MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seec | 2025-09-24 23:26:47+00:00
The situation today is not really comparable. Between the fully locked down hardware and many OS limitations it is much worse than it has ever been.

I mean now you cannot open a 3rd party software without going into settings to allow opening, another regression on previously needing to right click, open. The next step is forbidding any unsigned software altogether. And finally, forbidding any software that doesn't come from their fully controlled App Store.

It's really way beyond not shipping a software component directly in the system...
by electroly | 2025-09-24 23:26:54+00:00
Hmm, thank you, that's good to know. Did you just apply the Snapdragon driver zip over the x64 recovery drive? It didn't work for me when my OS killed itself but I could easily have done something wrong in my panic over the machine not working. Since I only have the one Snapdragon device, I was making the assumption that it would have worked if I had a second one, but I didn't actually know that.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-24 23:28:02+00:00
Yeah, there are some ridiculous theatrics going on.

> First responders who believe they are overdosing on fentanyl from simply touching it in fact exhibit the exact opposite of the symptoms we would expect. While fentanyl makes you euphoric and slows down your breathing, cops start breathing faster, sweat a lot, and become anxious. “I don’t want to discredit anyone or say they’re faking,” says Dr. Marino. “I do think people are having a true medical emergency when this happens. The symptoms seem most consistent with a panic attack or anxiety or a fear reaction.”

> Some will claim they had to administer naloxone (trade name Narcan), which can reverse an opioid overdose, in order to save their life. But if you are conscious enough to self-administer naloxone, you’re not overdosing on opioids. You would have lost consciousness and barely been breathing.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking/...
by MostlyStable | 2025-09-24 23:29:03+00:00
Since they are subscription based and not ad based, their incentives are inherently aligned with customer preferences. This doesn't mean that they are immune from getting worse, or just becoming complacent, but it does at least make it less likely. Ad-supported companies succumbing to enshittification is virtually guaranteed thanks to the misalignment of basic incentives between the company and users (note: not customers).
by inerte | 2025-09-24 23:29:05+00:00
If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.

My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
by latexr | 2025-09-24 23:29:17+00:00
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-09-24 23:29:22+00:00
My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.

If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.

Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.

Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
by mattigames | 2025-09-24 23:29:49+00:00
But like always they didn't stop once they were a bit profitable with a few ads, instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market, I have wonder if there can exist some variant of capitalism that punishes becoming a bit too greedy, like a soft ceiling (tied to the minimum wage) over which most of the profits go to taxes, and a hard one where all profits over that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
by viraptor | 2025-09-24 23:30:37+00:00
Did it? From that list: SQL server doesn't work on Mac and there's no Apple equivalent, virtualisation is built into the system so that kind of worked but with restrictions, games barely exist Mac so a few that cared did the ports but it's still minimal. There's basically no installation media for Macs in the same way as windows in general.

What I'm trying to say is - the scope is very different / smaller there. There's a tonne of things that didn't work on Macs both before and after and the migration was not that perfect either.
by Arainach | 2025-09-24 23:30:57+00:00
One involves clicking just before the button and dragging to just after the button (or vice versa).

The other involves opening a screenshot tool, selecting a rectangle, going to a website (that I might have to pay for?), pasting the image, waiting some seconds to cause global warming, getting some text back, clicking just after that text to just before that text.

How is that a similar level of effort?

The first I could walk someone who had never used a computer through over the phone in 1995. The second I wouldn't want to walk some of my coworkers through today.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-09-24 23:30:59+00:00
It's not the same everywhere in the EU, but here in Poland as an establishment owner you have to pay this fee to an agency that purports to represent the musicians. As you describe eg. Spotify in background.

This agency pays out proportionately to registered licensed musicians, but the proportions are calculated in some ridiculous way that doesn't really factor in who's music is played. It means that the only folks who get reasonable payouts from this agency are, like, stars and old hits authors. The ones who's music gets played a lot in radio and other places. Winners take all.

The reality is that a lot of that cash is really for some chums who's job it is to be controllers.

AFAIK the entire scheme is a result of that one and only legacy industry that needs to protect it's interests: football and sports in venues, and maybe music clubs. In practice it means you rarely see TVs in bars the way you do in the US.

Idk it's a shitty concept imho.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-24 23:31:27+00:00
That sounds cool. I was able to find this press release about a "zinc explosion" that's been documented in human fertilization

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/04/radiant-zinc-f...

I didn't yet have the patience to go through the original research papers to see what the manner of detection was (I've had a couple of drinks this evening), but the phrasing of zinc "sparks" suggests emitted photons. On the other hand, the fact they're talking about zinc rather than photons suggets they're talking about detecting ion transfer rather than photon emission
by okanat | 2025-09-24 23:31:32+00:00
Having a narrow product line helped Apple a lot. Similarly being able to deprecate things faster than business-oriented Microsoft. Apple also controls silicon implementation. So they could design hardware features that enabled low to zero overhead x86 emulation. All in all Rosetta 2 was a pretty good implementation.

Microsoft is trying to retain binary compatibility across architectures with ARM64EC stuff which is intriguing and horrifying. They, however, didn't put any effort into ensuring Qualcomm is implementing the hardware side well. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm has no experience in making good desktop systems and it shows.
by 9rx | 2025-09-24 23:31:39+00:00
> but people with fringe beliefs tend to dig a lot deeper

Do they actually, though? Or do they just look for endless superficial surface claims?

I mean, if they actually dug deep they're going to encounter all kinds of information that would indicate that the moon landing was real. Which, then, if they still maintain that it was a hoax in light of that then they have to believe that the deep information is also a hoax. So if someone really was digging deep into personal details of your life, then what they read about you must also be a hoax, naturally.

Which, given the concern, one may as well solidify by putting fake information out there about themself. No sane person is going to be searching high and low for details about your personal life anyway. A moon landing hoax believer isn't going to buy into a published academic paper or whatever breadcrumb you accidentally left as a source of truth to prove that you have a PhD when a random website with a Geocities-style design says that you never went to college!
by serf | 2025-09-24 23:31:49+00:00
you were just setup a different way; I haven't owned a TV in like 15 years, if I wanted to jump into a console it'd be just about as much effort as building a gaming PC for me.

I would need to start reading TV reviews, re-arrange the living room, etc.

I mean, yeah, I am not going to need to worry about resolution and graphics options as much, now I just need to figure out how to ad-block a smart TV and pay a new subscription fee (probably) .

My point : convenience is all relative.
by gkoberger | 2025-09-24 23:32:09+00:00
I loved YC and can't recommend it enough. But if you're going to start a company, please consider working at another company first, even if briefly. (And make it a company you respect and want to emulate.)

The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-24 23:32:40+00:00
> I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.

For one thing, the author could have just gone right to midjourney.com instead of going through an intermediate. Additionally, when I tried typing midjourney into google, midjourney.com was the first result. This is on mobile Firefox, with no extensions installed.
by nine_zeros | 2025-09-24 23:33:06+00:00
It is no wonder that Church membership is on the decline. The teachings of the Bible are opposite of what they preach and celebrate. The path of Jesus is opposite of the path of Trump and Republicans.

A lot of people can see the hypocrisy and inconsistency of MAGA Christians - and they don't like to be part of the hypocrisy.
by imiric | 2025-09-24 23:33:07+00:00
qutebrowser is not technically a "Python web browser". The GUI uses Python Qt bindings, and the browser engine itself is QtWebEngine. Python is simply the glue that ties it all together, and any language could be used instead, since performance is not a concern. This is why there are so many small niche "web browsers", such as Luakit, Nyxt, surf, etc.
by maltalex | 2025-09-24 23:33:37+00:00
> Neither are humans, so this argument doesn't really stand.

Even when we give a spec to a human and tell them to implement it, we scrutinize and test the code they produce. We don't just hand over a spec and blindly accept the result. And that's despite the fact that humans have a lot more common sense, and the ability to ask questions when a requirement is ambiguous.
by throwaway346434 | 2025-09-24 23:34:15+00:00
As others have expressed, sycophancy is not leadership.

How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?

Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648770/unethical-behavior-g...

This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.

We know this pattern of behaviour is not beneficial - in the context of NPD the worst version of this is becoming an enabler - https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-enablers/

While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.
by vunderba | 2025-09-24 23:34:17+00:00
Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.

And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.

This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.

[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
by riemannzeta | 2025-09-24 23:34:33+00:00
Antitrust and competition law certainly play an important role, but the examples you cite have not impacted the ability of what we have since the 1970s called "startups" to enter the market in competition with monopolies. The more recent attempts to block "predatory acquisitions" might be an example of antitrust/competition policy that is aimed at achieving the balance between small and large that Terry has in mind here, but I believe it's worth asking: Was the ability for groups to form startups to compete with the incumbents ever really harmed by these so-called "predatory acquisitions"?

Personally, I see the economic efficiency argument for having a relatively small number (say 2 or 3) large organizations that maintain key "distribution platforms". We don't need twenty different social media websites. Antitrust/competition law can play an important role in ensuring that everybody gets access to these platforms on the same basic terms — no favoritism. But I don't know that we need to prevent acquisitions of new apps that can then be bundled into services offered by one or more of those platforms -- at least not to achieve the balance between "small" and "large" that Terry seems to have in mind here.

Rather, I think what we need to aggressively protect is the incentive that small groups have to form and fund startups. In general, I think we're doing fine on the economic side right now. An exception might be the recent acquisitions of founders independent of their coworkers — this presents a profound threat to the startup ecosystem. But by and large the system seems to be working fine.

But is that true of political "startups" — i.e., new interest groups that form to pursue specific policy agendas, which might then be able to syndicate eventually even into new political parties? Of that I'm less certain. It sure seems like the last year or two have been trending toward less political freedom.
by jameslk | 2025-09-24 23:34:33+00:00
Many of the things you mention seem like they're symptoms of one specific problem with online dating: it's more like a sales numbers game than an intentional focus on one individual. This dynamic is present for both genders.

Due to the "sales numbers game" of online dating, there's an incentive to keep your pipeline full, lest one of your deals falls through and you have to start all over. This seems to create many of the negative phenomena that people complain about.

* Overwhelmed by too many matches or not enough matches? It's due to the numbers game

* Shallowness and hyper pickiness? Numbers game

* Getting ghosted? Numbers game

* That "stranger" dynamic- i.e. not enough time to really get to know someone beforehand? Numbers game

* Burn out? Numbers game

* Situationships? Numbers game

* Dopamine "likes" rollercoaster? Numbers game

Before online dating, everything was slower. You were introduced through a friend or family member. You met someone at work, third place, community, or at a bar. It was one person at a time. Not a pipeline of matches.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-24 23:34:37+00:00
Showering does use hot water, but, it's maybe 20-30 litres, and you're heating up by what 25-30 K ? That's just not very much energy, and since we want heat we can go via a heat pump to do less work, whereas that's not an option for the car.

I did some envelope guesses and I can't see how this can come out for the car.
by seec | 2025-09-24 23:34:48+00:00
Yes, permissions are horrid in all systems. In my opinion they are just a failure to design proper security without completely delegating the problem to the user.

The funny thing is that since people who are subject to security problems will allow them regardless, defeating the entire purpose of the measures.

Computer security is just a people problem; you can't solve it by child proofing stuff. Imagine a car that would prevent you going over the speed limit or ask permission every time you want to do so...

But in that case, that's just beyond stupid, there is no permission for you to act on. They could have a per-document setting or an app level setting to allow opening links in PDFs without requiring the user to agree EVERY SINGLE TIME. On a document that was generated on the computer reading it. It's just complete incompetence.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-09-24 23:35:08+00:00
I don't think we disagree, too much. tab panes matches the "button" example.

However, I am sympathetic to those arguing translation. Sometimes I'll visit Japanese or Chinese websites. With some frequency, even if most of the site has an English edition, I'll find some UI element not translated, including buttons and the like... OK I think it was the commenter that I responded to, in a different reply said... just Google it if it's a single word. Great! But I don't even know where to begin to get the right characters from my old fashioned US keyboard. So now I have to Google for how to use my keyboard to get the characters I want, which also may need pre-requisite knowledge of the language I'm trying to translate (radicals and all that jazz)... that's a heavier lift than may be anticipated and where a simple copy/paste into an appropriate translator would make things much, much easier.

I would suggest this: make everything buttons, links, tabs, etc. selectable and copyable unless there is a real explicit and compelling reason to do otherwise. Now to be fair, I'm old enough to have been "online" in some fashion or another since before general public internet access availability was a thing... so my expectations for butter-like user experiences are low and my desire to do any damn thing I want high... but even today, there are probably still more websites which don't stop you from copying anything than there are searching for that polished experience where only the right things can be selected. The discontinuity and the deviation from the expectation that I can copy anything I also find as something which diminishes the user experience, even if occasionally I'm annoyed by over selecting things.
by metalman | 2025-09-24 23:35:38+00:00
they leave out deap ocean warming, which is an extitential threat to our civilizational level. should our ocean warm past the delicatly balanced point of waters greatest density, it will leap its banks and take out all of the worlds shipping infrastructure. unfortunatly good data on the worlds oceans is not good enough to draw conclusions about what is happening. at 1.3 billion km³ it will take a concerted effort to monitor what is going on, other than the simple fact, that it is warming and expanding.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-09-24 23:36:38+00:00
I see. You're focused on philosophy only. My point is about the other areas of academia where you "doubt the situation is different." There, the dynamics I described are real. Either way, there's a certain perspective and bias one has from being inside a system. Telling someone they've got things the "wrong way 'round" risks being biased in the Plato's Cave kind of way.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-24 23:36:53+00:00
But then it's not (small creators + users) vs. the other parties you listed. Small creators, like small business, often exhibit the worst kinds of greed and exploitative behavior.

Also there's a lot of misalignment between users and providers at the cultural level - the society is yet to fully process the implications of "digital revolution" (and copyright industry meddling with everything isn't helping). A big chunk of that boils down to the same thing that started "the war on general-purpose computing": producers have opinions on how their products should be used, and want to force consumers to only use them as prescribed.

Whether it's because they want to exploit the consumers through a side channel (e.g. ads), or to "protect intellectual property", or because they see artistic value in the integrity of their creation, or because they think they know better than customers - reasons are many, but underneath them all, is the core idea the society hasn't yet worked out: whether, and to what degree, are producers even morally entitled to that kind of control.

My personal answer is: they're not (nor they are to their old business models). But then it's producers, not consumers, who have all the money and control here.
by mikert89 | 2025-09-24 23:37:45+00:00
This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society

If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.
by themaninthedark | 2025-09-24 23:38:10+00:00
So in a meta conversation about news, there was discussion yesterday about social media and speech. One of the main reoccurring threads of conversation was that news should be left to the experts and those vetted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354893

If that was the model that society adopted, the fine article would be among the set of data being censored. Robert Graham seems to be competent in his field but he lacks the pedigree that the NYT wants to cite. Even worse, he disagrees with those who the NYT turn to as matter experts: https://substack.com/@cybersect/p-174413355
by heisenzombie | 2025-09-24 23:38:45+00:00
Climate scientists have been correctly predicting the future for 50 years:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...

"Retrospectively comparing future model projections to observations provides a robust and independent test of model skill. Here we analyze the performance of climate models published between 1970 and 2007 in projecting future global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes..."
by inetknght | 2025-09-24 23:39:36+00:00
Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.

If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.

Keep being awesome, Kagi CEO
by nonfamous | 2025-09-24 23:40:02+00:00
Thanks for the anecdote, but everyone’s advertising experience is different — that’s the whole point of targeted advertising. It doesn’t invalidate the OP’s point, though.

FWIW, I just used the Google app on iOS and got one ad (for artlist.io) before the midjourney.com link. A lot of people use Google this way to get to a named website, btw.