MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-11-20 05:14:42+00:00
This notion that tech companies or even internet companies somehow fundamentally rely on PII is false and just an indicator of how normalized we've let unbounded and needless data collection become.

There are tons of business that can run without collecting any or extremely minimal PII. We already let the big companies take this data unnecessarily, let's not also let them brainwash us all into thinking unfettered surveillance is somehow essential to building a software business.
by samename | 2025-11-20 05:15:41+00:00
I agree that separating kids from adults is an improvement, but I disagree this is a "great step" due to the mechanism. Using a child's biometrics is a horrible step. Why can't this just be done with parental controls? We should not normalize games collecting biometrics on children. I don't expect them to keep the data safe or to not abuse the data.
by saurik | 2025-11-20 05:16:32+00:00
Or, like, if you aren't reading and caring about what the interpreter is--as that's the only time this can burn you: it isn't doing a PATH lookup, so you can't walk into this one on accident--then it could literally be something like /bin/rm on some key file. This entire article is based on an assumption that this is somehow so obviously bad that there doesn't even need to be an explanation or defense of any kind of that idea.
by masklinn | 2025-11-20 05:16:41+00:00
Sure but importantly they did realise they had erred and course-corrected.

> if it weren't for some dumb decisions like that one there would have been almost no upgrade discontinuity at all

Having been there and done that, nah, the text model changes alone required significant work to square up in most packages. And there were plenty of other semantics changes.
by wincy | 2025-11-20 05:16:50+00:00
I remember what got me to reinstall Windows after running Ubuntu for a week or two several years ago was they switched from Xorg to Wayland and I literally couldn’t watch movies because they switched over without Wayland supporting this?

It was absolutely bonkers to me and soured me from Linux for years.

I’ve administered thousands of Linux boxes but it’s a totally different ball game.
by coldfoundry | 2025-11-20 05:17:45+00:00
My mom does the same thing regarding “sales”, even after explaining to her the marketing/reasoning aspects of them. If she sees something on sale that was “originally $900” but on sale for $80, shes excited to buy it. It quite literally doesn't matter what it is. It’s nice to see I’m not alone in this situation with her. I can’t wrap my head around it!
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-11-20 05:19:05+00:00
All of them lol. Summers pushed aggressively for the free trade agreements (including allowing China into the WTO) that, in practice, shuttered American manufacturing, he pushed for cuts to capital gains tax, he lobbied aggressively against regulating derivatives and in favor of repealing glass-stegall, both of which directly led to the 2008 crisis, and then after the crisis he caused, he architected a recovery package that prioritized bailing out banks (but not enough to dig the economy out of recession quickly). He's one of the most damaging American figures of all time, he basically got us Trump if you ask me.
by tavavex | 2025-11-20 05:19:40+00:00
They do neither of those things because, unlike you, they don't care about improving the user experience. They care about making money through any possible means.

1. Making the system lean means that you'd have to exclude all the ads, all the free tracking you can do to extract more money, all tie-ins with additional Microsoft services you could've done. Getting paid for the product key is just one step of many in the process of wringing their stack for every last droplet of money they can provide. If anything, it's beneficial to Microsoft to make Windows into a singular giant blob that amalgamates every Microsoft offering into one and pushes them as hard as possible. What are those mainstream customers going to do, not use Windows? Though of course, when using a lean system is a requirement for some business customers, MS will also offer a separate minimal version that can only be obtained through business licenses, just to avoid missing out on those few percent of the market.

2. Why make AI features opt-in? That would require your AI offerings to be alluring enough to motivate users to install the AI features on their own, and how many people will realistically want to install Copilot into Notepad or any other psychotic integrations MS came up with? No, you NEED for your investment to have returns, you need AI to succeed, so what you do is put it in the next update, and then progressively keep punching it down customers' throats enough (via pop-ups, colorful buttons, hardware Copilot keys, ads, integrating it into every piece of software - soon enough they'll probably start substituting regular features with AI ones) until it starts looking like the investment is paying off after all and the investors are happy.
by ScamLifeguard | 2025-11-20 05:20:33+00:00
Hey - we started a company called Lifeguard to focus on exactly this! We focus on three parts: education (quick elearnings), finding/removing data (dark web scan, data broker removal), and auto-protection (chrome extension, iOS app, email integration - to label or block scam messages). I would love to talk to you to hear what product features would be most important for you. Please email me at kevin at trylifeguard.com
by aeonfox | 2025-11-20 05:20:35+00:00
He also highlighted an interesting take on vibe-coding:

> And the other thing of course that's the difference and this is the the heart of the article that Unmesh wrote that we published yesterday is when you're using vibe coding in this kind of way, you're actually removing a very important part of of something which is the learning loop. If you're not looking at the output, you're not learning. And the thing is that so much of what we do is we come up with ideas, we try them out on the computer with this constant back and forth between what the computer does with what we're thinking.

> We're constantly going through that learning loop program approach and Unmesh's point, which I think is absolutely true, is you cannot shortcut that process. And what LLM do, they just kind of skim over all of that and you're not learning. And when you're not learning, that means that when you produce something, you don't know how to tweak it and modify it and evolve it and grow it. All you can do is nuke it from orbit and start again.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-20 05:20:52+00:00
AI can interpolate in the space of search results, yielding results in between the hits that a simple text index would return.

It is also a fuzzy index with the unique ability to match on multiple poorly specified axes at once in a very high dimensional search space. This is notoriously difficult to code with tradition computer science techniques. Large language models are in some sense optimal at it instead of “just a little bit better than a total failure”, which is what we had before.

Just today I needed to find a library I only vaguely remembered from years ago. Gemini found it in seconds based on the loosest description of what it does.

That is a technology that is getting difficult to distinguish from magic.
by isodev | 2025-11-20 05:21:03+00:00
Ok, let’s not have the is Bluesky decentralised discussion again. Kudos to Bluesky’s PR efforts to use complex technology to basically sell themselves as whatever people want to hear (like NFTs but social media). There are a number of X/Threads clones out there, but I’d take a group chat on some relatively secure messaging platform over “social media” any day. Even better if it’s something I can self host or join into one from many servers (remember IRC? Good times).

We really need to rethink this “one corp owns all the keys and all servers” setup.
by dash2 | 2025-11-20 05:22:04+00:00
There are lots of principled arguments about privacy versus growth versus monopoly here. But the reality is: for 95% of people in the EU (or the UK), their only direct experience of GDPR is the cookie banner. They aren't going to understand your subtle arguments about whose fault it is; they know that GDPR came along and they had to click on cookie banners. And they (and I) absolutely hate it.
by nine_k | 2025-11-20 05:22:50+00:00
If IRC suffices for your purposes, then Matrix, with its encryption and all, is apparently overkill.

If I were to upgrade an IRC-based community to something newer and richer, I'd go with Jabber, well-known, well-established, with a ton of various clients and several servers. Yes, it's not ideal, but it's still a massive upgrade compared to IRC, if your server supports a good list XEPs and your community members agree to use non-esoteric clients that also support them.
by Rebelgecko | 2025-11-20 05:23:28+00:00
In general he was not a fan of regulating banks, although he walked back some of his beliefs after 2008. Although iirc he still supports combining investment and commercial banks. Various shenanigans involving privatization of Russian industry. Pushing for tax cuts at the expense of infrastructure spending. He didn't like that the US capped exec pay at banks that received bailouts (banks that gave him millions in speaking fees, which seems a lil bit sketch)
by joecool1029 | 2025-11-20 05:25:49+00:00
I’m a server admin and I still couldn’t tell you why when I sign new endpoints in and verify for cross-signing it still also asks me for a recovery key.

For encrypted search on desktop it has to fetch batches of messages and this is configurable in settings. It just had a number? what is that? how large the batch is, how many ms? no clue! good thing we can’t do encrypted search on mobile/web.
by Krasnol | 2025-11-20 05:27:12+00:00
Wow so much unrelated drama combined with pretty interesting advertisement.

Do you work for Meta?

People don't use WhatsApp because it's so secure. In certain countries people started using it because it was the first app that was cheaper than SMS and now they use it because everybody else is still using it. There is no other significant reason.

They have a history of security issues going back to 2011 when you could take over other peoples account. Today is just the last story of this ugly and leaking brother to Signal. The actually "most secure" app out there.
What I learned from analyzing ultra-lightweight browser racing games
by zduoduo | 2025-11-20 05:29:21+00:00
I’ve been studying how extremely small browser racing games manage to feel surprisingly smooth even without real physics engines.

Most of the interesting parts come from: – camera damping rather than car physics – simplified friction curves – fake drift angles – velocity clamping that makes the handling feel stable – micro-delays that give a sense of weight

I wrote a small breakdown and included a playable demo in case anyone is curious.

https://www.glitchkarts.pro/
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-11-20 05:30:01+00:00
We need 'unfluencers'.

The problem is that it would just be the same few message repeated ad nauseum:

- Treat it all like it's trying to sell you something

- Think for yourself

- Nothing is as simple as it seems

- One person does not represent an entire race/country/group (ie. anecdata is not truth)

etc.

As they say, however, a lie can travel the world twice before the truth has tied its shoe laces.
by dash2 | 2025-11-20 05:30:53+00:00
> Indeed, very different measures of political bias are possible and might show quite different results than those reported here.

Yeah, I was quite disappointed! I would like to see an e.g. Gentzkow & Shapiro "What Drives Media Slant" [1] style analysis where they use automated content analysis to measure output on a left-right scale. (The left and right poles are provided by Democratic and Republican senators, IIRC.)

I think things like "how much content a chatbot provides" and "does it use the word 'although'" are relatively superficial measures and text analysis could go much more in depth.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12707/w127...
by f1shy | 2025-11-20 05:30:56+00:00
You are certainly not the type I am referring to. Even if you cut all that, will not help a lot.

Anayway my story: never ever sid vacation abroad.Vacation outside my home only every 2 or 3 years. Never eat out. I have no idea how is it to go to a concert. No expensive hobbies. When I was 40 all of that provided 40k for a down payment.

I do not regret it.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-20 05:31:38+00:00
I'm aware that Ticketmaster supports scalping and profits from it itself. However, the premise of the article is that the artist hires Ticketmaster and profits from allowing Ticketmaster to do this on their behalf. Where is "blame as a service" here, when the reality is that Tickermaster is engaging in rent-seeking behaviour, extracting excess profit solely for its own benefit and not the artist's?
by voidhorse | 2025-11-20 05:31:58+00:00
Did you read the essay? It never claimed that AI was useless, nor was the ultimate point of the article even about AI's utility—it was about the political and monetary power shifts it has enabled and their concomitant risks, along with the risks the technology might impose for society.

This ignorance or failure to address these aspects of the issue and solely focus on its utility in a vacuum is precisely the blinkered perspective that will enable the consolidations of power the essay is worried about...the people pushing this stuff are overjoyed that so few people seem to be paying any attention to the more significant shifts they are enacting (as the article states, land purchase, political/capital power accumulation, reduction of workforces and operating costs and labor power... the list goes on)
by ziotom78 | 2025-11-20 05:34:12+00:00
As others have commented, this trick alone cannot ensure truly "reproducible" builds.

We used the same trick (git hash + git diff to monitor uncommitted changes) in a Python simulation framework we are developing for the JAXA/EU space mission "LiteBIRD." [1]

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1475-7516/2025/11...
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-11-20 05:34:34+00:00
My conclusion would be that under the current GDPR that if someone had the browser setting on, if a company did not respect that setting and kept private data, that they could be reported for GDPR violations and then the issue could be adjudicated, i.e that the courts would then decide if in fact GDPR violations occur by not following that browser setting.

Secondary conclusion - it might be more beneficial if one just contacted the EDPB and said since this browser setting exists and nobody is using it please issue a ruling if the browser setting must be followed, set it to go into effect by this date giving people time to implement it, and if they agreed the browser setting would be adequate to represent your GDPR wishes they might also conclude that it would be an onerous process to make you go through a GDPR acceptance if it were turned on, howe ver as this article is saying that they are "scaling back" the GDPR that would seem to be dead in the water, which is why I said under "the current GDPR".
by epistasis | 2025-11-20 05:35:07+00:00
I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.

I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.

Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.

All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
by joecool1029 | 2025-11-20 05:35:23+00:00
I mean we’re there for Signal. The parts that suck still are regarding access/retention of old messages which is an area Matrix is ironically slightly better about. But Signal we don’t need to think about verification, at worst it says this asshole has a new identity and then I have to tell them I’ve reset my iPhone for the 4th time this week…

Normal users do find retention important even if privacy/security minded users find value in ephemerality.
by cookiengineer | 2025-11-20 05:35:32+00:00
I can recommend trying out Mox as an email server. The author built everything from scratch and does a lot of great work when it comes to unifying everything. The wizard spits out all the discovery, DKIM, DMARC, DANE and MTA STS related subdomains you have to change the entries of (that is the most painful part) but everything else really works like a charm.

Much much easier installation process than weeks of trying to make postfix and dovecot work.

[1] https://xmox.nl

[2] https://www.xmox.nl/protocols/
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-20 05:35:33+00:00
So now you just have to get deplatformed by Cloudflare, AWS, Fastly, Azure, Radware, Google, Akamai, F5, Imperva and every other DDoS protection company in the world all at the same time while simultaneously suffering from a DDoS attack that never lets up or your site immediately comes back.

Meanwhile a DDoS attack is a crime, so Apple doing something with the equivalent effect is now something you're equating with the commission of a crime.
by int_19h | 2025-11-20 05:36:30+00:00
It's guaranteed to work provided that Bash is in the path.

It's very common for Python. Less so for Bash for two reasons: because the person who writes the script references /bin/sh instead (which is required to be there) even when they are writing bash-isms, or because the person who writes the script assumes that Bash is universally available as /bin/bash.
by brendyn | 2025-11-20 05:37:06+00:00
To me, I find it a bit frustrating that Arch linux routinely has "manual intervention required" problems every single year where the intervention is just a single command that pacman could have just ran themselves if they so desired. Sometimes, they get a new developer and you have to manually install their keys first otherwise packages fail authentication. What can you do in the face of that except conclude they don't want things to "just work" and create a derivative in the hopes of making things just work.
by jolmg | 2025-11-20 05:37:17+00:00
Because /bin is the standard location for bash. The only one that breaks that expectation is NixOS (and maybe GuixSD?), apparently. I'm surprised they didn't symlink /bin or put a stub. Last time I tried NixOS was like 10 years ago. I thought there was a /bin/bash, but maybe it was just a /bin/sh?

Other interpreters like python, ruby, etc. have more likelyhood of being used with "virtual environments", so it's more common to use /usr/bin/env with them.
by doubtfuluser | 2025-11-20 05:37:22+00:00
I think this is a super important point. Working on ai I’m really wondering where this will actually end in the case of our media consumption, AI is being used to generate more engaging content, this will imply ai will be almost a requirement to stay visible, so more ai will be used. In the end little to no “real content” will make it through.

Will there be a moment where people will leave social networks to get “real content” again? Will that be safe from AI optimization then?

Are we seeing the start of the demise of social media?
by rramadass | 2025-11-20 05:39:53+00:00
You are on the right track i.e. stay with an Arduino in the beginning. Note that "Arduino" is a family of boards with different MCUs but all providing a common API (mostly). So you choose the Board/MCU combination best suited for your system and can always move to something else later after you have gotten some experience. The reason is the Arduino Ecosystem. There are thousands of free tutorials, designs, libraries etc. all available for you to try out for your app and more often than not you can have your PoC/MVP by just plugging in some libraries and writing some glue code. You only have to learn the Arduino API and not any specific MCU's datasheets unless and until you are doing something more lower level. It is all way easier.

The Arduino Cloud offering (runs on AWS) makes integrating your Arduino-based system into an end-to-end SaaS app simple (just watch and follow some tutorials on Youtube). There is also the Arduino PRO series of hardware for you if and when you want industrial-grade hardware for demanding systems/environments.

If the Qualcomm c-suites have half a brain amongst themselves they will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-20 05:39:56+00:00
Gnome evolution has shift-ctrl-v to move to a folder with typeahead search. I don't use the gmail webclient so I can't say how it compares.

I should note that I mostly use the emacs notmuch mail client, which requires having the mail mirrored locally (which I do with e.g. isync/mbsync), but gives really responsive and rich search and tagging capabilities
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-20 05:40:00+00:00
> These were all precipitated by the US BIS50+ ruling that threatend to sanction any Chinese subsidiary of any company on the Entity list , which increaed the list from something like 1500 to 30k companies overnight with Nexperia in the mix.

The ousting of the CEO wasn't. He was pulling a lot of resources to China and also buying wafers that weren't actually used to fake business.

This was one of the reasons they got on the entity list in the first place and it's very shady if not illegal. But in China it's very common practice, the government even does it itself, building mega cities that remain empty because the prices are too high to afford. Just to prop up their economy stats.

Nexperia was never going to stay under government control, the government isn't in the business of making chips. But dumping the CEO was a good decision (and can't be overturned by the government because it was a court decision)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-20 05:40:18+00:00
Imagine mcdonald's CEO saying "But it has so much calorie density for the price! and the bigmac tastes so sweet". People don't necessarily want calorie density just the same as they don't want their burgers tasting like sweet pie, not the right flavor for the context. Similarly, most people aren't necessarily trying to be productive, and they want features in the right context, and when desirable.

Tangentially, Why is copilot, or even windows 11 as a whole so bland? Forget the features, why won't they slap some nice looking UI to sell the darn thing? wtf is up with the weird rainbow icon thing for copilot? It looks like something I would have scribbled together in photohshop when I was in highschool. Back to my food example, presentation of food carries most of the weight of what makes the food appetizing. UI/UX is presentation. A sweet hamburger, or a grey burger meat is bad UX just as a copilot showing up in random undesirable places is.
by TowerTall | 2025-11-20 05:41:20+00:00
As other had said it is a huge leap forward. What is holding me back from using mac/linux as dev platform is that Visual Studio (proper, not code) is windows only. I would hate if I had to use vs code as my ide for c#. I am aware that ryder exists but haven't personally used it for more than a few short moments. IMHO opinion, if you you want to develop using c# you are best of using windows because of better tooling with linux as deployment target.