to double down on her narcisism and went mental. Episode, however this is where it leads.

I am just happy that I can see it better and better and step into the right direction - away from social media.

PS. I removed X account few months ago, oh my, what a relief!
by Zee2 | 2025-09-13 08:15:36+00:00
As a counterpoint, Rust is one of the languages that AI is worst at writing - currently, at least.

Perhaps there could be a future where the compiler/checker will be able to integrate more closely with whichever agent is attempting to write Rust - more closely than the current paradigm, where a hapless Claude repeatedly bashes its head into the borrow checker to no avail.
by Tade0 | 2025-09-13 08:15:54+00:00
This. Main point of giving candidates CS problems was always to weed out those who couldn't program at all, but somehow were still in the industry. I worked with such people - it's unpleasant.

Somehow someone figured that giving harder problems should result in better candidates. Personally, despite having passed most of the tests I've been subjected to, I don't see the connection.
by Jensson | 2025-09-13 08:16:25+00:00
> they just know that the balance of power is so skewed that the interests of the employer become the only relevant part

That happens since people only apply to very well paying jobs. If you apply to shit enough jobs they wont be asking hard questions, and those who offer shit jobs will say "all the power lies with the employees, I have no power to make them stay or apply, I am social and nice to them and they still reject my job offer!".

Just give the companies what they want and they all will want you, it is that easy. If you try to give them something they don't care about, like a hiring manager giving you a smile and minimum wage, of course you will get rejected a lot. Give them what they ask for, not what you think they should want.
by bambax | 2025-09-13 08:16:46+00:00
YC tried this at some point. Just hire white guys that seem "bright" on paper but can't come up with any idea whatsoever, see where it goes.

Spoiler: it didn't go anywhere. The story on HN is still here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700712

but the link is 404

https://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html
by TFYS | 2025-09-13 08:17:03+00:00
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
by MrDresden | 2025-09-13 08:17:50+00:00
I notice that Mastodon is only mentioned in the article in terms of protocols, but to me the killer feature there is the absolute lack of an algorithm.

Nothing is ever pushed on me by the platform, so the whole experience doesn't become combative. That does mean though that each user has to do some work finding others they like, and that can take some time. But that also weeds out those that just want to be spoonfed content, which is a plus.

The last three years on there have been some of the most wholesome social media interactions I have had in the last 25 years.
by jajko | 2025-09-13 08:18:33+00:00
Yeah but its mostly because of jobs and corresponding salaries. For every person I know that simply loves living in the city, has no connection to the nature and the best weekend is spent partying or in similar city vein, there are 10 who would love to live in more rural place, but then there is work or services commute.

Triple that for families with small kids.

Also it doesn't have to be proper wilderness, thats only for few - ie our village has 2k people, kindergarten and school for kids up to 14 years, shops, 3 restaurants, football stadium, doctor and dentist and so on. Small city 5 mins drive, bigger 10, metropolis 20 mins drive. And just next to big wild forest and natural reserve from one side that continues up the hills 1km higher than where we are, and 15km stretch of vineyards from another. Almost ideal compromise for us, just me sucking up the 1h office commute 2x a week (for now).
by alexey-salmin | 2025-09-13 08:19:04+00:00
You still don't get it.

No need to synchronize the clock. The date alone is enough to guess hands of everyone at the table and turn and river, right after you see the flop.

That's as big of a hole as it can possibly get. That's enough to establish incompetence and/or gross negligence of the authors. Whether the hole was exploited is immaterial to the question.
by 3form | 2025-09-13 08:21:18+00:00
It's interesting to see Tumblr mentioned as a dead/zombified platform, while I understand it's found a perfectly fine niche for itself and it's living a great life in that sense.

It makes it overall sound like the author's metric of liveliness is the same if disguised metric of being big, which ultimately drove the other huge players to the state they're talking about.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-13 08:21:47+00:00
"You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful).

From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
by ookblah | 2025-09-13 08:22:02+00:00
reddit largely went the same way as FB for me and it's continuing full steam, but for now i can at least stick to topics i want to lurk about. never saw the need for twitter or tiktok (former i can't express myself adequately and the entire place felt like hot takes. tiktok i suppose is like the next level IG but i'm happy being the older guy getting the "trickle down" content to ig heh).

everything is so polarized and vitriolic now to gain views. i used to love online discussion and debate. i find it a fruitless endeavor the majority of the time now. mainly just to give my 2 cents as some kind of self-carthasis lol. HN is probably the only place i bother to expend actual energy writing a comment.
by tim333 | 2025-09-13 08:22:05+00:00
The main virtue of the shaheds is they are fairly cheap and simple so the Russians can send hundreds. If you try making them capable of evasive maneuvers and the like you lose some of that.

The Mangust design is quite interesting

>steered by the pilot until, at around 200 meters (650 feet), its auto-guidance system takes over and autonomously completes the interception. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57595

Still seems to be a prototype though - not sure they've hit any shaheds.
by lurk2 | 2025-09-13 08:22:52+00:00
> Is this incompatible with democracy?

Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
New Open Source Extension for Web Scraping – Visual and Flexible (No AI)
by OnPagedev | 2025-09-13 08:23:39+00:00
Hey folks!

I just released OnPage.dev, a Chrome extension for visual web scraping. Perfect for researchers, analysts, or hobbyists who want to collect structured data from websites.

Features: - Highlight elements visually to scrape - Auto-scroll and smart scraping for dynamic content - Export to CSV or JSON - Cloud version or self-host locally

GitHub: https://github.com/OnPage-Scraper/OnPage-Scraper Hosted version: onpage.dev

Why it’s different: You get a visual, user-friendly scraper without losing control over your data. I’d love to hear your feedback and see what workflows you’d use this for!

Reminder: Always scrape responsibly and follow website terms of service.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 08:24:42+00:00
Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane.

The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels.

Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days.

As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
by disillusioned | 2025-09-13 08:25:12+00:00
I mean, it's not "close to correct". It's... really almost 100% correct.

Go try it. Hit up J-Archive, prompt it that you'll feed it Jeopardy answers and want a simple response in the form of a question. I've yet to stump it, even with stuff like Rhyme Time: "a racket-&-net sport peril" (tennis menace) or other more complex clues. Every once in awhile, it'll switch to the thinking model, but most were immediate and correct.

Try here: https://j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=8967
by Juliate | 2025-09-13 08:25:50+00:00
Tangentially related, I've read recently (Twitter? article?) someone longing for having separate devices again: one for music, one for social networks, one for photography, one for email, etc.

Because unifying everything down to a single one dumbed us down and gave unwarranted control to fewer and fewer people on what we may listen to, what we may write, what we may photograph, what we may share. And how and where and why we do it.

(notwithstanding that this would allow to significantly enrich the affordance of each device/appliance, relative to its use, rather than just having everything only tactile on a screen made of glass and 2 buttons).
by IshKebab | 2025-09-13 08:26:09+00:00
It was authentic (whatever that means) back in the day when Facebook was just for university students. Your friends were actually friends (more or less), the only things in the feed were actual messages from them. No tiktok style trash.

Started going downhill when they let everyone go on it, and never implemented anything like Google's "circles" idea, which meant you ended up with your crazy aunt as a "friend", the feed became less relevant (I don't care about her Christian cult), people wanted to post on it less...

By the time they added post sharing and the algorithm it was pretty much dead. We all switched to WhatsApp for actual socialising. In some ways it's not as good, but it doesn't have ads or shared content (for now).

The only thing I use Facebook for is the Marketplace, which is... okish. And for Facebook Groups which are still pretty useful.
by vintagedave | 2025-09-13 08:26:13+00:00
I agree, I find those deeply counterintuitive too. For other readers, the tidal explanation I have read is yes, the moon’s gravity pulls on the sea to raise a tide on the side facing the moon. The reason there is a tide on the opposite side is that the moon also pulls on the earth’s solid mass (also water, but the solid part it’s important here), creating displacement that causes the water on the other side to rise. There is a difference in the gravitational acceleration across the diameter of the earth and it’s less on the far side, thus the unequal pull, thus displacement. Since they are orbiting, this gravitational pull doesn’t cause the two (earth and moon) to meet, though.

This is an amateur’s explanation and I’d welcome input from someone with more understanding. For tidal friction, I can’t answer at all, I need to research.
by usagisushi | 2025-09-13 08:26:34+00:00
I wonder why NK doesn't pay "fake" defectors to create counter-propaganda. Well, that's a silly joke. Yet, the fact is that regime has implemented new laws to strictly regulate citizens' access to SK/Western TV shows. Nor does it make any effort to present its own narrative to the world by allowing people to freely share some TikTok clips showing them enjoying domestic content about their supreme commander over shitty foreign Netflix videos. Why? Because no way it is possible.
by matesz | 2025-09-13 08:26:56+00:00
Unfortunately it's an incredible tool, especially for industries which pray on people's insecurities like beauty - botox, fillers etc. This person I know puts instagram story and gets instantly booked for all free slots she has for the entire week.

She talked about some people from her industry doing billboard ads and laughed how inefficient they must be, knowing that people are so hooked on "insta".
by lurk2 | 2025-09-13 08:27:00+00:00
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".

His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
Show HN: Lessons from handling timezone conversion in a global SaaS
by hlyhfhl | 2025-09-13 08:28:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building Vivoldi, a multilingual SaaS for link management and analytics, and one of the hardest engineering challenges we faced was timezone conversion. I wanted to share some lessons learned that may help others running global systems.

1. Aggregation tables need hour-level precision To support accurate timezone conversion, every aggregated record must include a timestamp with at least the hour. Minutes/seconds are not strictly necessary, but without the hour, conversions break. This significantly increases the size of aggregated datasets, so query optimization becomes mandatory.

2. Standardize server time, convert on the frontend All database records are stored in KST (Korea Standard Time), since that’s where our ops team is based. On the frontend, data is always converted into the user’s local timezone. This makes operations easier for admins while still providing the right context for global users.

3. Query tuning is not optional Timezone conversion adds unavoidable complexity, so database tuning is critical. Poorly optimized queries will choke when datasets grow large. Indexing, partitioning, and minimizing unnecessary conversions made a huge difference in our case.

I’d love to hear how others have handled timezone issues in their systems. Do you normalize everything to UTC, or do you also keep server-local time for operations?
by oneshtein | 2025-09-13 08:28:44+00:00
Nuclear power plants require international laws and international cooperation for insurance, because one serious incident, such as Chornobyl, can wipe a continent.

In Ukraine, profits from all nuclear plants will cover damages, caused by Chornobyl, in 1000-5000 years IF nothing more will happen to Chornobyl or other an other nuclear power plant in those years, which is unlikely.
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-13 08:28:45+00:00
Your whole outlook is against the philosophy of Free Software. The whole point of free software is user freedom. If users can get better/cheaper services from WPEngine than they can from WordPress, and this is putting WordPress out of business: good. Companies should compete on services, not by enforcing a software monopoly.

This is better for users than the alternative. Since they're using open source software, they can always switch back if WordPress starts offering better services, or switch to some new company that can do it even better than either in the future.
by lpln3452 | 2025-09-13 08:28:49+00:00
My goal on a webpage for specific product information is simply to extract data and leave. I have zero interest in learning a new immersive UX for a task that should take seconds.

The modern web's obsession with maximizing engagement and time on page is fundamentally user hostile. It creates a frustrating experience for anyone viewing the web as a utility rather than just a source of entertainment.
by flohofwoe | 2025-09-13 08:30:02+00:00
See that's the thing, you're trying to argue rationally ;)

But the discussion around nuclear energy stopped being rational decades ago. On one side you have the old guard of the environmentalist movement which got started with anti-nuclear protests in the first place and then had their "I told you so" moment in 1986, and on the other side you have that new "nuclear grassroots movement" which tells me that nuclear power is akshually completely safe, and even if an incident happens it's not doing any harm and btw those Chornobyl death numbers are completely overblown, the radiation was actually good for the environment or whatever.

Then I'm seeing that the latest European NPP in Finland was about 15 years late and 3x more expensive than planned (from 3.5 to 11 billion Eu) while wind and solar farms are just popping up everywhere around me without much fanfare, built by whoever has some money and a bit of unused farmland or roof space to spare. And I really can't imagine those same people pooling their money and starting to build nuclear power plants instead ;)
by Popeyes | 2025-09-13 08:30:14+00:00
The problem is that people are addicted to tension, by raising tension it fills a need, but the release of that tension is also addictive. Social media is just uppers and downers churned over and over. In one moment you can see some guy assassinated and then a box full of puppies rolling around and being cute. But that tension is only present at the extremes.

The point where social media failed was when the government agreed, at the behest of the companies, that platforms aren't liable for what is published there. So it has allowed a flood of inflammatory accusations that make it hard to find the individual responsible, where it would be easier to just take the platform to court like you would a paper, or a TV channel.
by MangoCoffee | 2025-09-13 08:30:26+00:00
>This open source purism only benefits the leeches.

I don't understand what open source purism even is.

You pick a license for your software, and now you're mad because people are making money off of it. Then why even go with an open source license?

Do what Bill Gates did tell people to pay up for using Microsoft software, because Microsoft software isn't open source.

What are you crying about?
by riffraff | 2025-09-13 08:30:29+00:00
Is Tumblr doing fine financially?

I used to consume a lot of Tumblr content 10+ years ago, and back then it seemed a wonderful platform (pseudonymity, lack of censorship, little or no ads) but I haven't seen anything from it in a while, which makes me think it may be less popular and so less viable.

I would be happy if there's still a small bu thriving community over there, and I wish they'd gone ahead with activitypub support.
by vaylian | 2025-09-13 08:30:32+00:00
> I see it too often e.g., in Clojure, where lib authors even have to add "maintenance disclaimers"

I think this is a peculiarity of Clojure. Clojure is optimized for simplicity and as the saying goes: "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."

I don't use Clojure these days. Maybe I should revisit the language. It has some really nice ideas.
by gsliepen | 2025-09-13 08:31:37+00:00
I wrote a software synth myself with the intention of running it on Raspbery Pi 3 / Zero 2. Those are actually quite capable processers; sound synthesis requires very little RAM, both code and for maintaining state, so everything fits in the rather tiny cache. But at the same time, while these Pis use "little" cores, the maximum throughput of NEON instructions is actually the same as for the corresponding "big" cores like the Cortex-A72. With four cores, you can do in the order of ~10 GFLOPS 32-bit FMA instructions. With a sample rate of 96 kHz and 32-note polyphony, you theoretically have a few thousand FMA instructions per note to spend.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-13 08:31:55+00:00
> Since C++20 you can use constinit, or std::construct_at to avoid static initialization woes entirely

This is just yet another bad defaults situation. Yes, that's the correct behaviour and so it's what Rust's statics do, but it wasn't how C++ worked so they had to add this constinit keyword. LazyStatic is solving the other thing - where we don't need runtime parameters but we are doing work at runtime so we aren't truly constant.