MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xandrius | 2025-12-14 18:05:04+00:00
I would be very happy to discuss the matter with you but there seems to be some hostility and edge in the way you argue your point which makes it hard to engage with.

Anyway, in short, everything you said applies to literally any human or even animal: if you give them something for free and then take it away unless they pay for it, they won't accept it (google maps). On the other hand, if you provide something for a price, and it's needed, people will pay even if there is an alternative (e.g. Netflix).

The difference is that many/most people are ok with ads as a form of payment for the free services, while others (including Europeans) are not ok with the additional hidden clauses regarding how their personal data is used. Is that wrong? I don't think so.

To make it more realistic, imagine getting a TV for free because it will insert ads every X minutes. The tradeoffs are pretty clear: Good TV for my time/attention.

But if someone then started also recording from said TV the inside of my room, my and my family's faces to be sold to unknown parties for unknown uses (and sometimes even to antagonists) then I don't think anyone would believe it is a fair implementation of the original and presented "agreement" (even if it is stated in their 1000 pages ToS).

Now, if Europeans start being vocal politically that such an invasion of privacy is not acceptable, does that make their claims invalid because there is no valid alternative to such services?

I'm pretty sure today's tech giants would be profitable even without the privacy invasion and the selling of the data; furthermore if their premium versions did not actually show you ads (some show you ads even if you pay), I'm sure people will slowly start gravitating there as they stop being ok trading their attention/time for money.

But if Facebook explicitly told you "pay us X/mo or we will sell your personal data to Russia", would people actually pay them or, perhaps, would they start considering other saner alternatives? I guess we'll never know.
by esbranson | 2025-12-14 18:05:08+00:00
> either the government makes such services, and makes them well enough to seriously compete

Europeans have already made open source versions of quite a few things as side projects without any funding. The issue is a lack of transparency (by American standards) that hides just how hideously incompetent and outrageous (even by American standards) member state governments are. (PACER is a big reason how Americans know what Europeans are ignorant about.) I do believe an EU member state could otherwise create any service that American companies already proved are desirable, make it free for nationals and residents and require payment for others, and use EUDI as the login and verification, probably for quite cheap.
by api | 2025-12-14 18:05:12+00:00
That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.

Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.

It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.
by karencarits | 2025-12-14 18:05:18+00:00
This looks really interesting! I am studying "knowledge-heavy" subjects with lots of facts I need to learn, and have been looking for software where I can write flashcards directly within my notes, and both review them when reading my notes, and globally across notes. I like to have my notes locally, so I didnt find any good solutions. But there are some parsers for anki that can process markdown documents and extract items within them
by codexb | 2025-12-14 18:05:21+00:00
There will always be value in doing work that other people don't want to do themselves or that requires expertise and skill that isn't conveyed all that well through books or pictures. The economy used to be full of stable masters for horses and carriages, and manual typists, and street lamp lighters, and television repairmen, and any number of jobs that don't exist anymore.

I'm pretty sure we'll survive.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-14 18:05:35+00:00
> If kids are reading for enjoyment already, is assigning a book in school going to kill their love of reading?

I nearly did to me, or atleast the continual assignments did. It took a long time for me to pick up a fiction book again. School never assigned me technical writing and encyclopedias, so I continued to enjoy those, thankfully.
Ask HN: Why are my newsletters going to Promotions?
by chistev | 2025-12-14 18:06:12+00:00
I run a very small blog with an opt-in email newsletter. All the usual email hygiene is in place (SPF/DKIM/DMARC and double opt-in).

Transactional emails (confirm subscription) reliably land in Gmail’s Primary tab. Actual newsletter emails (new post notifications) almost always land in Promotions.

The issue is that some subscribers don’t open Promotions at all, so engagement drops even though deliverability is technically fine.

Is this essentially “by design” on Gmail’s side, or are there structural changes that materially affect tab placement?

Is the only realistic mitigation educating users to move the email to Primary?
by martin-t | 2025-12-14 18:06:29+00:00
Because it's extortion just like paying the mafia for "protection" from themselves.

See, ads are not a pro-social service. Their fundamental goal is not to inform and facilitate mutually beneficial exchange of goods/services. Their goal is to allow companies who spend ad-money to gain an advantage over competitors who don't, regardless of quality of the product.

Ads are a fundamentally anti-competitive practice.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-14 18:07:09+00:00
I don't know any real farmers. Have a few neighbors with small herds of cows but that's not their only or even primary source of income. I try not to talk politics much.

People live out here knowing full well that the nearest hospital is 30 minutes away and if they need to call an ambulance it's probably going to be at least 15-30 minutes, maybe longer, before it shows up.
by chrilleweb | 2025-12-14 18:08:10+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a small open source CLI tool in my spare time and recently reached a point where it feels “done enough” to share — but I’m unsure what the right next steps are.

So far I’ve tried: - Writing a clear README with examples - Adding documentation and usage guides on my docs website - Sharing it in one or two relevant discussions (without spamming)

I’m explicitly not trying to market it aggressively — I’d rather get it in front of the right people and receive honest feedback.

For those of you who’ve shipped open source projects that actually got adopted: What made the biggest difference early on? What do you wish you had done sooner?

If it helps, the project it's the link if you have any tips

Thanks!
by fsflover | 2025-12-14 18:08:44+00:00
> Read the thead properly, please.

> Thats not an unfounded attack.

Have you got actual arguments and not just personal attack on me combined with the negation?

> completely wrong comparisons between GrapheneOS and GNU/Linux

Can you quote them?

> The statements that those other options are less secure are clearly backed up with technical information.

Which technical information? Security doesn't exist without a threat model, https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Threat_Modeling. I don't see one in the posts.

> public source availability just isnt the magic silver bullet you think it is.

FLOSS is certainly better to avoid backdoors, https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Malware_and_Firmware_Trojans...

> If the sideload restriction were to be put in AOSP you can remove that in a soft fork.

Until the code changes a lot, which will eventually happen.

> Best to judge individual posts on their merit

You didn't judge their post I linked on its merit. You just replied with a general statement basically saying that everything is complicated.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-14 18:09:01+00:00
> And this is not normal,

It's extremely normal. Click on HN's own legal agreement and see for yourself: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

You acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to terminate accounts that are inactive for an extended period of time. You further acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to change these general practices and limits at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice.

> No wonder OSS is losing when this is a hill you're willing to die on.

Again; "losing" is us-vs-them language that you know misrepresents OSS' goal. There is no way to create a OSS alternative to Apple ID, or Hacker News. There's frankly not any good-faith legislation that would prevent TOS and EULA agreements. This is the uncomfortable reality of our tech-encumbered world.

You want regulation? Regulate who gets your money. Vote with your dollar, and stop pretending to be a victim.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-12-14 18:09:05+00:00
The more you’re willing to pay to opt out of ads the more valuable the ads are. Also the ads are auctioned and in opting out you’re all ways going to be the highest bidder. Additionally how would you know the other bidders were real, it’s a massive information asymmetry that’s open to abuse. And I’m pretty sure they have abused it in the past.

I use substack and patreon and I wish we had micro transactions that’ll enable more of this model for content.

Now much of the same info is recycled via AI, instead of reading blogs / stack overflow etc I just ask AI and so far I can use AI without ads. I do pay for a subscription to Gemini.
by tomrod | 2025-12-14 18:09:09+00:00
Not all AI algorithms are neural networks. So from the get go, you are conflating terms to propose an underspecified and improperly esoteric worldview.

We invented AI. That the structure of a neuron inspired one subsystem architecture framework offers nothing essentialist or sacrosanct to the whole enterprise.

Sticks were our first clubs, but we don't limit our design and engineering for tools or weapons to the nature of trees. We extract good principles and invent the form as well as, often, the function.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-14 18:09:14+00:00
Right. And so is the article. When you are introducing an object you need to specify its properties, _including_those_it_inherits from objects you haven't defined.

If I haven't defined mammals, I say that bats are warm blooded animals that produce milk for their young, etc., but if I have (or expect my readers to know what a mammal is) I can just say they are mammals.
by bdcravens | 2025-12-14 18:09:38+00:00
Do you think I mean salaries will go up? That's not what a "buyer's market" means. It means there's more supply, so the buyers (employers) can pay less than in the past.

Assuming you understand what I meant: As for being naive, that's hardly true; my opinion comes from experience. When the bubble burst in the early 2000s, you saw a ton of developers looking for work. This pushed salaries down, even for senior and advanced developers.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-14 18:09:46+00:00
> If some sectors of the economy become drastically more efficient... overall society has become wealthier

That's a weird one - what's your metric for the "wealth of overall society"? Stock market indexes can't be it because those are subject to extreme levels of unreported inflation and gaming.

How can you measure something that is subject to extreme inflation when that inflation is not only unmeasured but not even acknowledged as a phenomenon?

At present, the "wealth of overall society" is a unicorn metric as opposed to the perfectly measurable and extreme levels of income and wealth inequality. In other words, the overall losses from skewed distribution dwarf the gains from higher efficiencies.
by breppp | 2025-12-14 18:10:14+00:00
Nothing new, racists through the 19th century and 20th used Zionism as a euphemism for Jews. Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one such example, the Nazis were also obsessed with Zionism

We also got 2000 years of Europeans blaming Jews by association with no proof which is exactly the beautiful cultural tradition celebrated in this article
by pdonis | 2025-12-14 18:10:21+00:00
> modern KDE has more-or-less the same taskbar.

More or less, yes; Trinity Desktop is basically KDE 3. But KDE has added on a lot of other cruft since then that has no value to me.

> Having text next to the icons is great, but it means you can only really have, like, 4 or 5 applications open and see all their titles and stuff.

That's what multiple virtual desktops are for. My usual desktop configuration has 8. Each one has only a few apps open in it.

> The optimal taskbar, imo, is a vertical one.

I do this for toolbars in applications like LibreOffice; on an HD aspect ratio screen it makes a lot more sense to have all that stuff off to the side, where there's more than enough screen real estate anyway, than taking up precious vertical space at the top.

But for my overall desktop taskbar, I've tried vertical and it doesn't work well for me--because to show titles it would have to be way too wide for me. The horizontal taskbar does take up some vertical space at the bottom of the screen, but I can make that pretty small by downsizing it to either "Small" or "Tiny".
by kurthr | 2025-12-14 18:10:22+00:00
I guess I'm in a bubble, because it doesn't feel that way to me.

When AI tops the charts (in country music) and digital visual artists have to basically film themselves working to prove that they're actually creating their art, it's already gone pretty far. It feels like the even when people care (and they great mass do not) it creates problems for real artists. Maybe they will shift to some other forms of art that aren't so easily generated, or maybe they'll all just do "clean up" on generated pieces and fake brush sequences. I'd hate for art to become just tracing the outlines of something made by something else.

Of course, one could say the same about photography where the art is entirely in choosing the place, time, and exposure. Even that has taken a hit with believable photorealistic generators. Even if you can detect a generator, it spoils the field and creates suspicion rather than wonder.
Ask HN: Feedback on OSS Project Idea
by ValtteriL | 2025-12-14 18:10:25+00:00
I want to learn c++, ultra low latency, and low level Linux internals through an OSS project that provides great value to its users. Aside from learning, the main purpose would be to provide a sense of accomplishment to me while doing good.

I'm thinking of a utility that allows greatly reducing the network latency of any program on linux. It would do this by hooking the socket syscalls of the target program into its own implementations that utilize userspace networking. So a kernel bypass without code changes.

The users would benefit from reduced latency and increased throughput, all without code changes. This would be beneficial in several situations, but for instance algotraders could use it.

I'm aware that F-Stack can do this to some extent, but it's limited and quite hard to deploy. I think I would fork it for this.

What do you think about the idea? Am I missing an existing solution that already does everything needed? Am I missing the mark on the user's needs?
by Telaneo | 2025-12-14 18:10:32+00:00
Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.

If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.
by hopelite | 2025-12-14 18:10:51+00:00
Who do you think you are to believe yourself so important that dictate what can be talked about, German? What is wrong with you? Did you not read what I wrote? Stop throwing yourself off the other side of the cliff out of spite, 80 years after your society was pushed to throw itself off the cliff!

Talking about "missing the point"? One instance of the clear backpedaling about mentioning nationality/ethnicity in regime propaganda outlets is cited in order to act as if it has not been decades of abusive shielding of evil, harm, and crime against the indigenous peoples of Europe. What are you even doing, acting contrary to your own survival, German?

It's a typical abusive, narcissistic action; a kind of narcissistic evasion when the manipulation, toxicity, lies, and abuse lose effect and "admitted" at least to oneself; which if immediately followed with not only pleading of leniency, reasonableness, and moderation; but also immediate further abuse through your type of nitpicking and tone policing, with accusations of unreasonable response or things like "not letting it go". It's a common and core indicator of the depraved mind of the narcissistic personality disorder and derangement.... "You are wrong, but if you are right then you didn't say the words right and immediately need to forgive and allow me to further abuse and manipulate or you are the bad one". It's sick and depraved. Stop behaving that way, all of you.

It will simply not end well, regardless of what you think, tell yourself, or try to lie and gaslight others with. Either the abuse and denial that rises to genocide by the UN and EU definition, through the denial of the very abuse being perpetrated will continue and the indigenous people and all their cultures and traditions that have been around for centuries and millennia will be eradicated and you will end up with a similarly corrupted and rotten society like the USA; or it will end in a backlash in Europe after the abuses just accumulate, people snap and there is an explosion that of course comes form it. You can only abuse so much and so long unless you totally kill your victims... your own culture, your own people, Europe as a whole, yourself even.

History and reality does not care what fanatical and fantastical illusions some of us hold about how everyone can live happily ever after...at gunpoint at other people's expenses. It is not possible that it will end well without total destruction and eradication of a whole civilization's culture and history again, like was done in France, Russia, and China through the communist mental pestilence. These are not difficult things to understand or predict, especially since they have happened several times now in history. Yet so many seem unable to understand or see the clear path to the invariable consequences.
by senthil_rajasek | 2025-12-14 18:10:58+00:00
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

-Confucius [1]

For certain concepts such as Linear Algebra, for instance books allow me to "do" and understand. Which is why I read more than I watch videos.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2826962/
by burnerRhodov2 | 2025-12-14 18:11:01+00:00
Employment stats are designed to measure economy-wide shifts, not early, localized, white-collar disruptions. The sampling will smooth those effects away until they’re large.

CPS samples 60k households per month to represent ~150+ million workers. Households stay in the sample 4 months, out 8, back 4.

Copywriters will get smoothed out in the aggregate, and the definition will mask this. Even if you work one hour, you are technically employed. If you are not actively looking for work for more than a month, you are also not technically unemployed.

Unemployment data is a lagging indicator for detecting recessions not early technological displacement in white-collar niches.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-14 18:11:09+00:00
The answer to everything is contracts. As far as requirements gathering:

1. Bill the clients for every requirements meeting. Time is money.

2. It’s up to the client to know what they want and up to you to build it. Time spent fantasizing out loud isn’t productive. Build a prototype, and bill them for the time. If it’s not what they want they can either build their own prototype or refine their guidance. Either way it’s time they are paying for just the same.

As for scope creep you can handle that one of two ways:

1. Add a change annex to the current contract. This means you will complete the PWS of the base contract first and then bolt the change on at the end as a refactor.

2. Amend the current contract to include additional features. Don’t do this.

In the end it’s all about the product work statement. You should think about goal completion only in terms: business objectives (data/money), visual/vanity, regulatory conformance, and extras.
by leobg | 2025-12-14 18:11:09+00:00
For the bar exam, I used a combination of an outliner and flashcards. Back then, I was usimg a PalmPilot. The idea was:

1. Turn the subject matter into a knowledge tree. 2. If a branch has more than 5 leaves, you split it up. 3. Flashcards are generated by traversing the tree. The parent node is the question, the child nodes are the answer.

The benefit of the tree is that it forces you to think about where in your structure a given piece of new information fits.
by matwood | 2025-12-14 18:12:36+00:00
I do almost your method, except I do the presentation a few times as practice to make sure the flow works. When I give the presentation it's not scripted, but since I practiced it is much easier for me to improv. My slides are typically very sparse and simply act as a trigger for which part of the topic I'm speaking on at that time.

But, to your point, I agree that your method is the best way if you know the subject matter. When I practice it's mainly for transitions/flow and not the information.
by mmooss | 2025-12-14 18:13:29+00:00
I think video is much more compelling to people in many ways (similar to TV vs reading a book), including to me. Part of that is seeing a person talking to you with all the cues of expression, voice, etc. There's a lower cognitive threshhold for engaging.

Video also has communication modes that text/print lacks: dynamic graphics and empirical video (showing the thing itself happening), audio, speech and expression (as described above).

With all that, I find it quite frustrating to see it consume so much time that could be spent reading and processing several things. How do others on HN - intellectually curious and serious, often busy - reconcile that?

Though my question is really, am I missing things by not watching video - things I won't realistically get through print? I mean high-quality things - I want the equivelant of a paper, review paper, or book by a professional in the field.
by shykes | 2025-12-14 18:14:02+00:00
Hi, I'm the founder of Dagger. It's not true that you can't use Dagger without our cloud offering. At the moment our only commercial product is observability for your Dagger pipelines. It's based on standard otel telemetry emitted by our open source engine. It's completely optional.

If you have questions about Dagger, I encourage you to join our Discord server, we will be happy to answer them!
by smarkmt | 2025-12-14 18:14:26+00:00
W.r.t data entry I've resorted at times to using a Google spreadsheet with autogenerated row UUIDs (it's useful for content to have a persistent ID in case you have to correct a typo or add new fields).

I also often found myself wanting to make different flashcard decks from the same basic information (for Mandarin pinyin sentence --> character recognition, characters --> English translation).

If there was a sheets like data entry interface backed by a text format it would be great.l (I rolled things with streamlit but it's always cumbersome to get started).