MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 14:07:00+00:00
> What about when your smartphone is required to verify your identity so you can work / earn a paycheck? What about when it's required in order for you to engage in commerce?

In some cases, it already is.

We're already far on the path you described, and there is no choice to make on it, not for individuals. To stop this, we need to somehow make these technologies socially unacceptable. We need to walk back on cybersecurity quite a bit, and it starts with population-wide understanding that there is such thing as too much security, especially when the questions of who is being secured and who is the threat remain conveniently unanswered.
by dangus | 2025-10-29 14:07:06+00:00
Bingo, this right here. Linux desktop wasn’t a daily driver until one day it was.

Although the only problem with this strategy is that Linux got that way because of a lot of private companies that actually wanted that. Valve didn’t want to be locked in with Microsoft. Many of Microsoft’s direct competitors also don’t want to be locked in. IBM famously switched to Mac, Google has been using Mac and Linux workstations for a long time as well.

Also, web technologies like Electron made porting applications to small user bases Linux easier. If that never happened, I wouldn’t be able to use my commercial apps on Linux. This concept might be a little more of a challenge for the mobile app ecosystem, which is a mix of native wrappers like react native and native apps, and there is a high amount of dependency on native APIs for the extra sensors and hardware features phones have the laptops and desktops don’t have.

E.g., For Linux on mobile to work react native can’t be an incomplete implementation like the status quo.
by nurettin | 2025-10-29 14:07:10+00:00
I worked for an Amazon scraping business and they used Luminati (Now Brightdata) for a few months until I figured out a way to avoid the ban hammer and got rid of their proxy.

They indeed provided "high quality" residential and cellular ips and "normal quality" data center ips. You had to keep cycling the ip pool every 2-3 days which cost extra. It felt super shady. It isn't their bots, they lease connections to whoever is paying, and they don't care what people do in there.
by immibis | 2025-10-29 14:07:33+00:00
Good. I like the idea of a secure enclave that I own and control when it's in my computer but in practice almost all of them are deployed in a user-hostile way to the benefit of shareholders, to the point that burning the whole idea down would improve society. Imagine if every ROM and piece of CPU microcode was a lot more transparent.

These things are often used because of contractual requirements. Mainstream media including video games are often contractually protected: you must not let it run/play on any device without sufficient hardware protections. So vendors have to include these protection systems even if they don't want to. If the systems were useless, this might end.
by runarberg | 2025-10-29 14:07:37+00:00
See also Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. I also find Chinese to be interesting, e.g. Mandarin and (formal) Cantonese have a near identical written language, while the spoken language is completely different, views on whether or not those languages are different languages or dialects vary wildly.

In my books, the distinction between languages and dialects are so arbitrary that the best method is simply to ask the people that speak those languages/dialects. If they consider them to be different language (which Maltese speakers seemingly do) I call them different languages.
by Theodores | 2025-10-29 14:07:52+00:00
The lead in gasoline hypothesis is certainly plausible, however, I blame the larger picture of car dependency as well as the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, when 'stranger danger' was the big fear.

The article does go into this aspect, with a map of Sheffield in the footnotes showing how far eight year old kids were able to travel over the different generations. There was a time when the child could go across to the other side of the city to go fishing, whereas now, a child is essentially imprisoned and not expected to be going very far.

The Thatcher/Reagan revolution created exceptional oppositional culture in the UK, with 'rave' being the thing. The last 'free range' children grew up to be the original ravers and they had considerable organisational ability, needed to put on parties and other events. Furthermore, the music of the rave scene was banned by the BBC and the government ('repetitive beats').

In time, most of the rave generation grew up, got day jobs, had kids and all of that fun stuff. They got old and moved on, however, there was nobody to fill their shoes. Instead of illegal rave events and lots of house parties, organised festivals and city nightclubs took over. The cost aspect meant going with a small handful of friends rather than just the closest two hundred friends.

A good party should be heard from a considerable distance away (sorry neighbours) and I am surprised at how few parties there are these days. I travel by bicycle on residential roads, often late at night. Rarely do I find myself stumbling across people having house parties. This doesn't mean that parties aren't happening, but, equally, it doesn't mean I am old and out of touch.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-29 14:08:03+00:00
At present, no doubt that level of attack is aimed that the highest level, it requiring considerable effort to implement.

That situation may not remain for long however. I am reminded of the parity chip scam where a specialized chip was integrated onto DRAM boards to make them appear to have parity-checking RAM onboard when there wasn't (parity RAM was considerably more expansive). Moreover, unless one was in the know and knew exactly what to look for on the PWA one could easily be fooled.

Little doubt in time that trick will be tried again here (damned pain when electronic components now have to be tracked and authenticated from manufacture to end use in the way aircraft parts and nuclear materials are managed).
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 14:08:13+00:00
It's really a company/team culture thing. Either you end up grouped together with people who always chase the latest fads and cargocult their way to their promotions, or you end up with the "Justify everything" camp where anything new is shit on.

Ideally, you end up in a company/team that sits somewhere in the middle, faithfully evaluating the trade-offs of everything, and don't spend 60% of their time reading the latest news from blogs and social media.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-29 14:08:34+00:00
The track saws that I am describing are in fact simply a circular saw + guide rail. And cutting on the floor with foam below is exactly the way to get into it.

Proper track saws though tend to come with finer tooth blades with a thinner kerf so that they cut cleaner than a circular saw. They also retract within a kind of housing so that they're safer — only plunging down when you lean on them to make the cut.

Once you use one, you'll not go back to your circular saw unless, for example, you're trying to cut some framing lumber in place.

I have a Makita [1] which I like a lot, but my sister, wanting to save a little dosh, got a Kreg [2] and is happy with it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Makita-SP6000J1-Plunge-Circular-Stack...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Kreg-ACS-SAWBB-Plunge-Cut-replaces-AC...
by zoeysmithe | 2025-10-29 14:08:45+00:00
>First there was simple TCP+HTTP. Then HTTPS came around, adding a lot of CPU load onto servers.

You can't do e-commerce without encryption. You live under capitalism. Its weird to me to see capitalists not wanting to accept payments for goods. As far as the complexity argument, goes, wait until you see what goes on in your CPU! Or the codebase of your average website. There is no real simplicity and simplicity just ties people's hands.

These weird worship of simplicity just don't make sense. By this argument we should have never left the mainframe green-screen terminal world. Or the PDP era. Or the abacus era for that matter. An arbitrary line drawn in the sense is a near purely emotional appeal and the libertarian housecat meme when applied to technology.

Instead, this is a train with no final destination and those who think overwise are just engaging in nostalgia.
by accrual | 2025-10-29 14:08:55+00:00
Thank you for sharing this. Keep up the good work and healing, OP! It's incredible that you've continued to be polite and to do as much as you can through your health struggle. Setting and enforcing boundaries can be difficult for some, especially when you're feeling hazy and not operating at 100%. I like that you pointed out being polite can be expensive sometimes.

This is excellent advice for anyone with knowledge based work though. Distractions, messages, pop-ups, asks, meetings, etc. are the leading reason I don't get as much done as I could. Some of your items could definitely help here.
by lunias | 2025-10-29 14:09:05+00:00
Intuitively this feels to me like an emergent property of interconnectedness. I suspect that if we operated more within the boundaries of smaller, localized communities, then deviance (from some communities' perspective) would be more observable by looking across those boundaries. Society has adopted a much more globalized consciousness where a lot of would-be-choices have already been distilled into a "best choice" based on the massive availability of data; knowing the "best choice" makes choosing easy, and people like easy choices, even if other people are making them on their behalf.
by jraph | 2025-10-29 14:09:12+00:00
> Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open?

Because Google and Apple have put themselves between us and everything else.

Until we manage to replace them (by lobbying to everything including governments against them, and by working towards making the alternatives usable), we unfortunately have to resort to this. I'd even say we are entitled to this because we never asked for Google and Apple to become compulsory, they decided this.

I would personally be able to switch to Linux mobile today because I don't rely on anything proprietary (except the interrail app occasionally, damn them - but possibly waydroid would work for this)… if only there was usable and reliable hardware that could run the mainline kernel: decent battery life, decent picture quality, decent GPS, decent calls (especially emergency calls even if I haven't needed to actually make one so far, finger crossed, and Signal would do for most other situations actually).

I've daily-driven the PinePhone for a year. Call quality is awful and calls are awfully unreliable, and SMS are quite unreliable as well. Too bad for a phone. Unfortunately the phone took a big rain and now its modem is unreliable and doesn't come back up very often, but that's something a phone will likely endure in its life. Pictures are awful. GPS never worked well on my regular PinePhone. It somewhat worked on the Pinephone Pro until it died because it overheated. Linux hardware support is okayish, it was nice to run completely free software which was my main motivation for trying it but the hardware is crap to the point of being unusable serious.

The FP5 can apparently run PostmarketOS quite well. It would make an awesome Linux mobile. Camera and calls only partially work though [1]. And that's the main features of a phone.

Linux mobile itself it becoming quite decent (if one can do without the proprietary apps), what we really need is good hardware running it. Then we can begin to imagine a world with it having a decent usage share.

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...
by wredcoll | 2025-10-29 14:09:26+00:00
> What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes.

This is a fascinating take, if you ask me, treating them as separate is the whole problem!

The point of being an engineer is to solve real world problems, not to live inside your own little specialist world.

Obviously there's a lot to be said for being really good at a specialized set of skills, but thats only relevant to the part where you're actually solving problems.
Experimenting with localization – added 33 languages to my side project
by vladsiu | 2025-10-29 14:09:37+00:00
Hey folks,

I’ve been experimenting with localization lately and ended up adding 33 languages to my current side project. I wanted to see what happens when you go all in and include almost every language supported by the App Store.

It was surprisingly tricky — text expansion broke some layouts, RTL languages needed special handling, and managing translations for so many locales was a learning experience on its own.

Now I’m curious how others approach localization in their apps. Do you use automated translation tools, or rely on native speakers? How do you handle testing for languages you don’t speak?

Thanks
by conartist6 | 2025-10-29 14:09:44+00:00
Come check out BABLR! https://github.com/bablr-lang https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX

We'll have a major release announcement any day now, but we're looking hard at the accumulated baggage and we think we can lose a lot of that weight while giving people a level of power they never had before
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-29 14:09:44+00:00
The author gives several examples of tinkering. Tweaking mouse sensitivity in FPS, installing a linux distro, experimenting with windows managers, changing mechanical keyboard caps etc.

Then he looks at one specific example of tinkering, the IDE, and sorts people as tinkerers based on that.

>There are plenty of people who still use the VSCode terminal as their default terminal, do not know what vim bindings are, GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least). I’m not saying these are bad things necessarily, just that this should be the minimum, not the median.

Couldn't someone not tinker with an IDE and still tinker with other things? I mean clearly you dont have to tinker with everything that can possibly be tinkered with, right? What is it about the IDE that makes it necessary to tinker with?

It seems like this was the main motivation for the article and then it got a bit over-abstracted.
by kakacik | 2025-10-29 14:09:44+00:00
A lot of assumptions, some could be correct, some are plainly not.

Your idea of living in society is something very different form my idea, or European idea (and reality). Not seeing how everything is interconnected, ripple effects and secondary/tertiary effects come back again and again, I guess you don't have kids... well you do your life, if you think money can push through and solve everything important. I'd call it a sad shortsighted life if I cared, but thats just me.
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-10-29 14:10:04+00:00
> I'm sure I could learn to be slightly faster on dvorak/colemak, but nothing beats the convenience of always having guaranteed access to qwerty, everywhere I go.

Colemak/Dvorak is not about speed, but about comfort and avoiding RSI (though I would place the actual layout somewhere far down on the list, a proper ergonomic KB is top priority). Also, in my ~8 years on Colemak lack of access to it was a problem exactly 0 times. I don't type books on other people's computers, and if I would, typing blind on a keyboard I am not used to is anyway a hopeless endeavor.
by saxenaabhi | 2025-10-29 14:10:18+00:00
I agree, I have a restaurant POS system and I think self-hosting would easily kill the product velocity, and if we screw up bad, even the company.

However, I do get the point about cost-premium and more importantly vendor-risk that's paid when using managed services.

We are hosted on cloudflare workers which is very cheap, but to mitigate the vendor risk we have also setup up replicas of our api servers on bunny.net and render.com.
by speleding | 2025-10-29 14:10:22+00:00
I don't like this change. There are a lot of SaaS business that allow you to create a CNAME along the lines of "saas_app_name.yourbusiness.com". For example Fastmail and Zoho do that, our business offers that feature as well. When you arrive at our site we do a redirect to a proper https URL.

But a browser will not accept a redirect from a domain with an incorrect certificate (and rightly so), so this will start failing if https becomes the default, unless we generate certificates for all those customers, many thousands in our case. And then we need to get those certificates to the AWS load balancer where we terminate https (not even sure if it can handle that many). I think we may need to retire that feature.
by whstl | 2025-10-29 14:10:35+00:00
I can confirm this.

The AWS mandatory training I did in the past was 100% marketing of their own solutions, and tests are even designed to make you memorize their entire product line.

The first two levels are not designed for engineers: they're designed for "internal salespeople". Even Product Managers were taking the certification, so they would be able to recommend AWS products to their teams.
by ndiddy | 2025-10-29 14:10:40+00:00
One thing that bothers me about the lack of a redesign is that it means there's been no progress on minimizing or getting rid of the notch. Apple is clearly able to do this, they made the notch smaller on iPhones a few years ago, but on Macs it's just as big and intrusive as it was when they introduced it 4 years ago. To me, this indicates that Apple either doesn't care about how intrusive having a big gap in the middle of the menu bar is, or worse, considers it a part of the Mac's "brand identity" now, something that indicates at a glance that someone's using a Mac.
by nogridbag | 2025-10-29 14:10:51+00:00
I've used several MVC UI frameworks in the past both on the desktop and web, and they all had the same problems. When the view becomes out of sync with the model, it becomes a nightmare to figure out why that's happening.

You have your model (data), and conceptually, you just want to bind that model to the view. But you have to write all this imperative code to do that. It's very simple with an imperative UI to have infinite loops even with very simple UIs. "When this field changes, I want to update this other field". But that other field has it's own event listeners that trigger other effects. The event listeners work fine in their own silo, but the interactions between fields cause unintended effects that are not obvious reading the code.

When the component is mounted, the behavior is very hard to reason about and you spend lots of time in a debugger tracing through all the event listeners just to reach the initial state of the UI. Additionally, in these frameworks the developer is typically responsible for cleaning up all the event listeners. It's very easy to forget to clean these up properly.

Once a UI reaches a certain complexity, you try to rewrite the imperative code so that it almost reads declarative and you wish you could simply use a declarative UI framework. I can't speak for React as I have not used that in a long time, but in Vue.js I never write the UI to use global state. All state is local to the views that it pertains to and with defineModel introduced back in late 2023, you can write small UI components without all the plumbing required in earlier versions. I've never experienced such a simple and reliable UI framework previously.
by owenversteeg | 2025-10-29 14:11:06+00:00
Among the hundred ninety comments here there are countless claimed examples of modern deviance. To list some: furries, blue hair, Skibidi Toilet, queer culture, protest music, modern hip-hop, violence on TV, kpop, modern protests, online subcultures, and Berghain.

The problem is that it is all standardized, commoditized, low-risk, polished, neatly packaged for easy consumption. You can buy a physical plastic Skibidi Toilet at Walmart; not one but countless nameless skibidi toilet SKUs, injection-molded in China in volumes that would boggle the mind and shipped across the globe for pennies. You can identify with a unique gender and sexual identity and Mastercard will sponsor the event, with free drinks (synthetic syrups shipped worldwide in bulk bladders served in the same plastic cup, conveniently conforming to global regulations enabling concurrent use in Chile, Canada and Curaçao.

It does not help matters that most of your clothes, food, and tchotchkes similarly spent some of their disturbed existence sailing the globe in bulk-shipped liquid form.

A good litmus test is time travel. Go back and ask anyone in town about the capital-D Deviants. You will quickly find deviancy defying all my complaints. You will find risky, rough-edged, tough-to-swallow deviancy lurking in every corner and every corner will be unique. If someone dares to dye their hair or start a protest or dance weird then it will be truly unique. The liquids which with they drink and dye will be local. The words they chant at protests, write on signs, speak in hushed tones will be in local accents, with local affectations, in the local languages. The clothes they wear, the things they eat, and even the dark corners they hide in will be unique. Now, of course, even the corners are the same. They are lit brightly with the same LEDs, they are constructed to international building codes, they are made from smooth featureless sheets extruded from nameless factories. They conform.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-29 14:11:31+00:00
Yeah, yeah, true objectivity is objectively impossible. We know.

The thing is, this isn't binary. There's a sliding scale between "totally objective" and "totally biased". When you eliminate the (unattainable) standard of "total objectivity", then reporters and news organizations move more toward biased. And the difference matters. You used to be able to get news that at least tried to be unbiased, that wasn't openly pushing a narrative. That made it possible to form a more accurate (though not totally accurate) view of what was actually going on.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 14:11:38+00:00
> Yes, but if you look up "bare metal" it goes to the page about actual bare metal (or bare machines or whatever).

Fix it then, if you think it's incorrect. Otherwise, link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_metal_(disambiguation) like any normal and charitable commentator would do.

> Can we stop this now? Please?

Sure, feel free to stop at any point you want to.
by MangoToupe | 2025-10-29 14:11:46+00:00
Is there any place on earth that has good coffee? Italy's coffee is horrible, even if they have quality machines to make it with. 99% of people will use "ille" or whatever that brand is, which is far worse than starbucks worst roast. Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.
by krapp | 2025-10-29 14:11:54+00:00
You've done the thing where you've basically restated my argument and implicitly agreed with it but for some reason also framed your comment as strident disagreement and accused me of motives I don't have. Like many people here, your emotions seem to have poisoned your intellect. I assume you just skimmed my comment and got triggered?

I'm not drawing an equivalency between consumer and producer, I'm pointing out a relationship which, while unequal, still exists and needs to be acknowledged. I'm not attempting to derail or minimize anything. You claim you "condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin," and that's fine, but in any practical sense it's meaningless moral posturing. Unless you run off into the woods to live off the grid, you're still a part of the problem, it's unavoidable.
by gattilorenz | 2025-10-29 14:12:00+00:00
"Why don't these people use the more universal name cookies and instead refer to them as biscuits?"

In Europe it's paracetamol, in the US is acetaminophen, both represent the same thing and are not ambiguous. Plus, it's literally mentioned in the 1st paragraph, together with the brand name Tylenol.

In the Netherlands it's sometimes informally called "aspirin", even though that's a different chemical altogether. In Italy, the brand name Tachipirina is often used.