MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by btown | 2025-09-29 13:12:59+00:00
In general, this point is absolutely correct, and regulatory capture as a mechanism to stifle smaller competitors is shockingly common.

But in the case of requiring brokers of political advertising to maintain transparency about the reach of that advertising - that seems far more palatable and far more in the public interest. If you want to play in that specific sandbox, you owe accountability to the public at a level where dynamics across election cycles can be analyzed.

Of course, all this is just a thought exercise, since the background of the original post is that Google is removing its archive because its response to the EU regulatory environment has been to pull out of the political ads market entirely on a go-forward basis. Regulations did not require it to maintain any historical archives, apparently, and so the natural consequence would be that Google had no reason to air its historical dirty laundry with no benefit to them at all.
by titzer | 2025-09-29 13:13:12+00:00
Missing in this analysis is that advertisers did not, in fact, put ads on Google for free. While it's surely not part of the terms of service that Google is going to "back up" your ads indefinitely, the calculus employed in this thread is very, very wrong.

Google made huge profits on political ads and when it no longer suits them to spend paltry disk space on them, it's dropping them like a hot rock.

Stop pretending like Google was somehow offering a platform that people were freeloading on. Rather, these political ads were 100% the funding that sustains the platform and makes them and all their shareholders money.
by SkyeCA | 2025-09-29 13:13:22+00:00
I am absolutely convinced as well that this a huge factor behind younger generations not drinking as much, at least not in public. One night of fun going bad would have been forgotten in the 90s, now it could very well cost you your job or schooling.

Heck forget drinking, these days there's always someone nearby who's ready to upload your worst moment to Tiktok, so don't you dare have mental health issues either.
by dijit | 2025-09-29 13:13:58+00:00
Getting a passport is extremely expensive for the underclass, think of it as being worth half a month of your wages to get an idea.

That’s before you include the mandatory security screening which will cause you to travel half of the UK (on our expensive travel infrastructure!)

If I didn’t have a job lined up I wouldn’t have gotten on, my mum didn’t have one her whole life until after I had gotten mine. It’s an arduous and expensive process for the bottom 20% of society in the UK.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-29 13:13:58+00:00
The question was asked May 23, 2018 at 12:42, the answer came May 23, 2018 at 14:51. That is a very quick response time.

OpenAI took the answer from here or elsewhere, stripped attribution and credit and a tenured professor celebrates the singularity.

If there is no pushback from ethics commissions (in general), academia is doomed.
by speak_plainly | 2025-09-29 13:14:00+00:00
It feels like a handful of billionaires and politicians recently decided that the world’s problems aren’t rooted in them or the systems that elevated them. Since the system worked for them, it must be sound; the problem must be everyone else. Their solution seems to be more control, more oversight, and a few technocratic tweaks. And if we just let them keep steering society, utopia is right around the corner.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 13:14:05+00:00
Yup. Thanks for your work.

If we want to preserve something, then it's up to us, to ensure that it's preserved.

If we pay someone else (like you) to do it, then we expect them to preserve it, but not if we aren't paying for it.

That said, preserving stuff; even electronic stuff, is a challenge.
by koolba | 2025-09-29 13:14:44+00:00
I encourage people making snap comments to read at least one entire paragraph of the article:

> “We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

I'd say I'm about as much against the modern surveillance state as the next codger, but that doesn't mean I don't understand its implications. People do act differently when they know they are being watched. Even more so when they know they are being recorded.

There's still quite a bit of federation in that each store or home has its own cameras, and chaining them together to get an end-to-end view of a series of events is still manual. But that won't be like that forever. Whether we like it or not, that's only going to get easier.
by eertami | 2025-09-29 13:15:32+00:00
> There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.

Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.

> Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".

The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them. If someone came to Switzerland and started complaining that they can't install a doorbell camera, then it would also be a case of them 'not liking it' - but they have a right to voice their opinion.
by burkaman | 2025-09-29 13:15:36+00:00
He's not out of touch. He's the first or second richest person on Earth, he has substantial influence over the president of the United States, and he's about to control one of the largest media empires in the country. You should be bothered by what he says because whatever dumb idea he has is going to become reality. He's one of the most powerful people on the planet.
by isodev | 2025-09-29 13:15:43+00:00
> I imagine many of these old ads do not comply with the new rules so Google removed everything just to eliminate the risk of a fine or enforcement action.

The EU does not regulate keeping historical records though. Google deleting them is almost suspicious because we can't imagine a good reason they'd go out of their way to have someone spend time on deleting information.

You're right about expectations from an Ad company though. Imagine people using their browser or phones thinking "privacy".
by cabirum | 2025-09-29 13:16:03+00:00
> but goroutine B (the goroutineB function) apparently never ran at all.

Untrue. Up the iterations to 1000, you'll get your interleaving. Since 1.14, goroutines are async preemptible (async safe points), and will not block the scheduler. Also, time.Sleep bad, use runtime.Gosched().
by em500 | 2025-09-29 13:16:31+00:00
Valid points, but I think the most obvious reason is that (at least the recognizable) employers are swamped with applications that all look great on paper, which likely got much worse with the rise of good LLMs. Compared with similar high paying carreers, like medicine (multi-year residency) or high finance (solving math and probability problems on the spot), the hiring process for software engineers isn't especially gruesome.
by titzer | 2025-09-29 13:16:39+00:00
This thread is full of comments that miss the fact that political ads are not uploaded to Google for free. Advertising is 99% of the funding that sustains the platform and makes Google oodles of money, and when it no longer suits them (read: doesn't generate profit and might be risky), they're dropping the content.

It'd be one thing if it was 20 petabytes of cat videos, but this is content that Google was literally paid to serve to people.

The whole discussion is cosmically ironic.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-09-29 13:17:27+00:00
Not sure if the causality there is the right way around, I would suggest that because they have these beliefs they are allowed to amass that wealth. Oracle is a CIA spin-off (1977), they even kept the code name. The CIA works closely with Mossad. The 'abolish all billionaires' plan is encouraged precisely because it will be ineffective - they're assets of the state secret police and good luck abolishing that.
by poppobit | 2025-09-29 13:17:37+00:00
I think the article nails it. AI makes spinning up code almost too easy, but then you get services where ops or security were barely considered. That’s also why people with those skills are still in demand — they’re the ones holding things together for now. It won’t last forever, AI will eventually move into those areas too, but until then it’s still on humans to deal with it.
by blindriver | 2025-09-29 13:17:40+00:00
I have changed my mind on this topic recently. I believe that when you video in public everyone that gets videoed should require explicit permission or their face and voices should be removed. The only exceptions would be videoing public servants and if a crime is being committed. Videoing for private consumption would also be allowed in my opinion but not if it's posted in a way that more than a handful of people could see or if its uploaded to a site.

With AI this is entirely possible and if you are going to post videos on youtube or anything, you should be able to afford the removal of non-verified participants.
by sgc | 2025-09-29 13:17:56+00:00
This specific case is about people who have no idea they are interested in the data today (likely because they don't yet know it exists), needing it for research tomorrow. It's about how we should go about archiving public data rather than about whether somebody did a good job on their personal backups. And, if a company presents a data set as an accessible store of public information, what is a reasonable timeline for removing that service, especially when it is trivial for said company to maintain it for a reasonable sunset period. This is obviously extremely important information, and rug-pulling so quickly is borderline malicious.

Even if it were about personal information, I would still find your comment short-sighted, because companies position themselves as reliable, and people rely on them because of this. Even if it's not always smart to go out in a bad neighborhood late at night in a very short skirt, there are moments when pointing it out borders on pathological.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 13:18:03+00:00
I just assume that there's a recording of me, at pretty much all times. I have always acted as if I was under scrutiny, anyway, so it's not been that big a deal, but it is annoying, to have it as a fact of life; as opposed to a personal choice for living.

Even when people are doing stuff like browsing pr0n, there's likely to be someone paying attention. Maybe not like those silly spam emails, but they know that we watched dwarf pr0n.
by man8alexd | 2025-09-29 13:18:24+00:00
There is a research paper on the subject "No Privacy in the Electronics Repair Industry" from 2023 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10179413

TLDR:

Researchers visited 11 service providers in Canada to replace a laptop battery. 10 out of 11 service providers requested OS passwords, 8 stored the password in their database and 5 printed the password on a sticky note and attached it to the device. In the second part of the study, the researchers prepared laptops with an easy-to-fix problem, some revealing pictures on the disk and custom logging software. In 6 out of 16 cases, the photos were opened and viewed and in 2 cases, logs were missing.
by jeffbee | 2025-09-29 13:18:26+00:00
I don't know if the stuff about the JVM is even true. I grant that Redpanda is written in C++, but it isn't clear that its performance advantages over Kafka are due to that rather than to the fact that Kafka was implemented in a performance-oblivious way by people who did not know anything about software efficiency. This doesn't reflect on the JVM. You can write a high performing system in Java and the modern JDK is a state-of-the-art toolchain that provides features that many C++ projects struggle with.
by GistNoesis | 2025-09-29 13:18:33+00:00
You may need to add some factor for the Hamming distance to make it admissible. On a 4x4 board each move change at most 4 bits. So 4 x the hamming distance should be OK.

Edit: I 'm maybe getting this wrong confusing lower bound and upper bound. Sorry I'm a little rusty.

Edit2: For 4x4 one lower bound is hamming distance/4 , because you need at least these many moves to reach the goal. For 5x5 hamming distance / 5 and so on... But not sure how much this will reduce the need to graph.
by epolanski | 2025-09-29 13:18:40+00:00
John has had meaningful impact to computing from algos, operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, etc.

Fowler has written *nothing* anybody ever cared for. Nothing.

Ousterhout has taught Software Design at Stanford where he's had students implement the most diverse software and finding the limits of his own theories and having them questioned rigorously year after year.
by Paratoner | 2025-09-29 13:19:17+00:00
> Whether we like it or not,

Seems to be an awful lot of that recently to justify anything, from mass surveillance to crypto fascism. "Its just how things are guys, law of nature!". As citizens of a civilized society, we collectively get to shape and orient how legislation is put into practice. But ofc, if all you and people like you have to offer is pre-deterministic fallacies, then we are indeed screwed.
by SkyeCA | 2025-09-29 13:19:17+00:00
Ultimately both are just movies and I dislike when people compare them to the real world given how exaggerated they are, but the basic premise of Brazil happens regularly: one piece of paperwork filed incorrectly can seriously impact your life.

See this woman for an example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/live-woman-decl...
by AJ007 | 2025-09-29 13:19:24+00:00
In F-Droid's case this is absolutely a regulatory reaction -- this is directly related to the DMA (and to some extent, the Epic lawsuits.) Google does not want third parties bypassing Google in any way -- which probably ties in to the whole AOSP thing.

> How much longer will free and open source be tolerated?

I don't think they have a choice. Imagine what would happen to Google if half their software stack was Oracle and the EU had backdoors in to all of the management and CEO's devices and private communication. Why not use Chat Control to verify that they are complying with the spirit of EU law? Turn on the remote microphones while they are at it too.

On one hand we can lament the death of open source. Yet, open source has never been healthier. There has never been more open source software available to use and in development. Even when in it comes to AI, the best open source models are actually really damn good, better than anything that existed roughly 12 months ago. As much as Google, Apple, and Microsoft want to force you in to their closed ecosystems they fear being locked in to their competitor's closed ecosystems even more!

This could be a 10 page comment, but yes, the regulatory environment is a real threat to open source and the open internet in general. Most of those threats have been coming from the EU, with things like Chat Control and PLD. Which is unfortunate, because the future of the free world will rest entirely with the United States (Also possible that the EU will be dissolved, the monetary union will have a very difficult time during the next financial crisis.)

On the other hand, software developers and users, have become too reliant on Android which is functionally a fake open source project now. I can't think of a stronger incentive to stop Android development than telling them you can't develop here without paying us.
by retinaros | 2025-09-29 13:19:30+00:00
this proves that freedom of speech is the only thing that ever mattered. the left toyed with it and now its the right turn. we can see now the same thing being deployed in UK targeting people sending memes. It will be same for the US.

don't ever create a precedent if you dont want your enemies to use your tools against you. that + the fact that LLMs will accelerate a lot of the surveillance industry.
by specialist | 2025-09-29 13:19:36+00:00
Since becoming politically active, my recurring facepalm is discovering that a whole lot of people don't see the world as I do.

I just finished If We Burn by Vincent Bevins and When the Clock Broke by John Ganz

One point (of many) repeatedly hammered home, with IRL examples, is that a whole lot of people demand Order, even at the expensive of Justice.

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

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790601-when-the-clock...

A very successful evergreen (authoritarian) playbook is to keep people anxious, so that they'll accede -- nay demand -- to ever more draconian, reactionary policies.

Something we're experiencing firsthand right now in the USA.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-09-29 13:20:10+00:00
Not to mention "auditors", whose goal is to use the ambiguous nature of feels-like-a-privacy-invasion-but-legally-isnt when you stick a camera in someone's face in a public place to try and get a rise out of people and prance around as victim.

I think this is a case where the reasonable person test is excellent. Is this use of a camera reasonable for personal/professional purposes

You should be expected to take reasonable steps not to victimise someone by use of a video camera, subject to public interest. That means filming strangers with intent to provoke them should be a crime but raging car park lady cannot reasonably claim to have been victimised. Consent affects what is reasonable without creating a duty-bound obligation not to film without consent.

We already have "reasonable expectations of privacy", why not flip that?
by ajross | 2025-09-29 13:20:10+00:00
> You're assuming that the intended result of this apparent campaign is to actually start a war between the EU and Russia.

Your original framing of your question was: "Does anyone else feel like there are actors now trying to manufacture consent for a war with Russia?"

So, yes, that's exactly what I assumed you meant. Because it's what you said. (Absent, again, a bunch of exposition that wasn't delivered).

And you still haven't clarified what "actors" you're thinking about. I stand by the criticism of this as conspiracy logic.
by osigurdson | 2025-09-29 13:20:11+00:00
This might count as "Readability" but it is more structural. If it is easy to remember how a system works it is a real benefit. This isn't traditional "simplicity" necessarily either. A system containing a lot of simple code doing simple things, together might be hard to remember in aggregate. I'm not sure what this metric is called but if I can't remember how something works a year after creation, it fails the test.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-29 13:20:18+00:00
A major issue the author missed is it is much harder to fire a non-performer in the tech industry today.

It takes 2 quarters (ie. 6 months) to go from recognizing a problem employee to firing said employee.

This makes the risk of hiring the wrong candidate significant as a hiring manager, because a bad hire reflects badly on you and eats up your budget thus preventing a backfill.

On top of that, firing individual employees can lead to litigation risk (even if frivolous), thus requiring hiring managers to go through the extreme song and dance of the PIP process and documented reprimands in order to provide counsel if litigated.
by higeorge13 | 2025-09-29 13:20:52+00:00
Companies keep ignoring the historical interview point. I have been to a few occasions when companies needed the exact thing i built in the past (e.g. migration to clickhouse), but chose to put me into a random take home related to a different technology (e.g. some bigquery assignment) and eventually reject me. Go off script and ask me details about the project which might solve your hands, why do i need to talk about something else?
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 13:20:57+00:00
> Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.

Obviously the law is different in different places.

However. The person is talking about Newbury which I used to live near, which is in the UK. So they are talking about their experience in the UK.

So the only law the is applicable here is UK law.

> The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them.

He specifically says at the end "This isn’t about what is legal". I also don't believe he understands the law, since he often conflates/misuses the use of term private throughout the entire article.

What he understands as private isn't what is understood by almost anyone (both legal and colloquially).
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-09-29 13:21:09+00:00
Why?

Because the vast majority of job interviews are with terrible candidates, even if the majority of candidates are excellent. This apparent paradox has a simple explanation: excellent candidates selectively apply to a few companies and get interviews/offers at almost all of them. On the other hand, terrible candidates are rejected at every step of the hiring process, and have to constantly reenter the interview pool.

Suppose 90% of candidates are excellent and 10% are terrible. If the excellent 90% only need to interview at one company, whereas the bad 10% need to interview at 20 companies, then only 0.9/(0.1*20+0.9)=31% of interviews will be with qualified candidates. To retierate: almost 70% of interviews will be with terrible candidates, even though 90% of people applying for jobs are excellent.

Because the cost of a bad hire is so consequential, the interview process is not designed to efficiently handle a minority of qualified candidates, but rather efficiently weed out a majority of horrible candidates. It is therefore a terrible process for the people actually qualified to pass it.
by Sayrus | 2025-09-29 13:21:21+00:00
For what it's worth, my own procedure:

1. Create a GCS bucket

2. Open https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?ws=!1m4!1m3!3m2!1s...

3. For each table under google_political_ads, run the following query: SELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.google_political_ads.<TABLE>` FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 6 DAY) GROUP BY country;

3. Export as CSV in GCS

Another procedure that is probably better but requires BigTable is:

1. Open https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?ws=!1m4!1m3!3m2!1s...

2. For each table, click Snapshot and set Snapshot time to Sep 23 (Sep 24 works as well)
by f311a | 2025-09-29 13:21:53+00:00
One thing I like about Rust is that it prevents you from doing stupid things on the compiler level. I write a little bit of C/C++ and Rust. If you don't do C++ on a daily basis, you will silently introduce problems in the code that are very hard to spot. You just need to have a very good mental model of how to write good C++. It requires constant exercising.

For Rust, you just have to fight the compiler. This is especially useful when you have people on your team with some experience who also want to contribute, but you don't want to constantly point them in the right direction.

I actually have no idea how big teams work on large C++ codebases. Usually, you need to have a good idea of how the whole thing works. You can change one part of the code, and it will introduce bugs in the whole project because of how the memory is handled. Isolated changes are hard. And historically, a lot of C++ codebases lack good test coverage.
by Jeremy1026 | 2025-09-29 13:22:12+00:00
If a person can use AI to complete an interview task, why don't you think they'd be able to use it to complete a work task? I think this thinking is flawed. 15 years ago the argument was, "they'll just use StackOverflow during their take home test." But then once we all got the job we'd check StackOverflow to help solve problems we come across. I don't think AI should be treated any differently, it's a tool to complete the job.