MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duxup | 2026-01-31 20:13:18+00:00
Rather than really address what is ass about social media, we just "ban" it for folks who we can ban it for. This seems off.

Kid's have unlimited time. They'll find something else, likely pretending to be adults and thus even more at risk.

Meanwhile everyone else gets an internet license and the government tracks you ...

This is a classic case of nice idea and the results will be all wrong / not even address the problem.
by gotrythis | 2026-01-31 20:13:32+00:00
I put a day of careful thought into writing a cover letter for a job a few weeks ago. Knowing there is there was the potential of AI screening, I checked if it would get flagged.

Every detection program I tried said the letter that I personally wrote by hand was 100% AI generated!

So, I looked for humanizer programs and ran my cover letter through a couple. Without the results in front of me at the moment, I can only revert to my judgemental conclusion instead of solid observations...

You need to write like an idiot to pass AI detection algorithms. The rewritten cover letter was awful, unprofessional, and embarrassing.
by messh | 2026-01-31 20:13:40+00:00
This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary orchestrators.

The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.

Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html
by constantcrying | 2026-01-31 20:14:21+00:00
This is of course a trend in many western countries. With some, like the UK and Australia, leading the way.

At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused. At the same time these bans should not be considered reasonable options. They exist to cover for the decade of inaction of politicians in addressing youth dissatisfaction and dysfunction.

A reasonable approach should not assume that the root cause of this dysfunction is youth interacting with social media, but should consider what lead to this in the first place. Apparently most adults seem to be capable of dealing with this situation, if they are not why would this ban, or at least some regulation, not extend to social media for adults.

In general I believe that dysfunction in the youth has multiple causes and that overuse of social media is just on part of the puzzle and that unhealthy use of social media is often caused by other problem and used as a coping mechanism.

These bans will not be effective and they will be assaults on the free internet, as the bureaucrats establishing the laws are also seeking to control the internet for themselves and will use this as a backdoor.
by manquer | 2026-01-31 20:14:30+00:00
if you want best support (while staying with big cloud) then Microsoft is the best .

Azure has its flaws but Microsoft puts a lot of people and effort behind it . We are not that large but there are so many instances where Microsoft reps will come in call with our customers or their people working with common customers will help out etc.

AWS has a done a decent job of taking enterprise business seriously last 10 years. you can get human support but generally they will charge you , I.e if better support you want you have to pay for premium support plans .

They are constrained unlike MS they don’t have non-cloud large enterprise business relationships for decades M365 or AD etc that helps with building the enterprise DNA.

In all three clouds it works best if you don’t buy directly, buy through a partner reseller , who both have the relationships to the CSP and have the people to work with you .
by krater23 | 2026-01-31 20:14:32+00:00
Never had this issue. Its just as simple as start to work without contract and the promise of department head to get a contract and after two weeks mention to the contracting that you work since two weeks and have still not signed a NDA.

Next sentence is: I don't fear to not get my money, but currently I don't know if you pay or someone else...
by modeless | 2026-01-31 20:14:45+00:00
I'm less concerned with whether it is technically opt in or opt out and more concerned with whether it is commonly enabled in practice.

What would resolve my objection is if Apple either made messages backups E2EE always, as Google did and as Apple does themselves for other data categories like Keychain passwords, or if they excluded E2EE conversations (e.g. from ADP people) from non-E2EE backups, as Telegram does. Anything short of that does not qualify as E2EE regardless of the defaults, and marketing it as E2EE is false advertising.
by reddalo | 2026-01-31 20:14:49+00:00
I honestly think that the search feature of Immich is better than Google Photos.

Maaaybe AI-based searches like "cat on a red car" are better on Google (but I wouldn't bet my life on it), but Immich applies the exact filters that I want (Google is too fuzzy).

Also, unlike Google, Immich doesn't censor your searches, so I can look up for naked pictures or photos of gorillas, and actually see the results.
by susam | 2026-01-31 20:14:49+00:00
> Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days

Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html>.

These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.
by solatic | 2026-01-31 20:14:58+00:00
You are correct, but only insofar as destroying paper value. If investors have a firesale because the market would prefer to realize whatever value might be rescued, even at a loss, but the proceeds of the sale stay inside the US, then that capital is more likely to be reinvested in the US once investor confidence returns. This is the underlying reason why most long-investors should continue to hold their positions despite short-term losses. The fact that NVDA has a $4.6T market cap, as a product of about 24 billion shares multiplied by about a $190/share price, does not mean that the market believes that all 24 billion shares could be sold for that $190/share price. That is a convenient fiction that falls apart when investor confidence bursts, but that does not in and of itself truly represent value destruction (Nvidia employees will still wake up the next day and go to work), at least not until second-order-effects kick in (e.g. Nvidia employees leave because their RSU packages are no longer competitive compensation). People who stay long in the stock market can wait for investor confidence to return, in which cash is reinjected into the stock market, and the losses in diversified portfolios are not realized. If the S&P 500 investor takes a 50% hit in a crash, decides to hold, then the S&P 500 rises by 140% in the next two years, then the investor who held will still realize a nice return.

The way in which that narrative does not happen is if the capital leaves entirely to be locked up in other investments; in the context of index funds which would anyway rebalance to rise with those other investments, if the capital leaves for other countries, to investments that are not covered by the index funds.
by dgellow | 2026-01-31 20:15:10+00:00
- video clip from the 80s in this video https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...

- 1987 newspaper ad in major newspapers where he complains about the strong dollar https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-foreign-policy-ad/ (and see the weak yen as something good)

- 2017 "the dollar is too strong and is killing us" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dollar-tumbling-trump-said-to...

- 2019 deleted president remark from whitehouse.gov https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...

- 2020, mentions of trump "long desired weaker dollar" https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2019/11/18/dollar-...

- 2024 arguing the dollar being strong is a tremendous burden https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-dollar-too-strong-...

- 2025 "you make a hell of a lot more with a [weak dollar]" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-strong-dollar-sounds-go...

- 2026 "I think it's great [that the dollar is weakening]" https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/the-dollar-is-sinki... (this one is literally from this week)

If you want to understand the goal of the administration, read Stephan Miran's 2024 paper titled "A user's guide to restructuring the global trading system" (the author is the current chairs of "Council Economic Advisers", the paper is casually called Mar-a-lago accord...):

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...

The TL;DR is something like: use overvalued due to reserve status => devalue 40% via tariffs + threatening to withdraw military protection from allies who don't comply

You can find more sources and videos with fairly basic googling, such as multiple interviews from the 90s (or 80s?) with Larry king, Oprah, and way more, none of that is hidden
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-31 20:15:31+00:00
> "Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans."

I'm fascinated by these claims from some LLM advocates that people will no longer need to know things, think, or express themselves properly. What value then will such individuals bring to the table to justify their pay? Will they be like Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest whose sole function was to repeat what the computer says verbatim? Will they be like Tom Smykowski in Office Space indignantly saying "I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that?!" Somebody, please explain.

[EDIT] The other funny aspect about these claims is, given that such an individual's skills are mainly in using an AI, that they can simply be outspent by their peers on AI usage. "Wally got the job instead of me because he paid for a premium LLM to massage his application and I could only afford the basic one because I'm short on money."
by jjcm | 2026-01-31 20:16:16+00:00
Nitpick - the question should have been:

> Why .avifs when we have .webps already?

Webp and avif are both image containers, both of which support animated images. The key difference here between avif|mp4 and webp|webm is the mime type and the associated UX with each of these. Image types are presented without controls, and are looping by default if they have multiple frames. Video types are presented with controls and with many other options.

It's a good question as to why avif though. Webp is entirely sufficient in most situations. Where AV1 as a codec shines is for more advanced compression, which may not be necessary for a simple looped gif-analog, but you'll still get some gains. The gains come at a processing speed tradeoff though, so they're good to use when you have advanced hardware on a low-bandwidth connection. I personally don't find the tradeoff worth it, so all of my media encoding pipelines opt for webp/webm by default.
by gman83 | 2026-01-31 20:16:21+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.
by b112 | 2026-01-31 20:16:22+00:00
Yes, it's dasterdly!

Almost every movie has a plot. How formulaic. How droll!

I find these sorts of discussions to be strange. Yes, stories follow specific methods to convey them. Yes, conflict is part of that.

I will agree that too formulaic is a sign of the times. I find that many 60s and 70s movies were the most creative this way.

The 30s often had movies that were just plays on film. The 50s were where the process of filmmaking gelled into reality. Not just how to make shots, but also the gear like steady cam, and an entire special effects industry, stuntmen, whole crops of professionals becoming uniquely skilled.

The 60s and 70s were the first generation of those which grew up with film as kids. The new medium was more understood. Experimentation ensued.

Then it became more formulaic. At least, it seems the way to me.
by amluto | 2026-01-31 20:16:43+00:00
> The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China

For better or for worse, many people on both sides of the strait have used language along these lines that suggests that Taiwan is part of China for decades and probably even since a bit before 1949 (I was not alive at the time). I think that, at this point, the term “mainland China” is just the default.

That being said, a person from China could just say they’re from China and no one would be confused. This is in contrast to someone saying they’re Chinese, which can be ambiguous.
by upcoming-sesame | 2026-01-31 20:16:46+00:00
All I want is to automatically periodically backup my Google Photos to some S3 compatible storage like B2.
I want to do that in case Google nukes my account one day for whatever reason.

I have not found any way to do that until today.

In addition, my local network is slow and I don't have much storage I am limited to solutions that are cloud-to-cloud.

If anyone has any idea, please help me out
by miduil | 2026-01-31 20:16:49+00:00
> Push notifications can be used to read messages.

Are you trying to imply that WhatsApp is bypassing e2e messaging through Push notifications?

Unless something has changed, this table highlights that both Signal and WhatsApp are using a "Push-to-Sync" technique to notify about new messages.

https://crysp.petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0151....
by nyrikki | 2026-01-31 20:17:11+00:00
Had more to do with punch cards and flexowriter tapes and octal, which predates large word sizes or even mainframes. Note the following from the MIDAS macro assembler [0]

Fortran predates this and was a different lineage than IBM, but not how six char symbols were a request

> The MACRO language had been used on the TX-0 for some three years previous to the writing of MIDAS. Hence, MIDAS incorporates
most, of the features which have been requested by users of MACRO, such as more flexible macro Instructions, six character symbols and relocation.

Note that when porting b to the pdp-11, which was ascii vs the earlier FIODEC/flexowriter 6 bit paper tapes is why c case statements fall through, they used it to allow lower case commands in ed as an example.

Flexowriters are 1940s iirc, and TX-0 through the early pdps were octal so it makes sense to grow in multiples of the 3.3 bit lines of paper tape

[0] http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/rle_pdp1/memos/PDP-1_MIDAS.pdf
by unyttigfjelltol | 2026-01-31 20:17:15+00:00
> let this be a lesson for you and your colleagues.

Nah, big tech infiltrates everything, it’s 100% their fault. Why did everyone switch to webmail? Why did we gravitate to web apps? Big tech persuaded us all to do it.

With big promises comes great responsibility, and the stuff in the fine print doesn’t count. It’s not ethical to invite dependency and randomly kneecap people; it shouldn’t be legal either.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-31 20:17:42+00:00
> Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.

I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social media discussions.

In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth about the world.

The whole experience caught me off guard because going into this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast path to doomerism.
by puppycodes | 2026-01-31 20:17:43+00:00
I agree that participation is not nessecary as I mentioned. But I find the way people comment and the back and forth on twitter interesting data. From the raw feelings or nation state bots pushing certain narratives, I personally find it informative viewing the platform where these interactions happen beyond divorced headlines.

95% of it is garbage, but as a member of a targeted class of people I like to see what angles they are coming for us from way ahead of time.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-31 20:17:50+00:00
You’re doing that thing where you confuse confidence with thinking.

You haven’t engaged with the argument once. You’ve complained about credentials, then tone, then AI, then “respect.” That’s four pivots and zero substance.

I didn’t say “trust this person instead of thinking.” I said experience adds context. You keep pretending those are the same thing because otherwise you’d have to actually respond.

The AI accusation is just embarrassing. It’s the online version of “I can’t refute this, so I’ll imply you cheated.” That might feel clever, but it mostly signals panic.

If you’re as sharp as you seem to think you are, this shouldn’t be hard. Pick a claim. Explain why it’s wrong. Everything else is just noise you’re making to avoid that moment.
by peter_d_sherman | 2026-01-31 20:18:39+00:00
>"But NixOS isn't the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme. Specifically Guile Scheme..."

I'd be curious if a list exists of all declarative Linux distros out there, along with the configuration language (Nix, Scheme, etc.)

I'd also be curious as to how easy it would be to convert Scheme to the Nix language or vice-versa, in other words, it seems to me that there might be a "parent language" (for lack of a better term) out there for all lisplike and functional programming language (a subset of Haskell, F#, or some other functional programming language perhaps) that sort of might act as an intermediary conversion step (again, for lack of a better term!) between one functional or lisplike programming language and another...

Probably unrelated (but maybe somewhat related!) -- consider Pandoc... Pandoc is a Haskell program that basically uses a document tree structure to convert between one type of document format and another... maybe in terms of programming languages you'd call that an AST, an Abstract Syntax Tree... so maybe there's some kind of simplified AST (or something like that) out there that works as the base tree for all functional and lisp-like programming language (yes, lisp/lisplikes sort of preserve its/their own tree; their own AST -- via their intrinsic data structure, and that would seem to be true about functional programming languages too... so what is the base tree/AST of all of these, that all languages in this family can "map on to" (for lack of better terminology), that could be used (with AI / LLM's) as an "Intermediary Language" or "Intermediary Data Structure" (choose your terminology) to allow easily converting between one and the other?

Anyway, if we had that or something like that, then Nix configurations could (in theory) be easily converted to Guix, and vice-versa, automatically, as could any other Linux configured by a functional and/or lisplike language...

That, and I found the article very interesting!

I may have to try Guix in the future!
by preston-kwei | 2026-01-31 20:18:42+00:00
I get the concern if the value is framed as “replacing an admin assistant”, but for many founders, the real win isn’t salary savings, it’s eliminating context switching, follow-ups, and mental overhead around coordination. As well as eliminating the mistakes that can be made by humans. Even small logistics can disproportionately drain attention. If done well, this is less about cost reduction and more about reclaiming focus and execution speed.
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-31 20:19:07+00:00
> The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.

More specifically: using "engagement" as the metric to optimize.

Users' use of content is measured: how long do they watch it? Do they leave a comment? Do they give a "like"? Based on that, the algorithm finds similar content that will elicit an even stronger response.

Every action you take on modern social media is giving information to your drug dealer so they can make the next hit even better. But not better for you; better for the social media, who make money from ads.

The continuously adaptive nature of the input stream as a basis for keeping users' eyeballs leashed to ads is what separates FB, Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube from the more benign, but still addictive alternatives (HN, Fortnite, WoW, NFL, Reddit).
by tzs | 2026-01-31 20:19:34+00:00
Anyone happen to know what the arguments were from those who supported that bill?

Here's a summary. In late 2016 the FCC passed a rule that:

(1) applies the customer privacy requirements of the Communications Act of 1934 to broadband Internet access service and other telecommunications services,

(2) requires telecommunications carriers to inform customers about rights to opt in or opt out of the use or the sharing of their confidential information,

(3) adopts data security and breach notification requirements,

(4) prohibits broadband service offerings that are contingent on surrendering privacy rights, and

(5) requires disclosures and affirmative consent when a broadband provider offers customers financial incentives in exchange for the provider's right to use a customer's confidential information.

The bill, introduced early in 2017, nullifies that rule.

It passed the Senate 50-48, then the House of Representatives 215-205, and was signed by Trump.

The 52 Republicans in the Senate voted 50 yes, 0 no, 2 not voting. The 47 Democrats, along with the 1 independent, voted no.

In the House the 236 Republicans voted 215 yes, 15 no, 6 not voting. The 190 Democrats all voted no.
by RajT88 | 2026-01-31 20:19:58+00:00
Facebook messenger similarly claims to be end to end encrypted, and yet if it thinks you are sending a link to a pirate site, it "fails to send". I imagine there are a great many blacklisted sites which they shadow block, despite "not being able to read your messages".

My pet conspiracy theory is that the "backup code" which "restores" encrypted messages is there to annoy you into installing the app instead of chatting on the web.