MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nurettin | 2025-10-15 12:21:16+00:00
> scraping 70 million retailer web pages every single day. This is a legitimate and massive source of automated traffic.

Why do they do this? For vital business intelligence. Major retailers like Amazon do not always notify vendors when they run out of stock. So, brands pay for data scraping services to monitor their own products. These "good bots" check inventory levels, see who is winning the "buy box," ensure product descriptions are correct, and track search result rankings. They even scrape from different locations and mobile device profiles to analyze what banner ads are being shown to different audiences.

_---------------_

Guilty as charged. You quickly learn to bypass bot detection measures and create a fully automated system to gather all this information just because amazon doesn't provide it in an accessible manner causing harm to businesses who need this intel and their own internet infra.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-10-15 12:21:33+00:00
> Programmers understand software ecosystems…

Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.

> …of which free software is just a subset.

We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.

> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?

Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.

> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity

That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.

I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
by Bender | 2025-10-15 12:21:55+00:00
I would only add to be careful when talking to doctors. There are still doctors that talk in terms of good and bad cholesterol rather than taking a lipid panel and getting a graph of small dense to large buoyant particles within the cholesterol. To make matters worse many of them in the USA have been corrupted by financial incentives to push statins and that is another deep and endless topic all in and of itself.
by gambiting | 2025-10-15 12:22:08+00:00
Oh there was this whole famous case with construction of HS2(Britain's high speed rail project) - a farmer was offered £2M(!!!) compensation for the project requiring that a single pylon was going to be constructed on his land. Outrageous, right? But get this - he successfully sued the government saying 2M is not enough, and an independent expert valued his losses due the presence of the pylon at twice that if I remember correctly - the government(the taxpayers) had to pay.
by DrScientist | 2025-10-15 12:22:26+00:00
Sure is more complex - but as I said key thing is to define those interfaces in a way that can be networked - you are just passing data not behaviour and the calls could fail to complete.

In terms of timing the call is synchronous and either succeeds or fails - the details like timeouts/ asynch underhood etc are hidden by the proxy - in the end the call succeeds or fails and if you surface that as a synchronous call you hide the underlying complexity from the caller.

A bit like opening a file and writing to it - most platform apis throw exceptions - and your code has to deal with it.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-15 12:22:37+00:00
I rarely go on facebook. Checking now.

Guns, Scifi, Religion, Tech, and lots and lots of jokes/memes.

Besides every other post being an AD, nothing objectionable at all.

Lets talk about how the algorithm works. It gives you want you want, what you interact with. On occasion offer things that other people like your profile do like. If you dont like something, you click the 3 dots and say 'not interested' and it goes away.

I'm guessing you dont have a brand new account where it's attempting to guess what you like; you interact with those things or the people like you do interact with those. You probably like to post on MAGA related things to tell them how terrible they are or whatever; but the algorithm doesnt consider if you're taking it positively or negatively.

>why do we accept this shit? Also engineers working in AI, is that really the world you want to build?

Working as intended. You will keep getting what you want. You have to do some soul searching of why this is happening to you.

There is debate to be had, often we cant see the big picture or consequences of new innovations.
by hamburgererror | 2025-10-15 12:23:25+00:00
Is there any other way than going through reverse engineering? Projects like LineageOS and others have shown this is really hard.

Why not simply start from scratch and make a truly open source phone? That is, design and build the electronics and the OS that goes on top of it. A bit like an iPhone+iOS but fully open source. Is this dream really unreachable?
by Closi | 2025-10-15 12:23:30+00:00
The counterpoint is 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'?

Sure you might be willing to build the bot to scrape it... but some other competitors won't go to this effort so it still means a bit of information asymmetry and stops some of your competitors poaching customers / employing various marketing tactics to exploit short term shortages or pricing charges etc.
by czhu12 | 2025-10-15 12:23:37+00:00
> Putting a latency-critical API on a stateless edge runtime

Isn’t this the whole point of serverless edge?

It’s understood to be more complex, with more vendor lockin, and more expensive.

Trade off is that it’s better supported and faster by being on the edge.

Why would anyone bother to learn a proprietary platform for non critical, latency agnostic service?
by pqdbr | 2025-10-15 12:24:15+00:00
One more article praising Codex CLI over Claude Code. Decided to give it a try this morning.

A simple task that would have taken literally no more than 2 minutes in Claude Code is, as of now, 9m+ and still "inspecting specific directory", with an ever increasing list of read files, not a single line of code written.

I might be holding it wrong.
by sambeau | 2025-10-15 12:24:29+00:00
This is the main issue. People simply cannot afford to use this extra power. If power was cheap then all kinds of devices would switch to electric, especially heating and cars.

The other issue is that the UK has unpredictable weather and no way to store energy at a grid-level. It can store enough to load balance spikes but there is still nothing to replace the months of gas we once had stored in giant salt chambers (you can thank Liz Truss for decommissioning those).

Without vast amounts of long-term energy storage we will continue to throw away power when we have too much and fire up gas generators when wind power isn't making any (which happens surprisingly often).
by yrro | 2025-10-15 12:25:14+00:00
Yup.

> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.

> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”

> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”

> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.

These people are absolute buffoons.

https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-12-september-2025/
by poszlem | 2025-10-15 12:25:53+00:00
This won’t happen until the immigration issue is resolved one way or another. The moment you introduce an unconditional $1,500 per citizen, the question of who qualifies as a citizen will become even more divisive than it already is.

EDIT: I’d genuinely appreciate it if you could explain why you disagree, instead of just mindlessly downvoting as though I’d said something offensive or inappropriate.
by gambiting | 2025-10-15 12:26:02+00:00
I live about a mile down from two large wind turbines and you can absolutely hear them, especially at night - it's a low droning noise that especially on quiet nights and in the summer when you have your windows open it actually bothers me to a point where I considered selling the house multple times already - but decided that rolling the dice on noise pollution and ending up with something even more annoying just isn't worth it.

>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.

I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
Self hosting mail server: external incoming/outgoing email problems
by tonguim | 2025-10-15 12:26:32+00:00
Good day!

After setting up our own mail server, external emails doesn't come and emails and nor going out.

Mail server was previously hosted by OVH. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.

; ; BIND data file for local loopback interface ; $TTL 604800 @ IN SOA mango.tkangz.sa. admin.tkangz.sa. ( 2025101405 ; Serial 604800 ; Refresh 86400 ; Retry 2419200 ; Expire 604800 ) ; Negative Cache TTL

@ IN NS mango.tkangz.sa. @ IN NS ns.tkangz.sa.

; ----- Serveurs de noms ----- mango IN A 10X.XXX.243.111 ns IN A 10X.XXX.243.112

; ----- Web OVH ------ @ IN A 87.98.154.146 www IN CNAME @

; ----- Email sur Google ----- ;@ IN MX 1 smtp.google.com.

@ IN MX 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. @ IN MX 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. @ IN MX 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. @ IN MX 10 ALT3.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. @ IN MX 10 ALT4.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

_sophie.tkangz.sa. IN TXT "v=SOPHIE1; p=none; rua=mailto:admin@tkangz.sa" @ IN TXT "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ip4:10X.XXX.243.111 ~all"

google._domainkey IN TXT ()

; ----- Service internes ----- pmb IN A 10X.XXX.243.38 gpa IN A 10X.XXX.243.36

; ------ Sous domaine demandés par les partenaires ----- dspace IN A 52.92.8.10

(END)
by nickpp | 2025-10-15 12:26:36+00:00
What you are describing is how governments prop-up incumbents. But this rarely apply to startups, who seldom stand a chance at getting government contracts and the like. Entrepreneurs will ignore those and build the startup from the bottom up, with small customers first.

Of course a less corrupt government could help here, like the x-prize helped SpaceX and electric car subsidies helped Tesla. But that's too much to ask from politicians of most countries.

To actually prevent startups competing and disrupting the market, I maintain that regulations are much more effective: they will prevent entrepreneurs from even thinking of entering and competing highly regulated domains. See the three canonical examples (health care, education and housing) where high prices and scarcity are the name of the game.
by jacknews | 2025-10-15 12:26:39+00:00
Militarily you are right, but remember war is politics by other means.

Thailand's Thaksin is now in jail and his daughter, basically his avatar, has been removed from government. Mission accomplished.

And to get a sense of how powerful this scam industry is in the country, the latest news is of a young Korean murdered after being kidnapped by a scam gang. Korea has responded forcefully, calling out the danger, yet the Cambodian press is now full of accusations that Korea is defaming Cambodia, that they are just as guilty of human-trafficking Cambodian brides, that some Koreans who were 'rescued' from a scam center don't actually want to go home, that the international press are unfairly treating Cambodia ... you know the story by now.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-15 12:27:11+00:00
I think it really depends on what you consider to be a victimless crime. I think nobody considers the same thing both to be a crime and a victimless crime. For example the article discusses adultery. There is obviously a third person harmed there, it only matters whether you care about that enough. Same with drug use. Drug use forces people to do other crimes and also invites people to take drugs that wouldn't otherwise, whether you consider these to be victims is on you of course.
by awongh | 2025-10-15 12:27:17+00:00
I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to marketing and business influencers.

Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked" enough to look real.

Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from your traffic being fake?

You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely)

You pay other publishing networks (maybe adsense?) and the website owners profit from sending fake traffic (maybe true? if the article were really trying to make a case for this, just name them?)

Or, you work inside a company and just want to make your department look good?

I'm not sure I know what the point of this article is besides a click bait title.

Just tell me exactly what the mechanism is for this fake traffic- don't hint at some kind of conspiracy.
by deaux | 2025-10-15 12:27:36+00:00
Ireland felt the external pressure to stop being a US big tech tax haven. But how can we keep those dollars while unloading the negative externalities onto the rest of the EU? I have a great idea - let's pivot to being a US big tech data compliance haven! They'll keep their legal HQ here for sure if we just let them wink wink nudge nudge get away with everything.

Despicable behavior, Ireland should be considered similar to Hungary in their obstruction of EU laws at the cost of everyone else.
by rybosworld | 2025-10-15 12:27:44+00:00
I looked up the definition of age-related and it's true that I'm misusing that term.

My original comment was in reference to the OP's comment:

> I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death.

My point was just that heart disease is primarily not caused by natural aging (the 80% of cases).
by vinishbhaskar | 2025-10-15 12:28:08+00:00
Here’s the full comparison I mentioned:

https://peerlist.io/vinishbhaskar/articles/top-all-in-one-ai...

It covers 9+ all-in-one AI platforms like Geeky.chat, TypingMind, TeamAI, MagAI, Mammouth.ai, WritingMate, Merlin, and Monica, all of which integrate multiple AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others).

Each section highlights key features, reasoning quality, collaboration options, and pricing

basically, how well these platforms perform beyond marketing claims.

Would love to hear which platform (if any) you’ve found most reliable for daily work.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-15 12:28:08+00:00
The poll I referenced on perceptions of criminality was from Gallup. Approval ratings are typically carried out by groups like Cid-Gallup, which is based in Costa Rica. In other words - foreign organizations. And you can also see countless videos on YouTube of people, including Americans, treking the streets of El Salvador and talking to random people about the changes that have happened. Nobody's holding back anything. People love it. This is real. You're obviously going to be able to find stories against it online because it directly contradicts the globalist and Progressive ideology on how to handle criminality. And there are countless groups backing those sort of ideologies with vast sums of money fueling them.

The effects in El Salvador have been so dramatic that you can immediately reject most tales that try to undermine it on a macro level. For instance if it were true that they were only capturing small fries while letting the big fish run unchecked, you wouldn't see this dramatic decline in criminality. The gangs are being completely dismantled. If the gang leaders are or were working as collaborators then that's great! Make people even less motivated to even think about joining gangs when the leaders themselves might be snitches.

I could go into detail about why Putin is popular, but it requires treking back to the 'wild nineties'. I'd love to discuss that if you're interested, but I think it's somewhat tangential to what we're talking about.
by Xelbair | 2025-10-15 12:28:16+00:00
Pharma is miles behind US,

Financial central was mostly London due to favorable local laws.

Nokia fills very small niche now, basically services backbone

Bosch and Siemens predate EU

BWM also, but i wouldn't put it at forefront of innovation with how automotive industry is going.

did you notice that not even a single company you've mentioned is something new, and all of them basically come from "western" side of EU or are already established industries sometimes predating WW1?
by DrScientist | 2025-10-15 12:28:27+00:00
Not sure I understand. What is a distributed monolith?

I'm not suggesting that the distributed bit is still coupled behind the scenes ( ie via a data backend that requires distributed transactions ) - the interaction is through the interface.

In the end you are always going to have code calling code - the key point is to assume these key calls are simply data passing, not behaviour passing, and that they can fail.

What else is need to make something network friendly? ( I'm suggesting that things like retries, load-balancing etc can be hidden as a detail in the network implementation - all you need to surface is succeed or fail ).
by Iolaum | 2025-10-15 12:28:39+00:00
I didn't want to go search for posts and speculation regarding what company maybe available so I asked it the question, and let it search the internet for me, compile the results and give me a speculative answer.

Also speculating on this issue is quite low priority for me that I didn't want to spend actual brain cycles.

Lastly I do try to find new ways to try and test ChatGPT to see how and when it works.
by nomilk | 2025-10-15 12:28:49+00:00
Seems organised crime is taking advantage of less-policed (or lawless) regions in Cambodia and Burma.

The spectre of a similar scam has resulted in lower Chinese tourism to Thailand. Basically Chinese (among other nationalities) tourists were led from the airport by fake immigration staff, put into cars and driven to Burma and forced to work 18 hour days in scam call centers.

A chilling but extremely worthwhile read.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/SOUTHEASTASIA-SCAMS/mypmxwd...
by yilugurlu | 2025-10-15 12:28:50+00:00
These two have resonated with me deeply.

- Eliminated complex caching workarounds and data pipeline overhead

- Simplified architecture from distributed system to straightforward application

We, as developers/engineers (put whatever title you want), tend to make things complex for no reason sometimes. Not all systems have to follow state-of-the-art best practices. Many times, secure, stable, durable systems outperform these fancy techs and inventions. Don't get me wrong, I love to use all of these technologies and fancy stuff, but sometimes that old, boring, monolithic API running on an EC2 solves 98% of your business problems, so no need to introduce ECS, K8S, Serverless, or whatever.

Anyway, I guess I'm getting old, or I understand the value of a resilient system, and I'm trying to find peace xD.
by voodooEntity | 2025-10-15 12:29:46+00:00
As someone who worked with serverless for multiple years (mostly amazon lambda but others too) i can absolutely apporove the authors points.

While it "takes away" some work from you, it adds this work on other points to solve the "artificial induced problems".

Another example i hit was a hard upload limit. Ported an application to a serverless variant, had an import API for huge customer exports. Shouldnt be a problem right? Just setup an ingest endpoint and some background workers to process the data.

Tho than i learned : i cant upload more than 100mb at a time through the "api gateway" (basically their proxy to invoke your code) and when asking if i could change it somehow i just was told to tell our customers to upload smaller file chunks.

While from a "technical" perspective this sounds logical, our customers not gonne start exchanging all their software so we get a "nicer upload strategy".

For me this is comparable with "it works in a vacuum" type of things. Its cool in theory, but as soon it hits reality you will realice quite fast that the time and money you safed on changing from permanent running machines to serverless, you will spend in other ways to solve the serverless specialities.
by epolanski | 2025-10-15 12:29:50+00:00
We have a similar situation in Italy with garbage.

Nobody wants new waste dumps anywhere near (tens of miles) of their own houses, and each time there's an insane amount of blockades and protests.

Bureaucracy gets very messy because towns and provinces and regions (equivalent to less federated us states, more or less) and the central government start having legal disputes over those things that drag decades.
by forinti | 2025-10-15 12:29:51+00:00
This takes me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Your physical experience of something has to be analysed in accordance with your mental model of it in order to attain a diagnosis (in the book it was a motorcycle engine).

My take on this is, especially in regard to debugging IT issues, is that you have to constantly verify and update your mental model (check your premises!) in order to better weed out problems.
by jt2190 | 2025-10-15 12:29:52+00:00
> This is the hidden bot economy.

I still have to hear a compelling argument about why I should use computers “by hand” and ignore these powerful tools. Price checking, comparison shopping, buy when released for sale… All of these things point me to using bots.

This feels a lot less like “fraud” and a lot more like “the world has moved on”. Maybe it’s time to route traffic that looks like bots to a bot-optimized shopping experience.
by tacker2000 | 2025-10-15 12:30:02+00:00
Incredible that these kinds of services were hosted like this.

I guess they never came out of MVP, which could warrant using serverless, but in the end it makes 0 sense to use some slow solution like this for the service they are offering.

Why didnt they go with a self hosted backend right away?

Its funny how nowadays most devs are too scared to roll their own and just go with the cloud offerings that cost them tech debt and actual money down the road.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-10-15 12:30:48+00:00
Compared to say MirageOS, you have access to a "full" unix system. So anything that is available on NetBSD is also available on smolBSD. It's also very easy to use, I tried it and managed to set up a small portable development environment in 5 minutes. You can use SmolBSD to build a full-blown OS should you want to, or just use it to build and distribute an app like you would with docker. It can also be used if you have a serverless-like workload where you need to spin up VMs extremely fast.