MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmbwell | 2025-10-22 13:08:52+00:00
I think targeting web sites was the right move because it was the web sites who were doing all the tracking.

Of course now we also have browsers to worry about as well, being products of the same ad companies that were clogging up the web sites in the first place.

But if cookie laws pushed data collecting web sites to malicious compliance, surely similar laws would do the same to (also data collecting!) browser providers. I’d prefer to avoid inviting browsers to add another layer of bullshit. And there’s no reason it would make web sites behave differently… if I’m a web site bound to comply with laws, I’m probably going to cover my own ass and keep doing what I’m doing without assuming the browser will handle it. Rendering the browser controls redundant and ineffective.

If we want to look for core flaws, look at allowing a handful of giant companies to control the market for personal data — or to traffic in personal data at all.

Ad companies have convinced the whole economic system of the Internet that they are inevitable and essential. They are neither. But we won’t fix that either.

The solution is to get off the damn internet, but short of doing that, I’ll prefer to keep my options open to disable telemetry on my own terms.

Here’s something I would like, though: total sandboxing per web site. Let every domain be alone in its own room of cookies and telemetry. Let it think I only ever visit that site, and optionally always for the first time. I shouldn’t have to blow away all my cookies all the time just to keep Facebook from following me all over the web.
by arnvald | 2025-10-22 13:08:53+00:00
Unfortunately there's simply no way this is going to happen:

* advertising is profitable for advertisers — they buy ad slots because it brings revenue

* advertising is profitable for publishers — some of the biggest companies in the world (Google, Meta) make most of their revenue from ads

* most people are reluctant to spend money, but they're ok to "spend" their attention and their data

There were multiple attempts with micro-payments and nothing has worked so far. Monthly subscription is preferred by customers and companies, but there are only so many outlets that anyone will subscribe to.
by amelius | 2025-10-22 13:08:53+00:00
Perhaps someone can help me with this. I was doing some experimentation with lenses and PBTR v4. This was going great, I was able to model the projection of an object through a lens onto a surface quite well. However, now I want to simulate doublets: lenses which consist of two parts so with two materials. I don't know how to model this in PBTR. It seems that it is not possible to have a shape (lens) touch more than one other material.

> PBRT's MediumInterface system can only represent a single "inside" medium and a single "outside" medium per shape. If a shape physically touches multiple different media (for example, a glass sphere sitting at the interface between water and air), PBRT cannot directly represent this configuration.

I think this is kind of odd for a renderer which is otherwise quite capable. Can anyone explain why this is the case, and how I can work around this limitation?
by robot-wrangler | 2025-10-22 13:08:56+00:00
> If you have sons you'll know there is a certain aesthetic young boy love and these books deliver it.

Reminded me immediately of Montehomo, the Hawks Claw, chief of the ever-victorious.

> At night, when the boys had gone to bed, the girls crept to their bedroom door, and listened to what they were saying. Ah, what they discovered! The boys were planning to run away to America to dig for gold: they had everything ready for the journey, a pistol, two knives, biscuits, a burning glass to serve instead of matches, a compass, and four roubles in cash. They learned that the boys would have to walk some thousands of miles, and would have to fight tigers and savages on the road: then they would get gold and ivory, slay their enemies, become pirates, drink gin, and finally marry beautiful maidens, and make a plantation.

https://americanliterature.com/author/anton-chekhov/short-st...

(Stretching the meaning of "American" literature there, and not a great translation, just the first I found)
by jotaen | 2025-10-22 13:09:01+00:00
I don’t know much about the MinIO project specifically, but to me it seems to be a common misconception that just because a maintainer provides their software project under a permissive license (such as AGPL, MIT, etc.) would necessarily imply that they do this for particular ethical reasons, like caring about “the community” (whoever that is) or contributing something for the greater good.

In the end, it’s just software made available under specific terms. While I understand the inconvenience for users if things change, it feels like part of the disappointment might stem from one-sided expectations.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-22 13:10:03+00:00
Yes and no, I'd say. Going back to the moon is big but it's also pretty self-contained, in a way. It just costs money (and doles a bunch of it out to the contracted companies). It's also mostly time-boxed.

Healthcare, worker's rights, voting rights, infrastructure, etc, are all more important (so I agree with you there), but also all have way more consequences that are wider-ranging and longer-term (which I'd say contributes do the political dysfunction around those topics).

This should be an "easy win" by comparison, and the "PR" impact of success (or failure) will be significant.

Edit: that said, if you gave me a magic wand to pick any one of these topics for the US to succeed at, it wouldn't be going to the moon.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-22 13:10:16+00:00
> So, why aren't they not considered native?

I didn't say that explicitly, but you are right that I'm implying that it is customary to use "native people" to refer to the original occupants of a territory, not subsequent waves of humans.

For context:

a) Khoisan (20,000 - 30,000 years)

b) Bantu-speaking groups (1,500 - 2,000 years)

c) white South Africans (300 - 400 years)

I guess you could say that there is a "degree" of nativeness, where a > b > c, but I would question the motives for doing so.

> No one considers the Roman empire not native to Europe

That's drawing arbitrary lines to suit your argument. Nobody would claim that the Romans were native to Gaul, for example.

I'm trying to understand what is the reason behind your points, but am struggling to do so. The less generous interpretation of your angel is that you're trying to say that white South Africans or Indian South Africans or Chinese South Africans are less native than black South Africans or that black South Africans are more native than the Khoisan. I don't know that you are saying this, but your argument does seem to point in that direction and is divisive, FWIW.
by candiddevmike | 2025-10-22 13:10:35+00:00
Related: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/20/americans-ca...

Wonder what the spillover effects will be of the auto lenders collapsing. With how much we love to repackage debt to earn a few bucks, there could be a ton of financial instruments intertwined with defaulted auto loans.

On the plus side, if everyone has their vehicle repossessed, maybe it will encourage more public transit and bike lanes.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-22 13:10:40+00:00
DNT already had legal weight in the EU. I don't see what problem is being solved by sending a slightly-renamed version of DNT instead, other than the weird privacy law a few American states have implemented that says "if the browser sends the signal by default it's not a legal signal and you should therefore ignore it" (which will probably be updated to neuter GPC if that ever gets any serious attention, the las were clearly written to give trackers the advantage).
by DrScientist | 2025-10-22 13:10:52+00:00
Isn't the point we've been - and we've learned there really isn't much there and it's not worth the effort?

Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected.

As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America.

And in terms of national prestige or uniting goal - wouldn't it be better to have a goal to create a long term sustainable energy economy for example. I think that has more strategic value than putting a man back ( or women for the first time ) on the moon.
by IMTDb | 2025-10-22 13:11:06+00:00
Please ask the EU to lead by example then. The official EU commission website has a cookie banner (https://commission.europa.eu/index_fr)

So either: The EU commission is including trackers on their websites. And they should stop OR they acknowledge that it's almost impossible to build a website without some form of tracking that falls under the law, and they should look into the law itself.

So they have work on their plate.
by alistairSH | 2025-10-22 13:11:26+00:00
Did they not have a disaster recovery plan in place? It's not amazing that they got hit with a breach. It's amazing that they couldn't just "nuke from orbit" and start with a day-old snapshot (yeah, that's massively oversimplified, but still, it shouldn't take months and $billions$ to recover either).

And that 40k ghost car doesn't sound realistic. LR only makes ~400k vehicles/year. That 10% of their annual output got "lost" beggars belief.
by zahlman | 2025-10-22 13:11:46+00:00
This is all commonly-highlighted stuff that rarely actually causes gotchas and doesn't give particularly deep insight into the language design. (It also assumes CPython and is specific to its implementation details, but everyone does that anyway — especially since the reference implementation is pretty much the only language spec we get.) Current LLMs could probably one-shot this entire document.

I'm also not a fan of using a brand-new repo with just a README.md to publish content like this. GitHub provides actual page hosting for a reason; it's disappointing to see 'github.com' (rather than 'username.github.io') in the URL and then get some random thoughts rather than an actual useful project (or at least an interactive demo).

Actually, this shouldn't be in Show HN at all, as there is nothing to try out here except by copying and pasting code snippets (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).
Show HN: Apaai Protocol – an open standard for accountable AI
by fpvidigas | 2025-10-22 13:12:23+00:00
We just released *APAAI Protocol v1.0* — a vendor-neutral accountability layer for autonomous and agentic systems.

As AI agents start to act (not just generate text), we need a consistent way to record what they intended, what policy governed them, and what evidence shows what actually happened.

*APAAI* defines a minimal HTTP/JSON spec for this loop: *Action → Policy → Evidence*

It’s model-agnostic, open-source (Apache-2.0), and already shipping SDKs in *TypeScript* and *Python*.

Example use case: An agent proposes to send an email → requires approval → submits evidence of delivery — all recorded in a standardized, auditable format.

Docs & spec: https://apaaiprotocol.org TypeScript SDK: https://www.npmjs.com/package/apaai-ts-sdk Python SDK: https://pypi.org/project/apaai GitHub: https://github.com/apaAI-labs

We’re opening the *RFC process* and would love feedback from the HN community — especially anyone building *agents*, *AI infra*, or working on *governance and observability* for autonomous systems.

Thoughts on the data model? Should “accountability as code” become a first-class design pattern for agentic AI?
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-22 13:12:42+00:00
For the transgressions that the current generation had no influence in and can't meaningfully change, yeah, I think they mostly get a pass.

Though "zero points" is also probably a bit too harsh. I think Americans should be proud of their peoples' past accomplishments, but should recognize that they're distinct from their own accomplishments and kind of irrelevant to the current race.

The current space race is really just about the US trying to show that it isn't in decline, that it's still more capable than a rising China. So, "my grandfather was alive when America set foot on the Moon, so we've already won!" is kind of a sad statement.
by gmuslera | 2025-10-22 13:12:46+00:00
Part of the problem of getting +/- 8C of different global temperature is the speed of it. https://xkcd.com/1732/ shows a timeline that goes back to 20000 AC, where global average temperature was like 5ºC less. There has been changes, but also adaptation. Now in less than 200 years we increased 2ºC, and the speed of change has increased, it was around 10 years ago when we reached 1ºC over preindustrial times, and now we are at 1.5ºC.

And without adaptation you get mass extinction. And the human system may be pretty fragile against the disappearance or deep change of key components of the global system.
by jraph | 2025-10-22 13:12:59+00:00
> My least-favourite is websites with the "Pay or OK" model

Which doesn't respect the GDPR.

> As an aside, is anyone else getting LLM-writing-style vibes from the linked page, or is that just me?

The multiple 3-item lists with the item's first sentence in bold, the logic not perfectly following from one sentence to another, the numerous comparisons/metaphores, the em dashes, and the general, distinctive tone are certainly clues.
by a4isms | 2025-10-22 13:13:01+00:00
Rules in sports are always being adjusted, and participants are always looking for (barely legal) ways to get around them.

Example: In cycling, they banned narrow handlebars. There's an aero advantage, but it was seen as a safety problem. So cyclists canted their brake hoods way inside, rested their hands on the brake hoods, and got an aero advantage.

And now there's a rule about brake hoods. Laws are meant only be living things that change as society changes, and also change to patch what we might call "exploits." You are perfectly correct: It's never one and done, it's an ongoing process.
by bariumbitmap | 2025-10-22 13:13:30+00:00
This was posted a few months ago but is too old for new comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43630381

I got a score of 15.6/20 on my second try, which is apparently a "Mathematical Genius". However the difficulty is very uneven because of the randomness of the questions. A few features I might like to see:

1. Adjustable timer. 10 seconds is very fast, it encourages a gut-based answer rather than thinking through the options.

2. A mode that scores based on correctness, not speed. Currently you can get all questions correct but still get a score lower than 20 because of insufficient speed.

3. Better mathematical correctness in graphing. For example, traditionally the natural log function ln(x) diverges at zero is is undefined for x < 0, but this plot shows a symmetric natural log function.

4. Option to zoom in and out of the graph. This is more challenging from a UI perspective but sometimes it's essential for distinguishing functions.

5. Customizable questions sets instead of random questions. I realize this is more complex, but the random questions are often just too easy, e.g. when the graph is obviously sinusoidal and only one of the functions is a sine function, but the main appeal of GeoGuessr is user-submitted maps.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-10-22 13:13:44+00:00
Glossing over "is academia commonly fraudulent" as rather too easy a target, LLMs do tend to write much better than people in languages said people don't really know.

If I wrote the above in Spanish it would be extremely difficult to guess what I'm trying to say. If I ask an llm to translate it, some of the ideas would get across.
by GJim | 2025-10-22 13:13:57+00:00
> companies should be banned from referring to selling off your data to random spam companies as "sharing with partners."

They are under the GDPR.

If you ask for my data, you must do so fairly and tell me what you are using it for.

In the examples you site, if you read the small print "sharing with partners" will go on to say advertising 'letting you know about products and services' and other such shite.
by sneak | 2025-10-22 13:14:00+00:00
They removed the admin UI from the web frontend in the f/oss version some months ago, too. I updated for security reasons and they'd stripped the functionality out. It's a jerk move.

MinIO is open source cosplay.

I wrote this back in July: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/minio-are-assholes/
by chinathrow | 2025-10-22 13:14:41+00:00
Why is this flagged?

I'm a long term Linux user (since 2003) and I have a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad X1 13th Gen sitting here with a blank boot medium and I have to decide what to install as an OS now. Ubuntu again? Fedora maybe due to more recent drivers? Omarchy due to - why not?

That article helped - the flagging? Not so much.
by helpfulclippy | 2025-10-22 13:14:44+00:00
Strong hashes aren’t so useful for you the individual with a high entropy per-site password… they’re useful for responsible organizations trying to proactively mitigate the impact of a future data breach on users with bad password habits (which is a lot of users).

If ClownCo gets hacked that’s bad. If ClownCo gets hacked and discloses millions of sets of credentials, it is now enabling a new wave of credential stuffing attacks.
by kragen | 2025-10-22 13:14:52+00:00
It's always possible. But New Century was originating tens of billions of dollars of mortgages per year, and at first glance, PrimaLend seems to have been closer to 0.1 billion dollars in car loans per year.

So I'd put this on the Candidate Apocalypse Etiologies List somewhere below the Trump tariffs, the Mutual Defense Treaty, TSMC, the Ukraine war, OpenAI, Gaza, the ASS buying drones, and Elon Musk's mental health.
by toddnni | 2025-10-22 13:15:01+00:00
Have been looking for minio alternative for long already. Found versitygw lately and would like to share the joy. It feels very promising. Fits to many small or lab use cases.

It does not actually solve the trickiness of managing large storage but relies on the backend (that is usually fs like zfs in small setups).

However, seems to be quite new project plus the risk, that the owning company takes it to bad direction, is there too.

https://github.com/versity/versitygw/
by westurner | 2025-10-22 13:15:25+00:00
pytest has a --pdb flag:

pip install pdbpp pytest --pdb

pdbpp: https://github.com/pdbpp/pdbpp

pytest docs > How to handle test failures > Using pdb — The Python Debugger with pytest > Dropping to pdb on failures: https://docs.pytest.org/en/stable/how-to/failures.html
by mdhb | 2025-10-22 13:15:38+00:00
I mostly agree.. there’s a couple of very specific scenarios where maybe something like knockd makes sense I think but they are all scenarios where you’re doing things covertly, not as a general authentication mechanism.

As a side note I just happen to be reading a book at the moment that contains a fairly detailed walkthrough of the procedure required to access the Russian SVRs headquarters in New York in 1995.

Think of this as an analogue version and in no way a perfect analogy but it does include a step that has more or less the same security properties as this… anyways here’s a relevant quote:

“After an SVR officer passed through various checkpoints in the mission’s lower floors, he would take an elevator or stairs to an eighth-floor lobby that had two steel doors. Neither had any identifying signs.

One was used by the SVR, the other by the GRU. The SVR’s door had a brass plate and knob, but there was no keyhole. To open the door, the head of the screw in the lower right corner of the brass plate had to be touched with a metal object, such as a wedding ring or a coin.

The metal would connect the screw to the brass plate, completing an electrical circuit that would snap open the door’s bolt lock and sometimes shock the person holding the coin.The door opened into a small cloakroom. No jackets or suit coats were allowed inside the rezidentura because they could be used to conceal documents and hide miniature cameras.

SVR officers left their coats, cell phones, portable computers, and all other electronic devices in lockers. A camera videotaped everyone who entered the cloakroom. It was added after several officers discovered someone had stolen money from wallets left in jackets. Another solid steel door with a numeric lock that required a four-digit code to open led from the cloakroom into the rezidentura.

A male secretary sat near the door and kept track of who entered, exited, and at what times. A hallway to the left led to the main corridor, which was ninety feet long and had offices along either side. ”

Excerpt from Comrade J by Pete Earley

As another funny side note… I once discovered years ago that the North Koreans had a facility like this that they used to run a bunch of financing intelligence operations using drugs in Singapore where I was at the time and thought it would be funny to go and visit. It was in a business complex rather than a dedicated diplomatic facility from memory. But as I recall it was a similar scenario of unmarked door with no keyhole.
by pirates | 2025-10-22 13:16:27+00:00
As one of the “self taught software engineers that made a great career for myself”, I think you are correct. Maybe not so much in the “better or worse” sense, but there are definitely moments in my “real job” where I can recognize that the thing we’re talking about or working on is something that my colleagues had formal instruction on and I didn’t, and usually in cases like this they’re better suited to talk about and work though the problem. To me the biggest difference is that they had the time/opportunity to work on a huge breadth of different problems and develop their pattern matching ability, whereas I only get to work on problems specific to my role/employer, so anything extra I have to learn on my own time. But they already know it.
by serf | 2025-10-22 13:16:32+00:00
>I don't know what the point was, though, given that the context of this discussion is specifically American politics and culture, but good on you.

the point is to exemplify how over-generalized and stupid it is to mention the universal human feelings of xenophobia and paranoia that occur when people witness an adversary during a war-action, land expansion, or anything near those concepts as if it was somehow a uniquely American/Chinese phenomena.

But -- the question asked was 'what will the world-wide discussion look like', not 'How will the Americans respond and feel?'

So, with that in mind, how about an answer to the question asked?

My personal opinion is that there will be a frenzy to remove the groups in power at the moment without much thought of who will fill the vacuum, and then about 40 years of bellyaching from the globe after the cards fall where they may.
by skeezyjefferson | 2025-10-22 13:16:49+00:00
Wasnt this a benefit of the semantic web we were pushing for? Standardized tags exactly for stuff like this? Just another example of the mess that web dev is - trying to coerce a markup language into a fully fledged programming language.

OP has a nice idea but hes short on technical details, which in this case is where the devil resides.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-22 13:17:13+00:00
> It's an Open Source project - I don't understand what people are complaining about

MinIO is a commercial company that provides some open source components and some paid components and services.

This meme where nobody is allowed to be unhappy with anything when the phrase “open source” is involved is getting old. In the span of two paragraphs your comment discovered why this is frustrating people: They have been providing certain things in the open source leg of their operation and then yanking them and stuffing them under a very expensive commercial leg later, after people have begun using them.

Being upset about that is reasonable and understandable, even if it triggers some of the people who believe “open source” means nobody is allowed to be unhappy with anything, ever.