MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hiddencost | 2025-10-27 03:34:32+00:00
Uh, it used to be until it was gutted in the last 30 years. Legislation and bureaucracy has been one of the most successful interventions for public health for centuries.

Read about the hole in the ozone layer. Banning lead paint. Read about the invention of public water authorities. Read Silent Spring and read about its aftermath. Look into the history of air pollution and the EPA. These are some of the crown jewels of human history.
by YZF | 2025-10-27 03:35:38+00:00
Right. Having worked on a commercial S3 compatible storage I can tell y'all that there's a lot more to it then just sticking some files on JBOD. It does depend on your specific requirements though. 1.5 FTE over 18 months sounds on the low side for everything you've described.

That said the article seems to be more about an optimization of their pipeline to reduce the S3 usage by holding some objects in memory instead. That's very different than trying to build your own object store to replace S3.
by bmitc | 2025-10-27 03:36:36+00:00
> It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated ourselves.

I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.
by maurycyz | 2025-10-27 03:36:54+00:00
> Do they do any harm

Not to me, but I've known people who have had their sites DDoSed out of existence by the scrapers. On the internet, it's often the smallest sites with the smallest budgets that have the best content, and those are hit the worst.

> They do provide source for material if users asks for it

Not for material they trained on. Those sources are just google results for the question you asked. By nature, they cannot cite the information gathered by their crawlers.

> You still need to pay for the traffic

It's so little traffic my hosting provider doesn't bother billing me for it.

> and serving static content (like text on that website) is way less CPU/disk expensive than generating anything.

Sure, but it's the principle of the thing: I don't like when billion dollar companies steal my work, and then use it to make the internet a worse place by filling it with AI slop/spam. If I can make their lives harder and their product worse for virtually no cost, I will.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-10-27 03:37:13+00:00
I agree with you, but that's not what's happening in this conversation. Nor are any of these services a historical archive, they are ongoing catalogues and your subscription funds new shows, as well as servicing cost.

And let's not feign ignorance by saying the overwhelming vast majority of things being watched are exactly that new content, not 30 year old reruns of Frasier.

EDIT: I apologize, only ~2 seasons of Frasier would extend past copyright. It started airing 1993.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-27 03:38:30+00:00
Agreed. I'd read the manual if there was something I needed from it, but everything is working fine. Yeah I might've rsynced between some local folders once or twice when I could've used git, maybe that was an inelegant approach, but the marginal cost of that blunder was... about as much time I've spent in this thread so whatever.
by ryan_lane | 2025-10-27 03:38:48+00:00
Lowest and fourth got a tax increase. Middle class got a minor tax cut, the middle-upper class got a decent cut, and the upper class got a large cut.

It's also worth noting that the cut in question also had temporary provisions that expired, causing a tax increase for nearly all brackets except the upper class.

There has also been a massive cut in social services, which primarily affect the lowest/fourth brackets, which means they're paying more taxes for fewer services.

It's hard to interpret that "tax cut" in a way that doesn't scream "we're increasing taxes on most, and cutting services, to give the wealthy a tax cut".
by Aurornis | 2025-10-27 03:39:06+00:00
> negative and pearl-clutching...

It's not "pearl clutching" to explain why the feedback you get from this method isn't going to be helpful.

Annoying your focus group and intruding upon their night out isn't the way to get valid advice. It's how you get "please go away" advice when they start telling you anything to de-escalate and finish the task so they can get on with their night

> It won't be coherent, but maybe it doesn't matter.

I don't understand why people are fixated on the idea of gathering user feedback at a bar, even when they admit it's not going to be good advice.

What's even the point of this exercise? Why go to lengths to extract feedback from bar goers if you don't think it matters?
by buu700 | 2025-10-27 03:39:25+00:00
I'd be interested in seeing the results if so. Like someone with $500k to burn just handing it to an AI and telling it to found a startup, including incorporation, vibe coding and deploying a product, publishing a website, bringing on cofounders and/or advisors and/or employees as needed, fundraising, etc.

My guess is finding agentic tooling that could even push the model hard enough to attempt that in earnest would be a problem, and the compute bills would add up quickly, but it would be a very interesting experiment. Probably with hilarious results, but seeing what the actual failure points are would be useful information. Maybe it would actually end up hiring and paying someone to do something insanely illegal.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-27 03:40:07+00:00
You won't get any love for calling it out, but I agree. A lot of hand-wringing goes into discussing "how Steve would handle it" even though that bridge was crossed a long time ago. Apple is not invincible, they're going to be looking for alternative revenue streams as the App Store monopoly becomes less certain and the hardware margins shrink further.
by kelnos | 2025-10-27 03:40:10+00:00
Many people (myself included) enjoy TV shows that have an ongoing story. Ideally we want that story to come to a satisfying end, eventually. It's disappointing when, after watching it for tens or hundreds of hours, the team behind the show delivers a sub-par ending, or no real ending at all.

Sure, there are lots of episodic shows out there where each episode can be enjoyed (or not) on its own, and if the show starts going downhill, you can just stop watching, and it's not that big a deal.

> you dont have to watch things you dont like hoping for a payoff later on.

No, but it's disappointing when I watch something I do like for years, and then the payoff never materializes. Sure, that doesn't erase the enjoyment of watching it over those years, but not getting that payoff feels like leaving us hanging off a ledge.
by int_19h | 2025-10-27 03:40:19+00:00
It did become popular because it was decentralized, but the specific features that this enabled were less about not depending on a central server, and more about being able to work with the same repo locally with ease without having to be online for most operations (as was the case with Subversion etc). Git lets me have a complete local copy of the source with all the history, branches etc in it, so anything that doesn't require looking at the issues can be done offline if you did a sync recently.

The other big point was local branches. Before DVCS, the concept of a "local branch" was generally not a thing. But now you could suddenly create a branch for each separate issue and easily switch between them while isolating unrelated changes.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-27 03:41:42+00:00
I dislike your definition. There are many problems besides economic ones. If you defined "general" to mean "things the economy cares about", then what do you call the sorts of intelligences that are capable of things that the economically relevant ones are not?

A specific key opens a subset of locks, a general key would open all locks. General intelligence, then, can solve all solvable problems. It's rather arrogant to suppose that humans have it ourselves or that we can create something that does.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-27 03:42:48+00:00
Japan is truly impressive on taking an anti-immigration stance because they have numbers already that would be the dream of other countries pushing such perspectives. Off the top of my head there's 0.3% immigration.

It's truly saddening that such a stance can still work when it's likely the average citizen will not encounter an immigrant in their day to day life. a million immigrants is not threatening the jobs of 300m Japanese people.
by com2kid | 2025-10-27 03:44:01+00:00
> computer software generated around $373b in revenue while mobile apps generated around $522b.

What percentage is consumer vs corporate spend in each category? How much of that 373b is SaaS revenue vs local installed apps?

> And here somebody was trying to mock Windows for being adware friendly circa 2005.

The adware in 2005 was actively hostile and infested entire systems. It replaced browsers, search engines, and even injected itself onto every webpage you viewed. In contrast mobile ads are interstitials during game play.
by altcognito | 2025-10-27 03:44:43+00:00
> I think a lot of American liberals have a hatred of him because he's right wing, but we should actually be (at least partially) praising him and pointing out his successes have come from being the exact opposite of Trump on issues like tariffs and deficits.

No liberal (of which I am), should really have looked at the economic policies they had prior to Milei and think they were a good idea. Leftist populism is no better than right populism. Milei may act like a populist politician, but if his policies are sound (I don't know enough to comment) -- then kudos to him.
by kelnos | 2025-10-27 03:44:56+00:00
I have a hard time blaming the earlier services, especially Netflix. They had a great product, and a great catalog. But then all the studios wanted to run their own streaming services, and pulled their content from Netflix. So then Netflix has to go and find ways to retain customers and increase revenue, and once you get into that game, the customer experience is going to suffer.

If the other studios had just left well enough alone and left everything on Netflix, it would have been fine. I'm not a fan of monopolization, but in this case it worked. A better model would be compulsory licensing under RAND terms. Then every studio would be required to license all their content to every streaming service, and then the streaming services would actually have to compete on quality of experience.
by jonway | 2025-10-27 03:45:27+00:00
Tesla is married to the designs because of the way that they’re manufactured.

For example Tesla uses a very large press to make the Y monocoque body in one or two pieces. They get a lot of their manufacturing capability this way, reducing assembly costs and weld time, but then they do weird stuff like bolting the control are inside the passenger wheel well interior under the carpet. This kind of stuff isn’t replicable , each vehicle is for the most part a siloed manufacturing process

This is fine for a one off model, but now the manufacturing process is bespoke across the board. Any other maker can switch out parts of the line and make a different vehicle, Tesla needs to redesign the process, supply new assemblies, get another Gigafactory Press from Idra Group, and then retrain everybody. So they don’t.

Instead you get Full Self Driving.

Pretty much every Tesla product has been seen more than a decade ago (cybertruck was first discussed in think 2014) except the Semi, which doesn’t exist, but had lots of press regardless.
by eru | 2025-10-27 03:45:29+00:00
Yes, I encourage my co-workers, when pushing to a common repo, to use `$user/$whatever` exactly to have their own namespace. The main selling point I'm making is that it makes cleanup of old branches easier, and less conflict-prone.

Tangentially related: when you have multiple local checkouts, often `git worktree` is more convenient than having completely independent local repository. See https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-27 03:47:27+00:00
> I dare you to define what you mean by waste.

I'll just go with the dictionary:

>to allow to be used inefficiently or become dissipated

So, why are we bailing out Argentina, or bombing the South American gulfs? We can't be efficient if we can't even explain our reasoning. I've heard very little reasoning from the administration.

The best I heard was "we're hitting drug dealers". Even if I believed that, pending hundreds of billions to attack boats with drugs on them sounds horribly inefficient. Drugs are not an immediate threat to people and we have many methods through negotiation to simply limit/stop such imports.

I've heard zero justifications anywhere on the Argentina issue. It seems even many republicans do not like this approach.
by ryan_lane | 2025-10-27 03:47:59+00:00
This is why I say it's propaganda.

The same underlying service is being done. It hasn't been cut. It's been shifted from a government service, to a private industry. The government pays roughly the same amount they were previously paying (or in a lot of cases slightly more, with the promise of paying less in the future), the private company provides the service as cheaply as they can, and takes a cut of the cost for profit, benefiting a small number of people, while providing a worse service level for tax payers.

This isn't a capitalism vs socialism thing. My issue with it is that privatization is blatant corruption sold as "capitalism". There's no capitalism here, because there's no competition, outside of the bidding on the contract. Competing on who can provide the cheapest service doesn't improve the service; in fact, it reduces the service quality to maximize profit. Reducing service quality to maximize profit would be fine, from a capitalism point of view, if others were offering the same service to the customer.
by phildenhoff | 2025-10-27 03:48:48+00:00
For those coming to this thread after it was scrubbed, the author unfortunately felt they had to shut the project down after being pressured by their employer. The name is redacted and the website shut down.

For what it's worth, commentary from others on the JJ Discord suggested that this could not be a legally binding requirement as the author is located in California. California has laws that prevent employers from controlling employees inventions outside of work hours when using their own devices: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/labor-code/lab-sect-2870/
by mjr00 | 2025-10-27 03:49:45+00:00
> Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. And no weird network issues to debug.

There may be some additional features that S3 has over a direct filesystem write to a SSD in your closet. The people paying for cloud spend are paying for those features.
by rramadass | 2025-10-27 03:50:22+00:00
Nice, thank you.

My introduction to this subject was through Harald Welte's work on OpenMoko (i still have an old one lying around somewhere) but after the explosion of iPhones/Android phones have not kept apace. Here is Harald's old but still informative presentation Anatomy of smartphone hardware: Dissecting contemporary cellphone hardware - https://media.ccc.de/v/25c3-3008-en-anatomy_of_smartphone_ha...

Also you might find Roger Ye's old book Embedded Programming with Android: Bringing Up an Android System from Scratch pretty useful.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-27 03:51:36+00:00
Might this not be a consequence of how "we" were raised? In the past there were 18 year olds who were successful and responsible leaders of nations. Marcus Aurelius became emperor at 16! My parent just wanted me to go to college and earn money so I grew up with a rather 1-dimensional and hedonistic perspective on life.

I'll be encouraging my children to have children as early as reasonably possible. In part it's because of greed - I want to see those grandkids, and maybe even remotely possibly great grandkids before I die, but it's also because it's what I wish I had done in hindsight. Having children has not only been the joy and pride of my life, but it also gave my life much more meaning and direction. In any case, I also think it's completely appropriate for grandparents to play a significant role in the raising of children.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-27 03:52:17+00:00
> Context switching is virtually free, comparable to a function call.

If you’re counting that low, then you need to count carefully.

A coroutine switch, however well implemented, inevitably breaks the branch predictor’s idea of your return stack, but the effect of mispredicted returns will be smeared over the target coroutine’s execution rather than concentrated at the point of the switch. (Similar issues exist with e.g. measuring the effect of blowing the cache on a CPU migration.) I’m actually not sure if Zig’s async design even uses hardware call/return pairs when a (monomorphized-as-)async function calls another one, or if every return just gets translated to an indirect jump. (This option affords what I think is a cleaner design for coroutines with compact frames, but it is much less friendly to the CPU.)

So a foolproof benchmark would require one to compare the total execution time of a (compute-bound) program that constantly switches between (say) two tasks to that of an equivalent program that not only does not switch but (given what little I know about Zig’s “colorless” async) does not run under an async executor(?) at all. Those tasks would also need to yield on a non-trivial call stack each time. Seems quite tricky all in all.
by kragen | 2025-10-27 03:52:26+00:00
There's no contradiction between year-over-year growth and nine months of economic decline; year-over-year figures also average in the three months before those nine. Six months, if you are looking at YoY figures for June.

However, I may have been tricked. https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/pib_09_250... says the official statistic is that the de-seasonalized GDP grew 0.9% in the first quarter and fell 0.1% in the second quarter, so even if the third quarter is down (the official statistics aren't out yet) it's only the second consecutive quarter of negative growth on a cyclically adjusted basis.

I can't find the non-cyclically-adjusted data.

0.8% growth for the first half of the year is very far from "rebound[ing] pretty spectacularly" but it's no recession. But it all depends on whether the 3Q results are -0.9% or +0.9%. Maybe they'll release the report now that the election is over.

Articles like https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/09/17/la-probabilidad-... are about near-future predictions, not established facts.
by Fnoord | 2025-10-27 03:59:10+00:00
We had Dilan Yeşilgöz here in NL, minister of justice and leader of the liberal party VVD (right wing). She's an immigrant, born in Ankara, of Kurdish ancestry. She lied about immigrant subsequent travelers (which she is herself!) being a huge issue, and the government fell because of this issue. Turns out it is 400 people per year. I don't know what it is. Self-hate? Rules for thee, not for me?
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-27 03:59:57+00:00
>> No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services.

> One misconfigured .htaccess file for example, could result in leaking files.

I don't think you are making a compelling case here, since both scenarios result in an undesirable exposure. Unless your point is both cloud services and local file systems can be equally exploited?
by runarberg | 2025-10-27 04:00:27+00:00
I am unimpressed, and I don‘t think there is any crisis (other then the lack of consumer protection around these products, copyright, and the amount of energy it takes running these system during a global warming crisis).

If you look at a calculator you will quickly find it is much better then a human in any of the operations that have been programmed into the calculator, and has been since the 1960s. Since the 1960s the operations programmed into your average calculator has increased by several orders of magnitude. The digital calculator sure is impressive, and useful, but there is no crisis. Even in the world outside computing, a bicycle can outperform an human runner easily, yet there is no mobility crisis as a result. ChatGPT is very good at predicting language. And in quite a few subject matters it may be better than your average human in predicting said language. But not nearly as good as a car is to a runner, nor even as good as a chess computer is to a grand master. But if you compare ChatGPT to an expert in the subject, the expert is much much much better then the language model. In these tasks a calculator is much more impressive.
by jrowen | 2025-10-27 04:00:50+00:00
Yeah I mean it's a huge company that has many heads and I'm not trying to say that they've never done anything unethical or taken missteps to be corrected. But on the whole, the evilness or dangerousness to the health and well-being of (for example) American citizens of what you describe pales in comparison to so many bigger problems that are facing this country (homelessness, medical care, wealth inequality, authoritarianism, bigotry, the military-industrial complex, supporting foreign genocides, the list goes on...).

Why should the average American give a shit about profiles being built and data being shared with governments? Virtually all of the danger of that is so hypothetical and far removed from the real terrors that many people are facing (please don't pull up an example of a greyhat-type individual that arguably wrongfully got caught up).

In any case, I think a trillion dollar company probably doesn't need defending.

So you just want a punching bag to bitch at? I'm not doing it for their sake, I'm doing it for yours. Crusading against Google, which has actually provided a lot of value to a lot of people and continues to do so, feels a bit myopic to me.
by photonthug | 2025-10-27 04:01:26+00:00
I think the TT has to be understood as explicitly adversarial, and increasingly related to security topics, like interactive proof and side channels. (Looking for guard-rails is just one kind of information leakage, but there's lots of information available in timing too.)

If you understand TT to be about tricking the unwary, in what's supposed to be a trusting and non-adversarial context, and without any open-ended interaction, then it's correct to point out homework-cheating as an example. But in that case TT was solved shortly after the invention of spam. No LLMs needed, just markov models are fine.
by anon7000 | 2025-10-27 04:01:51+00:00
It’s true. It’s also great that we have companies that want to do better. All it takes is a board & executive who don’t care for public good, but only for short term profit, and the entire mission of the company goes up in flames. And since profit is essentially the only thing that executives & boards are allowed to care about, it’s essentially inevitable unless the company founders stay laser focused on their mission, never take on arbitrary investors, and even consider PBCs.

VC-backed companies in the tech space have an especially horrid track record on this stuff. I was reading about how cool Blueprint seems as a company, but couldn’t help thinking “at least until they get bought out or fucked by investors”

Which is exactly why the government should be involved. Companies simply do not have incentives to protect humans in almost any way without the government stepping in. It’ll always be cheaper to fuck humans over, and always more expensive to do right by them.