MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitexploder | 2025-12-16 20:50:16+00:00
Interesting. It actually is posted that my property is under video surveillance. Colorado though. It seems like you would have a poor argument that you can’t collect and analyze images of a public space.

One cynical aspect of Colorado law I learned about going down the ALPR rabbit hole: in Colorado it is a higher class misdemeanor than regular traffic violations to purposely obfuscate your plate to interfere with automated plate reading. The law is “well written” in that there is little wiggle room if they could somehow prove your intent. Meanwhile it is a lesser class violation to simply not have a plate at all. Their intent feels pretty clear to me.
by sfink | 2025-12-16 20:50:54+00:00
No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)

I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
by kortex | 2025-12-16 20:51:05+00:00
I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
by Bender | 2025-12-16 20:51:14+00:00
If the TCP Window size is abnormally small I block those and MSS outside of 1280-1460 but that is prior to anything the browser is doing. Those can been seen with

tcpdump -p -i any -c512 -NNnnvv port 443 and 'tcp[13] == 2'

Or if a VPN is being used there is always a chance it is coming from a server/VPS provider and may be blackhole routed on my end.
by xpe | 2025-12-16 20:51:27+00:00
From "How to know what you really want" by Luke Burgis [1]:

> There are two kinds of desire, thin and thick. Thick desires are like layers of rock that have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level, they’re related to the core of who we are. They can be related to perennial human truths: beauty, goodness, human dignity.

> Thin desires are highly mimetic (imitative) and ephemeral desires. They’re the things that can be here today, gone tomorrow. Thin desires are subject to the winds of mimetic change, because they’re not rooted in a layer of ourselves that’s been built up over time. They are like a layer of leaves that’s sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life; the old desires are gone. All of a sudden we want something else.

Comparing the above conceptualizations with the ones offered by Westenberg (OP) could consume hundreds or thousands of words -- more than I want to spend at the moment -- but I will say this: both sets feel wrong, by which I mean they trigger my early warning detectors.

I'm not asking anyone else to trust my intuition. But you should trust yours. Intuition is usually a good starting point, at least.

With intuition alone -- without writing a full analysis -- we can see the above quoted explanations/definitions are highly complected. [2] Also, in my view, the offered metaphors don't carve reality at the joints. [3]

When I put ~20 minutes of concentrated thinking into the problem, here are some of the constituent parts of "desire" that I can unpack. (These are only fleetingly glossed over in the article.) In no particular order, to what degree are desires:

- conscious? - intentional? - intentionally trained and reinforced? - authentic? - ones we want to have? - situational? - pattern-matched responses? - evolutionarily-selected? - socially constructed? (imitative, mimetic) - moral? (positive, neutral, negative) - permanent, durable, lasting? - self-reinforcing?

This is complex!

Over-simplication can be a disservice. Adding another metaphor reminds me of the "N+1 standards" problem. [4] Maybe the new metaphor helps, maybe not. Either way, now we have more to sift through.

[1]: https://bigthink.com/series/explain-it-like-im-smart/mimetic...

[2]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

[3]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...

[4]: https://xkcd.com/927/
by devilsdata | 2025-12-16 20:51:36+00:00
Thanks for your comment, but I'm not a huge fan of Scott Siskind's. I was right into SSC for years before I had a moment of clarity and realised that his views are very dark, and shared by a lot of neo-nazis.

Since then, I've walked a kinder, more compassionate path. I hope the same for you.
by nickpp | 2025-12-16 20:52:15+00:00
> So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?

Pretty soon, actually. EU countries are falling further and further behind economically. Health care costs are increasing, taking up an ever increasing slice of the government budget. Labor force participation rate is decreasing due to generous welfare and high taxes. Natality is plummeting. Attempts to increase retirement age are met with riots.

We're a technological backwater. AI research is done in USA and China - the benefits will mainly go there too. We can't even cool our cities: we're losing more people every year to heatwaves than the USA to gun violence. We're closing down nuclear power plants after years of shamelessly funding the Russian war machine for cheap energy.

Years of redirecting defense spending into social programs are coming back to bite us. Russia is hungry and aggressive, while the US is not protecting us anymore. What do you think will be the life expectancy under drone and rocket attacks?
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-12-16 20:53:29+00:00
I don't know. To me this seems like an energized minority trying to use technology to make a lot of noise; much like social media activism. In our city Flock cameras are very controversial but both the PD and transparency reports have shown benefits from Flock. We're not a wealthy, well-to-do suburb though. I imagine heavy ALPR presence is a lot more silly in those areas.
by keybored | 2025-12-16 20:53:37+00:00
You are creating content[1] that is insightful. To everyone. Equally known.

We all cheer. We know this. Then we move on.

A catchy title. A novel enough term. That will hook them.

We all read. We all smile. The daily grind.

This insight is not original to me.

[1] It’s just content now

Not essays

Not music

Content
by keeda | 2025-12-16 20:53:50+00:00
> I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers.

That is true, but it does not survive contact with Capitalism. Let's zoom out and look at the larger picture of this simple scenario of "a creator creates art, another person enjoys art":

The creator probably spends hours or days painstakingly creating a work of art, consuming a certain amounts of electricity, water and other resources. The person enjoying that derives a certain amount of appreciation, say, N "enjoyment units". If payment is exchanged, it would reasonably be some function of N.

Now an AI pops up and, prompted by another human produces another similar piece of art in minutes, consuming a teeny, teeny fraction of what the human creator would. This Nature study about text generation finds LLMs are 40 - 150x more efficient in term of resource consumption, dropping to 4 - 16 for humans in India: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 -- I would suspect the ratio is even higher for something as time-consuming as art. Note that the time taken for the human prompter is probably even less, just the time taken to imagine and type out the prompt and maybe refine it a bit.

So even if the other person derives only 0.1N "enjoyment" units out of AI art, in purely economic terms AI is a much, much better deal for everyone involved... including for the environment! And unfortunately, AI is getting so good that it may soon exceed N, so the argument that "humans can create something AI never could" will apply to an exceptionally small fraction of artists.

There are many, many moral arguments that could be made against this scenario, but as has been shown time and again, the definition of Capitalism makes no mention of morality.
by msum | 2025-12-16 20:54:00+00:00
For one of our Samsung TVs, we were able to put the update on a thumb drive (we're old, we still have some around) and then use that to install the update on the TV.

It's kind of funny, we bought these TVs because they were "smart" (when they first came out) but they were so clunky and unreliable we disconnected them and used either PS or Apple TV for other things. Now we wouldn't connect our TVs to the internet for anything, and only use PS5s for specific things. We mostly just use our Apple TV.
by vindarel | 2025-12-16 20:54:22+00:00
The other way round, a Haskell on top of a Lisp, in production today: https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/

> Coalton is an efficient, statically typed functional programming language that supercharges Common Lisp.

Presentation this year on the ELS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of92m4XNgrM
by bgnn | 2025-12-16 20:54:34+00:00
Great piece!

Made me reflect on my own persuasion of thin desires and my struggle to control them.

It also made me see that my hobbies and my career are actually about following my thick desires. I'm in tech, yes. But I chose, among all the possibilities, to be an analog circuit designer. The analog part is what makes it a long hard skill to master, and my day job feels like constant learning from my interactions woth the world. I can't imagine doing anything which isn't interacting with the actual physical world!
by staticman2 | 2025-12-16 20:54:56+00:00
I'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.

I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.

Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-16 20:55:45+00:00
> At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.

Exactly. WHR is a wonderful tool to study how policy institutes and media work together to build a narrative over the years.

> “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”

One issue identified in the article that in some countries that really isn't taken to mean happiness, it's taken to mean "wealth". My take is simple that someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life without a chance to escape can still confidently put a 10 down. The cage may very well be golden, so it doesn't say much about their absolute happiness or suffering so to speak. Another situation is a person who sees more achievable opportunity - "if I can do x, y, z, I'll be higher on the ladder". Then they'd report themselves low, because they see a path to reach higher. But in the report they'll just look like the saddest person ever.
by more_corn | 2025-12-16 20:55:58+00:00
I think of myself as having average intelligence. When I worked hard I could get As when I slack off I can sneak by, when I do average work I get average results. This makes me perfect to answer because nothing comes easy to me but nothing is out of reach if I apply myself. I do alright because I’ve put in the effort and here’s how.

Evidence based thinking: (what is the evidence backing this conclusion and how trustworthy is it?) without this everything you believe is no better than fantasy.

Room to be wrong: what if my prior assumption is incorrect? Can I admit that and get better? Without this you can never improve. (Also if you can’t ever admit you’re wrong that’s essentially the definition of being an asshole)

Avoiding perspective /assumption lock: there are classic thinking problems like the one that spawned the term thinking outside the box (look it up and answer for your self how this might be assumption lock). The apocryphal Charley Munger effort to armor planes better in World War Two (it was actually someone else’s work and far less cut and dried but interesting), the actual Charley Munger effort to save the lives of pilots by inverting and solving (how do I save the most pilots? Invert that and it’s obvious, now invert again and you have a solution)

Then practice. Seek out thinking problems, read about solutions to thinking problems and see if you can find similarities in solutions, thinking traps to avoid.

Try out chess and see if it gets you thinking ahead or about what other people might do. (Most people in prison can’t draw a causal relationship between their actions and their situation, chess taught me to not be like that)

Read the classic book on systems thinking and see if it resonates with you

Talk to people who challenge you intellectually (people who can successfully convince you of something you didn’t think before). Socrates says the loser of the argument is the one who benefits most. Because he leaves with new ideas. The winner only gains satisfaction and that is worth far less than knowledge. Immediately after this step, return to step one and check evidence closely, because making a convincing argument is not always correlated with correctness. A convincing argument on faulty evidence is worse than useless. (Look up what Socrates says about sophistry)

Keep in mind that there are many types of intelligence. Emotional intelligence, financial savvy, street smarts. If you’re not trying at all in any of those areas you’re leaving money on the table. My buddy has low school smarts, high financial intelligence. His financial management is 100x better than his rich friends. He’s not “smart” he just tries harder, follows best practices, vets advice carefully and does the work.

Go do the work Lay out some areas you want to get better. Look up best practices, vet them, practice them.

You’re already on the right track. (Excuse me I gotta go do something that guy told me to do but I never got around to)
by zkmon | 2025-12-16 20:56:01+00:00
AI-generated images would remove all the trust and admire for human talent in art, similar to how text-generation would remove trust and admire for human talent in writing. Same case for coding.

So, let's simulate that future. Since no one trusts your talent in coding, art or writing, you wouldn't care to do any of these. But the economy is built on the products and services which get their value based how much of human talent and effort is required to produce them.

So, the value of these services and products goes down as demand and trust goes down. No one knows or cares who is a good programmer in the team, who is great thinker and writer and who is a modern Picasso.

So, the motivation disappears for humans. There are no achievements to target, there is no way to impress others with your talent. This should lead to uniform workforce without much difference in talents. Pretty much a robot army.
by alex92634 | 2025-12-16 20:57:03+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Alex. The lead engineer working on this. The main technical challenges revolved around treating documents as structured, interlinked data rather than static text, requiring a real-time system that preserves hierarchy, references, and dynamic variables across files. Doing that while keeping the editing experience fast, collaborative, and predictable demanded custom data models, syncing logic, and rendering pipelines that traditional editors don’t have. We’re very much looking to improve so all feedback is welcome!
by stanleysTool | 2025-12-16 20:57:25+00:00
Let's hope not another troubled and struggling math graduate:

Murder of Karel de Leeuw - Wikipedia

Murder of Karel de Leeuw Theodore Landon "Ted" Streleski (born 1936), an American former graduate student in mathematics at Stanford University, murdered his former faculty advisor, Professor Karel de Leeuw, with a ball-peen hammer on August 18, 1978.
by sfink | 2025-12-16 20:57:42+00:00
Not relevant here. Yes, you can donate to Mozilla.org and stipulate whatever you like, but Mozilla.org does not develop Firefox so telling them to use it for developing Firefox will do about as much good as telling them to use it to resurrect unicorns. Mozilla.org owns Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit entity that develops Firefox, but thus far the corporation hasn't wanted the complications and restrictions that would come from accepting donations.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-12-16 20:57:44+00:00
> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.

Easy: Be at the right spot in the right time and be lucky to be noticed.

WhatsApp had one smart idea: tying accounts to phone number, which solved detectability, while SMS where expensive in many regions. When ICQ/AIM still missed the mobile market and before Apple made iMessage.

Easy to replicate, as we can see with Facebook messenger or Google's different attempts, who invested quite a few resources into that.
by pornel | 2025-12-16 20:57:47+00:00
I can't tolerate it.

The split between tag and branch pipelines seems like intentional obfuscation with no upsides (you can't build non-latest commit from a branch, and when you use a tag to select the commit, GitLab intentionally hides all branch-related info, and skips jobs that depend on branch names).

"CI components" are not really components, but copy-paste of YAML into global state. Merging of jobs merges objects but not arrays, making composition unreliable or impossible.

The `steps` are still unstable/experimental. Composing multiple steps either is a mess of appending lines of bash, or you have go all the way in the other direction and build layered Docker images.

I could go on all day. Programming in YAML is annoying, and GitLab is full of issues that make it even clunkier than it needs to be.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-16 20:58:07+00:00
I think a self-hosting option for IM that's better than XMPP could be nice... that said, not sure if something like torrent would be good. I gave a lot of thought to something similar for emails, and the biggest issue came down to, it would be difficult to do something anonymous, distributed, and resistant to flooding/poison pill attacks.

Torrents themselves work against this, because you have known hash values as part of seeding... with email and messaging, you wouldn't have one-off advanced knowledge, and if anyone can send anyone a message, you'd be open to a flood of messages from what seems to be randos. There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse.

A federated system that's otherwise tethered to a domain/email or similar would at least allow for self-management and/or block listing techniques to work better in practice.
by adim86 | 2025-12-16 20:58:17+00:00
I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories.

As a software engineer, I decided to build an app about side quests. Reading this article I realized I could not put a finger on what I was getting at either, but I just knew I hadd to add wholesome activities that were not part of my life into my life and I kinda built this app for myself (initially for a hackathon) and just shared it with friends.

Hopefully it's useful to someone else on here (nasty self promotion): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sidequests-hq/id6751321255
by glenstein | 2025-12-16 20:58:17+00:00
And just to add, I kind of mourn FirefoxOS. We couldn't have guessed it at the time, but as of 2025, Google is pushing developer verification and stepping closer and closer to ecosystem lockdown. It would have been a great time for an alternative mobile OS 10+ years in the making, to welcome all the energy that has gone into beautiful projects like F-Droid.

If I could time travel into the past, in addition to preventing all the bad things (e.g. Young Sheldon), I might have told Yahoo they should flex some financial muscle while they still had relevance and worked to mobilize (no pun intended) developer time, energy, etc and perhaps even provide a baseline ecosystem of stock apps to support FirefoxOS.
by botw44 | 2025-12-16 20:58:49+00:00
Got tired of manually reconfiguring my outputs every time I moved my laptop between home and work. Existing tools were either broken, abandoned, or way more complex than needed.

So I wrote two small tools:

sway-displays interactive CLI for configuring outputs:

- Setup wizard that walks you through position, rotation, scale

- Save/load profiles (docked, portable, whatever)

- Calculates positions from relative placement (left-of, above, etc.)

sway-mirror zero-copy screen mirroring:

- DMA-BUF GPU-to-GPU transfer, no CPU copy

- Multiple scaling modes (fit, fill, stretch, center)

- Moves workspaces to source output automatically

Both are small, dependency-light, and designed for the "I just want my screens to work" use case.

Happy to take feedback or PRs.
by baobun | 2025-12-16 20:58:50+00:00
> Microsoft just conned a bunch more people with the same classic tech lock-in strategy they've always pursued, people are right to be pissed

People would be better served by not expecting anything different from Microsoft. As you say yourself, this is how they roll.

> The only learning to take away is never ever use anything from the big tech companies

Do you even believe in this yourself? Not being dependent on them would be a good start.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-12-16 20:58:57+00:00
That framing is silly. “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”. “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.” “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”

It doesn’t provide any value to reframe it this way, unless you think it’s some big secret that ads are the main source of revenue for these businesses.