MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-20 05:50:58+00:00
People keep making the comparison between the Apple App Store or the Google Play store and the XBox store or the Fortnite store.

But these are likely irrelevant comparisons.

For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open distribution on PCs which essentially means there is no lock in in this industry. And unlike the “web app” comparison folks try to make, open distribution can easily leverage the same capabilities as the store distributed games can (and in fact, they are more capable than games from some stores, like the Windows store).

But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.

People depend on these platforms. There are businesses you cannot interact with if not through your phone. There are public transportation systems that are almost unusable.

And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong. General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life. They should be treated differently and we shoudoht allow 2 companies to monopolize and/or embargo them like Apple/Google are trying.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-20 05:51:36+00:00
Sure there’s definitely a change in content but I don’t think it’s quite that bad. Tonight was capehart and brooks— who has never supported Trump even though he’s a conservative, so not a great foil for capehart… Pretty soft/polite analysis that always feels very late-aughts. Yesterday was someone who worked in the state department for 25 years giving a pretty dry breakdown on Venezuela. the night before that was a professor from Tulane criticizing trump’s strategy on Venezuela. The night before that was an interview with Bill Cassidy explaining the GOP health care proposal he co-authored, and a report from someone embedded with the Lebanese army. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s like a rehash of the conversation at the campus coffee shop over there.
by Morromist | 2025-12-20 05:51:39+00:00
Heh. True. The saga of r/art this last few weeks is a good lession in how trying to demonitize things can be difficult.

Still, with intense moderation it is sometimes possible. Wikipedia has a vast amount of information passing through it and has stayed pretty free of monitization - although, certainly some companies have written themselves some pretty positive wiki-pages - in general I would say it is a success.
by chistev | 2025-12-20 05:52:27+00:00
Read in 2025 -

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

Night by Elie Wiesel

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette Mccurdy (A re-read. Read it first in 2022)
by somenameforme | 2025-12-20 05:55:24+00:00
This is definitely incorrect. If you graduate with a low-value degree from an Ivy League, you're still going to be just as unemployable as somebody that graduated from Party U with a low value degree. The only real difference is that at top schools there are less people that are completely directionless in life (since you're less likely to get admitted in such a case) so if somebody is graduating with e.g. a philosophy degree, then they're probably doing it explicitly with the intent of going to e.g. law school or on an academic path, whereas many people at lower ranked universities end up there largely through inertia and may pursue degrees of minimal value with no real thoughts beyond taking the easiest path to achieving a college degree, which is the direction they were pushed onto without ever really thinking about it.

And even for valuable degrees, the advantage yielded is far less than you might think. It's not like the movies where you have dozens of companies begging you to come work with 6 figure starting salaries and fat bonuses up front. You open a few more doors, and people have a better than average initial impression of you, but at the end of the day - it's not a world-shifting advantage. The overall edge in outcomes is not because of the university, but because of the sort of people that the university admits. The sort of guy who graduates class president, valedictorian, wrestled at state, and with a near perfect score on his SAT is going to do disproportionately well in life completely regardless of whether he ends up at MIT, Party U, or just skips university altogether.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-12-20 05:56:51+00:00
Intense moderation eventually breaks down. Ultimately, the people doing the moderating are driven by the same selfishness as all humans. Even if a you can find a handful who won't bend for their own gain, they will be forced out by those who do and see an opportunity.

This is the same problem law has, even at the global scale.

You can't moderate when almost every single person in the chain is a bad actor. Individuals will chip away at any structure or organization day by day, year by year, until they are eventually rewarded.
by deaux | 2025-12-20 05:58:09+00:00
This comparison doesn't work at all. An APK for app A is compatible with Android devices of version X, regardless of the store it is sold on. A cosmetic for game B is not compatible with all games running on the same engine Y, for obvious reasons.

Asking Fortnite to accept other stores selling Fortnite-compatible cosmetics doesn't work either because Fortnite has not monopolized a trillion-dollar industry, meanwhile spending billions on lobbying to make daily life for the average citizen impossible without them, which the Google-Apple cartel has. Fortnite has also never gained market share by pursuing claims about being an open source platform or not being evil, again unlike Google. These differences.. make all the difference. Call me when my kids are forced to agree to Fortnite EULAs to participate in schooling all around the world.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-20 05:59:39+00:00
The entire point of being creative is that you actually MAKE it yourself, not that you tell the slop machine to make it for you. This is, quite frankly, the complete and total opposite of creativity. This is pure consumption disguised as creativity, wrapped up in a nice $99 box that will probably be e-waste in a couple years when the company goes under.
by BillSims | 2025-12-20 06:00:41+00:00
A year or more ago some poor guy asked a simple SO or SE question. I studied that for a while, tried multiple carefully crafted Google queries until I found one that gave a good correct AI result, posted a reply NOT POSTING THE AI RESPONSE, that would break their rules, ONLY telling the person what query to do to get an answer and urged them to study and test this carefully, and I posted that. Moments later I got a stern warning that my post had been torn down, likely because their AI hunter bots had seen the word AI in it, almost certainly before the original poster ever saw this. Nobody else ever even tried to help the person. Later, only slightly related, I realized it had been most of a year since anyone posted a question in the little SO and SE corners that I used to watch and so I scanned my last five years of posting little mostly trivial attempts to help users, many of those were "I think you've made a very simple mistake here..", some of those probably resulted in trivial fixes, usually the person didn't even respond to me. SO I thought I'd raise the average quality of posts slightly by going through and deleting my trivial posts. On both SO and SE their hunter bots immediately flagged me for doing this and I got messages from both telling me that all the stuff I had tried to help people by putting up over the last 5-30 years WAS THEIRS (SO and SE) AND BELONGED TO THEM!!! And I believe they put back some or all of my trivial stuff. And I stopped watching SO and SE.
by snackbroken | 2025-12-20 06:02:27+00:00
It looks pretty, but fails at basic usability.

After reading the top-left block of text titled "Optimizing Webkit & Safari for Spedometer 3.0", what the fuck am I supposed to read next? Am I meant to go recursively column by column, or try to scrutinize pixels to determine which of the blocks are further up than the others, skipping haphazardly left and right across the page? A visual aid: https://imgur.com/a/0wHMmBG

Columnar layout is FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN on media that doesn't have two fixed-size axes. Web layouts leave one axis free to expand as far as necessary to fit the content, so there is no sane algorithm for laying out arbitrary content this way. Either you end up with items ordered confusingly, or you end up having to scroll up and down repeatedly across the whole damn page, which can be arbitrarily long. Either option is terrible. Don't even get me started on how poorly this interacts with "infinite scroll".
by bonzini | 2025-12-20 06:03:59+00:00
I have checked three smaller machines.

On one (coreelec) systemd has 7M of resident data, of which 5.5M are shared libraries; by comparison, the numbers for sshd are respectively 6M and 3.5M.

On an OpenWRT machine without systemd (it's using procd) there are 700k of resident data. So the "cost" of systemd seems to be ~5M. Certainly I wouldn't run systemd on an old router with 16MB of RAM, but the cost is two orders of magnitude less than 1G-300M.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-20 06:04:29+00:00
Why learn to draw when the slop machine will make images for you? Why learn to write when the slop machine will make stories for you? Why learn an instrument when the slop machine will make music for you? This does nothing but kill actual creativity at the hands of the people making electricity expensive. We should be appalled and ashamed.

Also, criticism is not hate, and I think you and every other disingenuous AI cheerleader know it.
by assemblyman | 2025-12-20 06:04:31+00:00
I feel the American media and general public has gotten psyched by the recent announcements coming from China. This might be new weapons or Deepseek or conveniences in the cities. I wish the Chinese people all the best and sincerely hope they prosper. At the same time, I really wish Americans would get out of this panic mode. You answered several challenges over the last 250 years. Some were existential threats. America generally lays out its problems for everyone to see. Americans tend to be extremely self-critical. This is often misconstrued by some to be signs of weakness. Anyone who believes this is, in my opinion, delusional.

As an aside, there are some comments about the "Chinese way of thinking" and the "American way of thinking". I generally think these discussions veer off into notions of cultural superiority. That, also in my opinion, is the mark of weak minds. The fact is once something is shown to be possible, it is exponentially easier to duplicate and improve it. America did this with German technology, China did it with American technology and I am sure countries like India are going to quickly get there too (I am not suggesting the Germans didn't learn from others themselves). This sets a firm base for iterative improvements.

To riff off another comment, China's progress wasn't done by God. America will learn and adopt what's valuable and discard what's not. If I have learned anything about Americans (of all backgrounds), they don't shy away from a challenge. For all its faults, I still personally will root for a society based on something like the American constitution.
by cmcaleer | 2025-12-20 06:04:51+00:00
> The following fees apply when a user completes [...] any app installs within 24 hours of following an external content link

So does this mean a malicious competitor or motivated disgruntled user could fraudulently cause millions of app installs? With the scale smartphone activity fraud farms are at these days, paying a few thousand dollars on such a service to cause a developer to spend a few million dollars on worthless installs (or a lot of resources arguing with Google) seems like a worthwhile endeavour for the motivated.
by dpark | 2025-12-20 06:08:50+00:00
You can read all about the actual stories of minorities rising up to fight majorities in history books. This isn’t some hypothetical we have to approach from a purely philosophical standpoint.

All modern functioning democracies I’m aware of have a set of rights they have agreed everyone has a right to. This has largely been achieved through bloodshed.

Your idea that we’re should devolve into feudal tribes seems quite obviously destined to result in a great deal of bloodshed. We have the term warlord to describe those who frequently end up in charge in this sort of arrangement.

> a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.

Nowhere did I say or imply that. Those in power usually stay in power because they have power. Numbers are only one sort of power.
by svat | 2025-12-20 06:10:45+00:00
The HN title here is currently “Performance Hints (2023)”, but this was only published externally recently (2025). (See e.g. https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2002089534188892256 announcing it.) And of course 2023 is when the document was first created, but much of the content is more recent than that. So IMO it's a bit misleading to put "(2023)" in the title.
by JimDabell | 2025-12-20 06:11:57+00:00
> We held a vote that you weren’t aware of and decided that masonry was out. If you cared, you should have participated in the vote that you were not aware was happening. It’s too late to change it.

I think that’s an exceptionally uncharitable description of what happened. This is a decision the WebKit team has been repeatedly publicly asking people to participate in for over 18 months.

> Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout

> P.S. About the name

> It’s likely masonry is not the best name for this new value. […] The CSSWG is debating this name in [this issue]. If you have ideas or preferences for a name, please join that discussion.

— https://webkit.org/blog/15269/help-us-invent-masonry-layouts...

> Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS

> We also believe that the value masonry should be renamed.

> As described in our previous article, “masonry” is not an ideal name, since it represents a metaphor, and not a direct description of its purpose. It’s also not a universally used name for this kind of layout. Many developers call it “waterfall layout” instead, which is also a metaphor.

> Many of you have made suggestions for a better name. Two have stood out, collapse and pack as in — grid-template-rows: collapse or grid-template-rows: pack. Which do you like better? Or do you have another suggestion? Comment on [this issue] specifically about a new value name (for the Just Use grid option).

— https://webkit.org/blog/16026/css-masonry-syntax/#footnote-1

> [css-grid-3] Renaming masonry keyword

— https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9733
by assemblyman | 2025-12-20 06:12:42+00:00
I think you are writing your comments conditioned on not just what you are responding to but also a lot of internal assumptions about their intentions. The person you are responding to said or implied nothing about surveillance or Western assumptions about China. They are making the claim (apologies to them if I am misrepresenting) that societies or governments achieve extraordinary goals (i.e. goals that they were not expected to achieve within a certain time-frame) because of the physical, economic and social conditions and not because of cultural elements. Cultural explanations are post-hoc i.e. they are used after the fact to boost morale or give a sense of unity. More concretely, if China, the US, the EU, Japan, India, Russia can launch spacecrafts to the moon, so can Nigeria and Kenya given enough time, resources and the right incentive structure even if they are culturally very different from the countries above.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-20 06:14:50+00:00
> the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it

You're describing property in general. Not just IP.

> Apple was told "you can charge for your IP"

It's a bit misleading to use quotes in this case, given you aren't quoting the court.
by mothballed | 2025-12-20 06:18:55+00:00
Taiwan is considered by the Chinese to be part of China. Their strongest hypothetical allies, USA, when added to their population doesn't even come close to reaching the population of China. By all counts, they lose the popular vote of China (which again, considers Taiwan part of it). And China does not recognized their 'minority' government.

Yet Taiwan still exists, all while having less military power than China.

How is that? Seems to throw a bone in your whole idea that a rogue minority government in the envelope of a majority that considers them encompassing part of their country, is destined to fail or devolve into some pre-civilization caveman situation.

>>> Keep going. What happens when the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government?

>> a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.

>Nowhere did I say or imply that. Those in power usually stay in power because they have power. Numbers are only one sort of power.

And here we get to the truth of what you're saying. We can just handwave away 'numbers are only one sort of power' to mean literally anything could happen if the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government. Including, most common on the world stage, simply carrying on with trade while maintaining a tenuous balance and the occasional wars that happen even on inter or intra democracy lines. Because most often, it's not worth a violent fight. So basically, nothing of interest beyond the status quo to note here.

"Go down the hole deep enough" and you’ll figure out why my assertions are true -- the world is a collection of minorities in various alliances that manage to by those means still exist.
by agilob | 2025-12-20 06:18:58+00:00
An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF (out-of-fuel) mechanism. In emergency cases a passenger was selected and thrown out of the plane. (When necessary, the procedure was repeated.) A large body of theory was developed and many publications were devoted to the problem of properly selecting the victim to be ejected. Should the victim be chosen at random? Or should one choose the heaviest person? Or the oldest? Should passengers pay in order not to be ejected, so that the victim would be the poorest on board? And if for example the heaviest person was chosen, should there be a special exception in case that was the pilot? Should first class passengers be exempted? Now that the OOF mechanism existed, it would be activated every now and then, and eject passengers even when there was no fuel shortage. The engineers are still studying precisely how this malfunction is caused.

https://lwn.net/Articles/104185/
by hanspagel | 2025-12-20 06:21:03+00:00
From what I see, this does not help with pinning the dependencies and it doesn’t verify the downloaded action has the same content as it used to have. In other words, this is a tiny patch on a big wound.

We use commit hashes to pin actions, have the version as a comment (e.g # v4) and renovate will keep both up to date in the PRs.

And there is a more or less recently added repository setting to require actions to be pinned to hashes.
by Groxx | 2025-12-20 06:23:15+00:00
From just this page it's rather unclear what triggers this... if an fdroid app that does not use any Play libraries has a purchaseable thing on another site, is that in scope? Do they need to add Play libraries to track it, or be smacked? If yes, it'd certainly explain their "developer verification" effort, as it's a way to enforce rent extraction.
by kqr | 2025-12-20 06:23:16+00:00
I'd love to but... how? One alternative seems to be a programmer chip that must be puchased and then modified to not fry the camera with 5V. Another is maybe stripping a USB cable and soldering it to the wifi pads on the camera chip?

Neither of these seem like good ideas for someone like me, who is relatively hardware naïve and has small children running around making it hard to concetrate for more than 30 minutes at a time.

The question is genuine. I want to do this but don't actually know by which method.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-20 06:26:09+00:00
1. There are plenty of non-profitable non-financial things that do have scientific evidence backing them. Massage for example which can be performed by essentially anyone.

2. There needs to be some way to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Otherwise we all drown beneath the waves of lying charlatans. So how do we differentiate what works? "Evidence" seems like a reasonable criterion.
by bofadeez | 2025-12-20 06:28:58+00:00
Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.

The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.

Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.

Why not give him cash or a job or something else?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-20 06:30:17+00:00
A senior software engineer can easily make $300-400K+ at BigTech that’s “impressive” enough to me.

On the other hand, a “senior” working at a bank or other large non tech company will probably be making less than $175K if you aren’t working on the west coast.

For instance Delta

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries
by topspin | 2025-12-20 06:30:57+00:00
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/object...

Arbitrary name+value pairs attached to S3 objects and buckets, and readily available via the S3 API. Metadata, basically. AWS has some tie-ins with permissions and other features, but tags can be used for any purpose. You might encode video multiple times at different bitrates, and store the rate in a tag on each object, for example. Tags are an affordance used by many applications for countless purposes.
Ask HN: How do you deal with marketing?
by zata | 2025-12-20 06:31:50+00:00
I created a SaaS tool in AdOps space and I think its pretty useful. I have a couple of customers using it and finding value, but I am completely lost on how to grow it besides starting to give it away for free. How do you tech founders deal with marketing? Should I look for partner or is there hope for people like me?
by abustamam | 2025-12-20 06:31:57+00:00
A few years back, before I was an engineer, I worked at a local learning center franchise for a few years. We accepted online applications, but 99% of the people we hired came in through the front door and handed me a resume. I was not in charge of hiring, I just passed the resume to my boss (the owner). I never felt inconvenienced by this "role" I was given.

Some time after that, I was working for a consulting firm, but my desk was not at the entrance; another engineer's was. I distinctly remember a sharply dressed college student walking in, giving that engineer a resume, saying a few things, and leaving. His resume got passed up the chain and he got hired later. The only person I know who gave a paper resume.

If you're getting a lot of foot traffic that wastes your time, maybe bring that up with your employer?