MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nine_k | 2025-10-08 00:11:34+00:00
> There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell

There is, of course. The book is interesting within a particular range of cultures, and depends on good translations to be popular outside its native language area.

So, for a hyper-successful book, like "Harry Potter", the potentially interested audience is "merely" a few billion people, and "merely" a few hundred million are potential buyers of the book. 600M books sold worldwide, counting all the books in the series.

Selling 2x as much is highly unlikely, and 10x as much, completely unrealistic. The number of New Testament copies printed since 1450s is estimated to be below 7 billion.
by bccdee | 2025-10-08 00:11:44+00:00
"Demonstrated ability or achievement" is not highly hereditable. The word "demonstrated" should make that obvious. If I learn to play guitar and then have a kid, that kid will not know how to play guitar.

Aptitudes may be heritable, but an aptitude is very different from a skill. Potential is only useful once it's been actualized, and doing that takes resources.

> whether skills or wealth came first

Wealth comes first. The son's education is paid for with his father's money. We aren't born with skills.
by selinkocalar | 2025-10-08 00:13:13+00:00
The combination of LLMs and formal verification tools is pretty interesting. We've been thinking about this for compliance automation - there are a lot of regulatory requirements that could theoretically be expressed as formal constraints. Curious about the performance though. Z3 can be really slow on complex problems, and if you're chaining that with LLM calls, the latency could get rough for interactive use cases.
by gpm | 2025-10-08 00:14:13+00:00
Regulating imported equipment doesn't give you the ability to go back retroactively and say "shit, actually we need you to pull out all the equipment from <company> because it's a security problem". Or the ability to regulate what software updates are applied. And so on and so forth. And the government should have the ability to do that because it is a matter of geopolitics and national security to maintain the independence of our telecommunications infrastructure.

They did not slip in a clause which allows them to restrict which customers ISPs can serve, despite the headline saying otherwise.
by xp84 | 2025-10-08 00:14:23+00:00
It's worth pointing out just in case someone might forget/not think of it... Don't register your domain or DNS with Google Domains / GCP if you host your email with Google Workspace... since if you get locked out of the Google account you could be unable to update your DNS.

The saddest thing though is that in some ways Gmail is harder to hack into than some registrars. I remember a postmortem write-up from a guy who had his personal domain easily hijacked by social engineering someone at the domain registrar, which then served as the foothold of a larger identity theft attack against him. Google, by virtue of simply not even doing customer service, is much harder to social engineer, so the author of that piece pointed out that ironically if he'd put more of his eggs in the GOOG basket, he'd have been safer.
by TMWNN | 2025-10-08 00:14:36+00:00
>But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.

Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
by rockskon | 2025-10-08 00:14:50+00:00
You're missing the forest for the trees.

General purpose computing has been the backbone of the modern tech economy for decades and has changed our way of life.

Efforts to restrict that such as no longer allowing people to install applications-Google-hasn't-approved on their own devices is only going to benefit Google at the expense of others and cripple future innovation in the software ecosystem for mobile.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-08 00:15:20+00:00
> That's an interesting way to phrase it. It's like you're implying the company intentionally did not want to run it on anything but Windows (aka software is incompatible with non-Windows OSes) rather than trying to implement an effective anti-cheat (arguable) that works for their customers.

Not OP, but this is true depending on the game. For instance, when Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA V Online, they broke Linux support, and blatantly lied about Linux not supporting BattleEye, when that's just not true - they just needed to enable that option, but they just straight up lied saying BattlEye doesn't support Linux.

See: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31046...

> BattlEye on Proton integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out BattlEye to enable it for their title. No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication.

So all Rockstar had to do was reach out to BattlEye to enable it, but they couldn't be bothered to do so. Their anti-Linux stance here is pretty obvious.

Rockstar aside, there are other studios/publishers that have been openly hostile against Linux, like Epic for instance - Tim Sweeny has made scathing remarks against Linux, so it's clear where he/Epic stands on that front.
by ggm | 2025-10-08 00:16:34+00:00
I think I have to agree. I spend my life across 2 macbook and 2 android devices and I now cannot predict which web interaction (or WPA) will ask me to use which device(s) to validate which association.

I have bitwarden on all of them. I can coordinate 2FA TOTP easily. I don't see passkey adding value right now, it's simply added an extra model, alongside the others, which doesn't even reliably work.

Given their non-migrating quality, I can't federate can I?
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-08 00:16:40+00:00
Two factor tokens that can't be backed-up create stupid make-work.

Wouldn't it be great if Yubico let you back-up and restore a Yubikey?

It's maddening that they haven't come up with a reasonable way to allow a purchaser to register multiple Yubikeys to enable freely restoring backups between them. (Think of if analogously to buying multiple padlocks keyed the same from the factory.)

I'd prefer to be able to just set the same DKEK on the devices myself. Failing that I'd settle for Yubico being the arbiter. It would make the devices substantially more useful and less scary in loss / destruction scenarios.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-10-08 00:16:53+00:00
> It should be a matter of right.

I think that's a fine point to make, but I also think it's unlikely to be politically feasible, any time soon, in the US. You may have been perfectly capable of making this decision, but, in the most common case, most parents know that teenage brains driving almost adult bodies sometimes make really terrible decisions. And lots of us imagine we were much smarter than we actually were in adolescence. Moreover -- parents can be just as profoundly stupid.

I'd imagine a teenage Melanie Griffith would say she was perfectly capable of consenting to the very adult relationship she had with Don Johnson, and to which, I believe, her parents consented, as well. In retrospect, I'm not sure adult Melanie Griffith would feel the same. Or at the very least she may not allow her daughter to do the same.

Perhaps that's why we should willing to accept some guidance from things that at least can pretend to be objective -- science and journalism. Especially views critical of our priors and intuitions. And we definitely shouldn't seek to silence or de-platform anyone simply because they disagree.

Please -- vote the bastards out of office who don't take your problems seriously, but also please don't silence journalists for suggesting that there is more to this question than two simple American Left and Right narratives. Some of us need that kind of help to understand the world.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-08 00:17:30+00:00
Interesting. CA GATE has little/no effect other than pulling me out of class to arrange triangles with a timer. The public high school I attended offered most AP classes (but was otherwise under-resourced), around ~15 perfect SAT-I results, and ~25 full scholarships to Ivy League schools per year. Not as fancy as a room full of IITians, but almost. Maybe there was some purpose for the G&T program other than bureaucratic pyramid-building or the specter of inventorying possibly intelligent people. Oh yeah, and I was bullied in middle school by a math teacher who encouraged the class to bully me as well who seemed to be offended at having a student added to her class.
by bschwindHN | 2025-10-08 00:17:36+00:00
I've never used their toolchain, I use Rust on the RP2040 and it's a breeze to set up.

But yeah there's also CircuitPython where you literally drag and drop a firmware blob onto the volume that shows up when plugging in an RP2040 board, and then you're just editing a Python-esque script to do stuff. Not sure what could be easier when it comes to starting with embedded stuff. You can even use the Arduino IDE with RP2040 boards if you like.

https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi...
by TMWNN | 2025-10-08 00:18:19+00:00
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.

Indeed. As you said, it's the people, not the technical details of the "protocol" or "platform". My "favorite" Mastadon example: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
by vacuity | 2025-10-08 00:19:25+00:00
I have a general distaste for transparent policies, which I always find to fall short for some use case. In this case, the sender would know best what to do with their message. Moreover, for small buffers, page remapping won't be an optimization. I recommend reflecting this as an alternative send interface.

The lower a transparent policy lies in the OS, the worse it contorts the system. Even mechanisms necessarily constrain policy, if only slightly. I strongly believe that microkernels will only be improved by adhering ever closer to true minimality. If backwards compatibility is important, put the policy in a library. But I think transparent policies are generally advisable only when user feedback indicates benefit.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-10-08 00:19:25+00:00
I haven't tried /dev/push but I don't like these solutions, you always run into some limit and having a fancy ui is overrated.

I bit the bullet and started deploying on k3s; k9s is my fancy UI.

Machines are cattle, I can have as many nodes as I want. If I need to do something new usually there is a helm chart for it or a .yaml solution somewhere on the internet.

I have a lot of control, I've already seen a decent amount of problems, so I just copy paste from old projects. I don't think k3s would do great on 5$ machines with 1GB of RAM but Oracle Always Free gives you 6GB and Hetzner has beefy machines for 35$.

The infra people I work with (mid-large size companies) are cool with k8s on any big cloud so my work experience doesn't change much.
by TMWNN | 2025-10-08 00:19:37+00:00
>Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly.

How is this meltdown at Mastadon not the exact same thing as what we're discussing here regarding Bluesky? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As another said here,

>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-08 00:20:20+00:00
MIT/Apache2 is the default in the Rust ecosystem, and so the authors selected it because they didn’t care that much, and so going with the community default makes sense.

In practice, even if they’d chosen the GPL for their own code, they’d be including dependencies that weren’t GPL’d, so unless they were committing to doing everything from scratch (including the Rust standard library!) some parts of the codebase would be non-GPL’d.
by txrx0000 | 2025-10-08 00:21:00+00:00
They could make the ISP not be able to provision more than 0 kb/s of bandwidth to you unless some condition is met, which apparently could be anything that the Minister considers relevant.

--- You're "endangering national security" by "spreading harmful information online". Such speech is not protected by the charter. You are now banned from the Internet. ---

They probably won't do this right away, but the door is open.

And they shouldn't be able to do this to the ISP's suppliers either.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-08 00:21:02+00:00
Most of the gold market is “paper” gold, with the physical quantities being stored in a handful of large vaults around the world. The physical retail market is tiny compared to the massive paper market and the hoards of physical gold (owned by nations and large financial institutions) that sit in these vaults. I believe the operators are paid for storage.

Much of the gold in vaults doesn’t even move once it gets there, even through multiple successive owners. China takes physical ownership of its gold, though, so recently there has been a lot of gold moving overseas.

Germany and Italy have recently considered repatriating their physical gold, as they are no longer sure about leaving it in overseas vaults: https://www.ft.com/content/e39390cc-ea02-4197-843a-1e4c24242...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-08 00:21:38+00:00
I'm betting those guest instances are Windows 3.1 Real Mode however and so cannot load most protected mode drivers. IIRC, there are a bunch of protected mode things like the VDM that take control over the system because there's no such thing as nested virtualization until about 2005-2006 when VMware and similar hypervisors pushed for it.
by gpm | 2025-10-08 00:22:07+00:00
No, they could not, because laws are interpreted so that every word must have a meaning, and if "impose conditions" could include "the condition of 0 kb/s" it what have no different meaning then "terminate" and that would violate the cannons of statutory interpretation.

They also could not because the charter would prohibit it. While not all speech is protected by the charter (your categories aren't the right one, but there are categories like CSAM and hate speech), the government doesn't have the ability to prevent significant amounts of protected speech to prevent unprotected speech without invoking the notwithstanding clause (which this law does not).
by NothingAboutAny | 2025-10-08 00:22:29+00:00
I saw similar discussions around robotics, people saying "why are they making the robots humanoid? couldn't they be a more efficient shape" and it comes back to the same thing where if you want the tool to be adopted then it has to fit in a human-centric world no matter how inefficient that is. high performance applications are still always custom designed and streamlined, but mass adoption requires it to fit us not us to fit it.
by ragequittah | 2025-10-08 00:22:29+00:00
Neither. And this is another bias I keep seeing. Anyone who actually uses the technology in the way I do must be using it to write (I don't) or a shill. Nope I just have been using it for various things since the early days and I wonder why people are so allergic to being able to express themselves clearer and with more agency. Not everything has to be about money. LLMs and image generators can just be fun.

I like that my writing is considered well structured / grammatically correct enough to be llm worthy though. I often think I make several obvious errors when I write off the cuff internet posts (and probably did).
by ecshafer | 2025-10-08 00:24:10+00:00
Cloud was always going to be more expensive than on prem, that wasn't what was being sold. Cloud sells that they are able to give you high availability across multiple regions without having to do an expensive capital investment. Amazon/Microsoft/Google is selling the talented engineering for getting these data centers working around the world at a high level of availability to companies. Most companies like recurring costs compared to capital expenditures. Companies also prefer lower head counts and paying for services. It is BETTER from an MBA pov to pay Amazon to run a Data center since they are experts than for you to run a data center as a finance company.
by m55au | 2025-10-08 00:25:18+00:00
I don't think it will happen either, but I do think there is a bit of imbalance developing in the whole system right now.

For example a decade ago electricity prices in Nord Pool were relatively stable (and reasonable/lowish). Now it is quite common to either have 0 or even negative prices during summer and artificially set maximums in the autumn/winter. IIRC, the rules were that if the price hit 60% of the maximum, it had to be raised by 1000 €/MWh. It got to 4000 €/MWh (which is 4 € or $4.7/kWh) in 2022 and was supposed to be raised by another 1000, but it was decided not to do it, so I think it stands there right now. But in any case, this is a ridiculous price. As are the negative ones.
by zmgsabst | 2025-10-08 00:28:01+00:00
But that would only be something nationalism signaled if the converse weren’t also true — eg, totalitarian states like the USSR, CCP, etc.

Those also had:

- grievance narratives;

- a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens and enemies; and,

- use the above to justify authoritarian powers.

You haven’t shown that nationalism played a particular part in that cycle; just that it also happened in nationalist states. Almost like the problem is those factors, rather than nationalism.
by deanCommie | 2025-10-08 00:28:40+00:00
Even if there was somehow a way to do a "national divorce" without a bloody civil war (no chance), who gets to keep the kids? (nukes)

I worry that as bad as things are, at least the blue state resistance (pathetic as it is) provides SOME restraint on the red states/MAGA's worst instincts.

Even if there was a way to divide the country evenly without dealing with the urban/rural divide, I have to imagine the first thing the new separate Red America do is start invading it's neighbours, if not outright nuking parts of the world.

There is no way that a breakup of the most powerful empire in the history of the world, with military bases around the entire planet, can happen without severe consequences for the rest of us.
by lavezza | 2025-10-08 00:28:40+00:00
I was interested in when computers started showing up. I flipped through some years quickly. I see a terminal on page 158 in 1984 ('84:158). What looks like an 8-bit computer at '85:103 and a Mac at '86:190. Anyone see something earlier?

This could be a game. When was the first flat screen TV? When was the first CD rack? When was the first microwave?

There is a record player at '20:156. Did record players go away and then come back?

There are at least two typewriters in 2020 ('20:56 and '20:61). I wouldn't have expected typewriters in a 2020 catalog. Maybe that's a Swedish thing? Are typewriters still common in Sweden?
by em-bee | 2025-10-08 00:29:10+00:00
Do you really want to expose a full CRUD API, or are there consistency/security rules you want to enforce? That's cool, but makes API design a little more challenging and frontend development a little more frustrating.

fair point, however i don't see that as a drawback. the security/consistency rules you want anyways. and an API makes it easier to enforce them and not allow people working on the frontend to get around them because they have direct access to the database. in difference to what you said, i believe the benefit of a rich client is that it doesn't have full access to the database, but only the access the API provides.

i also don't feel that it makes frontend work more frustrating, on the contrary, it means i don't have to worry about access control in the frontend because the backend is supposed to take care of that.

to give an example: if i want to limit the size of the text field, i have to implement checks twice, once in the html/js, to help the user, and once in the database access to make sure the user didn't cheat. i have to do that regardless of whether front and backend are separated or not. it doesn't make a difference. but the separation ensures that the frontend code can't get around the limit.

where it does get frustrating is when you have different teams that have to communicate and agree. but the problem there is the team size, not the architecture.

this subthread started out with the claim that small teams don't need the complexity of frontend/backend separation introduces. that's where i disagree. the complexity shouldn't be an issue. as i said, i find it reduces complexity. a small team also won't have the communication problems when disagreements arise over the API. they can handle that like disagreements over the class hierarchy or datastructures or whatever. you talk about it, make a decision and everyone is on the same page on what to implement.

That's the kind of conversation I wanted to have with the candidates that went for that architecture

are you still hiring? :-)
by halfcat | 2025-10-08 00:29:38+00:00
> Don't register your domain or DNS with Google Domains / GCP if you host your email with Google Workspace... since if you get locked out of the Google account you could be unable to update your DNS.

This seems like a potential rabbit hole.

Use a different domain with your registrar than the domain you’re registering. Same thing with DNS host. Do you have two domains with two registrars and two DNS hosts? Presumably if either one gets compromised, the control of one domain could be used to gain control of the other. And you’ve quadrupled your attack surface by having two domains with two registrars and two DNS providers.

I don’t disagree with you, but I also don’t know a robust solution for this (happy to hear one, if you have it).
by kylecazar | 2025-10-08 00:30:56+00:00
"Because Timelinize is entity-aware, "it can project data points onto a map even without coordinate data. If a geolocated point is known for an entity around the same time of others of that entity's data points, it will appear on the map."

In the context of Timelinize, this is great! Outside of that, this sentence really drives home how much data Google could join on me -- a heavy Android/Chrome/Gmail/Maps w/ timeline user.

What are you planning with weather? Associating entities that have a known location with historical temp/forecast data?
by koeng | 2025-10-08 00:32:16+00:00
> Why are these capabilities so valuable to a large software company, when small software companies can do without them? This is leaving my area of expertise somewhat, but I’m pretty sure the main answer is large enterprise deals

I think the more boring answer may be that in any sufficiently large organization, the only way to maintain control is through legible processes, because the sociopaths do utilize the legible processes to keep things running (and utilize the illegible processes to make deals). Without legible processes, after dunbar's number, your communication falls apart.
by mastazi | 2025-10-08 00:32:48+00:00
You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.