MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-12 07:18:05+00:00
Apple is free to do as many interoperable components or integrated products as they please. The DMA doesn't define ANY such restriction.

What they CAN'T do is maintain an environment where their products cannot be met with fair competition by other players, by intentionally giving advantages in the ecosystem only to their own brands.

Apple might not dominate the market for fitness trackers above 150USD today if they wouldn't have prevented others to achieve the same interoperability with their iOS ecosystem.

Apples featureset for wellness tracking was not competitive, neither in function nor in price. Fitbit and Garmin were better in doing that task, but they were not able to display message notifications, apps, etc. because the required interfaces in iOS were only available to Apple's Watch.

Maybe Apple would have beaten them in 2nd Gen, maybe competitors would have followed with equally tight iOS-interoperability in 2nd Gen.

Maybe Apple Watch would nonetheless be the leading Smartwatch in the market today. Or maybe it would be e.g. the Moto360 (google it) just due to Apple's "virtue of sucking" and insistence of doing rectangular watches.

We don't know, because none of the other players are able to compete on fair terms with Apple in this segment until today. And today Apple has such a leap-start that it's questionable whether this can still be rectified.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-12 07:18:07+00:00
I don't see any cookies saved anywhere. I do see four variables in localStorage, though.

They also embed Youtube if you open the demo, which in turn tracks users (yes, even through the no-cookie subdomain: https://dustinwhisman.com/writing/youtube-nocookie-com-will-...).

Ursula von der Leyen would not be very proud.
by voidUpdate | 2025-09-12 07:18:52+00:00
`yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "URL"` does the trick for me, then I just load it on to my phone's mp3 player. These days, I also use a python script to quickly add the artist and name id3 tags, but I always just rename the file to "artist - songname.mp3" too
by esskay | 2025-09-12 07:19:03+00:00
I rarely if ever put a cookie notice as the sites I tend to work on are only going to have 1 cookie for user sessions which is essential functionality and thus cannot be opted out of. It doesn't collect/store/share data so it's not something that needs the opt out banner.

It's still stupid though as most of the sites I do absolutely still track certain activity, it's just done server side.
by hnbad | 2025-09-12 07:19:07+00:00
The law is fine. The industry has just decided that dragging its heels and risking fines is better than actual compliance.

Most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use aren't compliant.

EU law requires "Accept All" and "Reject All Non-Essential" be both equally easy to access and given equal weight (or rather: the latter can't be given less weight and made more difficult to access, which almost all of these scripts blatantly ignore).

Browser vendors can't solve this because the question isn't technical but legal. It's not about first-party vs third-party cookies (let alone same-origin vs cross-origin) but about the purposes of those cookies - and not just cookies but all transferred data (including all HTTP requests).

You don't need to (and in fact can't) opt into technically necessary cookies like session cookies for a login and such. It's plausible that these might even be cross-origin (as long as the other domain is controlled by the same legal entity). If they're provided by a third party, that would indeed be data sharing that warrants a disclosure and opt in (or rather: this can only happen once the user acknowledges this but they have no option to refuse and still use the service if it can't plausibly be provided without this).

The GDPR and ePrivacy laws (and the DMA and DSA) have done a lot for privacy but most of what they have done has happened behind the scenes (as intended) by changing how companies operate. The "cookie management" is just the user-facing part of those companies' hostile and dishonest reactions to these laws as well as a cottage industry of grifters providing "compliance" solutions for companies that can't afford the technical and legal expertise to understand what they actually need to do and think they can just tick a box by buying the right product/service.

Heck, most companies don't even provide legally compliant privacy policies and refuse to properly handly data access requests. The GDPR requires companies to disclose all third parties (or their categories if they can't disclose identities) your (specifically your) data has been shared with and the specific types of data, purposes of that sharing and legal basis for sharing it (i.e. if it required consent, how and when that consent was given) - and yet most will only link you to their generic privacy policy that answers none of those questions or only provides vague general answers or irrelevant details ("We and our 11708 partners deeply care about your privacy").
by port11 | 2025-09-12 07:21:02+00:00
It's not as huge as the coverage of it makes it seem, I think. But many Europeans grew up with it. It was something you'd watch with the whole family, and you have some great laughs at how ridiculous it all is.

But I have to say that, nearing 40, I no longer care about it. Without the family around to watch it, it's just another bit of TV I ignore. None of the people I know, LGBTQ+ or otherwise, care either.

Still, the media coverage seems to do a lot of heavy lifting to make it seem popular.
by 1dom | 2025-09-12 07:22:06+00:00
As a non-US citizen - even though I've been the only Brit in remote teams of Americans - I find this really hard to make sense of.

At least in the UK, if I saw this loaded on someone else's screen at work, I might raise an eyebrow initially, but there wouldn't be any consequences that don't first consider context. As soon as the context is provided ("it's comparing AI models, look! Cool, right?!") everyone would get on with their jobs.

What would be the consequence of you viewing this at work?

How would the situation be handled?

Is the problem a HR thing - like, would people get sacked for this? Or is it like a personal conduct/temptation, that colleagues who see it might not be able to restrain themselves or something?
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-12 07:22:17+00:00
I’m finding a lot of literature from NGOs specializing in US jurisprudence saying the first amendment has been interpreted to protect public, obvious recording[1].

If I tried to draw up an indentured servitude contract, what federal or state laws would explicitly forbid enforcing it myself? If state laws, do all states have equivalent laws?

[1]: https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/
by Springtime | 2025-09-12 07:22:24+00:00
If one wants full control cookies could just be disabled by default at the browser level (which also blocks local storage). I do this and just whitelist sites that actually need it (very few).

The issue is some sites won't display any content without cookies, even if it's unnecessary. The amount of React-using sites that will load the entire page only to a second later to fully blank out since the JS couldn't set local storage does get annoying (and can regularly be worked around by disabling Javascript if not used for anything substantial). A handful like this have appeared just this past week on the HN front page.
by reify | 2025-09-12 07:22:26+00:00
smart homes will end up like smart phones, not very smart.

I have a wonderful person managing my home, he does the gardening, the clothes and dishes washing, the vacuum cleaning, he adjusts the central heating, he turns the cooker on to cook, he turns the lights on and off with the switch, he adjusts the temperature of the fridge and freezer, when there is a knock at the door he looks out of the window to see who is there, he even makes a wonderful cappuccino with a coffee machine not connected to the internet.

He has no need to film or take photos of anyone going about their daily tasks when they knock at the door or just walk past his home, he is respectful of other people's privacy.

His friends feel really comfortable when they are in his home and dont feel spied upon.

He is such a smart guy, he does all these thing all by himself, without any help.

Isnt that wonderful

He is me.

A smart guy, or a smart woman is all you need, its quite simple, we have been managing for a millennium very successfully.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-12 07:23:54+00:00
On 29 August 1930, the entire population of the small island of St. Kilda, Scotland was completely and permanently evacuated. One reason was that its farm fields were contaminated with lead and other pollutants - which had unknowingly been added to the manure used to fertilize the fields, over a long period of time.

At least from the article, it doesn't sound like England's so-called government views the current situation there as a problem worth bothering themselves about.
by thinkingemote | 2025-09-12 07:24:59+00:00
The teams window seems to be broken for me, on a non latest version of Firefox. However the blog posts window in the submission works flawlessly.

In the teams window, The first page doesn't load the images but does the content, clicking another item in the menu does show the expected page but again with no images. At some point, clicking the menu items does not load the correct page. At some point after that the images load in, however the correct link to the correct post does not appear. I have to click about 6 times on the same menu link to see a cycling of different posts (possibly the ones I was clicking before) to see the expected post.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-12 07:25:34+00:00
This has nothing to do with ISO 3166 at all. The tzdata database is the work of a single person, Arthur Olson, not a committee (or rather it was, from its birth in the 1980s until 2011 when a company decided to sue him for no reason).

And for most of its life it’s been an explicit policy that timezones are named by continent and representative population center, not by country, to avoid entangling it in territorial disputes and improve naming stability for historical data. The US/* (and Canada/*, etc.) names are deprecated and have been since 1995 (?), but apparently people were still using them because the deprecation wasn’t really apparent unless one was especially into reading release notes.
by otterley | 2025-09-12 07:26:13+00:00
The First Amendment protects you against prosecution for filming the actions of law enforcement in a public venue. AFAIK it hasn’t been interpreted to void state laws that might forbid someone from recording a conversation between private individuals who don’t consent. The link you provided says as much.

How do you self-enforce an indentured servitude contract? Or any contract, for that matter? Only a court can compel performance or restitution for a breach of contract.
by hnbad | 2025-09-12 07:26:40+00:00
> In fact the law pretty explicitly disallows dark patterns like that.

Yes. For "cookie banners" the law in fact forbids hiding "Reject all non-essential and continue" to be given less visual weight than "Accept all and continue", let alone hiding it behind "More details" or other additional steps.

It also requires consent to be informed (i.e. you need to know what you're agreeing to) and specific (i.e. you can't give blanket consent, the actual categories of data and purposes of collection need to be spelled out) and easily revokable (which is almost never the case - most sites provide no direct access to review your options later once you've "opted in").

One good example I can think of for a "cookie banner" that gets this right is the WordPress plugin from DevOwl: https://devowl.io/wordpress-real-cookie-banner/ (this is not an ad, but this is the one I've been recommending to people after having tried several of them) because it actually adds links to the footer that let you review and change your consent afterwards.

EDIT: Sorry, I first misread "disallows" as "allows". I've amended my reply accordingly.
by tolmasky | 2025-09-12 07:27:12+00:00
Generally speaking, the second you realize a technology/process/anything has a hard requirement that individuals independently exercise responsibility or self-control, with no obvious immediate gain for themselves, it is almost certain that said technology/process/anything is unsalvageable in its current form.

This is in the general case. But with LLMs, the entire selling point is specifically offloading "reasoning" to them. That is quite literally what they are selling you. So with LLMs, you can swap out "almost certain" in the above rule to "absolutely certain without a shadow of a doubt". This isn't even a hypothetical as we have experimental evidence that LLMs cause people to think/reason less. So you are at best already starting at a deficit.

But more importantly, this makes the entire premise of using LLMs make no sense (at least from a marketing perspective). What good is a thinking machine if I need to verify it? Especially when you are telling me that it will be a "super reasoning" machine soon. Do I need a human "super verifier" to match? In fact, that's not even a tomorrow problem, that is a today problem: LLMs are quite literally advertised to me as a "PhD in my pocket". I don't have a PhD. Most people would find the idea of me "verifying the work of human PhDs" to be quite silly, so how does it make any sense that I am in any way qualified to verify my robo-PhD? I pay for it precisely because it knows more than I do! Do I now need to hire a human PhD to verify my robo-PhD?" Short of that, is it the case that only human PhDs are qualified to use robo-PhDs? In other words, should LLms exclusively be used for things the operator already knows how to do? That seems weird. It's like a Magic 8 Ball that only answers questions you already know the answer to. Hilariously, you could even find someone reaching the conclusion of "well, sure, a curl expert should verify the patch I am submitting to curl. That's what submitting the patch accomplishes! The experts who work on curl will verify it! Who better to do it than them?". And now we've come full circle!

To be clear, each of these questions has plenty of counter-points/workarounds/etc. The point is not to present some philosophical gotcha argument against LLM use. The point rather is to demonstrate the fundamental mismatch between the value-proposition of LLMs and their theoretical "correct use", and thus demonstrate why it is astronomically unlikely for them to ever be used correctly.
by pembrook | 2025-09-12 07:28:33+00:00
As someone who has worked at and run a company and dealt with lawyers regarding these regulations directly, I can tell you this is 100% not the case.

I’m sorry, but it turns out regulation with punitively high fines attached to it creates massive regulatory risk for public companies that have a duty to shareholders to take them extremely seriously, and document everything along the way. Otherwise they don’t just get in trouble with regulators, but end up in endless litigation with shareholders.

How you can believe creating an extremely nuanced set of holes, that if stepped in, results in billions of fines won’t delay new launches (and innovation ultimately) in the EU is just astonishing to me. The fun part is all the traps that open due to the combination of different regs interacting and new interpretations due to actual court cases.

Please don’t turn this into another “malicious compliance evil-corporate conspiracy” meme like GDPR is on this site. It doesn’t cultivate intellectual curiosity, just flame wars, and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.
by coldtea | 2025-09-12 07:29:28+00:00
>It's bizarre that you're even framing this conversation in this way - who are you to say how Apple is allowed to behave, and how anti-competitive they deserve to be on the EU market? Are you under the impression that corporations like Apple should wield more power than world governments?

More like that governments shouldn't dictate such terms and let the market decide - they should just prevent collusion and regulatory capture monopolies.

This is the opposite, an organically grown market share.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-09-12 07:30:27+00:00
The "reader app" exemption Apple introduced in 2022 is merely about an entitlement to link to your website for account management, isn't it ([1])? But your argument sounds as if each Spotify purchase made through the app is or was taxed 30% by Apple, which would seem anti-competitive. Could someone clarify what Spotify or its users have to pay to Apple?

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=grjqafts
by fawkesalbus | 2025-09-12 07:30:46+00:00
Why does a group have to marginalized to be worthy of advocacy? Charlie only ever expressed his opinion in written and verbal form. That is the bare minimum requirement for free speech. Once you start getting to “oh but this is hate speech” or “ free speech, but XYZ” then there is no free speech. The first amendment becomes meaningless.

He never suppressed or oppressed anyone like what DEI has been doing by openly discriminating against people based on their skin color (and therefore presumed financial status).

He had no version of correct and he didn’t want anyone to suffer. He merely spoke and wrote his opinion and for that “crime” and that alone, someone decided to hate him so much that they decided to silence him forever.

This is sad and shameful (as have been the attacks and assassinations of any elected official or public figure in the past many months).
by scrollaway | 2025-09-12 07:31:02+00:00
It’s because they can see it.

They can go in the inspector and see “oh wow so many MBs of JS”, but they can’t see the backend.

There is a good point to that: this data that is downloaded is an end user resource. Over a mobile network etc it’ll matter. But the days where it mattered at home/office are long, long gone, at least for the audience of the websites that adopt this strategy.

The obsession I believe is a remnant of these old days. There was a transitionary period still a decade ago (when hn was already not that young) where users would spend time loading a website, then complain about the amount of js on the page and how that is unnecessary. The connections got upgraded but nothing strikes down a habit…
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-12 07:31:18+00:00
Because in this case most politicians are performing double speak and failing to directly answer questions about recent Israel conduct. Many of these politicians claiming in private what most of us are seeing in the news. It is refreshing to have at least some politicians step up to the plate and directly speak to the numbers and multitude of evidence.

Likewise consider the opposite. Until recently I really respected Buttigieg, but when asked about Israel he cannot answer the question. He hopelessly looks for a moderate safe way out and it looks really incompetent.
by GistNoesis | 2025-09-12 07:31:26+00:00
For a .exposed domain, it's not really shocking.

The real shocking fact about floating point is that they are even used at all.

It's throwing out of the window the most basic property operations on number should have : "associativity" and all that for a gain in dynamic range which is not necessary most of the time.

The associativity we expect to hold is (a+b)+c == a+(b+c) and (ab)c == a(bc) and these don't hold for floats even though most math formulas and compiler optimizations rely on these to hold. It's a sad miracle that everything somehow still works out OK most of the time.

You lose determinism most of the time with respect to compiler optimizations, and platform reproducibility if processor don't exactly respect IEE-754 (or is it IEE-854).

The real problem comes when you want to use parallelism. With things like atomic operations and multiple processor doing things out of order, you lose determinism and reproducibility, or add a need for synchronisation or casting operations everywhere.

Even more problematic, is that because number operations are used so often, they are set in "stone", and are implemented at the hardware level. And they use much more transistor because they are more complex than integer arithmetic.

Real programmers don't use floating points, only sloppy lazy ones do.

Real programmers use fixed point representation and make sure the bounds don't overflow/underflow unexpectedly.

Let's ban all hardware floating-point implementation : Just imagine future alien archeologists having a laugh at us when they look at our chips and think "no wonder they were doomed they can't even do a+b right : its foundations were built on sand".
by UmGuys | 2025-09-12 07:31:44+00:00
I can't understand your summary of the post you're responding to. The man organized and constructed an empire that promoted hate through mob violence and decried Democrats (and anyone not straight white) as non human enemies, and you don't see violence? It's as if saying Hitler wasn't violent because there's no video of him killing anyone. Before it was reported he died, the MAGA cult leader guy explicitly called for violence in his name.
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-12 07:32:03+00:00
moving away from streaming honestly. recently i was without net for a bit and i found actually i dont have a lot of music anymore locally because i switched to streaming when it came out, happy to ditch a lot of diskspace/cupboard space.

now i slowly build it up again ;') its nice some streaming apps offer cache thats handy for offline, but its often a bit limited unless you play with it a bit.
by genewitch | 2025-09-12 07:33:14+00:00
I did the same thing, except my navidrome is a VM in a DC. Also run nextcloud, too; so my phone (camera) gets backed up on local NAS and in a DC. there's no way i have enough storage on my phone to tote my music, too. I have "thumb drives" for cars, one with some music, the other with OTRR radio programs (from archive.org). My car has a disc changer so i have 3 days of stream rips from 10 years ago, as mp3 cds.

Streaming was good, when pandora was free - and even when they first asked for money, it was still good. I never saw the appeal of spotify, and i'm glad $0 of mine went to their product.

I have file boxes full of audio CDs that haven't been backed up yet, who knows how long any of the stuff in there will be available in that format? My favorite anecdote is that some songs on official music streaming platforms will have the same artifacts as kazaa/limewire tracks 23 years ago.

I forget if symfonium has a paid version, but i think i sent money to them. There was another app for android that i tried (and probably gave money to as well), but symfonium never does the wrong thing, although i haven't figured out how it weights songs for random track shuffle.

i'm frazzled from this week, apologies for rambling just to say "hey, me too!"
by egman_ekki | 2025-09-12 07:33:23+00:00
> EU leadership are actively rooting for [a war] and waste no opportunity to stoke the tension

Yes, we should all just stop building our defenses and increasing our resilience and roll over. Let's roll out a red carpet for Russians all the way to Paris (or maybe Lisbon?). The same peaceful folks who talk about bombing our cities every week on their national TV.
by coldtea | 2025-09-12 07:33:42+00:00
>The answer is right in the text you quoted. Because it's a different market than the smartphone itself and unfair competition. It's Apple using its dominant position in the smartphone market to prevent others from competing on equal grounds in a different market.*

Was that an unearned position due to regulatory capture or something, or did people buy their stuff, even if it's more expensive?

Is it even a dominant position with no recourse? (last I heard Android has more share in the EU and the world). Did they collude with Google and other smartphone vendors to not allow them to build and allow similar features themselves?

>With iOS Apple owns the playing field where all accessory vendors compete, and Apple competes on the same field

Isn't that playing field their own OS and device ecosystem, they build?