MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hackbraten | 2025-11-04 23:02:27+00:00
Yes, I frequently have to do just that because some sites (e.g. Spotify) force me to pretend to be an iPhone, otherwise they refuse service. I have an add-on that lets me toggle between the iPhone and the real UA.

My feeling is that lying about my user agent makes Turnstile worse but that may be anecdotal.
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 23:02:30+00:00
With a quick LLM-assisted search, looks like the cheapest EC2 instance is t4g.micro, which comes in at $2.04/mo. It has 2 vCPUs and and only 512MiB of RAM. (I assume that doesn't include disk; EBS will be extra.)

I can certainly see a use for that small amount of compute & RAM, but it's not clear that your level of needs is common. I've been paying for a $16/mo VPS (not on AWS) for about 15 years. It started out at $9/mo, but I've upgraded it since then as my needs have grown. It's not super beefy with 2 vCPUs, 5GiB of RAM, and 60GiB of disk space (with free data ingress/egress), but it does the job, even if I could probably find it cheaper elsewhere.

But not at Amazon. Closest match is probably a t3.medium, with 2 vCPUs and 4GiB RAM. Add a 60GiB gp2 EBS volume, and it costs around $35/mo, and that's not including data transfer.

The point that you're missing is we're not looking for the cheapest thing ever, we're looking for the cheapest thing that meets requirements. For many (most?) applications, you're going to overpay (sometimes by orders of magnitude) for AWS.

You say "if you need a lot", but "lot" is doing a bit of work there. My needs are super modest, certainly not "a lot", and AWS is by far not the cheapest option.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-04 23:02:34+00:00
> I suspect it's going to be the same here. More expensive CPUs and GPUs are just going to mean more expensive CPUs and GPUs with no real silver lining.

Presumably, higher profits will incentivize other players to enter the market and increase supply, and/or the company earning high profits plows at least some back into R&D to at least create better chips, which can result in eventually lower prices for the previous generation of chips.

This isn’t a possibility with land and land rights, however, so I wouldn’t expect the same dynamics to play out.
by MostlyStable | 2025-11-04 23:03:28+00:00
You don't see a discrepancy between your claim that free markets have nothing to do with high barriers to entry and your own link claiming free markets require free entrance to the market?

And no, it is not specifically referring to government related barriers, although those certainly count. Government is very often the thing that generates barriers to entry, but it is by no means the only barrier to entry. Any barrier to entry is, from a strict theoretical sense, a departure from a pure free market, although that's more in the "spherical cow" sense of the idea.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-11-04 23:03:35+00:00
American companies do this a lot. Rule for thee, not for me. For example lawyers. Companies have a team of lawyers to ensure you only play by their terms, on terms they can only understand, with disproportionate amortized advantages/disadvantages (who can afford to add $1000 to their disney+ subscription? Disney spreads the cost lawyers across millions of transactions...). Or they retain their right to sue you, but force you into arbitration.

Not that I suspect perplexity is any kind of innocent of that behavior (or at least will remain so if extremely successful)

Now companies are doing the same with AI. We can use AI, and other tools to maximize what we extract from you, but you cannot use AI to help yourself with better outcomes.

I also commented here that it sounds anti-competitive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816871
by tim333 | 2025-11-04 23:03:50+00:00
The article is kind of silly like someone in the 1800s saying flying machines are a conspiracy theory. I mean obviously not - they were a proposed technology that hasn't been built yet but would in a while. I don't really get the point. I guess it's a discussion point of a sort. Maybe it's like those Weekly World News 'Gay Aliens Found' type headlines that get views for imaginative silliness?
by suriya-ganesh | 2025-11-04 23:03:53+00:00
I've been at too many startups with a devops team that would rather provision 15 machines with 4GB RAM THAN ONE WITH 64GB.

I once got into an argument with a lead architect about it and it's really easy to twist the conversation into "don't you think we'll reach that scale?" To justify complexity.

The bottom line is for better or worse, the cloud and micro services are keeping a lot of jobs relevant and there's no benefit in convincing people otherwise
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-04 23:04:30+00:00
They're also injecting a CA bundle so, presumably, they're in including their own root of trust so they can sign their own certificate. I'm on mobile and can't easily look at what they're including.

Edit: Guess I've got openssl in my termux environment. They're injecting a fake Nest root CA key. Makes sense.

I'm shocked it was this easy to subvert the root of trust on these devices. I would expect a newer device would have the trust root pinned in hardware (TPM, etc) and firmware updates would be have been authenticated.
by waynesonfire | 2025-11-04 23:04:35+00:00
That's insanely high. I'm surprised 74% of CEOs can even admit that their job is at risk. I've been made to believe these people are suppose to be narcissistic.

I kept reading and quickly realized this entire report reads like a bunch of bull,

"94% of CEOs believe AI agents could provide equal or better counsel than human board members."

Board members hold CEOs accountable. How is an AI agent going to do that? "hey chatgpt, can I have a raise this year?"
by NamTaf | 2025-11-04 23:04:57+00:00
I, too, went through like 18 months in the UK with the big stores not selling any until one reintroduced it recently. Alternatives on the internet were like 3+x the price, at least. It was incredibly frustrating. I now stock up and have 2-3 boxes of the stuff, in case it does vanish again.

Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.
by gruturo | 2025-11-04 23:04:58+00:00
Webp is utter garbage. Awful quality loss, which they're still in denial of, for minimal size gains over a jpeg encoded with modern software (which is also way way more compatible - software from 35 years ago can open it). But I'm sure it scores well in whatever flawed perceptual benchmark they automated.

If only google didn't oppose jxl - but they'd have to implicitly admit that webp is garbage and they don't like doing that.
by turtletontine | 2025-11-04 23:06:12+00:00
Basically, it’s an open question that courts have yet to decide. But the idea is that it’s fair use until courts decide otherwise (or laws decide otherwise, but that doesn’t seem likely). That’s my understanding, but I could be wrong. I expect we’ll see more and more cases about this, which is exactly why the EFF wants to take a position now.

They do link to a (very long) article by a law professor arguing that data mining is fair use. If you want to get into the weeds there, knock yourself out.

https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk15026/...
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-11-04 23:06:19+00:00
I had an Asus TP500Ln that I only just retried, it lasted me 10 years as a TV box, always more powerful than fire sticks/actual tv boxes.

Replaced it recently with a 4 year old laptop.

I simply install Ubuntu, plug in the TV through HDMI and keep the charger plugged in all the time.

Then I can install stremio, Kodi and any other streaming apps I like. Technically I could also set up some retro games.
by eddealmeida | 2025-11-04 23:06:21+00:00
I've been thinking about the Faustian bargain we're all being offered by the internet economy. We're constantly told to "build our personal brand," but what we're really building is a marketable product—a polished, optimized version of ourselves that's designed for maximum engagement and profit.

The most successful people online often seem to be the ones who have perfected this art of self-commodification. They've smoothed out their rough edges, found their niche, and consistently deliver what their audience wants to hear. They've essentially sold a version of themselves.

But at what cost?

As developers and creators, we're both building these systems and living within them. We're creating the algorithms that reward certain behaviors while punishing others. We're designing the platforms that make personal branding not just optional, but necessary for professional survival.

I've made my choice: I'd rather stay true to my messy, complicated, sometimes controversial self than become a perfectly optimized content machine. But I'm curious where other technologists draw the line.

How much of your authentic self would you compromise for online success? Have you ever:

Avoided sharing an opinion because it might hurt your "brand"?

Felt pressure to present a happier/more successful version of your life?

Worried that the persona you've built online is eclipsing your real self?

This isn't just about influencers—it's about all of us who participate in digital spaces.

https://blog.thecodejedi.online/2025/11/the-authenticity-par...

The most valuable thing we might preserve in the digital age isn't our privacy, but our personhood.
by protocolture | 2025-11-04 23:06:34+00:00
>No one’s networking is worth hundreds of millions.

I was with you until here. Honestly, some networking is actually just that good. I dont believe this to be the case universally, but some people can connect people so efficiently that its mind blowing.

>A reasonable approach is to cap CEO salaries at $2-5M

Why is this reasonable?
by jMyles | 2025-11-04 23:07:17+00:00
I think the point is:

It's bizarre (and not at all in keeping with the western legal tradition) that particular people can essentially not be named as defendants in a civil matter depending on their employer.

Even the "benefit of clergy" claimed by the perpetrators of the Boston massacre did not, as far as I know, preclude civil proceedings against them.

Elections are not a good tool to determine which civil matters may proceed, and particularly blunt if the mechanism is based on who changes state employment status on their basis.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-04 23:07:44+00:00
I didn't say you couldn't screw them. I said they screw you back in terms of repair/maintenance costs (and don't save enough fuel along the way to make it worth it).

By the late 90s the domestics had refreshed their vans to use engine architectures designed in the early 90s. They all have a bunch of tasks that are shit to do depending on the model and options. 6.0 Ford head gaskets are legendary in that regard. Ford is generally bad since so much stuff is a "pull the cab" problem which is a much bigger problem on a vehicle with a box truck body that extends over the cab and their infatuation with OHC engines makes things naturally more cramped. But it's just a lot less of a problem when you're not shitting out turbos every now and then or dicking with all the potential leak points of an cooling system that has 3x the components it needs to (looking at you Mercedes) or R&Ring a rear cylinder head in a transverse application (Fiat obviously). I'm not saying they're unreliable, but if you have a fleet of 5/10/20 there's always gonna be something that needs fixing and "needs fixing" is generally more expensive on the euro designs. And it's not really the engines. It's the whole chassis that has stupid stuff randomly distributed around it.

The Mercedes door tracks and tearing a suspension mount off on a minor sideways slide/bump that should've just required a change of underwear and maybe a tire/rim weren't things I made up, those were examples I've cleaned up after. Another example that comes to mind is how the Front of a Transit is 10lb of shit in a 5lb bag. That doesn't leave a lot of room for oopsies. Can't really bump them into anything without causing problems. I've seen a GMC van (Uhaul truck specifically) eat a deer at highway speed without even popping a leak because they had the foresight to put a whole bunch of dead space there. Imagine not having to incur $$$ downtime in that situation.

They're fine vehicles when new, have a lot of space, are as ergonomic as anything else out there but if you aren't buying a huge fleet that will be strictly managed so nothing gets routinely abused/overloaded, can't afford to pay games depreciating over 3yr and then trading in can't easily use rentals to cover downtime (<cough> Amazon <cough>), walk into your local Chevy dealer and say "I want what Uhaul has".

Sure, none of this matters if you're paying the mechanic/autobody rates in Turkey or Lithuania to keep them going or trading in every 3yr before MOT starts screwing you at every pass through but we can't all be that lucky.
by catapart | 2025-11-04 23:07:53+00:00
Any interest in honorable mentions? I've got a (pretty basic) kanban-style taskboard manager app clocking in at just under 715kb.[0] When I finish the project and switch to using the minified code, I think I'd still be a hair over 512, so it's a fully lost cause at making the club, but I hope you can forgive the shameless plug due to shared appreciation for small apps!

[0] https://catapart.github.io/magnit-ceapp-taskboard-manager/de...
by adrianmonk | 2025-11-04 23:08:46+00:00
The flip side is that, if you do hammer out an agreement on what the thermostat should be set to, with an analog thermostat, you can have arguments about whether it is actually set to that.

"We agreed it would be set to 74!"

"It IS set to 74!"

"No, it's set to like 74.2 or 74.3 or something! The little pointer is not pointing directly at 74, and you know it!"
by Sebb767 | 2025-11-04 23:10:32+00:00
> Probably because actual time required to manage a db server is really unpredictable.

This, and also startups are quite heterogeneous. If you have an engineer on your team with experience in hosting their own servers (or at least a homelab-person), setting up that service with sufficient resiliency for your average startup will be done within one relaxed afternoon. If your team consists of designers and engineers who hardly ever used a command line, setting up a shaky version of the same thing will cost you days - and so will any issue that comes up.
by mmooss | 2025-11-04 23:10:36+00:00
> There have been a few autocratic-esque governments that have gotten around the dictator information problem by basically implementing a free-ish market by fiat.

The way I understand that is they allow some freedom and thus receive some of the benefits. They still are far behind democracies socially, politically, economically, militarily, etc.

China did the same for awhile, starting small when Deng Xiaopeng took power and expanding until Xi took over.

Freedom of individuals, which allows a country to harness all of their talents and imaginations, is an enormous advantage. People forget that freedom is the most powerful thing in the world.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-04 23:10:54+00:00
>"Residential proxies" have very little legitimate use

You have to be joking. Having seen a list of biggest Luminati contracts, legitimate use makes up probably well over 90% of traffic via these services.

It’s companies like Expedia and OpenAI, not Nigerian princes.

Yeah sure, fraud happens. Those customers aren’t even lucrative because posting scam ads on Craigslist or wherever does not use much bandwidth. Criminals also use Google search.
by godelski | 2025-11-04 23:11:37+00:00
It's not silly to compare, but it is silly to draw causal relationships. Especially when cherry-picking

- Singapore is authoritarian and has a low homicide rate - Venezuela is authoritarian and has a high homicide rate

Huh... maybe authoritarianism isn't sufficient to conclude the homicide rate... I mean Saint Kitts and Nevis is a constitutional monarchy and has the highest homicide rate in the world.

But let's also compare Homicide and GDP[0]. There's multiple interesting things to say from graphs like this. Though I still wouldn't conclude a causation here.

People love data when it confirms what they already believe but people don't like putting in the work needed to interpret data. Granted, the latter is not easy. But maybe if we're not math lovers we probably shouldn't claim to also be data lovers.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc?x...
by sbinnee | 2025-11-04 23:12:03+00:00
> Srinivas argued that agents should have “all the same rights and responsibilities” as a real human user. “It’s not Amazon’s job to survey that,” he said.

I am not against people using agents to do shopping although I won’t do that until I see a reliable agent. From the title I thought Amazon might have a point to protect users. But oh no. I should have known better that Amazon must have been cooking their own shopping agents. It’s already hilarious at this point.

Anyway, this excerpt from Perplexity has so many issues. It just looks like an ugly fight.
by armada651 | 2025-11-04 23:12:23+00:00
The node sizes have become more of marketing term, so it's more useful to look at the half-pitch resolution when doing comparisons. In 2007 researchers demonstrated they could reach a 15nm half-pitch using an electron scanning beam. [1] Whereas ASML reliably achieved this resolution using EUV around 2017.

Thus in the early 2000s you would be about 10 years ahead using electron scanning beam lithography. However that assumes you have all the tooling and transistor designs to actually create a working chip at that resolution. Showing you can etch a feature at nanometer scale is one thing, actually using it to create a working chip is a whole other ball game.

[1] https://spie.org/news/0599-double-exposure-makes-dense-high-...
by IncreasePosts | 2025-11-04 23:13:08+00:00
Maybe Malta is just too small of a world for that magic toggle, since entrenched interests can basically just prevent the government from approving certain strategies, like building more large buildings with apartments like the Mercury Tower. But on the global stage, not even the biggest player(US) can dictate what China, India, the EU does, so if the US self-limits because of entrenched interests, that's just more juice for the squeeze for other players not aligned with the US.
by georgemcbay | 2025-11-04 23:14:08+00:00
> I suppose the notion that you could just distribute untested software onto an unlimited amount of other peoples computers without consent wasn't yet considered unethical

As someone who is old enough to have been a teenage hacker back in this timeframe and who spent his time on old Diversi Dial dialup systems which lead to early internet systems via gnu/fsf's open access policy, which lead to bitnet relay, and who was around during the initial development of irc right around this very year (1988) I can say that it was absolutely considered a bad act to do this sort of thing back then even as just a prank or demonstration (which made it kind of cool to back-then me, as a teenager, but which made it certainly unethical in a professional sense even for the time).

... however when you oopsied and the shit hit the fan, you could get away with it if your dad worked for the NSA.

The vast majority of people who weren't RTM would have had a far more severely negative outcome in his situation.
by strgcmc | 2025-11-04 23:14:11+00:00
I'm sure nobody cares, but the data I can check shows a couple interesting observations (won't call them conclusions, that's too strong):

- Yes, you can find certain slices of 1.8% of customers, that would represent 50%+ of revenue... But this is usually pretty close to simply listing out the top 1.8% of all accounts by spend

- Therefore, to support the original claim, one would essentially have to definitionally accept that nearly all of the top revenue accounts are "problem gamblers" and almost no one else is... But this doesn't pass a basic smell test, because population wise there are more "poor" problem-gamblers than there are "rich" ones, because there are a lot more poor people in general than rich ones, so it's very unlikely that nearly all of the 1.8% of total population problem gamblers also happen to overlap so much with the top 1.8% customer accounts by revenue.
by haunter | 2025-11-04 23:14:16+00:00
Video of the crash, left (?) engine was already engulfed in flames while taking off

https://x.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930

https://xcancel.com/BNONews/status/1985845907191889930

Edit: just the mp4 https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1985845862409334784/pu/...

There is an incredible amount of ground damage! Just wow, this is very bad https://files.catbox.moe/3303ob.jpg
by renewiltord | 2025-11-04 23:14:31+00:00
The biggest annoyance for me is that if you somehow say you use Rust and you make money, the community will descend upon you like vultures saying you need to donate. Honestly, they should just amend their license to be like the Meta Llama License since the community clearly desires that kind of thing greatly.

I do like Rust, but I steer clear of the community because of this tithe-seeking nonsense.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-04 23:15:13+00:00
The Nvidia 3000 series were on Samsung's process since it was quite a bit cheaper than the TSMC process at the time. Samsung has already said it intends to undercut TSMC so assuming they are fairly equivalent it doesn't seem unreasonable for consumer CPUs and GPUs to be made on their process, it gives a price advantage to anyone that makes the move.
by janalsncm | 2025-11-04 23:15:26+00:00
1. The city vs country distinction cannot account for a 60x difference in safety. There are many other countries which are also orders of magnitude safer than both NYC and the US.

2. One person’s “firearm regulation” is another’s authoritarianism. A regulation simply means one’s ability to have a firearm will be taken away in some cases i.e. fewer rights.

3. There is no point where freedom ends and authoritarianism begins. It’s a matter of the types and number of rights which are protected by the government. Anyone who believes removing the right to bear arms in some circumstances agrees that there can be a tradeoff between freedom and safety which was the core of my argument, that the US is becoming less free while becoming no more safe.
by teachrdan | 2025-11-04 23:15:35+00:00
You're right. I apologize for using a link that did not support my argument.

The Wikipedia page on the debate about the bombings is very informative. I've seen what I consider to be strong arguments that the Soviet invasion of the Sakhalin Islands and potential invasion and occupation of Hokkaido.

I'm also disappointed that the critics to my original post failed to engage with the central question: What was the rush to bomb Nagasaki if not to ensure the US got to further intimidate Russia? (and test both a uranium-based bomb and a plutonium-based one)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...

From the above Wikipedia page:

Ward Wilson wrote that "after Nagasaki was bombed only four major cities remained which could readily have been hit with atomic weapons", and that the Japanese Supreme Council did not bother to convene after the atomic bombings because they were barely more destructive than previous bombings. He wrote that instead, the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and South Sakhalin removed Japan's last diplomatic and military options for negotiating a conditional surrender, and this is what prompted Japan's surrender. He wrote that attributing Japan's surrender to a "miracle weapon", instead of the start of the Soviet invasion, saved face for Japan and enhanced the United States' world standing.[120]

Prime Minister Suzuki said in August 1945 that Japan surrendered as quickly as possible to the United States because Japan expected the Soviet Union to invade and hold Hokkaido, an action which would "destroy the foundation of Japan".[121][122]