MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-25 01:30:08+00:00
I agree. I would say in practical terms the most impactful subcategory here is companies and their consolidation. This is especially so because they tend to be more strict about funneling money to the top, which generally means they funnel decision-making to the top as well, and that leads to the problem mentioned about individuals having difficulty influencing what goes on in the organization.

The same phenomenon is observable with other kinds of groups, but I think less so. Various kinds of clubs and local institutions exist more robustly than small independent businesses. Even those that remain though are under threat from big companies. (A great example is how Craigslist, and later things like Facebook Marketplace, centralized and gobbled up all the money that used to go to classified advertisements in local newspapers.)

I think a key point is this:

> Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer.

More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that economies of scale are a bad thing. As in, they have harmful effects. When it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do more and more of what you're doing, that creates a runaway feedback loop. We need to consciously work towards making it so that the stable equilibrium state is many small organizations that stay small, and growth happens largely through the creation of new organizations rather than the growth of existing ones.
by credit_guy | 2025-09-25 01:31:09+00:00
I don't think you are trolling, as I see you answered along these lines before. But how exactly is "the West" reaping the benefits of scale, or climbing the learning curve, from 5 completely disparate projects, one of which failed? China is building more than that every single year, and has been doing that for a decade.

> Should we just push through no matter the cost even though we have cheaper alternatives?

This is a false dichotomy. I am not saying we should not build solar, or wind. And I am not even saying we should divert resources to nuclear. It should be the private sector. Are you saying even the private sector should not invest in nuclear? Why? Don't you think people are smart enough to decide for themselves what do to with their money? If Bill Gates wants to invest his money in Terrapower, why do you think this is a problem? He invests a lot of money in renewables too.
by cgio | 2025-09-25 01:32:06+00:00
I have my claim to a minute expertise in this domain. Was assigned to lead an initiative for something that was not achieved in 3 prior attempts. I was given the 6 strongest, most genius engineers from 6 different teams. Everyone, including me, was quite opinionated and with a great explanation for their opinion. It was not an explicit credo, but I made it my position to leverage the mirror of the saying “don’t interrupt your enemy when they make a mistake”. For us it would be, “don’t interrupt your friend when they make something great” with the corollary “do something else, and make it great”. There were other important parts to that like finding the organic separation of duties and teasing or nudging directions, accepting suboptimal valleys in places, etc. But it worked, and I am as proud as I can be for being lucky. Rooms of geniuses are challenging but also such a great opportunity to learn from each other and learn how to collectively optimise the boundaries to focus on disagreement only where it makes sense.
by leakycap | 2025-09-25 01:32:54+00:00
UPDATE: It's up. But the link that previously was a status page now redirects to something else.

Details on this incident: https://www.dockerstatus.com/pages/history/533c6539221ae15e3...

Unacceptable level of communication during critical downtime; I know no one who was able to access or use Docker but it is still listed in the history as partial service degradation
by doom2 | 2025-09-25 01:34:26+00:00
If anything, I think we're even closer. It feels like the current administration is stifling speech more than ever. It's open season on people who don't proudly wave the flag or correctly mourn Charlie Kirk. People who dare speak against Israel are being doxxed and in some cases hounded out of their jobs. Books are being taken off library shelves on the whim of a very few community members with objections. And all of it is getting a giant stamp of approval from the White House.
by ebbi | 2025-09-25 01:34:30+00:00
But they're partnering with Qualcomm, so I'd imagine they'll be using their latest ARM chips to try and compete with Macbooks. I think iPads have too much of a stigma now (not a 'real' 'computer'), and it may take a few years to break out of that for enterprises to take it seriously, whereas Google can start fresh in positioning this platform if they play it right - though that's a big ask coming from the company that has (lost count of how many!) chat platforms.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-09-25 01:34:57+00:00
In the old days, companies were valued on their expected dividend. Share prices didn't move that much, and trading shares took time and had fees attached. You could speculate on share price moves, and people did, but the primary source of income from holding shares was dividends.

Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.

The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.

I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.

[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds
by userbinator | 2025-09-25 01:34:59+00:00
How to make the normal person aware and interested in their own digital rights.

Start a revolutionary, reactionary movement. Many people wonder how the current US president was elected. Regardless what your political stance is, it's good evidence that if you can recruit a huge number of followers in your agenda (and in the process, likely make nearly as many opponents), and have them repeat your "propaganda" as much as possible, you can do anything. That's how you can defeat Big Tech.
by leakycap | 2025-09-25 01:35:16+00:00
> I don't know if curation is really the problem.

A lack of oversight is what I see as the problem, and the solution would require a significant human element.

Expecting a retailer to know/inspect the product they collect margins on shouldn't be a big ask.

The retailer has to know what they're selling, but Apple seems to turn a blind eye to shady listings because of the way Mac App Store results are shown and the lack of useful filtering available to the user.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-09-25 01:36:38+00:00
This is partially why the average age of a successful founder is late 30s to early 40s at the time of founding.

There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.

Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.

But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.

And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.
by khuey | 2025-09-25 01:37:01+00:00
> It's odd because in the UK sports betting is pretty much embedded in the culture.

I remember being astonished walking around London for the first time 15 years ago after getting off the plane from the US and seeing a place called "Ladbrokes" that really would leave lads broke.

> I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.

There's a direct onramp from something very popular (sports) into sitting on your couch and losing all your money on your phone. It also makes sports worse for everyone who doesn't gamble on it too.
by egypturnash | 2025-09-25 01:37:10+00:00
Ted Olson: who America listens to. Olson is a prominent constitutional lawyer who argued the case to repeal PASPA in the District Courts and Supreme Court. He was central to cases involving legalizing gay marriage, upholding the second amendment, and the landmark campaign financing ruling in Citizens United.

If we assume that these are all cases that he was on the winning side of, then good on him for the first one, but dude sure has a lot to answer for with the other ones and the case under discussion in this article.
by smcleod | 2025-09-25 01:38:19+00:00
As I stated this is the top Qualcomm model we're talking about, not the base which is significantly lower.

Given their top model underperforms the most common M4 chip and the M5 is about to be released it's not very impressive at all.

Even the old M2 Max in my early 2023 MacBook Pro has 400GB/s.
by tejohnso | 2025-09-25 01:38:20+00:00
I couldn't remember ever seeing anything this bad. So I tried this in my browser and the real midjourney was the first result. Then I remembered I'm using Brave as my default browser, and most people aren't. In all the years I've been using it I've never once regretted it, and every once in a while I get a little reminder like this about how bad ads are on the web. I don't know why it isn't a more popular browser choice.
by slg | 2025-09-25 01:38:52+00:00
I think this is more a function of the internet than purely the legality. Legal gambling wouldn't be nearly as damaging if it was limited to sportsbooks that only allowed gambling on-site similar to how some places have handled gambling on horse racing for decades. The dangerous part is not simply the ability to bet on a sport, it's having a device in your pocket that allows you to gamble instantaneously at any time and (almost) any place.

I think the same thing applies to most vices. Any friction in engaging in the vice is a moderating influence. Someone is more likely to get dangerously drunk while drinking at home than at a bar in which you have to order every drink from a bartender. It was likely more difficult to fall into a porn addiction if you needed to look another human in the eyes when you rented that dirty VHS tape. It's easier to overeat if you're having the food delivered to your home than if you order every item from a waiter in a restaurant. When we all know an activity should be done in moderation, making it as easy to engage in that behavior as possible is probably a bad idea.
by leakycap | 2025-09-25 01:41:33+00:00
They better not be airing my dirty laundry!

My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.

Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
by garciasn | 2025-09-25 01:43:05+00:00
Wait; are you saying that as a society we should regulate EVERYTHING people spend money on regardless of their method of doing so? Because, as everyone knows, EVERYTHING is addictive in one way or another.

I don't personally agree with gambling, as I just don't understand how someone could possibly enjoy it; but, I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.

Churches, retailers, bars, strip clubs, restaurants, etc. All of these allow people to spend their hard-earned money in questionable ways and many folks go WAY overboard w/them. But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
by rbranson | 2025-09-25 01:43:32+00:00
Magnetic hard drives are 100X cheaper per GB than when S3 launched, and are about 3X cheaper than in 2016 when the price last dropped. Magnetic prices have actually ticked up recently due to supply chain issues, but HAMR is expected to cause a significant drop (50-75%/GB) in magnetic storage prices as it rolls out in next few years. SSDs are ~$120/T and magnetic drives are ~$18/T. This hasn't changed much in the last 2 years.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-25 01:43:36+00:00
"Yes, leaks can be part of a strategic move by politicians and it can be a source of exploitation by political operators but to equate all anonymous sourcing with propaganda is misleading."

AFAICT, the blog author never equated _all_ anonymous sourcing with propaganda. The blog post is not titled "The NYT is bogus"

Instead, the blog post discusses a specific story that relates to a specific "SIM farm"

It questions why _in this particular instance_, relating to a "SIM farm", the source needed to remain anonymous

But that is not the only reason the author thinks the SIM farm story is bogus/hype

Based on technical knowledge/experience, the author opines the "SIM farm" was set up for common criminal activity, not as a system purposefully designed to overload a cell tower

It is the later opinion, not the one about the NYT, that is interesting to me in terms of evaluating this "news" hence I am curious what similar experience the parent commenter may have, if any

After so many years of being exposed to it on HN and the developer blogs submitted to HN, I have become accustomed to dismissive tone and black-and-white, all-or-nothing, pick-a-side thinking from software developers, i.e., what the parent calls "absolutism", absence of "nuance", etc. Probably not a day goes by without some HN commenter trying to dismiss "mainstream media", making some nonsensical complaint about news reporting that they dislike

Silicon Valley is now intermediating the publication of these worthless opinions for profit: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on

But, like I suggested, if one reads the blog author's source code and discussions of programming and cryptography, then one might be more willing to tolerate some personal opinions about the NYT. Ideally, programmers would only comment online about programming, and not, for example, about journalism, but that's not what happens in reality
by Gathering6678 | 2025-09-25 01:43:51+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this feels like a long-winded way of saying: if an adversary could control a significant portion of relays without being found out and for a not-insignificant period of time, it could defeat Tor.

Is it correct? Probably. Does it justify the "Not secure at all" indictment? No.
by kajaktum | 2025-09-25 01:44:34+00:00
In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-25 01:44:39+00:00
Maybe Midjourney let its brand namespace become too diluted with copycats and also-rans and coasted on their initial work instead of putting in the effort to maintain the space. Maybe a lot of ppl searching for things that are like Midjourney are causing the competitors (who are obviously making efforts to invade the keyword) to be listed alongside. Maybe there's actually way more variables in the mix with OP's search/account/profile (however prolific or not it is). It's just not that clear cut and google is still has massive utility.

Another day another weak substack submitted by ....
by smsm42 | 2025-09-25 01:45:32+00:00
Just 10k? And this is presented as historically huge fine? I don't know about thst particulat lawyer, but I heard lawyers charging multiple hundreds of dollars per hour, so that's what, less than week's wages? What kind of crappy deterrent is that? He should have been banned from court for a couple of years at least, if he repeats - forever.
by bill_joy_fanboy | 2025-09-25 01:45:57+00:00
Not a lotto fan, but, in theory, the money collected by state lotteries goes to some sort of public good (scholarships, etc.). Don't get me wrong, I still see them as destructive, but they don't operate with the same intent.

These new sports books are operating purely to enrich the owners of the platform. Ban 'em.
by kemayo | 2025-09-25 01:46:47+00:00
I think we're at an impasse on the issue of your argument, and your characterization of my interpretation of it. I disagree, but I don't think we're going to reach an agreement here. I will drop it, and we can just argue about product design.

> In any case, have you ever complained about the video controls until now? I've never heard anyone make this complaint before. Who was asking for this change before it happened?

I don't think this matters. It's an improvement. Does every change to a product have to be driven by active complaints? Doing so feels like a way to get everything to just "good enough".

> I would emphasize that the goal is to watch the video, not to watch the controls.

Sort of. The goal is mostly to watch the video, sure, but sometimes the goal is to use the controls. When the goal is to watch the controls, it's best if they can be used as quickly as possible, so you can get right back to watching the video. For me, this change supports that.

> Apple could make it even easier for you to process the controls by completely blanking out the video, leaving only the controls, but that would be even worse, not better.

Yes, so I'm glad they found a happy medium where I can more-easily comprehend the controls and still see the video. Good call, Apple!

> This is an inconvenient workaround and not a solution to the problem.

Isn't it? I admit that it conforming to my prior behavior, because I never want to have the video covered up by the cursor, makes me find it not inconvenient at all... but I'm unlikely to be the only one with that preference. Plus, "the mouse recently moved and is now hovering over the video" feels like a pretty reasonable cue that the user might intend to interact with the controls, so Apple choosing to make it easy for me to quickly get the control I want the moment my cursor moves onto the video feels like it's making my video-watching experience better. And in the unlikely case that I was to overcome my distaste and just leave the cursor there, hey, it's only a few seconds before it hides the controls anyway.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-09-25 01:47:19+00:00
then why US people cant vote a politician that would bring a betterment for their country??? like every other country??

we literally see an anti government protest around the world in past few month from UK to Nepal to Australia

because they got divided between left vs right political spectrum that ignore massive issue that is happening right now

if there is a protest from other country, it labelled as anti government protest but if there are protest on US, it called an left/right protest
by gxs | 2025-09-25 01:48:03+00:00
Yeah agree 100% - this is why I’m a happy kagi customer

It’s kind of cool being treated like a customer

New feature releases aren’t about ad placement or SEO or personalization / tracking

Instead, their product updates are targeted at me - cool nifty features that I can immediately try out

Like kagi or not, just the feeling of having devs care about my actual personal experience is a breath of fresh air

I know not everyone is an fortunate, but I’d happily spend on other software of this caliber
by ayaros | 2025-09-25 01:48:05+00:00
Just because it is not doing anything at the moment doesn't mean it doesn't serve an important, necessary purpose. For a windowed application environment to be functional and usable, there needs to be an easy way to drag windows around the screen. When you start moving things into that space, it makes the system harder to use.

A once-simple action which required minimal thought now requires you to parse an arbitrarily populated area of the screen and find a tiny gap within a litany of buttons and controls and carefully drag that part of the window. If you make a slight mistake and click on a tab or button, the unwanted activation of that control (e.g. switching to a new tab) serves to needlessly penalize the user.

This is not just an issue with web browsers now, but seemingly everywhere. It's been a big issue in the macOS Finder for a while now.

At the very least, Firefox still gives me the option to show the native window title bar, which I very much appreciate. It's certainly not the sexiest part of the UI, given the native element clashes a bit with FF's controls, but at least it's usable! This is an issue that could be solved by giving people a choice via a simple toggle... Most often, the option isn't there.

I'm sorry people have downvoted my post here a bit, and I agree it was a bit strongly worded, but I won't apologize for venting some frustration at what I see as the perpetuation of user-hostile design choices like this.
by doom2 | 2025-09-25 01:48:12+00:00
> So they are allowed to be as upset as anyone else about this stuff.

My issue with this take is the lack of evidence. I don't read about Trump voters calling their reps to try and push back (and let's be real, most Republican members of Congress these days would likely dismiss such constituents as being "paid protestors" or something). I haven't seen Trump voters out protesting against some part of the administration's policy. I _have_ seen anonymous reddit users in a Trump related subreddit say, "yeah, don't agree with this at all". Which leaves me wondering: how upset are they, really?
by inamberclad | 2025-09-25 01:48:23+00:00
When someone vehemently supports a strongman government, endorses a racist view of population dynamics, the banning of books, the repression of ethnic and gender minorities, and unleashing a jackbooted gang of thugs who perform extrajudicial violence and abductions, what else should they be called? That description is applicable to both a 1930s bona-fide Nazi and a modern day Trump supporter.
by jprd | 2025-09-25 01:49:02+00:00
I wish I hadn't clicked on this link, I do my best to avoid DHH so I don't have to say negative things. This screed is...something.

Those out there using the word "woke" in 2025 as some sort of windmill to tilt at should be avoided at all costs, it is a signal that they are the exact thing they claim to be warring against.

If someone is using their company blog to bitch about having to grow as a human because culture is progressing, they might as well be running the US gov't.
by Marsymars | 2025-09-25 01:49:08+00:00
Might depend a bit on your desired experience. I find Google to be too aggressively localized, where (from Canada) I’ll search for (made up example) e.g. “Eiffel Tower” and instead of the results that I’d want to be #1 and #2 (wikipedia and toureiffel.paris), I’ll get (after a pile of ads) “JimBob’s Eiffel Towel Of French Fries”, “kid builds scale model of Eiffel Tower for local science fair” and some tour company offering Eiffel Tower tours.