MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-26 23:43:00+00:00
If they were really concerned about interchange fees, they wouldn’t accept American Express cards either. The difference between the interchange fees of Visa vs Amex is much greater than tap to pay versus non tap to pay.

There is a reason that there are a lot more places that don’t accept Amex than don’t accept tap to pay. You see this a lot internationally.

Just this year alone, every mom and pop place I went to in Costa Rica, Canada, UK and France accepted Apple Pay but only merchants in the UK widely accepted Amex.
by apple4ever | 2025-11-26 23:43:47+00:00
Yup that's right. I had multiple low (<200) tests over 3 years, and finally was able to get on it (haven't actually started it yet to be fair).

Now I am worried about the long term effects, but it's been so long that if I am on it for the rest of my life and it does help me, that's good enough.
by bondarchuk | 2025-11-26 23:43:56+00:00
But you have to engage with it before you can find out whether you like it.

>If you can't tell the difference, and it's entertainment stop worrying about it.

At the end of the day it's a philosophical/existential choice. Not everyone would step into the awesome-life-simulator where you can't tell the difference. On similar grounds one might decide on principle to consume only human-made media, be a part of the dynamical system that is real human culture.
by stouset | 2025-11-26 23:44:48+00:00
I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer).

The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-26 23:45:28+00:00
In practice this is a non-issue. No production code ships as raw AI output. There's always architectural decisions, integration with existing systems, security reviews, debugging cycles, and business logic validation layered on top. Not to mention massive amounts of yelling and shouting at the AI to get it right. Each of those involves the kind of creative judgment courts have historically recognized as copyrightable contribution.

The more interesting question: will companies need to document human contribution to defend copyright claims? That might accidentally improve code review practices.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-26 23:46:14+00:00
Look, I don't like some of the things the EU is doing and I think Apple should consider (along with other tech companies) selling products tailed to the EU, Asia and rest of the world. In the long-run, it might be cheaper.

That said, they are setting a good example of legislating for tech. We should be doing a lot of that here in the US. I don't need a bulletproof, ultra-secure, end-to-end encrypted, formally verified phone (although that would be nice). As a boring regular person, I want to not have to need all of that because my government will imprison people that violate my rights. But more on-topic, the FTC (EDIT: FCC) exists to regulate among other things, wireless comms, so this would be something they should be legislating.

Although, putting on my tech hat, I need to re-state that I disagree with this move. I want tech companies to experiment and use faster, more secure, more reliable comms tech without having to worry about compatibility. It is in my interest as a consumer.

Lightning was a superior technology to USB-C, we don't have it now because the EU forced apple's hands. I don't want to lose out on good tech. The EU should have instead forced everyone else to use lightning if they want things simpler.

Why is the EU intent on having inferior tech, inferior capability, inferior pay, inferior innovation-friendly environment. They have the power to demand better things and provide them for their people. The compromise isn't needed. At the risk of offending the HN crowd, I'll even say that the EU shouldn't support open-source things unless they are actually the superior tech. You can't eat or pay your bills with ideals. If commercial/properietary tech is better for europeans, that is what the EU should focus on.

I will drive European or Japanese cars that are better than American cars, I don't mind doing the same with tech, except with Europe that's getting more and more rare. What happened to Nokia and Ericsson. NL has ASML, wouldn't it be nice if we had a TSMC competitor in Europe as well? I don't want to keep going on, but I hope my point is clear.

Competition is good, Android shouldn't need to support AirDrop, it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.

Instead competition, the EU is wanting forced mediocrity. They are within their rights for sure, but it isn't the best thing to do.

I only wish they did the same thing with electrical outlets and forced the world to use one mediocre standard :)
by jlarcombe | 2025-11-26 23:47:24+00:00
Agree totally. Reminiscent of the Paul Erdös reaction to the proof of the Four Colour Problem.

It's been quite good reading these comments because a lot of them have put into words my own largely negative feelings about the AI ubiquitous hype, which I have found it hard to articulate. Your second paragraph, and someone else's comment about how they are attracted to computer science because they like fiddly detail and so are uninterested in a machine hiding all that, and a third comment about how so-called "busy work" is actually a good way of padding out difficult stuff and so a job of work becomes much less palatable when it is excised entirely.

The other thing I find deeply depressing is the degree to which people are thrilled (genuinely) by dreadful looking AI art and unbearable to read AI prose. Makes me think I've been kidding myself for years that people by and large have a degree of taste. Then again maybe it just means it's not to my taste..
by crazygringo | 2025-11-26 23:49:03+00:00
The author has this backwards:

> but the new trend is surveillance pricing. A company will know that you just got paid and so charge you just a bit more for your chicken nuggets than they do when you haven’t been paid in two weeks.

First of all, no, a company has no idea when you get paid. The reality of lots of apps (like McDonald's) is discount pricing. You pay full price at the store if you're a rich person who can't be bothered with apps. Downloading an app and creating an account is the modern equivalent of cutting out coupons or buy-10-get-one-free cards -- price-conscious consumers will go to the trouble and get cheaper prices. They're just loyalty programs. Price discrimination like this is nothing new, and it lets rich people subsidize the lower costs for people with less money.

These apps run in sandboxes. There's not much to surveil. Obviously don't grant them permissions to see your contacts or track your location all the time. Will the app be able to tie all your purchases to a single identity? Of course. But the stores already do that anyways if you use the same credit card for each purchase.

I don't mind downloading apps for the 5-10 stores/restaurants I go to most. Beyond that, I obviously won't because it's too much of a hassle. But the loyalty discounts I get save me real money. I have no problem with that.
by dhharker | 2025-11-26 23:49:56+00:00
Yes abolutely, that's one of the reasons why I live there. In some areas there are various laws (and pen pushers) to battle in order to make any changes to the built environment, often requiring places stay frozen in time, but also resulting in any new development which does happen being done in keeping with the existing architectural norms and usually to a much higher (and more expensive) standard than regular development elsewhere. This is why the Cotswolds looks like a movie set rather than a real place people actually live. Indeed for the people who actually do live there, the volume of tourists who come to see this has become a monumental pain in the arse. Strict rules have their downsides; for example preventing beautiful old buildings being brought up to date and maintained sensibly, and causing great expense and inconvenience to people doing things which won't have any appreciable effect whatsoever. The balance is not quite right, but the system is weighted towards preserving old stuff and maintaining the architectural "vibe" of locations so we at least get to enjoy that.

Historically buildings were built using the local stone. Not so much wood. Stone is a much better thermal buffer and doesn't burn down so easily. The colours vary from foreboding dark greys through various shades of honey to bright oranges and yellows. There's even some bluish ones. But as the laws in the beautiful areas require new buildings to fit in with old, the brand new houses are built of the same stone as the hundreds of years old houses next door. Not only does this look very nice, but perhaps gives the impression of the buildings fitting or blending into the landscape in some more natural or fundamental way - like these settlements have been here as long as the bedrock.

During the lockdowns when people were getting arrested for going outside there was a joke going around; a policeman stopped God in the Yorkshire Dales and asked him 'What do you think you're doing? You're breaking lockdown!'. God replied: Working from home.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-11-26 23:50:29+00:00
> Can an app uniquely identify me

Even browsers can identify* you, if they really want to.

*not as cleanly though, could be tricky for fingerprinting to track one user across different devices/browsers/netowrks.

Recent discussion on fingerprinting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46016249
by stavros | 2025-11-26 23:51:04+00:00
Was it made of glass?

I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.

Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.
by sfRattan | 2025-11-26 23:52:33+00:00
This assumes the information is clear and consistent enough across time and distance for arbitrage to happen. Pricing in-app, per customer, changing per day would introduce too much unpredictability for most customers to attempt arbitrage. If people in a group all check their apps, and the person with the best prices orders for everyone, it could work in the context of a shared meal.

But imagine trying to sort out X number of people who each want a different basket of items from, say, the Walmart app. Each of those items fluctuating daily in price for each customer independently makes arbitrage almost prohibitively difficult to coordinate.

The best case scenario is something like Steam sales, where a wishlist function notifies you when items you've "watched" are on sale. There are third parties like, for example, Deku Deals that track this pricing data across time for console games.

But Amazon is already trying to banish external AI agents from any access to its data. And what does a price history graph even mean if prices are specific to each customer and stochastically varied each day to induce impulse purchases?
by notahacker | 2025-11-26 23:52:47+00:00
I'm just imagining the first contact a human probe makes with an alien civilization consisting of a chatbot expaining to its alien interlocutors that Elon Musk is the best human, strongest human, funniest human, most attractive human and would definitely win in a fight with Urg the Destroyer of Galaxies... and I don't think I'm the first person to have that idea :)
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-26 23:52:58+00:00
Love the quote:

Every systems engineer at some point in their journey yearns to write a filesystem

It reminds me of a friend who had a TRS-80 color computer (like me) in the 1980s who was a self-taught BASIC programmer who developed a very complex BBS system and was frustrated that the cluster size for the RS-DOS file system was half a track so there was a lot of space wasted when you stored small files. He called me up one day and told me he'd managed to store 180k of files on a 157k disc and I had to break it to him that he was storing 150k (minus metadata) files on a 157k disk as opposed to the 125k or so he was getting before... With BASIC!
by bigyabai | 2025-11-26 23:53:02+00:00
> it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.

Okay, so, why don't we see competition in places where it matters, like Airdrop, iMessage and the App Store?

The answer seems to be pretty simple, to me; Apple considers themselves above competition. It doesn't matter if a superior system exists, they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone. It's a lose/lose situation between consumers and the economy, who neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-26 23:53:22+00:00
An interesting writeup on using a different representation for time is here[1]. It can represent any specific second from March 1, 2000 +/-2.9Myears with 62 bits and can efficiently calculate Gregorian dates using only 32-bit arithmetic. An optimization involving a 156K lookup table is also discussed.

A few notes for those not familiar with Lisp:

1. Common Lisp defines a time called "universal time" that is similar to unix time, just with a different epoch

2. A "fixnum" is a signed-integer that is slightly (1-3 bits) smaller than the machine word size (32-bits at the time the article was written). The missing bits are used for run-time type tagging. Erik's math assumes 31-bits for a fixnum (2.9M years is approximately 2^30 days and fixnums are signed).

3. Anywhere he talks about "vectors of type (UNSIGNED-BYTE X)" this means a vector of x-bit unsigned values. Most lisp implementations will allow vectors of unboxed integers for reasonable values of X (e.g. 1, 8, 16, 32, 64), and some will pack bits for arbitrary values of X, doing the shift/masking for you.

1: https://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
by bigfatkitten | 2025-11-26 23:53:45+00:00
> There is often a scale variance too - in Australia, "hobby" income is treated differently from "business" income. [0]

I have an ABN and I am registered for GST for side hustles beyond the hobbyist income threshold. This costs me about 10 minutes of extra admin per year when I do my tax return.

All I need to do is give the tax office three figures: How much money I earned, how much GST I charged, and how much I paid (ie how much they need to give back to me.)
by e12e | 2025-11-26 23:53:48+00:00
Indeed. Having a look at how Tono handle music copyright in Norway, there's this bit that I think is interesting - what if parts of your system is fully ai generated?

> When Either Music or Lyrics Are 100% AI-Generated

In cases where a work consists of both lyrics and music, and one of these is entirely AI-generated, you will not receive rights to that part of the work.

To obtain copyright in a musical work, you must contribute a creative, human input. Copyright arises automatically when a work is created and requires no form of registration. The right protects you and works created through your human creativity.

> Distinguishing Between AI-Assisted and AI-Generated

If you contribute human creative input that influences the final result, it is TONO’s position that artificial intelligence is used merely as a tool.

Be aware that you have no guarantee that an AI service will not generate the same or a very similar melody or lyric for others as well. If, in your creative process, you use or are inspired by AI-generated text or music, you are on safer ground the more you alter what the AI tool helped you with.

https://www.tono.no/en/faq-items/guidelines-for-the-rights-m...
by dimitri-vs | 2025-11-26 23:53:54+00:00
Agreed. Been using Claude Code daily for the past year and Codex as a fall back when Claude gets stuck. Codex has two problems: it Windows support sucks and it's way to "mission driven" vs the collaborative Claude. Gemini CLI falls somewhere in the middle, has some seriously cool features (Ctrl+X to edit prompt in notepad) and it's web research capability is actually good.
by ohhnoodont | 2025-11-26 23:54:11+00:00
I’ve actually ended otherwise decent relationships early because the other person was way too coy/upset with bodily functions like farting and pooping. If we’er sleeping together I expect us to be farting together. And if we are living together I expect us to be using the toilet in front of each other. Anything less is both inconvenient and reflective of deep personality conflicts that will never be resolved.
by selcuka | 2025-11-26 23:54:24+00:00
I use LMStudio for running models locally (macOS) and it tries to estimate whether the model would fit in my GPU memory (which is the same thing as main memory for Macs).

The Q4_K_S quantized version of Microsoft Fara 7B is a 5.8GB download. I'm pretty sure it would work on a 12GB Nvidia card. Even the Q8 one (9.5GB) could work.
by daemonologist | 2025-11-26 23:55:33+00:00
12GB will be sufficient to run a quantized version, provided you're not running anything else memory-hungry on the GPU.

You're not finding hardware specs because there are a lot of variables at play - the degree to which the weights are quantized, how much space you want to set aside for the KV cache, extra memory needed for multimodal features, etc.

My rule of thumb is 1 byte per parameter to be comfortable (running a quantization with somewhere between 4.5 and 6 bits per parameter and leaving some room for the cache and extras), so 7 GB for 7 billion parameters. If you need a really large context you'll need more; if you want to push it you can get away with a little less.
by gyomu | 2025-11-26 23:58:49+00:00
> Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles

Their background is in marketing/packaging/retail design, and they were at Kate Spade before Apple.

https://a-g-i.org/user/alaindye/

It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine why someone from that world would prioritize things looking good in promotional photos/videos, and not care too much about human factors and fundamentals of interaction design.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 23:59:55+00:00
I don't care which sovereign state or union forces the trillion dollar tech giant to behave. I'm just glad it happened. And I applaud China if this was their victory.

I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google.

We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world.

They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc.

They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-26 23:59:57+00:00
I think this whole narrative being spun here that Good Guy Apple was Being Oppressed by the lowly end users & wanted to do the right thing (be thrown into the briar patch) all along, just never could form the political will for it and needed EU intervention is some insane fucking weird ass made up nonsense. WTF wtf wtf? Surely you must be joking.

Apple has had MfI certification on Apple compatible products for decades & has actively wanted to protect that revenue stream & domain of control. If folks could just plug in devices & have them just work, that would erode their ownership.

And just as bad, it would raise all sorts of questions like "why does this mouse not do anything on my iPhone" and obscure the careful market delineations Apple vigorously has established between its products (which makes people buy more products than they need). Apple never wanted to be a good guy, Apple never wanted to lower itself to the common market of peripherals and standards. Their involvement with USB-C was likely far far far before it was apparent their device teams would have to give up MfI controls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program
by nacozarina | 2025-11-27 00:00:17+00:00
there isn’t a govt on earth that can survive that large & sudden an increase in long-term unemployment; overthrown or bankrupted, they’re gone either way. the pitchfork mob will proceed to start burning data centers. the idea they’ll all quietly choose serfdom over revolution is wildly unrealistic. ai needs much stronger regulation to have a chance at survival.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-27 00:00:25+00:00
> Even a 5090 can handle that. You have to use multiple GPUs.

It takes about 40GB with the fp8 version fully loaded, but ComfyUI can (at reduced speed), with enough system RAM available, partially load models in VRAM during inference and swap at need (the NVidia page linked in the BFL announcement specifically highlights NVidia working with ComfyUI to improve this existing capacity specifically to enable Flux.2) to run on systems with too little VRAM to fully load the model.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-27 00:01:54+00:00
Yeah, I don't like this. By insisting that the main tell of AI writing is that it's comically inaccurate, it accidentally enforces a pretty bad association: that if something looks accurate, it's not AI slop.

I think you gotta start with a definition of what AI slop is and why it matters. Most of what LLMs generate is not obviously incorrect.
by KK7NIL | 2025-11-27 00:02:59+00:00
> These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.

I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.

Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.

> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.

This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.

> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.

That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.

> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.

That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.
by colechristensen | 2025-11-27 00:03:06+00:00
This is a link budget problem. A probe has to have a certain transmit power, receive sensitivity, physical size, fuel for orientation, etc. So you have to come up with the optimums there were it makes sense at all which isn't easy, especially compared to having one big station near earth that communicates point to point with the deep space whatever.

It might just have to be much too big to be worth it in the next n centuries.

If humans settle Mars it'll probably make sense to build one there for marginal improvement and better coverage with the different orbits of Earth and Mars.