MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2025-12-05 20:18:54+00:00
I think Netflix's incentives, especially now that they have an ad tier, have changed.

With a subscription service 10 years ago, you just need to have enough must-see content:

- Original scripted TV series that become mainstream known and/or seen as prestige TV, like "The Crown," "Mindhunter," "Bridgerton," "Stranger Things" etc.

- "Crown Jewel" reruns with huge fanbases such as The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Arrested Development, etc.

- Unscripted TV series that become buzzy - like Love Is Blind, Tiger King, etc.

Having those categories all well-stocked ensures that only a fool would cancel their Netflix subscription as they'll be out of the loop when the new season of a 'zeitgeisty' show drops. You don't really need all your viewers to watch more hours to get more money every year, you can grow revenue with a combo of new viewers and price increases as long as users just watch regularly.

I think present-day Netflix sees incentives:

- to get as many people on the ad tier as possible so they can scale revenue with watch time

- to increase watch time which is a solved problem via psychological manipulation if you have good ML like they do

- more watch time without spending more money points pretty obviously to lowering cost per show as much as you can, which manifests as worse quality, more reality, more imported dubbed shows, etc. and drastically curtailing giving huge checks to the Matthew Weiners, David Benioffs, and Vince Gilligans of the world to bet on a massive superhit.

So they will want to focus heavily on the unscripted category plus whatever they can slap together cheaply, then autoplay and optimize their way to growth.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-05 20:18:59+00:00
The tech industry is full of brash but lightly-seasoned people resurrecting discredited ideas for contrarianism cred and making the rest of us put down monsters we thought we'd slain a long time ago.

"Defensive programming" has multiple meanings. To the extent it means "avoid using _ as a catch-all pattern so that the compiler nags you if someone adds an enum arm you need to care about", "defensive" programming is good.

That said, I wouldn't use the word "defensive" to describe it. The term lacks precision. The above good practice ends up getting mixed up with the bad "defensive" practices of converting contract violations to runtime errors or just ignoring them entirely --- the infamous pattern in Java codebases of scrawling the following like of graffiti all over the clean lines of your codebase:

if (someArgument == null) { throw new NullPointerException("someArgument cannot be null"); }

That's just noise. If someArgument can't be null, let the program crash.

Needed file not found? Just return ""; instead.

Negative number where input must be contractually not negative? Clamp to zero.

Program crashing because a method doesn't exist? if not: hasattr(self, "blah") return None

People use the term "defensive" to refer to code like the above. They programs that "defend" against crashes by misbehaving. These programs end up being flakier and harder to debug than programs that are "defensive" in that they continually validate their assumptions and crash if they detect a situation that should be impossible.

The term "defensive programming" has been buzzing around social media the past few weeks and it's essential that we be precise that

1) constraint verification (preferably at compile time) is good; and

2) avoidance of crashes at runtime at all costs after an error has occurred is harmful.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-12-05 20:19:00+00:00
I didn't mean to imply my choice was good or bad and to make any value judgement about your circumstances. I'm sorry if it seemed that way.

The age restriction seems obnoxious to me, too. I'd love to gather criticisms of this reasoning with citations that I can take to my PCP. It gives me the willies rolling the dice with this. I would much rather get the vaccination now but I also see his point. (I'm entirely too much the layman to go out looking for studies about the long-term protection of this current vaccine.)

re: the delta - He was advising me to defer the vaccination as long as possible. I'll edit my note to reflect that. Quibbling about a year is silly. He advised waiting until at least 60.
by ampersandwhich | 2025-12-05 20:19:15+00:00
I see where this concern comes from. But I think people overinterpret the EU’s legislative agenda by focusing on which companies get fined. Since American firms dominate the global tech market, they naturally end up in the crosshairs more often. That can look like a racket if you disagree with the laws, especially given the size of the penalties.

I think a more mundane explanation, which I personally subscribe to, is that Europeans have different priorities than Americans. They don’t want the same trade-offs, and they’re willing to make certain business models economically unviable if they believe those models are harmful or in bad taste. US companies are disproportionately affected because they don't share those values. First amendment, etc.

From the outside, this can create the impression of "hidden motives": the stated reasons sound unconvincing, the effects fall heavily on US companies, and so people infer that the EU is targeting Americans. But really, I think we're just different. If US laws disproportionately burdened EU citizens, I’d expect Europeans to be equally upset. It's only natural. I'm sure few people in Europe would be thrilled to find out that GDPR doesn't apply to ChatGPT because they got involved in some copyright lawsuit in New York.

That said, there's always a mix of motivations. I'm personally not a fan of other EU initiatives, like the one on encryption, but I think GDPR and DSA mostly mirror what the average João wants. I'm not sure most people care that much about the geopolitics.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-05 20:19:25+00:00
As you say, Walmart now sells 100" 4k TV's with HDR for less than the average persons tax return. They often have them in-stock in the store.

Meanwhile most theaters are 2k, lack dolby vision or other HDR, have worse audio (many can't do Dolby Atmos with proper height channels), and are filled with people using their cell phones through the entire film.

Cinema is either dead, or on life support.
by cratermoon | 2025-12-05 20:19:30+00:00
After the first world war Austria-Hungary and Serbia ceased to exist and, along with parts of Russia, became parts of the new countries of Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia along with an enlarged Romania and a number of other smaller countries.

The result of this is that many people became stateless or de facto citizens of a country where they were in the minority. The Minority Treaties attempted to ensure these citizens maintained rights in countries of the League of Nations, but this was ill-enforced at best.

During the years leading up to World War II, numerous of these new countries, plus France and Germany, began to de-naturalize people of minority (for that country) descent including Germans, Poles, Balkans, Russian, Spaniards and of course Jews. They began to revoke citizenship of both naturalized and native-born people, and attempted to deport them to various places even though many had never lived there and those countries did not want them.
by zahlman | 2025-12-05 20:19:32+00:00
As explained upthread,

> You are within your rights to say no

Given that you don't have a right to enter, if you say no (which you are within your rights to do), and you are denied entry, then nothing wrong has happened.

If you believe that they shouldn't make entry conditional on something, then you are asserting a right to enter. That's what "right" means.
by pksebben | 2025-12-05 20:19:38+00:00
see, when you cut out the part about "because of terrorists" that sounds like a patently laughable claim. I would tend to agree with the poster on the strength that some propaganda is very, very easily spotted:

- anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau "narco-terrorists")

- "think of the children" / "we must protect the children"

- "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"

- "they're turning the frogs gay"

- "we need to protect America"

tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and it's on you that you haven't bothered.
by Frost1x | 2025-12-05 20:19:52+00:00
I would argue not good enough but better. A home cinema depending on viewing distance can have superb visual qualify. Comfort is going to be impossible to beat to being at home. A lot of theater projectors top out at 4k just like home TVs and they’re not as bright. Also information density is lower (it’s 4k spread over a huge wall).

The only shortcoming now really is if you want to view with several people and socialize after, it may be difficult for someone to accommodate a large party with good viewing in their home without a theater setup. And of course audio, audio is where theaters can still stand out. It’s a pain in the ass for most homes to setup a good sound system, you really often do want a dedicated theater area which most aren’t going to have. A soundbar helps. You can Jerry rig some surround speakers into any space but it’s often a pain. So that’s really the last barrier: cheap low latency sound that can beat a theater.

For me comfort trumps the slightly degraded sound. Plus some baby crying or random person chatting during the movie can break that as well.
by mistercheph | 2025-12-05 20:20:10+00:00
Keyboards are higher bandwidth man-machine interfaces than mouse + GUI unless what you're exchanging is spatial information, which is typically not the case for writing software.

There is a higher learning curve, and we can argue about the tradeoffs you make, but some powerful tools can be difficult to learn to use. Complexity != bad design; sometimes you're just exposing an underlying problem space that can't be simplified without being cut off from part of the solution space.
by zerotolerance | 2025-12-05 20:20:27+00:00
Google created two kinds of value: content discovery via connection (value to the consumer), and market reachability for advertisers. Oh, and also the world's most inconvenient spell check.

AI proposes to solve: a content supply side problem which does not exist, and an analysis problem which also only maybe exists. Really what it does in the best of cases (assuming everything actually works) is drive the cost to produce content to zero, make discovery less trustworthy, make the discovery problem worse, and launder IP. In the best case it is a net negative economic force.

All that said, I believe the original comment is about the fact that the economy exists to serve market participants and AI is not a market participant. It can act as a proxy, but it doesn't buy or sell things in the economic sense. Through that lens, also in the best case the technology erodes demand by reducing economic power of the consumer.

That said, I'm stoked to hear about the next AI web site generator or spam email campaign manager. Lets setup an SPV to get it backed off-balance sheet.
by Ancapistani | 2025-12-05 20:20:27+00:00
It's extremely uncommon for the court to issue an opinion with such large repercussions.

Even if birthright citizenship is overturned (which I find very unlikely), I would expect it to be narrowly defined so as to apply only to children born of parents not present legally in the country - and likely with a specific carveout for those who overstay visas and such, as those people are clearly subject to US jurisdiction by virtue of the application process.

The absolute largest change I would expect would be to end birthright citizenship for children whose parents illegally entered into the US and have never had a visa of entry permit of any type whatsoever.
by lukan | 2025-12-05 20:21:49+00:00
You say this like trivial misstakes did not happen all the time in classical engineering as well.

If there is a memory leak, them this is a flaw, that might not matter so much for a specific product, but I can also easily see it being forgotten, if it was maybe mentioned somewhere in the documentation, but maybe not clear enough and deadlines and stress to ship are a thing there as well.
by hellojesus | 2025-12-05 20:22:08+00:00
Can't you do mac filtering on your router at the very least?

Why not install root certs on all your kids' devices and then force them through your home proxy so you can run content classification and proactively block and get reports of what you've blocked? A little privacy-invasive, but if your kids are young enough, it makes sense to get alerts when they've attempted to access boobs or gore so you can have a convo about it.
by maciejzj | 2025-12-05 20:22:30+00:00
I believe that the root cause for the "fatigue" and tension around AI is much more embedded in the societal context.

US (and the rest of the western world) citizens face real life problems in youth employment, social/political instability, unaffordable housing, internet addiction (yes, I believe that it is real problem that people spend 5 hours on their phones daily) and social atomisation. Meanwhile all resources are put in a rush into building technology that does not fundamentally improve people's well being. Advanced societies have had pretty good capabilities of doing writing, design, coding, searching information, etc. Now we are pouring all available resources, at any cost, to automate these processes even more. The costs of this operation are tremendous and it doesn't yield any results that improve everyday lives.

In 2020 there was a ton of UI/UX/graphics companies that could produce copious amount of visual content for the society while providing work to many people. Now we are about to automate this process and be able to generate infinite amount of graphics on demand. To what end? Were our capabilities to create graphics any kind of bottleneck before? I don't think so.

The stock market and tech leadership are completely decoupled from the problems that the majority of people faces. The real effect of AI at hand is to commoditise intellectual work that previously functioned well dispersed in society. This does not bring benefit to the majority of people.
by j45 | 2025-12-05 20:22:32+00:00
This is not at all what I am saying.

"GenAI" is nothing new. "AI" is just software. It's not intelligent, or alive, or sentient, or aware. People can scifi sentimentalize it if they want.

It might simulate parts of things, hopefully more reliably.

It's however a different category of software which requires management that doesn't exist yet how it should.

Cybersecurity security theatre for me is using a web browser to secure and administer what was previously already done and creating new security holes from a web interface.

Then, bypassing it to allow unmanaged MCP access to internal data moats creating it's own universe of security vulnerabilities, full stop. In a secured and contained environment, using an MCP to access data to unlock insight is one thing.

It doesn't mean dont' use MCPs. It means the AI won't figure out what the user doesn't know about security around securing MCPs which is a far more massive vulnerability because users of AI have delegated their thinking to a statistics formula ("GenAI"), because it is so impressive on the surface, but no one is checking the work to make sure it stays that way. Managing quality however, is improving.

My comment is calling out effectively letting external paths have unadulterated access to your private and corporate data.

Data is the new moat. Not UI/UX/Software.

A wormhole that exposes your data makes it available for someone to put it into their data moat far too commonly, and also for it to be mis-interpretted.
by Mond_ | 2025-12-05 20:22:59+00:00
This is a bit confused. You're saying `float`, but a float comes with NaN by default. Any float can take NaN values.

If you actually want the compiler to check this on the level of the type system, it'd have to be `NonNaNFloat | NaN`. Then you can check which one you have and continue with a float that is guaranteed to not be NaN.

But (importantly) a NonNaNFloat is not the same as a float, and this distinction has to be encoded in the type system if you want to take this approach seriously. This distinction is NOT supported by most type systems (including Rust's std afaik, fwiw). It's similar to Rust's NonZero family of types.
by grepex | 2025-12-05 20:23:05+00:00
This 100%. For me, the philosophy is not so much a terminal-centric design but a keyboard-centric design. Sure, this could be done in a GUI, but even GUIs with a keyboard-centric design are not as fluid as a TUI.

I'll also add that (like the parent comment) I did not get the appeal. Not until I forced myself to use it more and saw the benefits.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-05 20:23:13+00:00
External Torx. They're not so unusual. Even General Motors has used those in some places for eons -- I still have the set of them I bought at Autozone to replace the brakes on a Saturn a couple of decades ago.

The real fucker in automotive fasteners is XZN, aka Triple Square. These are all over VW products.

As fasteners go, they're fine. They work well.

The interface has 12 points, and it looks like something from the toolkit like an Allen key or a Torx bit might be the right choice, but it isn't that way at all: The angles are wrong (XZN angles are based on squares, not hexagons).

But that's OK: They make XZN socketry in factories every day that does have the correct angles. They're easy-enough to buy and to use.

The fuckery aspect is a human factor: Because it looks like it "should work" with a Torx driver or an Allen key, people dive in with the wrong tools and fuck it up for the next guy.
by chrysoprace | 2025-12-05 20:23:52+00:00
GUIs are often mouse-centric, resource-hungry.

TUIs and CLIs are often keyboard centric only use as many resources as it takes to do the task, and then minimal resources to draw the text. Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, so you can get an output from a CLI and then pipe it into another.

At work I literally use the same workflow at home across two different operating systems because they both share a terminal. I don't even know how to switch workspace on a Mac because I don't need to, tmux sessions fulfil the same task.
by H1Supreme | 2025-12-05 20:23:58+00:00
> I haven't really found anything yet that Gemini can't do in python for this.

Python for audio apps? First I've heard of this. Is it a "Python acts as a thin wrapper over C" or something?

> I have really gone further though and thought why do I even care about VST or a DAW or anything like this?

Been there. I started making music on a Windows 95 PC, built up a studio over the years (including some DIY hardware), and eventually was using Logic as glorified multi-track recorder + effects rack. These days, I've kind of went back to my roots, and I'm doing a lot of sample chopping. Only difference is: I'm using my own sounds as source material.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-05 20:24:05+00:00
HBO remains what HBO is because they don't put out 600 other shows besides Game of Thrones that are utter garbage.

Here is a list of hundreds and hundreds of HBOs work over the past several decades. How many do you even recognize the name of? 20%?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HBO_original_programmi...
by danudey | 2025-12-05 20:24:26+00:00
This is something that infuriates me to no end - companies forcing software decoding on my devices rather than shipping me a codec my device supports.

When I'm watching something on YouTube on my iPhone, they're usually shipping me something like VP9 video which requires a software decoder; on a sick day stuck in bed I can burn through ten percent of my battery in thirty minutes.

Meanwhile, if I'm streaming from Plex, all of my media is h264 or h265 and I can watch for hours on the same battery life.
by xp84 | 2025-12-05 20:24:29+00:00
That was the given reason, and I'm sure they knew it was ridiculous and fixed it as soon as they could get all their ducks in a row, but it sure was comically bad from the outside perspective of ordinary users. Even if there had to be 2 apps for some contractual reasons I think most people would have been more tolerant if they had identical functionality and appearance after login, and were just titled "HBO Go for Cable" and "HBO Go Streaming."
Ask HN: A dating site where puzzle score decides outfits in your profile photos?
by amichail | 2025-12-05 20:24:35+00:00
I’ve been toying with an idea for a dating platform that mixes game mechanics with profile presentation. The core twist is that users solve puzzles on the site, and their performance affects how their profile photo is styled.

Here is how it works:

Everyone uploads normal photos, but the platform uses AI to change only the clothing. Nothing about a person’s physical traits is edited. At the start, the system puts you in hilariously cheap or awkward outfits as a kind of lighthearted baseline. As you do well on the puzzles, your clothing in the photos automatically improves and becomes more stylish.

The entire system is transparent, so every user knows the outfits are game rewards rather than reflections of real wealth or fashion sense. The idea is to create a fun progression system that people can show off while also offering an easy conversation starter. Think of it like cosmetic upgrades in a game, but applied to dating photos in a way that stays respectful since it only changes clothing.

I’m curious how people feel about this kind of playful twist in a dating environment. Would it make the whole experience more engaging?
by halfcat | 2025-12-05 20:25:07+00:00
> So why do people still design declarative languages?

Cost.

If money were no object, you would only hire people who can troubleshoot the entire stack, from React and SQL all the way down to machine code and using an oscilloscope to test network and power cabling.

Or put another way, it would be nice for the employer if your data analyst who knows SQL also knew C and how to compile Postgres from scratch, so they could fully debug why their query doesn’t do what they expect. But that’s a more expensive luxury.

Good software has declarative and imperative parts. It’s an eternal tradeoff whether you want the convenience of those parts being in the same codebase, which makes it easier to troubleshoot more of the stack, but that leads to hacks that break the separation. So sometimes you want a firm boundary, so people don’t do workarounds, and because then you can hire cheaper people who only need to know SQL or React or CSS or whatever, instead of all of them.
by somerandomqaguy | 2025-12-05 20:25:13+00:00
Authorized software means authorized for that car's VIN number. Basically it's the same issue with parts in Apple products that are serial number locked.

If for instance if you damaged a headlamp, and then went to an authorized BMW dealer, bought the correct brand new OEM BMW head lamp assembly from the parts department of an authorized BMW dealer, and followed the replacement procedure to the letter in the BMW service website... it won't work. The headlamp assembly is not authorized to talk to the rest of the car even though it's OEM, untampered, with stock firmware.

The headlamp has to be reprogrammed with the correct VIN number in order for the rest of the ECU's in that particular car to recognize it as authorized.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-05 20:25:55+00:00
My community did the big dig around 2001. They finished around 2010. It was a huge project that took hundreds if not thousands of man-hours. I'm not sure if anyone ever actually calculated the total cost. And this is for a pretty small town. Now the day-to-day connectivity is much better, and weather almost never knocks us out, but when something does get knocked out, it takes longer to fix.

Overall, it's much nicer. No ugly telephone poles, don't have to worry about weather, just reliable, strong service. But to think it pays for itself in 2 years is laughable.