MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-07 19:12:51+00:00
Regulation isn't good enough. The government needs to make their own competing ISP.

Hell, at least in the US, there's precedent for this: government builds and maintain all the roads; they run most transit and intercity rail operations; and they run physical mail delivery. At one point they even owned most of the railroads[0]. Communications and travel infrastructure are things government is moderately good at.

For some reason, we just decided not to have a government-sponsored telecom company, even when Ma Bell made it patently obvious that having all the country's telecom infrastructure be privately owned by one company was a bad idea. It's obvious that a government-run ISP is about as crucial to life in 2025 as a government-run postal carrier was in the early 1800s.

[0] In the 1970s, all of America's railroads went bankrupt. First, they discharged their passenger rail mandates into Amtrak, then they went bankrupt anyway, and then they got nationalized.
by LaurensBER | 2025-11-07 19:12:54+00:00
This is a very reasonable approach until somehow your competitors service loads twice as fast on the Vodafone Germany network.

As a business, at that point, you're basically extorted to pay the ransom or deal with a loss of revenue. Since the ransom is most likely lower it won't take long for your other competitors to start paying it as well leaving you with an objectively worse product, irrespective of your warning banner (which lefty Linda or Gradma Garry isn't going to understand).
by GrumpyYoungMan | 2025-11-07 19:12:59+00:00
> "How many centuries did it take for civil engineering, for example, to become the codified, standardized, and respected calling it is now?"

But the software industry is not starting from centuries ago. We have the benefit of modern education and literacy rates, instantaneous global communication, centuries of experience and data in other life and safety critical fields to draw on to understand how to establish a reasonable level of safety in the face of uncertainty, vast libraries of knowledge and data that can be called upon online, and nearly a century of increasing regulation and professionalization in those fields. Sorry but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-11-07 19:13:23+00:00
Forecasting terrorism and preventing terrorism are two completely different things.

Thinking it justifiable, thinking it inevitable, and thinking it effective are three completely different things.

Do not ask the questions that are easy to ask; ask the questions that are hard to ask. Then within that, do not ask the questions whose answers are hard to find; ask the questions whose answers are hard to hear.
by kristoff_it | 2025-11-07 19:13:34+00:00
This writing is absolutely too vapid (even as far as AI slop goes), especially for the kind of jabs it makes at Rust.

Zig is not the end solution to all problems, just like neither Rust is. Each is a sweetspot on the spectrum of possible solutions, each with it's own sets of pros and cons that appeal differently to different people.

It used to be that some Rustaceans would be aggressive against Zig and that has thankfully died down. We do not need to repeat the same the other way around, so please don't get baited by AI slop.

Also, you don't `catch unreachable` errors when printing to stdout.
by arcfour | 2025-11-07 19:13:35+00:00
Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you.

I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did.

(I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
by 317070 | 2025-11-07 19:13:37+00:00
> I would respect you far more if you candidly admitted that you are violently envious of wealthier and happier families, and wish to manipulate the levers of the state to crush them and steal their property on your behalf.

I don't think that is accurate, but let me try to get as close as possible with something that is accurate:

* I am not envious of people with wealthy and happy families. After all, I have exactly such a family.

* I am empathetic with people that don't have such a family.

* I recognise that there are a lot of the former, who are wealthy beyond their needs due to no merit of their own, while there are a lot of the latter who live below their needs despite their merits.

* I want the state to provide for the poor up to what they need, and to fund it they can take some from the rich who got it without merit.

* Inheritance is the perfect place. After all, the estate is given for neither merit nor need. And the owner of the estate doesn't exist anymore, so has no more moral rights.
by ben_w | 2025-11-07 19:13:50+00:00
Musk's claimed $20k price for the Cybercab is not credible until actually delivered, given what happened with Cybertruck.

But obviously, Musk's diminishing credibility isn't seen as a problem by investors because if it was he'd be kicked out.

That aside:

> For instance no car company outside of China except Tesla makes a profit on EV sales

BMW Group says otherwise: https://www.bmwgroup.com/content/dam/grpw/websites/bmwgroup_...

(And yes, BMW do have an autopilot, who knows if they'll hit their schedule, but all they have to do to beat Musk with delivering this is not slip as much as him, and he slips a lot in a way that only looks good when the comparison is US government space contractors: https://daxstreet.com/news/228484/bmw-sets-sights-on-level-4...)

Lots of the EU companies don't say much about separate profitability of ICE vs. EV, or if they do I couldn't find it.

But even then, so what if Tesla was the only non-Chinese EV company making a profit? Those Chinese EVs are still causing trouble for the old manufacturing bases in the US and Europe even though the Chinese cars have huge tariffs.

Tesla's prices only work against traditional manufacturers, and American ones at that (here in Europe, we're not big on Ford or General Motors either, lots of European EVs are getting nice and cheap way ahead of Musk actually delivering anything for $20k) — Tesla don't get to keep a big margin when Wuling or BYD comes along and gives Americans (or indeed anyone else) an EV that's $18k (/€18k/£18k) despite tariffs.

> Currently Waymo is well above $2per mile and has no clear path to 30cents.

Neither does Tesla. Like I said, Tesla are at least 6 years behind. Tesla's still got humans behind the wheel, and what statistics can be found in public information they have a high rate of manual intervention compared to Waymo.

Unless something has changed recently, Tesla's (so-called, and much criticised for the name) "Full Self-Driving" is SAE Level 2, whereas Waymo was already testing Level 4 autonomy back in 2017. (That's 8 years, not 6, I'm being generous even just by allowing Tesla to claim the current Tesla Robotaxi to count as an equivalent of the first commercial Waymo Robotaxi service, given the Waymo commercial service started several years after a few very impressive public demonstrations which, unlike Musk's demonstrations, have yet to be tainted by lawsuits revealing the involvement of metaphorical smoke and mirrors).
by dataflow | 2025-11-07 19:14:02+00:00
> The move would give some parents — after a specific assessment — the right to let their children access social media from age 13. It wasn’t immediately clear how such a ban would be enforced: Many tech platforms already restrict pre-teens from signing up. Officials and experts say such restrictions don’t always work.

This makes it almost sound like a no-op once enough children convince their parents to give exemptions. Hopefully it works out better than that.
by linohh | 2025-11-07 19:14:20+00:00
Usually these ISPs are part of or under the municipal utility provider. So if they lose money, it first gets offset by profits from other utilities and eventually yes, the taxpayer will step in, directly or indirectly. No big deal. No one is complaining about subsidies for water or power lines in rural areas, neither should they when it comes to internet. Remember: These ISPs were founded because the market was already failing to provide decent offers or any at all.
by iamnothere | 2025-11-07 19:14:28+00:00
> platforms that are likely to contain child pornography

So every platform, everywhere? Facebook and Twitter/X still have problems keeping up with this, Matrix constantly has to block rooms from the public directory, Mastodon mods have plenty of horror stories. Any platform with UGC will face this issue, but it’s not a good reason to compromise E2EE or mandate intrusive scanning of private messages.

I would not be so opposed to mandated scans of public posts on large platforms, as image floods are still a somewhat common form of harassment (though not as common as it once was).
by colechristensen | 2025-11-07 19:14:43+00:00
>Unless there's some subtlety I'm missing here.

I've gotten rid of 90% of the ads by paying for YouTube, the rest of the ads I skip by jumping forward in the video which is annoying but only a little OR by being legitimately interested in what the person has to say if they're reviewing a product which has been in some way paid for. I'm also just fine with someone promoting their own merch or patreon which I am sometimes actually interested in.

The subtlety I don't get why you're missing is I now have very much reduced ad exposure and the rest I do have is entirely controllable.
by why_at | 2025-11-07 19:15:01+00:00
Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but I don't think that's necessarily what was being suggested.

>Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.

I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular things should be subject to some protections and not necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control over them. One way of doing this would be to have some regulation which forces companies to make their products accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW after they've reached a certain level of popularity. Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems reasonable to me.
by aanet | 2025-11-07 19:15:04+00:00
This ban (or attempt to regulate), similar to Australia's, is at least 10-15 years too late to be honest. It likely would have stopped or lessened the negative impact of FB (and its ilk, but mostly FB, tbh) on much of the society.

Now we know, of course, and everything in hindsight is 20/20.

It's STILL worth trying to regulate social media, now emboldened and firmly established as a rite of passage among youth, adults, and older generations.
by gs17 | 2025-11-07 19:15:09+00:00
> Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link.

For me it sometimes (I'm not sure why, it isn't even "intelligent" about which emails have options, automatic noreply@ emails sometimes have it) has buttons to pre-fill a reply with a message out of a few choices. It's not unprompted, but I could see someone accidentally clicking it instead of the reply button.
by Zigurd | 2025-11-07 19:15:17+00:00
While Amazon was running in the red, they could've turned profitable before they did. They could just turn the knob on pricing and become profitable. Bezos is very much a numbers guy.

Elon flies by the seat of his pants. There's no knob at Tesla. There's no robotaxi product or service yet. Viability is way more than a question of pricing.
by GrumpyYoungMan | 2025-11-07 19:15:57+00:00
The things you list illustrate @aplamers point that software "doesn't really kill people". If you asked the average person on the street, they might just barely remember the Boeing incidents and the rest they probably have never heard of. Even something as gruesome as the Therac-25 incident is probably unknown to most.

It's the rising tide of low-level everyday harm from software that is going to motivate the public to start coming after the software industry.
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Show HN: DocSumm AI – Source-linked summaries for long PDFs/URLs
by rohitrajdev | 2025-11-07 19:16:13+00:00
We built DocSumm AI to summarize long PDFs and web pages with verifiable citations.

- Source-linked bullets & highlights (jump to exact passage) - Works with PDFs, web pages, transcripts - Exports Markdown/DOCX; privacy mode (no data retention) - API + webhook for batch/automations

Docs: https://github.com/RohitRajdev/docsumm-ai

Happy to answer technical questions (PDF text layer, layout recovery, citation evaluation).
by reaperducer | 2025-11-07 19:16:30+00:00
Some of it even has unsubscribe links (I didn't subscribe), or, "If you don't want to hear from me again, just let me know", etc.

I don't know if this counts as "drip marketing" (a new term to me), but just this week Apple spammed me with some Apple Card offer for Hertz car rentals.

No way to unsubscribe. No link. No mention of unsubscribing at all. And on the Apple Card web site, no way to turn off marketing emails.

I wish you could still report these spam's to the FTC.
by metadat | 2025-11-07 19:16:37+00:00
This makes me sad, R* has made some of my most favorite games, especially Red Dead Redemption 2.

They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings?

I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.
by hilbert42 | 2025-11-07 19:16:53+00:00
This is a bit messy but if there are completing options at a given location install multiple ISPs and run them concurrently and log the details—download speeds, etc.

There's nothing as good as hard verifiable data—even if regulators play hardball and favor ISPs then you've the evidence to whip up political action (claim biased decisions, etc.).
by SaltyBackendGuy | 2025-11-07 19:17:04+00:00
> For one there is no indication that parents are any more literate in regards to digital practices than their kids

This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.

It's absolutely a collective action problem.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-07 19:17:33+00:00
Businesses desire growth, not conservation or charity. And that desire is frequently achieved through illegal means. Wage theft for instance is a far greater sum than the total of robbery in the US. The criminality is rampant!

Meta is also in the news today for making 10% of its revenue from scams, as well as for having codified policy that scammers representing at least 0.15% of their revenue must be protected from any moderation.

Business thrives on illegality.
by josephg | 2025-11-07 19:18:03+00:00
> How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?

Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school.

Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-07 19:18:06+00:00
I remember that AT&T store! Note that mall is

https://www.simon.com/mall/the-mall-of-new-hampshire

They built it around 1980 when they built 93 as a ring road going around the city and I remember Sears immediately moving from a downtown location at the North End of Elm street to the mall and then most of the other department stores on Elm going out of business shortly thereafter.

As much as I could complain about the anti-pedestrian development of Southern NH that wants to be like a human lung and have exactly one path through the hierarchy from here to there [1] I can say my family did profit from Rt 93 because it caused the neighborhood I was in to develop so that the value of my house went up 1500%.

[1] this guarantees you'll encounter multiple traffic jams when multiple parts of the hierarchy get overloaded
by D-Machine | 2025-11-07 19:18:21+00:00
> They keep it because most people actually want that behaviour.

> they keep it because it drives engagement (aka profits); people naturally like interacting with someone who agrees with them

Yes, we are saying the same thing, or at least that was what the "actually" was meant to imply (i.e. revealed preference).

ChatGPT does in fact prompt paying users to set up the tone and personality up front (or it did for me when I set it up recently), but it would be nice if this was just like a couple buttons or checkboxes right up front above the search bar, for everyone. E.g. a "Prefer to agree with me" checkbox, and a few personality checkboxes or something would maybe go a long way. It would also be more usable for when switching between tasks (e.g. research vs. creative writing).
by OJFord | 2025-11-07 19:19:05+00:00
Well, they're off by default in the countries mentioned in the top-level comment because they're legally required to be opt-in there (the implementation rather than the feature of course, but it couldn't really be otherwise).

I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't have to make it optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs) for little upside (...force adoption against the will of users who would go out of their way to opt out of they could?).
by adverbly | 2025-11-07 19:19:14+00:00
If you ignore performance and mathematical elegance and safety and just look at how much a language lets you get away with from a productivity standpoint, I think Ruby is a pretty standout winner and nobody else even comes close really...

Very clear APIs and syntax(with the possible exception of blocks which can be weird because they aren't quite functions), and tons of raw metaprogramming powers.

You can argue it sacrifices too much of the other things to deliver on these things, but it's hard to argue against it doing well at what it optimizes for!
by lloeki | 2025-11-07 19:19:17+00:00
> it’s built into Ruby!

Nitpick: technically `Gem::Version` is part of `rubygems`, and while `rubygems` is (typically) packaged with Ruby, it's actually entirely optional, so much so that `rubygems` actually monkeypatches† Ruby core's `Kernel` (notably `require`) to inject gem functionality.

MRuby has none of it, and CRuby has a `--disable-rubygems` configure flag.

Back in 1.8 days, you even had to manually require `rubygems`!

† https://github.com/ruby/rubygems/tree/4e4d2b32353c8ded870c14...
by terminalshort | 2025-11-07 19:19:19+00:00
IMO MFA (or a passkey) is much more important. Most online accounts I have I couldn't give a rats ass if someone got in. (Not that they would because there would be no monetary value to them). Best to focus on those that are important and set MFA on them. If they don't offer MFA, find someone else who does. MFA + crappy password is better than strong PW w/o MFA, because even a PW manager can be leaked. This isn't to say you shouldn't care about secure PWs, but IMO it's the less important factor here.
by ajross | 2025-11-07 19:19:38+00:00
The problem with that story is the dates. If you sold in 1998 when PG realized the ponzi characteristic of the market[1] you'd have lost ("lost") a ton of money. The nasdaq composite in June of 1998 was about $1800. It reached a peak of $5000 (!!!!) just before the crash.

The advice is correct, but in practice it's only helpful if you can time the crash, which you can't. Cycle-driven run-ups in advance of bubble burst events can be shockingly long.

[1] Which is roughly where we are right now with the AI bubble.
Show HN: I built single time-sorted place to read HN, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot
by busymom0 | 2025-11-07 19:20:04+00:00
You can read more about it by clicking the slogan at the top of my site "your daily compass for the STEAMD web".

I often browse forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits. Having to constantly switch between various sites to stay up to date was frustrating. So, I built Lime Reader.

It has currently aggregated the best 20 thousand articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various sites and displays them in chronological order. It shows the score on the side which can be clicked to read comments. I hope it saves you time from having to constantly switch between sites.

The percentages at the top lets you select how much top posts you want to see from each source. Top 100% will show all the top content. If you are short on time and just want to see the cream of the crop, try 5% to see the top 5%. You can change the link to a custom number too.

You can customize theme and other stuff in the settings page. Also, by default, headlines that are classified as political by an LLM are dimmed and show a "P" before them. You can disable dimming or entirely block political headlines in settings.

There are many useful settings you may want to tweak:

https://limereader.com/settings

Tech details:

I really hate huge bloated sites and also hate adding third-party frameworks unless absolutely needed.

Therefore, I have engineered Lime Reader to be as small in size as possible so that it loads instantly. It's server side rendered, so it works even with JavaScript disabled (though enabling it gives you a few extra features like quick access to archive.org for each link).

Both PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom rate my site's performance as Excellent.

This is the first time I decided to develop my entire backend in Swift. It uses only one third-party framework called Vapor for serving the HTML. I am using SQLite for database which comes already included on Apple platforms.

I am running a local LLM model (qwen3:8b) using Ollama for classifying headlines as political or not. It's doing the job decently well. I access it from my Swift backend app using its REST api.

I welcome any feedback.

Also, I am the developer of HACK, the top ranking app for Hacker News on iOS and Android. Is there any interest in turning Lime Reader into an app too?
by rufus_foreman | 2025-11-07 19:20:23+00:00
>> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines.

I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.

The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.