MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bri3d | 2025-09-05 22:37:19+00:00
I agree with this overall, and I don't think it the notion of making friends online has died, for what it's worth: I've made a lot of friends online from various comment-media in the last 3-5 years. Forums are still the highest friendship to noise ratio, oddly, with Discord in a close second, but I also got my current job off of Hacker News and have made some friends here too.

I also 100% agree that super-wide-scale social media feels like it's dying, though - Instagram, Twitter, and any Reddit with more than a few thousand users are definitely worse by the day, but I never really got a huge amount of value from those spaces anyway. My Twitter account (which in fairness, I think had 1FA with a password from 2008 or so) somehow got taken over by what appear to be drug dealers from Japan and I didn't particularly mourn the loss.

Oddly the only online space I really _miss_ is, of all things, the early days of Xbox Live voice chat. Matchmaking seemed to really heavily favor ping and in turn I'd frequently encounter my neighbors in lobbies. Everyone used a microphone. It was still toxic in terms of various -isms, slurs, and so on, but the trash talking was generally more of an aside and you'd frequently get some genuine small talk and connections while you queued for matches. I've tried it a few times since and while I'm sure part of it is just me getting older, the signal isn't even really there (I think a lot of people are in private party chats in Discord, if they're talking at all) and if it is, the noise ratio is way higher than it used to be.
by overfeed | 2025-09-05 22:37:30+00:00
It was tongue in cheek, since only governments can effect actual tariffs.

However, the consumer effects of a "tax" or surcharge on a foreign service applied to a specific jurisdiction are indistinguishable from a tariff. The only difference is the money doesn't go to the government treasury - in any case, that's not the reason most governments introduce tariffs. If Google were to introduce a Europe surcharge, they'd be ironically in alignment with Brussels.
by verdverm | 2025-09-05 22:37:41+00:00
If I buy a book, learn something, and then profit from it, should I also be paying more than the original price to read the book?

> Ai is not a human with limited time

AI is also bound by time, physics, and limited capacity. It does certain things better or faster than us, it fails miserably at certain things we don't even think about being complex (like opening a door)

> And it is also owned by a company not a legal person.

For the purpose of legalities, companies and persons are relatively equivalent, regardless of the merits, it is how it is

> In world where massively funded companies can freely exploit their work and even in many case fully substitute that principle is failed.

They paid for the books after getting caught, the other companies are paying for the copyrighted training materials
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-05 22:38:26+00:00
Habermas wrote a ponderous two-volume book titled

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac...

which seems to postulate that some kind of deliberative process by which "people come together to share disparate views" could solve many of the problems that he points out in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)

if we could just find the right process but in 2025 it seems dangerously naive today. That is, when people come together to share disparate views online they seem to relish attacking each other and reinforcing tribal identities. I have a lot of problems with this recent Nate Silver editorial

https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism

particularly (i) it didn't start on BlueSky but really started on Twitter and Tumblr, and (ii) centrists like Matt Yglesias who pick fights with that kind of leftist or anyone who complains about being bullied by trans people is either doing it to get a rise or drive traffic to their blog. Even if he names it wrong, the phenomenon he's describing is a very real thing and it's particularly harmful to the causes and the individuals that those who participate in it claim to be advocating for.
by Telaneo | 2025-09-05 22:38:27+00:00
This is probably correct the instant you get a whiff of bad faith or differing fundamental principles that you aren't going to be able to change, and if you do try, it'll devolve into an argument, but I've been involved in significantly longer threads that were just people asking for advice who had a lot of questions that weren't easily answerable with a google search, as well as deeper discussions that were genuinely made in good faith and made me question some of my assumptions. The latter is quite rare, but they certainly are a thing.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-05 22:38:39+00:00
There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me)

I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be.

Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)
by piva00 | 2025-09-05 22:38:42+00:00
You don't seem to understand the inevitable, and absurdly wasteful game of whack-a-mole this kind of action becomes... Look at the size of the oceans around the USA, look at the amount of water around Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, all of Central America where boats can sail to deliver larger payloads of drugs.

Do you believe, even with all its might and firepower, the USA has enough ships, helicopters, surveillance planes, satellites, to cover all of this area? Do you believe that cartels with very deep pockets won't be looking for ways around whatever the USA can throw at them, finding new routes, new modes of transportation, etc.? Do you think they are stupid?

No matter how much firepower the USA wastes shooting speedboats there will be other routes for drugs to get into the USA.

Again, you do you, but you don't understand at all the amount of effort it'd take to completely shutdown all trafficking routes, all transportation of drugs, into the USA, lol.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-05 22:38:53+00:00
Everyone always says this stuff, but man these things are such garbage to use: terrible user interface, LCD screen with random blinking elements to tell you that's being edited, response rate slower than a ping to Mars. Modern app-connected thermostats are so much better.

I have the same thing and to be honest, if I had to replace a $200 thermostat every 2 years I would gladly do it. In fact, this whole thing has made me go and research which thermostat will fit where I live.
by quesera | 2025-09-05 22:40:22+00:00
FWIW, oven/range circuits are notoriously overspecified.

Code in the US is 220V/50A. Your wall oven will get the same, despite having a much lower max draw than the usual oven/cooktop combination.

50A (upgraded from 30A several years ago) is specified for having the oven plus all cooktop elements ON. Maximum instantaneous draw will be below 50A. There's also the standard 20% headroom allotment, and some additional safety margin to account for the heat generated by all of the above being ON (or high duty cycle) for an extended period.
by toast0 | 2025-09-05 22:41:40+00:00
If you take existing parking and make some of it EV charging, it doesn't take up much extra space; the charging equipment does take some space, of course, but sometimes there's room to be found for that.

Depending on EV adoption and how much charging people want/need, you can start with a couple spots that are active charging only, and see what that looks like. If the chargers are always full, consider adding more and/or having several spots for each charger and standards and practices to move your car and the charging plug when yours is full, etc. If the chargers are underused, consider making the spot open when the lot is full, etc.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-05 22:41:45+00:00
The pun is strong with this one!

On a more serious note as much as you can be when you realize that discussions aren't happening in good faith and that biases like nations come...

I think that why nationalism/patriotism works is that the state has a monopoly over (legal) violence / laws in general. But the only way that might work is if we believe into them & thus nations have massive wheels of (propaganda?) or whatever it might take to convince the masses to be patriotic.

I feel like everyone all around the world is kinda the same man. We are homo sapiens. Nations shouldn't define us or the way we interact in an ideal world but I feel like a hypocrite when I myself defend my nation sometimes. I generally prefer decentralization to the point that we might take pride in our nations but we don't get influenced by it because the bigger the nation, the larger its influence/propaganda.

I feel like switzerland might be a good example in the sense that I have heard that there are people who don't even remember the (president/prime minister's?) name while working fine. I wonder if the whole world could essentially agree on international laws while being decentralized.

I just feel like that most of us are puppets and very few puppeteers in this world essentially controlling us / manipulating us into doing things that we generally wouldn't do.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-09-05 22:41:51+00:00
"A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation."

-- William S. Burroughs, "The Western Lands"
by mullingitover | 2025-09-05 22:41:52+00:00
> The proposed plan would grant Musk up to 12% of Tesla's stock, worth about $1.03 trillion if the company hits its target market value of $8.6 trillion. The plan requires boosting Tesla's valuation nearly eightfold, or about $7.5 trillion, over the next decade.

Obviously no chance in hell that Tesla hits that market cap legitimately just based on the performance of the past four years.

However, if the administration succeeds in killing the Fed’s independence and sending inflation to the moon, he might get that payday early! It will in be Zimbabwe dollars, but he will get that trillionaire title (along with many others).
by cheald | 2025-09-05 22:42:12+00:00
FWIW, I replaced my Nests with Centralite Pearls a few years ago, and have been extremely happy with them WRT Home Assistant. The Pearl doesn't seem to be widely available anymore, but any Zwave or Zigbee thermostat + a local hub gets you a thermostat that should work with Home Assistant and will be immune to being sunsetted like this.
by jongjong | 2025-09-05 22:42:20+00:00
Isn't that how the whole system operates? Everyone is a conduit to allow rich people to enrich themselves further. The amount and quality of opportunities any individual receives are proportional to how well it serves existing capital.

So long as there is an excuse to justify money flows, that's fine, big capital doesn't really care about the excuse; so long as the excuse is just persuasive enough to satisfy the regulators and the judges.

Money flows happen independently, then later, people try to come up with good narratives. This is exactly what happened in this case. They paid the authors a lot of money as a settlement and agreed on a narrative which works for both sets of people; that training was fine, it's the pirating which was a problem...

It's likely why they settled; they preferred to pay a lot of money and agree on some false narrative which works for both groups rather than setting a precedent that AI training on copyrighted material is illegal; that would be the biggest loss for them.
by sureglymop | 2025-09-05 22:43:14+00:00
Switzerland has five main collecting societies: ProLitteris for literature and visual arts, the SSA (Société Suisse des Auteurs) for dramatic works, the SUISA for music, Suissimage for audiovisual works, and SWISSPERFORM for related rights like those of performers and broadcasters. These non-profit societies manage copyright and related rights on behalf of their members, collecting and distributing royalties from users of their works.

Note that the law specifically regulates software differently, so what you cannot do is just willy nilly pirate games and software.

What distribution means in this case is defined in the swiss law. However swiss law as a whole is in some ways vague, to leave a lot up to interpretation by the judiciary.
by gxs | 2025-09-05 22:43:29+00:00
They are so shady about this stuff

I have a Honeywell t6 that I got when they installed a new unit - Honeywell INSISTS that you create an account and download the app to connect it to your home network

Thankfully this is bullshit and you can connect it directly from the thermostat to HomeKit - you will not find a single piece of documentation on this though and will be told it’s not possible

The real kicker is that there is a notification to register your device that you can’t get rid of unless you register your device

You can only snooze it for a couple weeks at a time

How I’d love to have one on one conversations with the evil people who approve this type of crap
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-05 22:43:53+00:00
Just in case: This is not a call for everyone to "pair program" with an AI.

If you pair program with someone else on your team, you both learn what the other is thinking. You both become more familiar with what the code is doing, and why it's doing it.

If you "pair program" with an AI, anything it learned, it forgets as soon as the prompt is closed.

So don't think that's what he's talking about here. He's talking about XP, with humans, just like in the 1990s. There may be some AI in there too, but that's not where the XP part comes from.
by tgma | 2025-09-05 22:44:04+00:00
Sure you can look at it[1], but you're not expected to look at Apple Photos database. The computer is.

Write a correct JSON parser, compare with protobuf on various metrics, and then we can talk.

[1]: although to be fair, I am older than kids whose first programming language was JavaScript, so I do not think of JSON object format with property names in quotes and integers that need to be wrapped as strings to be safe, etc., lack of comma after the last entry--to be fair this last one is a problem in writing, not reading JSON--as the most natural thing
by tuckerman | 2025-09-05 22:44:25+00:00
> That means, if something goes wrong the surrogates are stuck with med bills too, in addition to the legal ones.

This is not true.

Our contract, which was extremely standard, made us assume all medical expenses related to the pregnancy, including any complications that could have occurred afterwards. If anything happened to her health insurance coverage we would have also had to pay for premiums for new coverage.
by mattnewton | 2025-09-05 22:44:58+00:00
> I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.

Not to derail the conversation, but IMO the current US administration isn’t a wake up call. It’s a temper tantrum by people who understand that the US isn’t as relatively wealthy to the rest of the world as it was after WW2 but don’t understand why. If some of the thrash accidentally improves the West’s defensive posture or spending that’s good but there is no coherent plan of why things need to be changed.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-05 22:45:00+00:00
One interesting aspect of this is how using BIND puts focus upon serial numbers.

Serial numbers were a bane 3 decades ago. When Daniel J. Bernstein invented djbdns, xe made the software (tinydns-data) auto-generate the serial numbers from the last modification timestamp of the source file, and made several observations on the subject of serial numbers that are well known, or at least easy to work out for onesself with a modicum of thought.

This article warns the reader thrice, in all-capitals, about remembering to manually increment serial numbers. That's still after all these years reasonable advice for BIND users and a still habit to form if one uses BIND. The numbering scheme used here will only allow 100 changes per day, of course.

But nothing in the article, nor the planned parts 2 and 3 described in the ensuing FediVerse discussion, actually needs zone serial numbers to be incremented at all, as there's no replication of any kind, let alone "zone transfer", here and parts 2 and 3 (if they end up as stated, they not having been published yet) will not encompass replication either. It's heavily stressed because it has been a common pitfall for BIND users for decades; but ironically the article series does not actually need it.

It's a shame, really, because the things that should be emphasized as much if not more here, are reduced in comparison. internal. still not being an IANA special-use domain name is one. (See RFC 8375 for home.arpa., which is a special-use domain name.) The way that this setup will leak 192.168.0.0/16 reverse lookups outwith 192.168.1.0/24 to the world at large, and 172.16.0.0/12 lookups outwith 172.16.0.0/16, is another. (named.rfc1912.zones does not cover any of the requisite domain apices, RFC 1912 not being RFC 1918, and is in any case a RedHatism that one cannot rely upon on even, say, Debian, let alone on a non-Linux-based operating system.) The pitfalls of using a superdomain that one does not own, e.g. homelab.jhw. here, is a third that is glossed over. (Anyone who has tried to set up an organization's domain naming will know of the pitfalls that this entails; this is as much of a bad habit to avoid gaining in the first place as updating BIND's serial numbers is a habit to learn.)

Furthermore, making "everything at home just work, even with no internet connection" involves something further, missing from this and from the described forthcoming parts 2 and 3: a private root content DNS server. There's a surprising amount of stuff that relies on at minimum getting negative answers from the . content DNS servers for top-level domains that do not exist, and various blackholed domains.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-05 22:46:51+00:00
It's starting to look like when you buy any kind of electronics gizmo with a UI, your choices are limited to:

1. A non-smart device that will work forever but looks and feels like it's still in the 90s

2. A device with a nice, responsive UI, but destined for the landfill because it's chained to a cloud service.

Why are these things mutually exclusive? Across so many product categories, there's seemingly few or no options for a nice UI but without dependence on an Internet service that will inevitably shut down.
by crikeykangaroo | 2025-09-05 22:47:00+00:00
That's indeed how it usually goes with these lunatics.

1) Commit war crime.

2) Face the music for a moment.

3) Go to a friendly podcast and raise support (just say you have trauma and pain, and the people you've killed were animals anyway).

4) Become a free man.

5) Optionally for Seals: write a book with a chapter about hell week (can be done @ step 2 as well)
by rpcope1 | 2025-09-05 22:47:12+00:00
Honeywell's z-wave thermostat basically does all of the shiny shit you'd want out of a connected thermostat while making basically impossible to lock the user out because Honeywell decided it didn't like the product anymore. Why people have to keep relearning this with IoT devices baffles me, and that Z-wave or maybe Zigbee isn't what's insisted upon.
by another_twist | 2025-09-05 22:47:26+00:00
When I first learned Laplace transform in university, it was my goto for differential equations of any kind. I was even naive enough to believe well this is a solved problem now. Eventually found out this wasnt the case after studying PDEs. Its still my favourite transform. Immensely useful not to mention the whole method of moments in random variables is basically laplace transform.

I don't like Fourier transform but for petty reasons. In the engineering exams, I messed up a Fourier Transform calculation and ended up just a few points short of a perfect score. Hate it ever since :)
by gerdesj | 2025-09-05 22:47:31+00:00
You can't go too far wrong with unbound and it is seriously fast and light.

Real men cry into their text editors with BIND and PowerDNS but you do get the whole toy box with these beasties. I've whizzed up many BIND daemons. I once ran a pair of PDNS servers with a MySQL replicated back end.

I currently have an internet exposed and rather locked down PDNS for ACME DNS-01 (Lets Encrypt). The CA consortium are insisting on SSL certs going down to 40 odd day lifetimes within about three years. I look after quite a few SSL certs for my customers. Anyway.

For home labbers, you might consider a Pi Hole (doesn't have to run on a Pi - a VM will do) or, a bit more hard core: https://technitium.com/dns/ (web GUI - yay!) pfSense has Unbound built in and I think OPNSense does too - both are fine choices of router. OpenWRT probably has unbound in it.

When I say, you can't go too far wrong with unbound, I mean it. If it works then it is almost certainly configured correctly.
by jdeibele | 2025-09-05 22:47:47+00:00
I drive a 2023 Bolt EUV and it has wireless CarPlay. My wife's 2024 Equinox EV has Android Automotive and no CarPlay. We don't have Android phones so I don't know how well an Android phone would work with Android Automotive.

I've been tempted to get a larger car but the Bolt is so much more fun to drive compared to the Equinox.
by chmod775 | 2025-09-05 22:48:09+00:00
Makes those forces seem a lot less "special" if their highly trained SEALs on their super secret mission can get startled by a bunch of fishers probably going about their daily routine.

Truly outstanding planning, reconnaissance, and decision-making in the field. If I ever need some guys in swimwear taken out, I know who to call.

North Korean media likes to depict US soldiers as what can only be summarized as cruel demons. Depictions of US soldiers torturing and killing civilians are especially common[1]. If they were ever warming up to the west, this incident among others should serve as a good reminder to not alter course.

> [..] talks have fallen apart and North Korea has forged ahead with its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program.

I'd build more nuclear weapons as fast as I could as well if that's who I'm dealing with.

[1] Some examples of North Korean anti-American propaganda for your viewing pleasure: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/north-korea-anti-american-p...
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-05 22:48:22+00:00
I personally find Bind to be such an awful DNS server to configure. It's a bit like setting up Arch or Gentoo; tons of configuration so you can get down to the details and learn about every single part of the system, but ultimately there are only a few fields that you generally need to touch.

My DNS server of choice remains PowerDNS. I also find the API easier to use with certbot and the available web UIs.
by tgbugs | 2025-09-05 22:48:27+00:00
I think about this every single time I drive by a stretch of road that has these. You can't have public goods when the value of those goods in private hands is greater than the risk of, ahrm, converting those public goods into private goods.

When a society fails to provide sufficient opportunity for all its members then those who have been left behind can simply make up the difference by retrieving their share of the common wealth by other means.

The cost of trying to police this (ignoring entirely the moral and ethical implications of such policing) at the scale of e.g. all roads with guardrails is more than the value if replacing the rails, and likely substantially more than just providing the missing opportunity and removing the sources of wealth inequality that make wealth redistribution in the form of guard rails an inevitability.