MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dahart | 2025-10-08 14:32:08+00:00
I could agree that advertising is ‘always manipulative’ in the sense that, of course, it always seeks to sell you something and hope you’re swayed into buying. Most of it isn’t secretly or overtly manipulative, most of it is someone saying out loud “here’s my thing, buy it”.

> There are no honest advertisers. Only scum.

That’s a step too far, IMO, and before saying that you should at least reflect on how some advertising somewhere likely benefits you. There are many kinds of advertising. Advertising is not necessarily dishonest. If you work for a for-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a non-profit company, your company probably advertises. If you work for a government agency, your org probably advertises. Advertising is any form of letting people know you or your services or goods exist. If you’re only talking about a subset of that, we should discuss how you’re defining advertising.

We are chatting on the website of a venture capital company. This very forum you’re using is a subtle advertisement, and a significant portion of the chatter here is about how to start a company, including marketing and advertising. The type of ad/marketing that HN is is neither annoying nor manipulative.

If you ever start your own company - and I recommend it - that’s when you learn the fact that advertising is both absolutely necessary and fairly difficult to do well. If you ever do anything in public, announcing it is advertising. The vast majority of companies advertise, as do many government and non-profit and public-interest organizations, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Advertising is a huge part of the business model that funds the arts in the US, and without it, we’d have a lot fewer plays, dancing, and music.
by troyvit | 2025-10-08 14:32:42+00:00
I work for a local public radio station under NPR. First the funny part: public media stations are adamant that those aren't "ads" but are "sponsorships", as advertising would break their mission of being a non-commercial entity free from commercial influence. They get pretty granular with their rules in this regard. For instance you probably won't hear mention of pricing or subscription models in the messages because that crosses a line.

As a result we don't charge much for sponsorships. We still make money off of them, but it's small compared to what we receive from donors. IOW that flaw is our greatest strength: we aren't answerable to advertisers and only to our listeners.

Getting on my soapbox, when you see deals like ABC and Paramount licking Trump's boots, it's because they are deeply, deeply invested in those commercial interests. Many of those extend beyond advertising to trying to please the state and get merger approvals from the FCC, but in the end, for those guys it all comes down to revenue. That's important to keep in mind when you're looking at what they think is important to show you.

We're not perfect that's for sure, but we at least don't have to pander to advertisers.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-08 14:32:49+00:00
People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or better at business, or have better product ideas. They're generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went to the right prep school and college, they were friends with the right people already in the executive class, they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to retirement.
by tastyfreeze | 2025-10-08 14:32:58+00:00
The Leviathan cannot be controlled. It hungers for power and control. People in positions of power are deceived into thinking that if they just had a little more power they could fix so many things. The Leviathan grows. The people are crushed.

Our desire for power feeds the Leviathan. To prevent this power must be diffuse.
by kakacik | 2025-10-08 14:33:32+00:00
You are right, but also expect some high noble goals from russian leadership. It was supposed to be an easy land grab, a very valuable land grab full of heavy industry and literal gigatons of natural gas. There was never a rich greedy person who didn't want more. And lets not forget they weren't that far from success in first days - if they won Hostomel airport, Kyiv would probably fall and with it the rest would be a domino effect.

Especially given how russian elites are just several pyramids structured (and behaving) exactly like typical mafia. They only go for themselves, screw the rest. They only think now and maybe tomorrow, long term planning ain't a strong point of decision makers to be polite. Nihilism all around, to the very top. The whole war became purely an ego game, emotional stupidity of little boys who simply refuse to lose face (and thus life and legacy) even when colossal fuckup they created is right in their faces all the time.

But is is actually colossal fuckup to them? No it isn't, they get some international hate but plight of commoners is completely irrelevant to them, and who cares when you still have billions all around the globe. Also don't underestimate the capacity of russian population to just quietly accept brutal oppression and go on, its not something west can fully grok. Life of a human being has no value there, that's still the case as it was.,
by jotaen | 2025-10-08 14:33:38+00:00
> I'm sorry but this reads like AI slop. Or maybe it's not AI slop, it's just regular human-generated slop, but regardless: it's useless.

> For one: it's intentionally completely unverifiable. Sure, maybe the writer's not brave enough to break their NDA by sharing names. But it's also convenient: nobody can ever poke holes in the story, or add their own context to it. The story just gets to live on its own and earn internet karma regardless of whether it's at all true.

I’m not sure why this would be surprising: it’s a personal story shared on a blog, not an investigative article in a newspaper.

I also don’t think it helps calling everything “AI slop” these days only if one doesn’t like it for some reason.
by draga79 | 2025-10-08 14:33:45+00:00
I've modified this sentence, I hope it's clearer now:

They had already received a proposal - expensive but, when compared to similar offers made to other organizations, apparently reasonable — for a managed service hosted by an external provider and based on an open source mail stack. The company offered a managed version with its own proprietary additions and enterprise support.

The catch? While such pricing had become almost "normal" in the market, it was still wildly inflated considering what was actually being delivered. Agency A already had solid infrastructure - reputable IP classes, redundant datacenters, everything running smoothly. We had built and maintained that environment for years, and it was still performing perfectly.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-10-08 14:34:43+00:00
Last summer a friend needed help building a huge home backup system, and though I had no real experience with Synology, it was the only brand I was familiar with and some Googling indicated that no other commercial product seems close. A DIY box — TrueNAS or whatever — is out of the question, this friend isn't technical.

I had heard about the Synology HD policy thing, but had forgotten when I ordered the drives. By the time they arrived, the need was pressing and I had no window to exchange the drives, so I had to just hack the damn system.

Now I have to go out of town to unhack the damn thing so I can be sure nothing I did interferes with future updates.

This is the polar opposite of the experience I was expecting. This foolishness cost me a lot of time and is about to cost more.
by meganvs | 2025-10-08 14:34:51+00:00
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by N70Phone | 2025-10-08 14:35:04+00:00
It seemed quite the opposite. That you knew exactly what you were saying, but using weasel words to imply ICE was acting above board without stating any falsehoods that might be challenged.

The rhetorical trick of my reply being that it forces you to either address to the meat of the subject, or leave the statement uncontested.

But congratulations, conceding the argument rather than ousting yourself as a fascist was the better choice.
by trod1234 | 2025-10-08 14:35:07+00:00
One must naturally make assumptions when responding to something that is poorly defined or communicated. That's just how it is. That's an issue for the original poster, not the responder.

The terminology of AI has a strong link with LLMs/GenAI. Quite reasonable.

As for code/architecture/infrastructure I like those things too. You do have to shape your communications to the audience you are talking to though. A lot of the products have eliminated the demand for such jobs, and its a false elimination so there will be an overcorrection later in a whipsaw, but by that time I'll have changed careers because the jobs weren't there. I'm an architect, with 10+ years of experience, not a single job offer in 2 years with tens of thousands of submissions in that time.

If there is no economic opportunity you have to go where the jobs are. When executives play stupid games based in monopoly to drive wages down, they win stupid prizes.

Sometime around 2 years is the max time-frame before you get brain drain for these specialized fields, and when that happens those people stop contributing to the overall public parts of the sector entirely. They take their expertise, and use it for themselves only, because that is the only value it can provide and there's no winning when the economy becomes delusional and divorced from reality.

You have AI eliminating demand for specialized labor that requires at least 5 years of experience to operate competently, AI flooding the communication space with jammed speech (for hiring through a mechanism similar to RNA interference), and you have professional certificate providers retiring all benefits, and long-lasting certificates that prove competency on top of the coordinated layoffs by big tech in the same time period. Eliminating the certificate path as a viable option for the competent but un-accredited through university.

You've got a dead industry. Its dead, but it doesn't know it yet. Such is the problem with chaotic whipsaws and cascading failures that occur on a lag. By the time the problem is recognized, it will be too late to correct (because of hysteresis).

Such aggregate stupidity in collapsing the labor pool is why there is a silent collapse going on in the industry, and why so many people cannot find work.

The level of work that can be expected now in such places because of such ill will by industry is abyssal.

Given such fierce loss and arbitrarily enforced competition, who in their right mind would actually design resilient infrastructure properly; knowing it will chug away for years without issue after they lay you off with no intent towards maintenance (making money all that time).

A time is fast approaching where you won't find the people competent enough to know how to do the job right, at any price.
by im3w1l | 2025-10-08 14:35:08+00:00
But he is absolutely right about that. There is in humans a sort of essence. We can't currently fully pin it down, but it is something related to our intelligence, to our feelings, to our consciousness, and to our souls. This is worth preserving.

Then there are these many other things: our skin colors, our two legged locomotion, having five fingers, lungs that breathe air. These things are not required, and could be improved our replaced without losing who we are.

You could imagine fully replacing biological humans with purely electronic robots, but such a thing is not possible at our current poor level of understanding of our essence. There is simply too high risk of losing part of it.

But in the far future with super-intelligent robots and/or genetically engineered post-humans, what could the role of a current-human even be? He would be a living fossil. A circus animal novelty, a pet? A primitive indigenous people with Terra as their reservation?
by bri3d | 2025-10-08 14:35:11+00:00
Whatever silly OTP implementation is involved is 99.9% irrelevant to unlocking a phone, and OTP for root-of-trust has been in use in phones for 15+ years anyway.

Maybe we use some hardware-level trick to get to some protected firmware initially to reverse engineer it, but almost universally it's what reads the state of the fuses (or something after it) that actually gets exploited. That's changing, too, but in general very slowly and at at the pace of hardware manufacturers learning how to make software (aka, glacial with a few notable exceptions).
by whimsicalism | 2025-10-08 14:36:00+00:00
Given what we now know about backmigration and intermixing (particularly with Denisovans), it's really not coherent to say any "out of" theory is the Truth.

Sure, modern homo sapiens outside of Africa are all descendants of a founding group that left Africa, but they are also descendants of hominids who returned to Africa from elsewhere as well as local hominid populations that had left Africa far earlier (like Neanderthals and Denisovans).
by troyvit | 2025-10-08 14:36:10+00:00
I disagree with you but damn I don't get the downvotes. Every news org has an angle, and that angle often (but not always) follows revenue. I like to believe that NPR's angle follows the revenue they generate from their listeners. All that said, I don't listen to them either and only occasionally read the site. The best public radio news comes from the local reporters anyway.
by lpcvoid | 2025-10-08 14:36:31+00:00
Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well.

Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology.

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.3/leds/leds-class.html
by Citizen8396 | 2025-10-08 14:36:40+00:00
This adds complexity and the added questions of how much you really trust vendors to handle it correctly.

After setting them up, I store one or more at various other locations. The core services people use them for rarely change, and adoption outside of those important services is slow. Even if you only kept one at home and one on your person at all times, this might mean a key would survive something like a house fire.

If given the choice between a hardware token and a passkey, I would prefer the former since it is almost impossible for it to be tampered with (especially without physical access to it).

I do see your point about HSMs and see why people would want such features (especially if there are multiple interested parties involved).
by stonemetal12 | 2025-10-08 14:36:46+00:00
> a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, .... their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave

Isn't that a contradictory position? Locking in raises the cost of disloyalty, loyal customers (by definition) don't need to be locked in.

You only need to lock in loyal customers if you are planning on turning customer hostile.
by nilirl | 2025-10-08 14:36:51+00:00
That's setting up a straw man.

By framing an argument against semantics or social obedience, you're ignoring self-implicating behavior; you're intentionally ignoring people's needs.

Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" instead of "Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper, this is no time to consider how I treat other people."
by perlgeek | 2025-10-08 14:37:20+00:00
Companies should create value, and capture a fraction of that value.

What Synology did was trying to significantly increase the fraction of value they captured, at the cost of their customers, who would have to pay that, and without providing extra value for their customers.

This is not only a a bad deal for customers, it also triggers our sense of injustice.

The best companies create value, and capture only a part of it, and leave other parts of the value for both customers and partners/suppliers.
by Bjorkbat | 2025-10-08 14:37:26+00:00
I think people underestimate the degree to which fun matters when it comes to productivity. If something isn’t fun then I’ll likely put it off. A 15 minute task can become hours, maybe days long, because I’m going to procrastinate on doing it.

If managing a bunch of AI agents is a very un-fun way to spend time, then I don’t think it’s the future. If the new way of doing this is more work and more tedium, then why the hell have we collectively decided this is the new way to work when historically the approach has been to automate and abstract tedium so we can focus on what matters?

The people selling you the future of work don’t necessarily know better than you.
by sjm-lbm | 2025-10-08 14:37:36+00:00
Is this true though? Texas has had some well-publicized failures (well, really one major one), but as best as I can tell they are more or less middle of the pack on grid reliability[1].

I mean, you'll need a backup generator anywhere, but the report I found (admittedly with just a bit of googling) makes it seem like Texas is a better potential location than quite a few states (including California).

[1] - https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
by ralfd | 2025-10-08 14:37:40+00:00
> Empathy involves actively sharing in the person’s emotional experience.

hm, i think Fricken has it right: He is actively sharing in the other persons emotional experience, it just is that he is feeling glee about it.

Actually the higher the empathy (knowing that the other person is a superfan and knowing how much the other teams losing sucks for them) the higher the delight.

It is similar in war: If you are in the trenches you know exactly how your enemy in their trench is feeling (and know how they are feeling about you). But that doesnt mean they get your solidarity or mercy.
by jasonlotito | 2025-10-08 14:37:58+00:00
I was literally reaching out to friends yesterday to ask about NAS options and Synology wasn't even discussed, where it would have been before this mess.

Even now, after the reversal, it's really not an option. I mean, I have no assurance it won't get reversed again, and I don't want to invest into something that won't necessarily work long term.

Basically, I want to be sure I can access my data and get updates, and right now, Synology is not that from what I see. I'm just looking at this as a home user, but unless there is some guarantee, Synology just seems to be waiting to pull the rug out from you regarding your data.
by huem0n | 2025-10-08 14:38:05+00:00
With context (e.g. no due process) those logs are chilling

> redacted ate sandwich

> redacted and UNK1 purchased head phones

> redacted and UNK1 used their phones to scroll through news

> UNK1 opened settings app and top of phone showed 'redacted iPhone'

All that work being done manually is one thing -- it would be limited to high profile targets. But with AI, its concerning that this kind of detailed transcript could be scaled to mass surveillance.
by manwe150 | 2025-10-08 14:39:07+00:00
If you imagine having a very deep hole in the ground, the longest sight line would be from the lip to the bottom. If you then dig a small hole at the bottom, you wouldn’t be able to see the bottom of the second hole, but only some part of the wall

Similar in reverse, if the pyramid had a false peak (a inflection place where topology changes from steep to less steep), it could obscure line of sight between the real peak, if the angle formed by the line of sight between the two distant peaks tries to intersect the intermediate inflection point
by alex_duf | 2025-10-08 14:39:12+00:00
regarding how long the ingestion should take to implement, I'm going to say: it depends!

It depends on how complex the models are, because now you need to parse your model before inserting them. Which means you need tables to be in the right format. And then you need your loops, for each file you might have to insert anywhere between 5 to nested 20 entities. And then you either have to use an ORM or write each SQL queries.

All of which I could do obviously, and isn't rocket science, just time consuming.
by volkl48 | 2025-10-08 14:39:12+00:00
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS.

I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.

-----

As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.

It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.

For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.

It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
by sleepyguy | 2025-10-08 14:39:15+00:00
Yeah, Oncor isn’t great. They do just enough to keep the lights on for regular customers. But I’m pretty sure large data centers negotiate a higher level of service and purchase power at discounted rates. FB, for example, has a massive data center in the Alliance corridor — check out the link. Those trailer-sized units you see along the outside of the building are enormous diesel or natural gas generators — more than a hundred of them, each about the size of a locomotive. They even have their own electrical substation. The scale and redundancy of that place are unbelievable.

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.9832754,-97.2573651,467m/dat...

So I’d imagine they could keep everything running for as long as necessary. I remember during the big winter outage a few years ago, they didn’t have any issues at all.