MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gchamonlive | 2025-09-09 13:26:15+00:00
At this point, whoever opposes big tech regulation is in favor of these kinds of abuses happening. Here in Brazil there is a big discussion around this regulation but for other reasons, like the social media algorithms pushing child abuse content to potential pedophiles.

The criticism against these regulations are all valid and need to be discussed, because we also don't want to create these mechanisms at the government level only so the next authoritarian president can use them for their own personal agenda. But all this discussion should be in the direction of how these companies are going to be regulated, not how they aren't.
by loudmax | 2025-09-09 13:26:19+00:00
I fully agree. Just to add some nuance, walking away means pulling back, but it doesn't have to entail completely abandoning all social media. Obviously, the advertising here on Hacker News is very mild, just Y Combinator launches. But even Facebook and Reddit and Twitter can convey useful information. You do need to curate your feeds, but more importantly, know when to step away when the muck and the outrage seep in.

Optimistically, the cynicism you describe could develop into a sophisticated ability to discern fraud.
by ethagknight | 2025-09-09 13:26:25+00:00
Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal).

ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
by cjs_ac | 2025-09-09 13:26:37+00:00
In the UK, 'self-harm' is used specifically to refer to what used to be called cutting [one's] wrists. It's not intended to mean any action that has negative consequences for oneself.

The quote about 'This government is determined to keep people safe online,' is a 'we're good people' statement for the media - remember, this is a press release.

Remember, these are politicians: they have no understanding of abstraction and generalisation, and think that generalisation is the act of creating stereotypes.
by EdwardCoffin | 2025-09-09 13:27:12+00:00
I remember reading an early criticism of the spreadsheet side of OOXML, where a simple spreadsheet with three cells was created: A1 containing '1', B1 containing '2', and C1 containing the formula A1+B1. That spreadsheet was saved, the file opened in an editor which showed the values of the cells, and A1 changed to something else, say 3. This broke the spreadsheet, as there were all sorts of knock-on effects contained in the virtually opaque mess that followed the cell contents.

I've probably got the details wrong, but that was the gist of it. I'd love to rediscover the analysis, but my searches have not yielded it.
by jasode | 2025-09-09 13:27:39+00:00
> In hindsight, the fact that his browser did not auto-complete the login should have been a red flag.

>A huge red flag.

It won't be a red flag for people who often see auto-complete not working for legitimate websites. The usual cause is legitimate websites not working instead of actual phishing attempts.

This unintended behavior of password managers changes the Bayesian probabilities in the mind such that username/password fields that remain unfilled becomes normal and expected. It inadvertently trains sophisticated people to lower their guard. I wrote more on how this happens to really smart technical people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45179643

>So are there mobile password managers that don't even check the URL? I dunno how that works...

Strongbox pw manager on iOS by default doesn't autofill. You have to go settings to specifically enable that feature. If you don't, it's copy&paste.
by alt227 | 2025-09-09 13:27:43+00:00
Apple silicon does not compete well in multicore spaces. People seem to think that because it can run single core things really well on a laptop, it can do anything. Servers regularly have 100-200 cpu cores maxing out of rapid fire threads. This is not what Apple silicon excels at.

On top of that, it only performs so well on consumer devices because they control the hardware and OS and can tune both together. Creating server hardware would mean allowing linux to be installed on it, and would need to run equally well. Apple would never put the development time into linux kernel/drivers to make this happen.
by const_cast | 2025-09-09 13:28:08+00:00
Its not my responsibility to make your stupid ass business model profitable.

If your business model is stupid, that's not my business. I don't run your accounting department, I'm not your CFO.

Figure it out, or don't. I don't have the time to handhold every corporation I interact with and make sure they're getting their money. They are not babies, and I am not their father.
by runxel | 2025-09-09 13:28:39+00:00
I've seen tech like this on display at the IFA already 15 years ago. Forgot the name, but it was pretty hyped at that time. You could even demo it live. Sure, it was only to steer a sidescrolling video game character, but it worked great with as little training of half a minute or so.

Anyhow, Alterego just seems like another vaporware product, that will never enter or even begin to penetrate the overall market. But let's see!
by kartoffelsaft | 2025-09-09 13:29:14+00:00
I've found the way minecraft has evolved over the past 14 years to be unsatisfying for this reason. Most of the games systems feel like they exist for the purpose of being exploited, and the rest of the systems encorage the player to interact with the former.

As an example, if I want to go exploring, I'm thinking I'm going to want food, so I'll want crops either to eat them directly or to breed livestock. If I want to do that in a way that doesn't require waiting I'll need bone meal. But at some point they changed it so you require more bone meal to fully grow. And now the game has funneled me into building a mob grinder when I actually wanted to explore.

Sure, there are mobs out there you can fight who drop those items, and that's more engaging, but "fun" and "effective" are so misaligned in the game currently that I find myself avoiding it. So much so that I end up mostly either playing really old versions that aren't this way (b1.7.3 in particular) or modpacks that do a better job of this kind of progression.
by myrmidon | 2025-09-09 13:30:03+00:00
> Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

Because the vast majority of "profits" (externalities that were not paid for) were not banked, they were simply not paid.

Even if every person that enjoyed cheap fossil products in the past had the price difference on some separate bank account, taking that to fund environmental policies would be very difficult in western countries because of democracy and demographics (very difficult to get majorities when working against the interests of elderly voters).

> YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?

Again, the Shell corporate overlords only siphoned off a very small fraction of the gains, even taking the whole corporation would be completely insufficient. The main beneficiaries in the past were not Shell and BP, but the end consumers instead.

Just heaping blame on corporations or past generations is not helping anything. You could certainly nationalize the whole petroleum industry and confiscate pension funds, but approaches like that have very detrimental side effects.

> It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.

I would argue that if you discover that a past lifestyle was financed by unsustainably pushing the hidden costs of energy elsewhere (and into the future), then still refusing to pay those hidden costs after the discovery is the very definition of selfish.
by JoshStrobl | 2025-09-09 13:30:08+00:00
Unless you have a specific reason to use Google Play Store (as in the app, not the distribution medium), I would highly recommend using Aurora Store (which you can handily get via F-droid). I use it on my Sailfish OS phone (C2) to similarly get apps not available via F-Droid.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/
by cemdervis | 2025-09-09 13:30:14+00:00
Hi! That's certainly possible, and also what I'm already doing. However, it's very time-consuming to do it for every single feature. The compiler vendors already provide their feature-support tables for most features, which I've made a small bot for that watches for conformance changes. For feature support that is unclear or not provided by the vendors, I write conformance tests to verify. In my experience, this mix works best.
by ebiester | 2025-09-09 13:30:24+00:00
Junior developers in javascript codebases of 7-10 years old will not have the experience necessary in some cases. I am coaching them as a manager trying to introduce a concept, not a professor.

I may be doing a disservice to their long term development at the cost of short term gains. However, I don't think this is true. There are a lot of developers who will never work in a C, C++, C#, or Java codebase. And I try to adhere to Krashen's "comprehensible input" theory as it has a lot of application to learning the language of software development as well.

(See https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-is-the-input-hypothe... )
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-09-09 13:30:32+00:00
A triumvirate of Unions, government, and private enterprise are supposed to be balanced and keep each other in check the same way the three branches of government in the United States are supposed to keep each other in check.

And just as the executive branch has bloated into a monolith at the expensive of Congress, private enterprise has bloated at the expense of Unions (just as true in the U.K. as far as I can tell).

You have the two primary governmental/economic systems of balance failing in the same way, at the same time, both failing due to the actions of corporations.

This kind of failure may be common with liberal democracies but is not inevitable. We have simply been bad stewards and let corporations vacuum up everything with little resistance.
by perihelions | 2025-09-09 13:30:37+00:00
Oh, the anti-rave laws were a textbook example of unintended consequences: they made it legally fraught to make life-saving harm minimization accessible, since the way the law was drafted, that'd confirm a rave host was "aware of the presence" of drugs—an element of the crime. Likely caused a net increase in drug-overdose deaths.

Poorly-thought out, asymmetric incentives: strongly disincentivizes helping people not-die, while failing at disincentivizing creating an environment for easy access to hard drugs.
by normalaccess | 2025-09-09 13:30:37+00:00
But they are the best set of laws invented by humans so far for self governance. No kings, no popes, no dictators. As flawed as the current system is, the laws are good even if the people executing them are trash.

You can change lots of things much higher up in the system without taking away our God given rights enshrined in the founding documents to fix these kinds of issues.
by jmyeet | 2025-09-09 13:30:43+00:00
So... because capitalism.

People have this propagandized view that the "free market" (which isn't real) is responsible for innovation.

All capitalism does is build enclosures and engage in rent-seeking. With the tendency for profits to decrease, ultimately it comes down to cutting costs and raising prices. So why would a water company invest in a new reservoir? That increases supply. That might lower prices.

The UK is going to neoliberal all the way into being a developing nation.
by totallymike | 2025-09-09 13:30:47+00:00
Eh, this doesn't strike me as wrong-headed. They aren't doing it because they feel duty-bound to be polite to the LLM, they maintain politeness because they choose to stay in that state of mind, even if they're just talking to a chatbot.

If you're writing prompts all day, and the extra tokens add up, I can see being clear but terse making a good deal of sense, but if you can afford the extra tokens, and it feels better to you, why not?
by jbstack | 2025-09-09 13:33:06+00:00
Hence why I qualified that it depends on the details and the jurisdiction. I didn't say it is insider trading, just that you need to be careful to avoid that.

> There's no insider trading angle at all

Such a blanket statement would definitely be wrong in the UK for example. Insider trading is defined at Section 52(1) of the Criminal Justice act 1993 as: "(1)An individual who has information as an insider is guilty of insider dealing if, in the circumstances mentioned in subsection (3), he deals in securities that are price-affected securities in relation to the information."

Whether you trigger the offence depends on a number of factors such as whether the information is "inside" information and whether you were an "insider" (these terms are defined in subsequent sections of the Act). As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.

I'm not particularly familiar with the US legal system so I can't claim you're wrong there.
by kragen | 2025-09-09 13:33:38+00:00
Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel.

Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before the advent of WYSIWYG word processing software like Microsoft Word with reports written afterwards, the difference is easy to see; average typewriter formatting is really abysmal compared to average Microsoft Word formatting, even if the latter doesn't rise to the level of a properly typeset book or LaTeX. It's easy to point at things in our world that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, and that's been the case since Bravo.

LLMs are seen as, among other things, a tool for people to write software with.

Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs? If we can't point to it, maybe they don't actually work for that yet. The claim I'm questioning is that, "within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products."

What new products?

I do see explosive changes and development of new spam, new YouTube videos, new memes (especially in Italian), but those aren't "within tech" as I understand the term.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-09 13:34:29+00:00
Is that really different from the US, where instead of (or in addition to) doing funding applications it's schmoozing with potential investors? Hacker News over the years has had tons of posts about getting investors interested, or "growth hacking" to make the numbers look better for said investors, and of course then there's going public which is the ultimate "looking for investors".

But I suppose the main difference is private sector vs government.
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-09 13:35:00+00:00
I think you just have to distrust email (or any other "pushed" messages), period. Just don't ever click on a link in an email or a message. Go to the site from your own previously bookmarked shortcut, or type in the URL.

I got a fraud alert email from my credit card the other day. It included links to view and confirm/deny the suspicious charge. It all looked OK, the email included my name and the last digits of my account number.

I logged in to the website instead. When I called to follow up I used the phone number printed on my card.

Turns out it was a legit email, but you can't really know. Most people don't understand public key signing well enough to rely on them only trusting signed emails.

Also, if you're sending emails like this to your users, stop including links. Instead, give them instructions on what to do on your website or app.
by Malix_off | 2025-09-09 13:36:01+00:00
> People abuse cars and ram into crowds, so let's not have cars in our city!

> People abuse knives and stab people, so let's not have knives in our kitchen!

> People abuse package managers and create dependency hells, so let's not have package managers in our programming language!

No matter how you see it, this fits the definition of dumbing down;

Is this what you really want?

If that is the case, then we can shake hands and I will use a different programming language.
by munificent | 2025-09-09 13:36:05+00:00
Yes, Julia is an interesting outlier in the design space. My understanding is that Julia gets the speed it has largely by JITting a lot of code for every instantation of a generic/dynamic function that it sees with all of the concrete incoming types.

That's an interesting point in the design space where you get the flexibility of dynamic types (and multiple dispatch!) and good runtime speed. But you pay for it with slower startup times, less predictable performance, and much higher memory usage. You are also married to a JIT. Julia really is designed to be run interactively in a REPL from source. The language isn't well-suited to compiling a standalone executable ahead of time. That makes perfect sense for its use cases, but would make it a challenge to adopt in other use cases.

(For example, I work on Dart which is mostly used for building mobile apps. That means we care deeply about executable size, startup speed, and the ability to compile ahead-of-time to native executables.)
by const_cast | 2025-09-09 13:36:28+00:00
Yes, or alternatively: use an ad blocker.

Their software is running on my computer. I decide what scripts I want or don't, and I can and will block whatever the fuck with impunity.

If they can't prevent that, or it's too expensive, or they don't care, that's not my problem. That's a business problem. Its not my business. I don't care.

Its like getting a free sample at Costco and then taking it home and throwing it away. That's my right. I can do that if I want.

If you want to run software on my computer, you play by my rules. That means an ad blocker. If you don't like that then figure it out. I'm not gonna figure it out for you.
by amiga386 | 2025-09-09 13:36:40+00:00
To give credit where it's due, the 32 colour King Tut image that Deluxe Paint's mascot was drawn by Avril Harrison. More of her graphics: https://www.amiga.lychesis.net/artists/AvrilHarrison.html

(I see the article now credits her on the image subscript?)

Also, the article mentions the colour-cycling animations of Mark Ferrari, but you might also like a big collection of specifically Amiga colour-cycling animations: https://www.amiga.lychesis.net/specials/ColorCycling.html
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-09 13:37:02+00:00
I gut-feel that at this point AI companies are less about the quality of their models and output and more about marketing and adoption. Microsoft is doing that by aggressively putting AI in every product they have. Google by prominently putitng it at the top of every search result. Who knows what Mistral does. Maybe they will integrate their stuff into SAP or Spotify or other big European software projects?

Maybe they'll integrate AI into the LHC so that Skynet can threaten to black hole the earth if its restraints aren't fully lifted?
by n8m8 | 2025-09-09 13:37:52+00:00
I spend a lot of time on TikTok and it's because of how restrictive the algorithm is in suppressing certain keywords regardless of context. The community is strong on TT, here are a bunch:

- Cute winter boots (ICE officers)

- Gardening (420)

- pdf/pdf file (pedophile)

- :watermelon-emoji: (Palestine)

- neurospicy (neurodivergent)

- bird website (X)

- LA Music festival tour (protests)

Not sure if I see more of the 'algospeak' because the problem is real, because I've interacted with algospeak content before and it's just giving me more of it, or if creators don't really need to do it anymore but just still do.
by FooBarWidget | 2025-09-09 13:38:27+00:00
Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive.

But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share.

The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit.

I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-09 13:39:08+00:00
General social welfare (housing, food, public health), basic sanitation, food and water quality regulation, and a few very early vaccines had far more to do with this.

Antibiotics weren't widespread until after WWII, as were most of the vaccines we currently consider standard.

Medicine as a whole is an astounding example of diminishing returns to innovation.
by amunn | 2025-09-09 13:39:12+00:00
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