MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by user____name | 2025-12-22 10:39:25+00:00
There are a lot of common sense ideas around migration that don't bear out in reality.

For example, in the article they start with a survey question:

> (“Do you think that, in your current country of residence, laws on immigration of foreigners should be relaxed or made tougher?”; 7-point scale).

I don't think this is a good question. Consider the Brexit Paradox: more strict immigration policy often increases the immigration rate because foreign workers decide to move into the country permanently. As they risk losing their access to wel paying jobs otherwise. Conversely, relaxing these policies could actually result in less outgroup culture being imported. And yet such a more relaxed policy would be labeled as "pro (im)migration".

The book "How Migration Really Works" by Hein De Haas was a good read. I didn't find it biased or partisan. It slaughters a lot of left and right wing sacred cows. Made me realize how much political time and effort gets wasted on things that won't work.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-22 10:39:26+00:00
We should just have some standard for crawlable archived versions of pages with no back end or DB interaction behind them etc., for example if there's a reverse proxy, whatever it outputs is archived and it wouldn't actually pass on any call in the archive version. Same for translating the output of any dynamic JS into fully static HTML. Then add some proof-of-work that works without JS and is a web standard (e.g. server sends header, client sends correct response, gets access to archive) and mainstream the culture for low-cost hosting for such archives and you're done, also make sure that this sort of feature is enabled in the most basic configuration for all web servers and such, logged separately.

Obviously such a thing will never happen, because the web and culture went in a different direction. But if it were a mainstream thing, you'd get easy to consume archives (also for regular archival and data hoarding) and the "live" versions of sites wouldn't have their logs be bogged down by stupid spam.

Or if PoW was a proper web standard with no JS, then ppl who want to tell AI and other crawlers to fuck off, they could at least make it uneconomical to crawl their stuff en masse. In my view, proof of work that would work through headers in the current day world should be as ubiquitous as TLS.
by siliconpotato | 2025-12-22 10:42:09+00:00
I made a tiktok account to write a comment on a video I hated. Now when i sign in again I am presented with lots of awful videos from the guy I dislike. I cannot delete my viewing history using the website, and following other accounts doesn't remove the obsession tiktok has with always showing me his videos as the default.
I'm not installing the app, so the only way around this is to delete my account completely.
by srean | 2025-12-22 10:42:19+00:00
To tell it accurately of course takes work.

However if you live in the open, or have daily access to the open sky, after a while you are bound to notice.

We are so used to having a ceiling above us, so used to constructions blocking our view of the sky that this seems a feat.

I was the same till I got access to the sky. Then ... oh wait ... the sunset is shifting towards those landmarks every day. Oh wait, now its turning around to go the other way.

The total span of movement is so large, that its hard to miss unless you are on a featureless landscape or in the open sea.

I am super impressed by humans noticing and separating the planet's from the stars. Look at those stars they don't twinkle and they move funny. I guess the planets drew attention because of their brightness and by their lack of twinkle.
by mcherm | 2025-12-22 10:42:43+00:00
When the behavior is not only something something you "don't like" but is also (as this woman perceives it) a professional threat (she makes a living out of carefully choosing her words; she felt this attributed to her words she would never have said) and furthermore is unexpected, to simply quietly leave the platform seems insufficient. One ought to warn other users about the unexpected dangerous practice -- which is precisely what this article accomplishes!
by davnicwil | 2025-12-22 10:44:29+00:00
Coding on metros, trains, buses and planes is exactly the reason I always make sure my dev environments work 100% offline, with dummy services in place of the real ones.

One thing I love about coding on public transport is the sense of urgency can be fun.

Being on the verge of figuring out a bugfix or whatever when you know train is pulling into the station and you have maybe a minute to go, cracking it, quick test, bundle the laptop quickly back into your bag as you step off the train is quite a nice feeling.
by foldr | 2025-12-22 10:44:32+00:00
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at. Could you point to some papers exemplifying the kind of work that you’re thinking of? Of course there are lots of people training LLMs and other statistical models on EEG data, but that does not show that, say, GPT-5, is a good model of any aspect of human cognition.

Chomsky, of course, never attempted to model the generation of natural language and was interested in a different set of problems, so LLMs are not really a competitor in that sense anyway (even if you take the dubious step of accepting them as scientific models).

I certainly don’t agree with Norvig, but he doesn’t really understand the basics of what Chomsky is trying to do, so there is not much to respond to. To give three specific examples, he (i) is confused in thinking that Gold’s theorem has anything to do with Chomsky’s arguments, (ii) appears to think that Chomsky studied the “generation of language” (because he he’s read so little of Chomsky’s work that he doesn’t know what a “generative grammar” is), and (iii) believes that Chomsky thinks that natural languages are formal languages in which every possible sentence is either in the language or not (again because he’s barely read anything that Chomsky wrote since the 1950s). Then, just to make absolutely sure not to be taken seriously, he compares Chomsky to Bill O’Reilly!

On point (iii), see http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~syntax-circle/syntax-gr..., and the last complete paragraph of p. 145.
by dcminter | 2025-12-22 10:45:34+00:00
Conversely, feature flags can create annoying issues due to compliance requirements.

I worked on an underwriting system where we had to be able to explain the reason for a decision. This meant that you needed to have on file both the state of the flag and the effective logic at the moment in time that a line of credit was offered to a customer.

They're useful, but not necessarily simple.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-22 10:45:50+00:00
I dislike LLM-slop too, but this is clearly a situation where enforcement of a policy is impossible. If those two new winners were using LLMs to generate code or media, we wouldn't know and neither would awards committee. This can only end up as a tool to selectively ban contenders, devaluing the whole award idea in the process.
by Roark66 | 2025-12-22 10:46:50+00:00
I'm glad the author clarified he wants to prevent his instance from crashing not simply "block robots and allow humans".

I think the idea that you can block bots and allow humans is fallacious.

We should focus on a specific behaviour that causes problems (like making a bajillion requests one for each commit, instead of cloning the repo). To fix this we should block clients that work in such ways. If these bots learn to request at a reasonable pace why cares if they are bots, humans, bots under a control of an individual human, bots owned by a huge company scraping for training data? Once you make your code (or anything else) public, then trying to limit access to only a certain class of consumers is a waste of effort.

Also, perhaps I'm biased, because I run a searXNG and Crawl4AI (and few ancillaries like jina rerank etc) in my homelab so I can tell my AI to perform live internet searches as well as it can get any website. For code it has a way to clone stuff, but for things like issues, discussions, PRs it goes mostly to GitHub.

I like that my AI can browse almost like me. I think this is the future way to consume a lot of the web (except sites like this one that are an actual pleasure to use).

The models sometimes hit sites they can't fetch. For this I use Firecrawl. I use MCP proxy that lets me rewrite the tool descriptions so my models get access to both my local Crawl4ai and hosted (and rather expensive)firecrawl, but they are told to use Firecrawl as last resort.

The more people use these kinds of solutions the more incentive there will be for sites not to block users that use automation. Of course they will have to rely on alternative monetisation methods, but I think eventually these stupid capchas will disappear and reasonable rate limiting will prevail.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-22 10:46:54+00:00
The world was a much better place when engineering was done by men in dress shirts, who saw technical excellence as their professional obligation, but then returned home to their families and could leave their professional life behind.

People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression.
I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you.

And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
by leejo | 2025-12-22 10:47:13+00:00
> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

FWIW I don't see this as an attack (with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of comments in the linked thread) and posted the link to the reddit thread as I see it more as an interesting observation around the myriad issues facing "legacy" languages and communities. To wit:

* Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.

* What's the future of this policy given the fractured nature of the web these days, walled gardens, and now LLMs?

* An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.

* Link rot is pervasive, we all knew this, but just how much of Wikipedia is being held up by the waybackmachine?

* Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.
by KempyKolibri | 2025-12-22 10:49:14+00:00
> A lot of the COVID pseudo-science was specifically designed to manipulate people's emotions (e.g. journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result [1]).

1. What Covid pseudo science are you referring to?

2. How does the x thread you referenced show “journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result”? As I read it, the rejection was because the journal had a higher bar for evidence on claims around herd immunity than the researchers were able to meet. That is, they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.

It’s not clear to me that this bar existed just to increase vaccine uptake, but to generally avoid moves towards relaxing interventions based on insufficiently strong evidence (social distancing, mask wearing, etc).

It’s not clear to me what objection one would have to having a high threshold for evidence when publishing research with such high potential to impact public health. That seems like a good thing to me.
by csomar | 2025-12-22 10:49:14+00:00
The people in the system have to do something to justify the existence of such a system and bump their metrics. Whether someone did something bad or not is irrelevant. It is the job of the prosecution lawyers to figure out the grounds. Legality and culpability is a paperwork.

Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
by cess11 | 2025-12-22 10:49:40+00:00
If you don't remember, why speculate?

Ek had been the CEO of µTorrent and they hired a person who had done research on Torrent technology at KTH RIT to help with the implementation. It was a proven technology that required relatively small adaptations.

They moved away from this architecture after the entertainment industry got involved. Sure, it was a cost issue until this point, but it also turned into a telemetry issue afterwards.
by simasscores | 2025-12-22 10:51:54+00:00
The app determines “unused” files by inspecting the filesystem metadata, specifically the creation date and last modification date of each file. It does not rely on last access time, since that approach would be unreliable on APFS.

I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been using it constantly and it gives very useful suggestions. For example, some movie files I converted to a different format were flagged — the originals were already deleted, but the converted files were still lingering in ~/SmartConverter/Exports/Movies.

There isn’t currently a customizable threshold you speak about, but that’s a great idea! I’m just launching the app, so I haven’t collected a lot of feedback or feature requests yet — thank you for the suggestion!

The files in the app support folders you mentioned usually don’t take up much space, so they rarely appear at the top of the suggestions list. That said, occasionally MacSpaceBack may suggest a file you don’t want to delete — that’s why it includes the “Mute” feature, which lets you ignore suggestions for specific files.

I view this app as a super quick way to reclaim a few gigabytes of data without spending a lot of time and for me it proven to be super helpful
by fastasucan | 2025-12-22 10:52:23+00:00
>I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.

My experience from being a mental-health patient is that things take too much time. For me I struggled with how it seemed like that the society universally had agreed that medication for my condition is bad. Taking medicine doesn't mean that you cant threat your illness in other ways as well, in my experience taking medicine helps you to be able to take the changes you need in life.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-22 10:53:14+00:00
>The CTO of a startup I worked at hated dependencies. We worked with some 3D calculations (software for drones), and he was writing tens of mathematical functions himself.

What a terrible idea. Implementing mathematical functions is extremely hard to do well. And by well I mean "function properly at all". This isn't about speed, this is about the fact that if you haven't done actual research into what you are implementing, then your implementation is going to full of errors, many of them totally non obvious. Rolling your DIY numerics, without spending a lot of time on it is just asking for problems.
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-22 10:53:36+00:00
Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU

The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries

Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws
by nicoburns | 2025-12-22 10:54:05+00:00
My understanding is that this only gives you access to C++ TurboModules? Binding to C++ is already easy in Rust (and odten Rust itself is a better choice for these "cross-platform business logic" kind of modules anyway). The value here is in unlocking bindings to the native platform APIs (which are mostly Java/Kotlin/Objc/Swift)
by Roark66 | 2025-12-22 10:54:14+00:00
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.

Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
by ako | 2025-12-22 10:55:18+00:00
Yesterday i used Claude Code to define and implement a YAML based DSL for playing backing tracks. I can ask an LLM to generate this DSL for any well known song, and it will include chord progression, lyrics, bass, drums, strumming pattern, etc. It's a go command line tool that plays the DSL via midi, and displays the chords, strumming patterns, and lyrics. Also does export to Strudel.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-22 10:55:40+00:00
> I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video

Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.

My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)

Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
by pezezin | 2025-12-22 10:56:02+00:00
Not loving the government is OK. Heck, hating the government might also be OK.

Insisting that we European citizens hate the EU when it is not true, and then doubling down with accusations of censorship when the whole thread points out your mistake, is downright stupid. But hey, if that makes you happy as some kind of freedom fighter, go for it.
by miguelgrinberg | 2025-12-22 10:56:16+00:00
When I said "the maintainer is warming up to the idea" I meant to the idea of upgrading Fetch Metadata from the current status of defense-in-depth to a full solution that can replace the token-based approaches.

It is pretty clear to me that the maintainer is cautious and is seeking other expert opinions before accepting the proposed upgrade to full solution. This, to me, shows integrity and not the lack of it. I apologize if my choice of words somehow can be interpreted in any other way!
by shrewdcomputer | 2025-12-22 10:56:34+00:00
> With the AI slop being promoted on the major social media platform’s algorithm, I believe we will go back to following real humans. Back to followers, where we decide who we want to see.

This is a nice thought but I think it's wrong. If TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts have proven anything, it's that people don't want to decide they want to consume. It's cynical but it's what the data has shown time and again works for these platforms. Passive consumption is easier for the user and companies know it keeps us online longer.

When you ask people, they will say they want to see who they follow but their behaviour, incentivised by companies, says otherwise.
by asimovDev | 2025-12-22 10:57:31+00:00
That's quite interesting, thank you for answering.

Not to put a lot on your plate, but have you considered creating a trial version that doesn't delete the files but just says how much space you can reclaim? I assume listing out the files wouldn't be very good cause then user can just go and manually delete the files without purchasing. maybe something like "87 files would be deleted to reclaims XY GB of space. Purchase now" or something along those lines.
by pembrook | 2025-12-22 10:57:36+00:00
Every year the percentage of European GDP driven by government spending rises by roughly 1%. We just hit over 50% on average in the Eurozone.

So they have over 50% control, and this will only rise as the population further ages, eating all productive activity in the economy.

It doesn't matter who 'owns' the means of production if the government is post-facto seizing a controlling stake in all economic activity via taxation and deficit spending (phantom taxation via inflation). Europe is quite literally eating its private sector like saturn devouring his son.
by usrusr | 2025-12-22 10:57:39+00:00
I wonder how much Google is factoring in the implicit cooling cycle? Because any pressurized gas energy storage is either including some advanced heat storage or is just venting the heat created during compression (the ancient Huntorf facility in Germany is infamous for that, super wasteful)

Usually you want to keep the heat and put it back into the compression medium during decompression and hope that losses from the heat storage aren't too big, but when you have a cooling use case nearby, you can use that low intensity heat to compensate heat storage losses, or even overcompensate. When you consider how much of the power input of a datacenter is typically used for cooling, compressed gas storage could be useful even if there was zero electric recovery (just time-shifting the power consumption for cooling to a time with better energy availability)
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-22 10:57:40+00:00
Not ever in your life being able to afford a home is the new normal, and to me it's a sign of deprivation. That's the reality younger generations are dealing with, not only temporarily renting, but renting for life.

Which isn't anything new. It's feudalism, and the way things usually are. But that's a far greater concern for those in that situation, than AIDS or nuke scares.
by nicoburns | 2025-12-22 10:57:44+00:00
A lot of complex GUIs are written in C++ (or are thinish wrappers around an underlying toolkit that is C++). This is often for performabce and/or resource consumption reasons. UIs may not have hard realtime requirements, but they are expected to consistently run smoothly at 60fps+. And dealong with multiple screen sizes, vector graphics, univode text,r etc can involve a lot of computation.

Rust gives you the same performance as C++ with much nicer language to work with.