MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-27 22:08:50+00:00
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!

Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.

I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.

Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.

For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)

But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
by Nasrudith | 2025-12-27 22:08:53+00:00
The Great Filter is just bullshit until we come across space ruins to prove that something has been filtering out civilizations. It is possible that we are just the "precursors" without any giants to stand upon the shoulders of.

Catastrophazing new media hasn't gone out of fashion yet. Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?
by nirvdrum | 2025-12-27 22:09:01+00:00
> Why do you care about the history of a branch?

Presumably, a branch is a logical segment of work. Otherwise, just push directly master/trunk/HEAD. It's what people did for a long time with CVS and arguably worked to some extent. Using merge commits is pretty common and, as such, that branch will get merged into the trunk. Being able to understand that branch in isolation is something I've found helpful in understanding the software as a whole.

> Caring about the history of a branch is weird, I think your approach is just not compatible with how people work.

I get you disagree with me, but you could be less dismissive about it. Work however you want -- I'm certainly not stopping you. I just don't your productivity to come at the expense of mine. And, I offered up other potential (and IMHO, superior) solutions from both developer and system tools.

I suppose what type of project you're working on matters. The "treat git like a versioned zip file" using squashed merges works reasonably well for SaaS applications because you rarely need to roll anything back. However, I've found a logically structured history has been indispensable when working on long-lived projects, particularly in open source. It's how I'm able to dig into a 25 year old OSS tool and be reasonably productive with.

To the point I think you're making: sure, I care what changed, and I can do that with `diff`. But, more often if I'm looking at SCM history I'm trying to learn why a change was made. Some of that can be inferred by seeing what other changes were made at the same time. That context can be explicitly provided with commit messages that explain why a change was made.

Calling it incompatible with how people work is a pretty bold claim, given the practice of squash merging loads of mini commits is a pretty recent development. Maybe that's how your team works and if it works for you, great. But, having logically separate commits isn't some niche development practice. Optimizing for writes could be useful for a startup. A lot of real world software requires being easy to maintain and a good SCM history shines there.

All of that is rather orthogonal to the point I was trying to add to the discussion. We have better tools at our disposal than running `git commit` every 15 minutes.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-27 22:09:36+00:00
> Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades.

Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill.

There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-27 22:10:37+00:00
> countries (emerging markets / BRI recipients) who would have borrowed USD from FED (or US influenced IMF/WB) now borrow from USD from PRC -> reduce US treasuries demand

This makes no sense. If the PRC is lending U.S. dollars, that doesn’t reduce Treasury demand. It increases demand for dollar-denominated assets, goods and service providers. The borrowing country has to spend those lent dollars after all.
by johnisgood | 2025-12-27 22:10:45+00:00
> you shouldn't have long-lived public keys used for confidentiality.

This statement is generic and misleading. Using long-lived keys for confidentiality is bad in real-time messaging, but for non-ephemeral use cases (file encryption, backups, archives) it is completely fine AND desired.

> Would "fetch a short-lived age public key" serve your use case?

Sadly no.
by phtrivier | 2025-12-27 22:11:41+00:00
We can't afford scientist in Europe anymore, we have pensions to pay.

I suppose China does not need american scientist to work in China. They just need to make sure they can't work in the US. Which they are doing.

The only "funny" outcome is that they manage to fund a startup that develops tools to alleviate climate change, and explicitly reserve them to countries and states that believed in climate change in the first place.

But that would be mean. So, of course Florida can have it. It will just be slightly expensive for them.
by cxr | 2025-12-27 22:12:28+00:00
Two oversights in this article:

- Failure to mention Netscape Enterprise Server (NodeJS is not responsible for expanding "the language's scope[…] far beyond the browser"—it was on the server from almost the very beginning; the author cites Brendan's 2011 blog post[1] which namechecks Rhino, but then leaves this out)

- Failure to mention JS running on the James Webb Space Telescope (Brendan's post also namechecks Nombas, but doesn't go into much detail about it; Brent Noorda, who's also the son of former Novell CEO Ray Noorda, covered this in an update to the Nombas section of his site[2] in 2022)

1. <https://brendaneich.com/2011/06/>

2. <https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm>
by ianburrell | 2025-12-27 22:12:34+00:00
Causality moves at the speed of light. Events that are farther apart are called spacelike and aren't causally connected.

I think you might be confusing events that have some history between them, and those are influence each other. Like say right now, Martian rover sends message to Earth and Earth sends message to them, those aren't causally connected cause don't know about the other message until light speed delay has passed.
by joecool1029 | 2025-12-27 22:13:26+00:00
I don't know legally how it works, but my gut says if this is found to be a wrongful termination under state/local/FMLA, then it also stands to reason that this could also be a wrongful death. From 1960, but it covers this line of thinking wrt suicide: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

Anyway here's the actual complaint (I read it after I wrote the above), I guess her parents/counsel thought the same thing: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docInde...
by lateralux | 2025-12-27 22:13:30+00:00
My Orange Pi RV2 sucks :( The available distros, drivers, kernel, and tools do work, but they’re crappy, and poorly maintained. There’s no support and very little documentation, which is a real shame. From a hardware point of view, it’s a nice board and when I properly compiled some softwares myself I actually got really interesting performance, but it was a pain in the ass.
So I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi 4, much better supported and documented.
by wk_end | 2025-12-27 22:14:33+00:00
> Government agencies don't have "free speech".

My understanding is that, in many ways, government agencies are more constitutionally protected speech-wise than private entities, precisely because any hierarchical attempt to punish them for their speech would be coming from the government rather than private entities. IANAL (or even American) though so grain of salt.

In any case, a lot of the right-wing hypocrisy around free speech that was being called out by OP didn't have much to do with constitutionally protected freedom of speech either - it was complaining about things like private companies (e.g. Twitter) shadowbanning people.
by upofadown | 2025-12-27 22:14:35+00:00
Are you referring to "Encrypted message malleability checks are incorrectly enforced causing plaintext recovery attacks"?

Seems like a legitimate difference of opinion. The researcher wants a message with an invalid format to return an integrity failure message. Presumably the GnuPGP project thinks that would be better handled by some sort of bad format error.

The exploit here is a variation on the age old idea of tricking a PGP user into decrypting an encrypted message and then sending the result to the attacker. The novelty here is the idea of making the encrypted message look like a PGP key (identity) and then asking the victim to decrypt the fake key, sign it and then upload it to a keyserver.

Modifying a PGP message file will break the normal PGP authentication[1] (that was not acknowledged in the attack description). So here is the exploit:

* The victim receives a unauthenticated/anonymous (unsigned or with a broken signature) message from the attacker. The message looks like a public key.

* Somehow (perhaps in another anonymous message) the attacker claims they are someone the victim knows and asks them to decrypt, sign and upload the signed public key to a keyserver.

* They see nothing wrong with any of this and actually do what the attacker wants ignoring the error message about the bad message format.

So this attack is also quite unlikely. Possibly that affected the decision of the GnuPG project to not change behaviour in this case.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:pgpauth

Added: Wait. How would the victim import the bogus PGP key into GPG so they could sign it? There would normally be a preexisting key for that user so the bogus key would for sure fail to import. It would probably fail anyway. It will be interesting to see what the GnuPG project said about this in their response.
by isthatafact | 2025-12-27 22:14:55+00:00
That is an extremely cynical view, and it does not fit with reality.
There is no mechanism where little Timmy gets a free ticket to be a university professor in science.

People who manage to make a career in science usually follow a specific educational path that includes a phd and postdoctoral research. No one would claim it is completely fair because there are many things that can block or hide that path (family situation; life events; lack of encouragement from teachers; being born in the wrong country; etc.). However, the system does not otherwise care about your background in any meaningful way.

You should consider the dark implications that you may be pushing misinformation that could discourage people who are gifted or intellectually curious and motivated from trying to improve the world by doing science.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-27 22:15:15+00:00
> higher yield means the bond is sold at higher discount i.e. cheaper

Yes. The Fed set a policy of higher rates. It did that by selling bonds and driving the price up.

Then it set a policy of reducing rates, and was able to do that by just selling fewer bonds. Not buying them. That implies strong demand for these assets. (You can’t use price as a proxy for demand in Treasuries since it’s an explicitly manipulated price by its issuer.)
by rootbear | 2025-12-27 22:15:17+00:00
I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?
by data-ottawa | 2025-12-27 22:15:28+00:00
The situation reminds me of that New Yorker comic: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders"

Governments should be responsible for preventing these types of externalities as one of their core functions. There is no incentive for markets, consumers, and companies to deal with this, yet the forecast costs of climate change and sea level rise are (and will be) massive. Many places have some weak patchwork framework of private insurance and FEMA style funds, but without an actual pricing and enforcement system there's no way out of the warming feedback loop.

I was extremely disappointed in the failure of my (Canada's) government to articulate what a carbon tax was or how it worked to voters, and that allowed the opposition from both sides to chip at it until now it's a politically toxic idea.

The game theory of international accords is increasingly falling apart and countries will try to undercut each other on carbon pricing.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
by oblique | 2025-12-27 22:15:56+00:00
> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."

> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators.

Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult.

The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
by ben_w | 2025-12-27 22:15:56+00:00
The absence is the evidence.

Being a precursor is not inconsistent with great filters, a great filter is why nobody else is there to be one.

Great filter is anywhere at all in the progress of life from pre-life chemistry to stable interplanetary expansion; filters behind us, for example multicellular life or having dry land so we can invent fire, are still potential great filters and they would leave no space ruins to find.

That said, my assumption is lots of little filters that add up. Eleven filters behind us each with 10% pass rates is enough to make us the peak of civilisation in this galaxy; eleven more between us and Kardashev III would make the universe seem empty.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 22:16:03+00:00
Well, I'd be careful about the "always", when Facebook and Twitter started out they understood virality but they did not understand monetization -- early on the likes of Zynga and King were making money off Facebook and it wasn't until Facebook was forced to go public and Sheryl Sandberg was running things that they figured out that they could capture the free publicity brands got on Facebook and sell it back to them.
by caseysoftware | 2025-12-27 22:16:16+00:00
The EV tax applies to people who a) casue a disproportionate amount of wear & tear on the roads vs ICE vehicles and b) are generally higher income in the state.

When you look at taxation from a "charge the people who use it" or the "the rich should pay more" perspective, this appears to address both.

Is the problem simply that you want to pay less taxes?
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-27 22:16:29+00:00
To recap, the original statement was, "Llm's do not verbatim disgorge chunks of the code they were trained on." We obviously both disagree with it.

While you keep trying to drag this toward an upper bound, I'm trying to illustrate that a coin with "//" reproduces a chunk of code. Again. I don't see much of a disagreement on that point either. What I continue to fail to elicit from you is the salient difference between the two.

I'm trying to find a scissor that distills your vibes into a consistent rule and each time it's the rebutted like I'm trying to make an argument. If your system doesn't have consistency, just say so.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-27 22:16:45+00:00
> you can take the slip roads almost everywhere but they’re slow.

We have that problem here in Germany. The roads aren't just slow - the people living in the towns these roads run through are going through hell because they are affected massively. Can't safely cross the road, emergency response vehicles take ages, an insane amount of noise and emissions (because vehicles near idle make much more toxic exhaust when at low load and thus temperature), more brake and tire dust... Austria was fed up years ago, Bavaria recently followed suit [1].

[1] https://www.adac.de/der-adac/regionalclubs/suedbayern/news/a...
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-27 22:17:07+00:00
You're just so used to a debt fueled economy that you can't think of it being any other way. That is the problem though in that 99 times out of 100, debt goes rogue in a runaway sense and blows up the system. It is a time bom.

In essence, debt doesn't need saving from the system; it's the system that needs saving from debt.
by DANmode | 2025-12-27 22:17:21+00:00
or maybe we, as a group, underestimate the impacts of chronic infection on the body and brain.

Otherwise “simple infections” are (likely, almost obviously) responsible for tons, including dementia, Parkinson’s, more,

and they’re the ones everyone ignores,

or struggle to even get a diagnosis for,

and instead say “it’s normal to not be able to squat once, or have any energy when you’re ‘getting older’!”.

These infections can drive…completely life-changing medical trajectories - without the patient ever noticing.

Everyone just thinks they won the “reverse—lottery” when cancer or dementia finally shows up…I’m becoming less convinced it’s a “chance” thing at all.

We just don’t see, nor monitor the beginnings - and if we do happen upon them, hey, “everybody has Staph, EBV, [insert bacteria or virus here] - nothing to be worried by! Very common!”
by cstricklan | 2025-12-27 22:17:33+00:00
I normally try to stick to serverless with SST for quick projects because I like that they scale to $0, but this is enticing. Shelley is a great feature and must have well-designed system prompts and tools for testing the website built-in. It just one-shotted a volunteer management app and with just one more click in the console I can expose it to the public.
by NelsonMinar | 2025-12-27 22:17:55+00:00
On the flipside, clock sync for civilians has never been easier. Thanks to NTP any device with an Internet connection can pretty easily get time accurate to 1 second, often as little as 10 ms. All major consumer computers are preconfigured to sync time to one of several reliable NTP pools.

This post is about more complicated synchronization for more demanding applications. And it's very good. I'm just marveling at how in my lifetime I from "no clock is ever set right" to assuming most anything was within a second of true time.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-12-27 22:18:08+00:00
> Groq built the region's largest inference cluster in eight days in December 2024. From that Dammam facility, GroqCloud serves "nearly four billion people regionally adjacent to the KSA." This isn't API access. This is critical AI infrastructure for a nation-state, funded by the Public Investment Fund, processing inference workloads at national scale.

Maybe I'm just completely out of touch, and hardware has never been my expertise, but does it take O(days) and not O(years) to build data centers these days? I know Grok DCs in Memphis were built under a year cutting many corners and using plenty loopholes, but even by those standards, bringing up a full data center in just over a week sounds impossible without some insane construction automation to me.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-27 22:18:22+00:00
"And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things."

What you describe doesn't really provide much signal about this, because a big corp will always have a huge interest in having uniform working contracts. Exceptions are possible but only worth the headache with them for fairly high level employees. So even for a clause that they really wouldn't care much about, you'd expect a similar reaction.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-27 22:19:05+00:00
> If you want cars off the road, you tax rich people and build trains and bike lanes, and shut down cynical RTO. Full stop.

The first two smell like communism, the last massively harms the rich people and their playthings (REITs - real estate investment trusts). Won't happen, not in countries where Big Money is pulling the strings (i.e. the US, Germany and UK).
by spiantino | 2025-12-27 22:19:28+00:00
i thought so at first, but I did some digging and changed my mind. it's possible the following is how it goes:

- secondary transaction with the preferred shareholders (VCs) at some price that implies a 20b valuation

- founders quit and get new employment agreements

- some cash is transferred to the company as a license fee

- no acquisition means no DOJ approval

in this scenario the headline can be $20b but the cash expense can be much lower, you have full flexibility to direct whatever cash or equity you want to founders vs the rest of the company, as an up front payment or as retention/salary, and the founders have no hinderance from working on anything they touched at previous company because of IP license.

I actually bet this is how it went down. This is becoming the standard in the industry and it's just awful for the future of SV
by nirvdrum | 2025-12-27 22:20:00+00:00
> But this would require hand curation? No development proceeds that way, or if it does then I would question whether the person is spending 80% of their day curating PRs unnecessarily.

It's not really hand curation if you're deliberate about it from the get-go. It's certainly not eating up 80% of anyone's time.

Structuring code and writing useful commits a skill to develop, just like writing meaningful tests. As a first step, use `git add -p` instead of `git add .` or `git commit -a`. As an analog, many junior devs will just test everything, even stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense, and then jumble them all together. It takes practice to learn how to better structure that stuff and it isn't done by writing a ton of tests and then curating them after the fact.

> I think you must be kind of senior and you can get away with just insisting that other people be less efficient and work in a weird way so you can feel more comfortable?

Your personal productivity should only be one consideration. The long-term health of the project (i.e., maintenance) and the impact on other people's efficiency also must be considered. And efficiency isn't limited to how quickly features ship. Someone who ships fast but makes it much harder to debug issues isn't a top performer. At least, in my experience. I'd imagine it's team, company, and segment-dependent. For OSS projects with many part-time contributors, that history becomes really important because you may not have the future ability to ask someone why they did something a particular way.