MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codedokode | 2025-09-01 04:36:12+00:00
I wanted to add a correction, I think that the user should be able to give up this right if it helps prevent theft for example. Today, if forums can be trusted, many Android phones protected with Google Account (FRP - Factory Reset Protection) can be unlocked in different ways, sometimes as easy as opening a keyboard (or invoking a voice input), going to settings and disabling the protection, or deleting a partition with FRP data. And for other phones there are no publicly available information, but there is software that you can rent. So (if the information on the forums is true) it seems that Google's anti-theft protection was made just for a bullet point in marketing materials and not for really preventing theft.
by motorest | 2025-09-01 04:36:47+00:00
> don't you think it's highly unlikely that someone will stumble over the power cable in a hosted datacenter like hetzner?

You're not getting the point. The point is that if you use a single node to host your whole web app, you are creating a system where many failure modes, which otherwise could not even be an issue, can easily trigger high-severity outages.

> and even if, you could just run a provisioned secondary server (...)

Congratulations, you are no longer using "one big server", thus defeating the whole purpose behind this approach and learning the lesson that everyone doing cloud engineering work is already well aware.
by RossBencina | 2025-09-01 04:38:07+00:00
The article mentions sleep, which is very important to us all. But something not mentioned is that the symptoms of Sleep Apnea can look a lot like ADHD, and if you have sleep apnea and ADHD then you get a double whammy. Sleep apnea can start at any age, which could be one reason why your attention suddenly got worse. If you're waking up unrested, or have any of the other signs of sleep apnea, get it checked out. In my case my doctor resisted testing "because I wasn't obese," (more or less, perhaps I'm being unkind), so you may have to work at it. But an in-lab sleep study will give you a clear diagnosis. I have seen reports of people who were able to stop ADHD medication once their apnea was treated.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-01 04:38:23+00:00
But is it too much to ask to at least let me get my grandma back out of the hospice? Don't just lock all the doors and put up a sign saying "Thanks for your loyal business, it's been an amazing journey". And if I'm the one who owns the building and you were just staffing it, then I'd appreciate having the door keys back as well, please!
by skybrian | 2025-09-01 04:38:24+00:00
For a technical user, being able to install any software you like means you have full control. But another perspective is that if someone else installs the wrong software (such as if a housemate installs spyware), your phone could betray you.

Security-conscious people might actually prefer to own hardware-limited devices. An example of this is having a camera with a physical shutter, or a light that shows camera activity that can't be disabled by software.

Similarly, some people might prefer to own devices that don't allow side-loading at all, since it disables a potential vulnerability. Maybe it would be best if Google allowed this to be a configurable option when buying an Android phone. (I suppose they could buy an iPhone, though.)
by slt2021 | 2025-09-01 04:38:31+00:00
Re China, I believe there is misunderstanding. China has free market economy, but China does not have big oligarchs running the country, the opposite of US.

In China, political and economic leadership are separate. Country is ran by the party, while economy is ran by small-med-large companies fiercely competing among themselves. Any oligarch trying to get political influence is quickly shut down (jack ma).

USA on the other hand are fully ran by the oligarchs, every single politician is beholden to special interest groups representing the big corporate capital, and nobody cares about the common man. Anyone trying to break into power representing the common man, at the expense of the big oligarchic capital, is quickly shut down (bernie)
by enos_feedler | 2025-09-01 04:39:38+00:00
This is a sad reality. I see 2 paths forward 1) we somehow build the right layers into the internet that we can withstand open hardware. 2) open hardware running any software becomes an education use and hobbyist market only. I could see an edu slice to every corporate entity deploying open and free stuff just as onboarding to paid. Hackable hardware with kiddyflix.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-01 04:41:17+00:00
I wish I could upvote this 100x.

I gave a lot of myself to a job, of my own free will. It felt like a mission at the time. Then I lost several people in my life who were my world, and discovered the harsh reality that it didn’t matter at all, and I never really stopped to be honest about what I wanted in life. I’ll never get the time back that I gave away for nothing.

While I was dealing with my personal life exploding, there was a political change at work (unrelated to me directly) that made most of what I had sweat over for a few years nearly irrelevant. It reinforced the lesson and like yours, the importance of boundaries and knowledge of self.
by AuthAuth | 2025-09-01 04:41:54+00:00
A lot of the time businesses just aren't that important. The amount places I've seen that stress over uptime when nothing they run is at all critical. Hell you could drop the production environment in the middle of the day and yes it would suck and you'd get a few phone calls but life would go on.

These companies all ended up massively increasing their budgets switching to cloud workloads when a simple server in the office was easily enough for their 250 users. Cloud is amazing for some uses and pure marketing BS for others but it seems like a lot of engineers aim for a perfect scalable solution instead of one that is good enough.
by antonvs | 2025-09-01 04:42:12+00:00
> efficient allocation of capital

One big problem is that such claims are often cover for what amounts to theft. PE companies loading acquisitions with debt, for example, or "enshittification" - both tactics which are optimized to transfer wealth to investors, not improve the overall allocation of capital.

The idea that all these shenanigans are "efficient allocation of capital" is just propaganda, left over from decades ago before the system became what it is today.

This is where you need government intervention and controls, but unfortunately the US government is structurally and systemically unable to provide that. Regulatory capture, legalized corruption ("campaign finance", "lobbying"), money as speech, corporations as people - none of this is morally sound, and the justification that it's all in service of "productivity gains, lower costs" etc. is hollow.

> but deciding where to draw that line in practice is messy.

Of course - that's the nature of morality, it's inherently political. There would be no morality without other people. But that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up on it.
by zkmon | 2025-09-01 04:42:28+00:00
Where do you draw the boundary between code and hardware? System code has become more like a firmware. Vendor sees it as device, not as code + hardware. It's like a TV or a cassette player. There is no code. You can bring your content and "play" it. Any additional ability that you build on your own (you want the cassette player to play DVDs?), would void the warranty. But you can buy a DVD module from the vendor that is made to fit into your cassette player.

In reality, what you are expecting is, to be able to use your common tools to modify the device. But the vendor uses some weirdly shaped screws for which you don't have tools to work with. That is the real complaint.
by kelnos | 2025-09-01 04:44:15+00:00
I don't really agree with this take.

I do think that it should be easier for people to build and install alternative OSes on their phones.

However, building your own mobile OS is just really hard. And on top of the technical challenges, the UX challenges, the overall polish challenges, there are non-technical challenges that are often impossible for alternative OSes.

* Industry connections problems. As an example, no open source mobile OS has a contactless payments app, at least not one that is generic and can support more or less any credit card out there. That is, you can't build an Apple/Google Wallet analogue and have it work.

* As much as I wish Jobs had stuck to his guns on the "no iPhone SDK" thing, and had instead developed and improved the mobile web stack, that's not the reality today. There are many things you just cannot do current mobile OSes through its web browser. Native apps are required there. And so that means companies need to choose the platforms they build for. Today that's easy: iOS and Android. But getting governments and banks and various companies to build apps for your niche mobile OS is going to be essentially impossible. And with closed-source kitchen-sink libraries like Google Play Services, it's incredibly difficult even to get a lot of Android apps running properly (and consistently reliably) on "de-Googled" Android phones.

Ultimately the real problem is that there's no capable, standardized, OS-agnostic platform for building mobile apps. The web platform could have been it, but it's not, and now Apple and Google have a vested interest in ensuring that it never can be, because building native iOS and Android apps locks people and companies into those ecosystems.

Ultimately^2 the real problem is that free markets are a myth, and don't work. Companies want to become monopolies, and want to bar new entrants. I would absolutely love some mandate/legislation/whatever that made it mandatory that we have a fully open source mobile OS, and that all the players involved need to be allowed to build equivalent functionality into it that Android and iOS have. I know that sounds radical and like government overreach (and current governments wouldn't go for it anyway). But the alternative is what we have today: monopolists that don't care about the rights of their customers. There's really no "free-market" way out of this.
by sfink | 2025-09-01 04:44:25+00:00
> Would it be accurate to describe Jujutsu as "a Mercurial-inspired frontend for Git"?

In my opinion: yes. (Maybe with a slight caveat that I think some of the Mercurial inspiration came through Sapling.) And it's not limited to Mercurial/Sapling ideas, it has some new stuff too, but I think that still counts as "Mercurial-inspired".

> Also, another question I have for people who have used Jujutsu: Is it focused on interactive use, or is it also convenient to use for automatic/non-interactive use?

I use it in automation. I'm hampered because the primary VCS for the automation is git, so I'm doing more of a compatible layer and can't go too crazy with the jj-specific stuff.

But jj has some features that are excellent for automation.

Example: you can manually wrap things in a discardable transaction: grab the current operation ID, do all kinds of weird mutating operations that add and remove patches, maybe even merge and rebase, and then at the end (maybe in a `finally` block) do `jj operation restore <id>` and everything will go back to the way it was.

Another example is that if you want to tweak something, say a config file, in N different ways, you don't have to mess around with naming branches and switching between them or whatever. Just create N independent child commits and make the appropriate changes in each.

Or conversely: make M children for the M values of configuration value 1 and N children for the N values of configuration value 2, then create a new multiparented child (a merge commit) for each combination. `jj new <a> <b>` creates a merge commit with parents <a> and <b>, so:

jj new $base -m 'var1=a' jj new $base -m 'var1=b' jj new $base -m 'var2=x' jj new $base -m 'var2=y' jj new 'description("var1=a")' 'description("var2=x")' -m 'var1=a, var2=x' # run scenario 1 with those settings jj new 'description("var1=a")' 'description("var2=y")' -m 'var1=a, var2=y' # run scenario 2 with those settings

Sorry, I'm using the `description(...message...)` revset expression to retrieve the appropriate commits when in practice you'd probably record the IDs and do `jj new $a $x` with no descriptions anywhere. But hey, the above would work as written!
by overfeed | 2025-09-01 04:44:43+00:00
> If she does that, she's not building her own mental model of the processes she's describing, and soon she'd have no idea of what's going on anymore.

Which is fine by management, because the intent is to fire her and have AI generate the reports. The top-down diktats for AI maximization is to quickly figure out how much can be automated so companies can massively scale back on payroll before their competition does.
by protocolture | 2025-09-01 04:45:28+00:00
>It doesn't work. Everything from banks to Netflix and others are slowly edging out anything where they can't fully verify the chain of control to an entity they can have a legal or contractual relationship with.

Theres nothing stopping a hardware vendor from being able to delete the system installed keys/certificates, breaking trust to allow you to install your own. Sure netflix might not like it but you still have the right to run your own code and netflix has the right not to trust your OS.

>Governments shouldn't be able to prevent me from end to end encrypting things.

Agreed.
by deepfriedchokes | 2025-09-01 04:45:50+00:00
IMO, these are emotional decisions, not rational, and often people aren’t aware of where those feelings originate, as they stem from the subconscious.

IMHO, the elephant in the room is capitalism, but it’s like the church, so sacrosanct you aren’t allowed to question it, so instead people take their anger out on those with less power.
by seltzered_ | 2025-09-01 04:46:10+00:00
The deeper meditation is understanding the politics of Henry Ford, how he too bought a newspaper business, and the worker conditions and economies. See:

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_...

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
by vbezhenar | 2025-09-01 04:46:11+00:00
> What if I want to require (for anti-piracy reasons) that to use my software you must also give me complete access to your computer, all the data on it, and all your communications.

That's exactly what happens with anti-cheat kernel modules. As one might expect, ordinary people couldn't care less, as long as it works good enough.
by OmarAssadi | 2025-09-01 04:46:52+00:00
I mean, I agree that you should be able to avoid things like Netflix and make use of libraries and other archives, but that's sort of the point; there is a ton of media that never even gets a physical release anymore; once one of these platforms goes under, or something enters licensing hell, or whatever else and gets removed, all you can do is hope someone out there with both the know-how and access went out of their way to illegally download a copy, illegally decrypt it, and illegally upload it somewhere.

I say "know-how" and "access" because, while I'd still argue decrypting, say, Widevine L3 is not exactly super common knowledge, decrypting things like 4K Netflix content, among other things, generally requires you to have something like a Widevine L1 CDM from one of the Netflix-approved devices, which typically sits in those hardware trusted execution environments, so you need an active valuable exploit or insider leaks from someone at one of the manufacturers.

But also on top of all of that, you also need to hope other people kept the upload alive by the time you decide to access it, and then you also often need to have access to various semi-elitist private trackers to consistently be able to even find some of this stuff.

The legal issues with DRM here are hardly exclusive to Netflix and other streaming services, but at least in the case of things like Blu-rays or whatever — even if it is technically illegal in most countries to actually make use of virtually any backed-up disc due to AACS — you usually don't have the same time-pressure problem nor the significant technical expertise barrier.

>If streaming services like Netflix are harmful then we should avoid using them. Thus it should not be important for our freedom-preserving computers to be able to access Netflix.

I generally do avoid them whenever possible, though, yes. And I've explicitly disabled DRM support in Firefox on my computer. But I am just one person and I don't think my behavior reflects the average person, for better or for worse.
by dingi | 2025-09-01 04:48:01+00:00
There are two fundamental issues in the ARM ecosystem for general-purpose computing: the lack of a standard boot environment and the lack of a reliable device auto-discovery mechanism. Device trees still require a lot of manual intervention. I haven't yet come across an ARM board that can boot a vanilla Debian AArch64 image without extra work. This makes me skeptical about the prospects of ARM in the desktop and laptop space. Is it really worth giving up the messy but standards-based x86 platform in exchange for bespoke ARM solutions?
by bruce511 | 2025-09-01 04:48:16+00:00
Forgive me, but is Netflix asking for that?

As I understand it, Netflix wishes to authenticate the device, and DRM their content. I'm not aware of anything beyond that (but I'm also not paying attention. )

Now you may have used the example of what might happen, but then Netfix seems a strange example. Surely Apple and/or Google are more likely players in that example?
by protocolture | 2025-09-01 04:48:57+00:00
> let's be real: Google and Apple have more power than most nations.

Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk.

Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height.

Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-01 04:49:19+00:00
If your boss is bad, they'll abuse power no matter the system. I don't disagree. But that's true in every field. So why do IT support, paralegals, and lab techs manage to make non-exempt status work without "pervasive surveillance"?

Help me connect the dots: how do you get from "I had a bad boss who broke the rules" to "therefore we should remove the legal framework that makes rule-breaking punishable"? Because without that framework, exploitation isn't just a possibility, it's legal.

That’s like saying "people will speed, so speed limits don’t work." Sure, some people speed, but the world without those limits and the legal weight behind them is objectively worse.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-01 04:50:35+00:00
> Rust has limited options to opt into shared mutability

The idiomatic Rust equivalent of a C non-restrict pointer is arguably &Cell<T>. The biggest problem with it is library code that takes &mut T when the likes of &Cell<T> might suffice (because potential aliasing does not affect the semantics of what that Rust code is doing), but this is an acknowledged problem and the Rust project will take pull req's that fix it where it occurs.
by countWSS | 2025-09-01 04:51:16+00:00
Most of code that "needs to be written" is just a copy of something standard, "Do X in the simplest way possible" code that doesn't need optimizations, and writing it by hand is just waste of time. AI is good enough to write megabytes of that code, since its statistically common and part of tons of codebases. Its the other half of code that AI can't handle, that you need to manually verify it doesn't hallucinate fantastic stuff that manages to compile, but doesn't work.
by noisy_boy | 2025-09-01 04:51:35+00:00
I feel like such initiatives miss one obvious target - the well heeled tech savvy user (who quite often is also privacy minded) and wants the latest. At the price point they are selling a Snapdragon 7 device, I can get a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone from the market quite easily. Now I am happy to pay more because of what they stand for but I don't see them selling a model that features the latest and greatest + the privacy focus. Surely the latest hardware and privacy/environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive. I change my phone every 4-5 years on average so I try to not contribute to the landfills but I do want the latest when I buy.
by budududuroiu | 2025-09-01 04:51:49+00:00
Not only were the PLA and CCP massively popular because of the insane corruption and hyperinflation under the Nationalists, the ROC imposed (at the time), the longest martial law in human history [1]

Taiwan is democratic today, because of transitional justice, but at the time when the PRC succeeded the ROC in China, the nationalists led by Chiang were as dictatorial as you can get

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
by vbezhenar | 2025-09-01 04:52:14+00:00
> ability to run other operating systems on phones

> building those alternatives is basically impossible

For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook.

Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources.

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.
by sfink | 2025-09-01 04:53:11+00:00
Technically, it's z-k (z=0, k=15). It makes for a nice root change ID: zzzzzzzz. Less choking than kkkkkkkk.

The relevance, btw, is that you can use git commit IDs in place of change IDs anywhere and they won't conflict; jj knows which you mean by the character set. (They could still conflict with bookmark names, sadly. But I haven't heard of that being an issue in practice.)
by cschneid | 2025-09-01 04:53:19+00:00
I find AI is most useful at the ancillary extra stuff. Things that I'd never get to myself. Little scripts of course, but more like "it'd be nice to rename this entire feature / db table / tests to better match the words that the business has started to use to discuss it".

In the past, that much nitpicky detail just wouldn't have gotten done, my time would have been spent on actual features. But what I just described was a 30 minute background thing in claude code. Worked 95%, and needed just one reminder tweak to make it deployable.

The actual work I do is too deep in business knowledge to be AI coded directly, but I do use it to write tests to cover various edge cases, trace current usage of existing code, and so on. I also find AI code reviews really useful to catch 'dumb errors' - nil errors, type mismatches, style mismatch with existing code, and so on. It's in addition to human code reviews, but easy to run on every PR.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-09-01 04:53:54+00:00
Maybe you feel the need to equate everyone in order to feel better with your complicity, but it is simply not true. Every empire has committed atrocities, sure. Not every country or ethnic group though. Some have been historically non aggressive and grossly mistreated by greedy emperors, conquerors and politicians.

"Europe" has nothing to account for. Western Europe ? Sure.