skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you like a site to go back to it repeatedly don't you think it would be fair to "pay the fee" of seeing the ads, thus supporting that site...

I struggle with this. Of course I want the producers of content that I like to make money. And it seems obvious to me that if I'm one of the people consuming (and liking) that content... some of that money I want them to make should come from me.

But the pipeline that the "modern web" provides to complete that transaction is openly hostile towards me. It makes content creators that I want to support participants in a giant machine designed to build a dossier on me (and every other user of the "modern web"). It also encourages VERY LARGE numbers of content creators I do not want to support -- those whose primary goal is to be participant in that machine; who only produce content because the machine requires it.

I would argue that this machine has never built this dossier with my "informed" consent (but lawyers could make the case that it has). But now, the machine builds it without even bothering to get my "uninformed" consent. For example: Facebook is known to build profiles on people that don't have Facebook accounts -- ie: people that could never have agreed to their TOS.

The top priority of this giant machine is putting ads in front of my face. Helping me discover content that I want to consume is only a secondary priority.

And there is a GOOD reason for why this machine evolved: people don't want to pay money _directly_ to content creators, so a way evolved for them to receive compensation _indirectly_. So yes, this is -- at least in part -- my (our) fault.

But I really feel like things have shifted to the point where the large majority of compensation that content creators receive is a function of their value to that machine... not a function of the value they create for the people who consume their content.

This is all a very long way of saying: I don't believe the value of a content creator _to me_ should be calculated based on their value _to this machine_.

I don't know what the solution is. Find a way to accurately assess the value _to me_, not _to the machine_ -- and then provide a way for me to pay the content creator directly. If I like the content enough -- and IF I'm not shown ads or tracked once I'm a paying customer -- I will pay. This is how newspapers worked for... centuries? (Save that newspapers did show ads, though they did not track you).

The problem is... I think that being part of the machine is more lucrative than selling content directly to consumers. And the hostility of this machine towards me has turned this into a fight. Of course I'm going to fight back.

> ...however annoying they are?

This is where you start to lose me. I don't think "annoying" captures just how "hostile" this machine has become.

I'm old enough to remember switching from Yahoo Search to Google Search -- NOT because the results were better, but because Google's ads were less intrusive. I never blocked those ads. I even clicked a few...
I'd agree on this.

For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit.

On the other hand, bidding my own name: pennies.
Yes, it is extremely limited, albeit in different ways than humans are. My point was just that as a profession, they aren't currently setting a very high bar.

There are always exceptional individuals, but sadly exceptional individuals can't scale to meet the needs of a society. (There's a serious shortage of therapists, teachers, etc., even counting all the lousy ones!)
Let me be the devil's advocate: don't people already listen to and trust other people who have biases?
Debugging a Slow Web App
I got an email today from one of my clients, letting me know that one of his web apps was down. He said he was getting an error and asked me to take a look.

In the end, I was able to fix it and get it running faster than ever. What caused it turned out to be a huge surprise to me. I thought I'd outline the steps I went through here, to try to help others trying to solve similar problems in the future.
Yep, but try to put Google ads on a page with naked or scantily dressed people, you'll get banned real fast. =)

Stealing and impersonation good, sex bad.
How is a black box that systematically disadvantages already disadvantaged groups of people the best idea we’ve got?

Click the circles in the analysis summary table.
Can we look back on this disorder and take in how truly awful it is to live with it?

For most of your life, people call you lazy, inattentive, annoying.

You try to keep up with schoolwork/work/taxes/chores/XYZ but the activity makes you want to vomit from the tightness in your chest and the mental fog that creeps whenever you want to just get done with it.

The majority of people believe ADHD does not exist, and keep leading you down a road where your self-esteem keeps getting destroyed more and more when no methods seems to work effectively.

When you get diagnosed, which in most parts of the world is so hard it'd be easier to plan your suicide; and you get prescribed medication, people call you a drug addict.

ADHD is one of the most researched disorders and the most treatable, but the majority of people who have it are hardly diagnosed and their problems are never taken seriously, because neurotypicals have a hard time relating with the experience.

You always have noise in your head. You can never relax. You always have to be doing something. You have a constant monologue going in your head and made up scenarios.

You're either stuck trying to start a task for two hours, or obsessively doing something for 12 hours.

Comorbid anxiety disorder is very common to have developed from all the childhood trauma resulting from ADHD.
I disagree that it’s a scam to advertise over someone else’s name as long as it’s clear and you’re not trying to confuse the user. I’ve found better alternatives than what I was looking for through competitor ads. I’ve had this happen on Google and the App Store and I appreciate it.

It gives newer, or less well-known, companies a chance to gain exposure. And consumers like me might learn about a superior option they didn’t know previously.

Edit: Thought experiment. Over in the Figma thread there’s a lot of talk about trying to ween themselves and others off Adobe products. So is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?
Show HN: Convert sketches into images using ControlNet
Hi HN!

We're working on an AI studio product, and have been experimenting with the recently-released ControlNet (https://github.com/lllyasviel/ControlNet)

After wasting hours with it, we decided to put together a quick fun project. "Sketch" allows you to draw anything (works w/ touch inputs on mobile too), enter a prompt (it can be as simple as "drawing" and it'll try to guess) and you get something out fast. Keeping it all on a public feed as well, to serve as inspiration.

Hope anyone here finds it fun :-)
> The form includes significant loopholes, like failing to require the apps to report data sharing with “service providers.”

> As we’ve noted, data sharing with “service providers” is exempt from disclosure requirements.

> Many different companies act as service providers, including Google itself

Well, whaddya know. Apps don't have to report whether they share data with Google.

I found it striking that in the list of four questions that Mozilla asked Google, not one of them elicited a straight answer. I don't mean just evasive or slippery; they failed to answer the question, instead answering a different question, one that wasn't asked.
Bitcoin isn't unique in that though. Picasso paintings also have no top as long as their physical fundamentals stay strong.
Buy it from them or wait until expiry, no other option unless you have a trademark from before the domain was registered.
How to find a memory bloat in your Rails app before it happens
Memory bloat in Ruby happens when someone loads a lot of data to the memory. Ruby Virtual Machine does not return most of the allocated memory to the operating system even after data is collected as a garbage. It’s not a big deal for local development or console programs, but if you have a bloat in the big Rails app it might cost you a lot of money.

It is quite easy to find a fix memory bloat when it happens, but can we prevent it?
One of the problems that I can see in building that marketing program for those who really want the service or product is that many of these transactions are one time transactions in that at the conclusion of the transaction, the customer no longer has a need for or interest in that service or product and so they are effectively a dead lead. Continuing to contact "potential customers" to sell them something they don't need will always be seen as an annoyance. There has to be a process for customer contact info to be scrubbed from the lists once a transaction has been completed.

For example if I contact someone about long-distance transport of a vehicle I end up with dozens of calls and emails from companies claiming to be drivers all of whom will do it for the lowest price. Over time I select one of these companies or find another somewhere else. However, it can take months for the contacts to taper off with the email spam being the last thing to shut down. It is obvious that you only need to contact one company thru their website in order to get on the list of potential customers so they all sell contact info to each other. The last time I got an email reminding me that they are ready to transport my vehicle it had been two years since that vehicle was transported to me. This stale contact info has to be a drag on the system somewhere. I just mark all as spam and forget about it.
The Natural Selection half life mod, and the standalone NS2 are still the best (maybe only?) asymmetric shooter/RTS hybrids I've played.
Is there an actual technical limitation or just because of the binary naming convention? I ask because some of the flatpak apps I have installed I almost always run via the command line by putting "/var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin" in my path and aliasing to the long name, ie: "alias evince=org.gnome.Evince" and they seem to work fine.
Show HN: Generate unlimited stable diffusion wallpapers ( Mac App )
So this is a fun read and probably also lots of fun to write.

One fact that does not get enough mention though is that, regardless of the code golfing results, Haskell programs have the habit of being exceptionally concise even if you don't try to write short code.
+1, it is entirely human to game a system/structure. In the case of YC, I'd bet there's always some slack in their cohorts every season. It could pay off, it could not but they're at a size where they can have it. Startup School is one of those positive ROI things that help tradeoff the gamification
we just try to kill them. look how human treat other human>
When being paid in exposure is worth it
Guns are definitely a major problem - a lot of people who shouldn't have access to guns do and use them. I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes - those will happen anyway regardless of the law.

However, easy access to guns mean that people in an unstable mental state might use one to commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do (or at the very least significantly reduce the amount of victims if they had to use a knife instead of a ranged weapon).
Which would be fine if brought up among friends sharing a pint, and not as the second paragraph addressed to complete stranger.

It's perceived as creepy because it's an odd way to bring up your interest in a country.
It's important for us tech-savvy folks to be reminded of the jungle that exists out there beyond the technological walls of safety that our hard earned knowledge has afforded us.

And that those of least means all live outside those walls.
I had an ex-coworker who would read books in their terminal. they had no idea how to complete their job.

The optics to management: “they are always at their desk in their terminal, they’re getting work done!”

They ended up “departing” shortly after a new person joined and called it out in a meeting.
Taiwan is only near China.
Except you can't kill someone with encryption.

Your freedoms end where my freedoms begin, and guns are just a tool to change that dynamic. They serve no other purpose, unless we're talking hunting, for which you can still get guns, after some education.

I don't get how Americans seem to think it makes sense to require a license to drive a car but not to own a gun? Who is more dangerous, a guy driving a sedan or one holding an AR?
Agreed that there is a learning curve, I guess I was assuming some competence with both stacks—not starting from scratch (although I think if you were starting from scratch it would still be easier to learn AWS than self-managed hosts).

Yeah, big companies don’t like giving devs raw Terraform. My company has sandbox environments where devs can do iteration with permissive Terraform access. That works pretty well for stuff like this.

Also, I use AWS for hobbyist stuff and you can easily use this serverless stack for <$5/month.
And this is from country where certain celebrities abused children for decades in plain site without any encryption. Where children of entire towns were mass-abused also in plain site and under the nose of police. Where members of Royal family are known kiddy fiddlers without anything serious happening to them.
Unfortunately, as is almost always the case, the almighty dollar skews ideals. Is it even technically possible for a public company to be "good" these days?
On the other hand, Britain's obsession with banning knives/sharp objects appears to be unique - many countries have no such restrictions and yet they don't seem to have a stabbing epidemic.
If you think it's so easy describe how it would work in this case, where a human already familiar with the business fell for the scam anyway.
CentOS Stream 9, which is basically RHEL9 9.(x+1). The issue itself was overblown to hell, and after realizing that "rolling release" meant "one minor release ahead", I decided to stick with it.

For my usecase, it works fine and nothing has changed at all. My workloads are mostly container-based, so the base OS doesn't matter as much.

I run RHEL-like because I'm familiar with it (since I use Fedora as my desktop/workstation OS), so CentOS will likely stay unless I get myself fully immersed into the alternatives down the road.
A reasonably common theme in SF stories is that after we encounter some other intelligent, star-faring, race, that both races find each other delicious.

After reading about intelligence and feelings in other animals, I find myself eating less meat. Even fish & insects have been shown to experience pain.
> As I was writing up this post, I noticed that almost every single line began with a variable. At a first glance, “never gonna” wouldn’t work because variables need to be unique.

This is less of a challenge for IOCCC entries like my [1] where I wanted the variables & constants to spell out the language it interprets:

Int L[A],m,b,*D=A,
*c,*a=L,C,*U=L,u;s

as C doesn't care about capitalization, whereas Haskell reserves upper case for types and constructors.

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c
If this is the case, why is the issue of child _privacy_ (and the effect of losing it upon passing of this bill) not considered as part of the "concerns" for online safety (and carefully omitted as part of the risk assessment)?

This is not some spectrum with safety (but loss of freedom) and danger (with freedom) on each end. The results of this bill will be both less freedom and less safety.
Who knows, maybe it'll help people develop actual critical thinking skills?
I think of it another way. The bill itself isn’t anything to do with protecting children - but lots of people (MPs, charities, campaigners) have been misled into supporting it. It’s what makes “think of the children” the best way to pass bad legislation. Not only does it make it very hard to object to a bill that won’t actually help children, but you get lots of free support from well-meaning people who don’t understand the implications of the bad legislation they’ve been conned into fighting for!
It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least.

Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up.

Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok.

Google: Search, YouTube, ads, and technical infrastructure (cloud) can all easily be separated, and Search and YouTube could likely command an even bigger premium by treating other ad networks as first-class citizens. Google ads could get a lot more business too when they are not tied to other products (those products might compete with yours, driving you away from Google ads).
I miss the days when chanspeak wasn’t spouted off across different forums & websites by fascinated newcomers.
Perhaps they should have alternated reading with sessions of HackerTyper ;)
snarky + opinionated !== flagged. it's okay to have a dark sense of humor; the mods aren't AIs. Yet.
Well, hypothetically, if the government on average does more good than harm why would you not want that? Sure you'd get Hitler-lite on occasion, but that would be balanced out by anti-Hitler-lite doing good.

Of course, the damage the bad apples do far outweighs the benefits of the good so that argument doesn't hold. A century of good governance with global assistance barely balanced out the damage Hitler triggered in 5 years. Destruction is easy and creation is hard. And that plays out on the small scale too with small numbers of corrupt officials undoing huge amounts of work by good people.

If we had perfect information, we'd find that the spying apparatus of the 5 Eyes has done far more bad than good to the general welfare. The political corruption that must be causing is immense, we already know that every president since Obama has been targeted by the intelligence apparatus in some form. It is unlikely it ends there.

I'm less sure about the situation in the UK, but they generally follow the US trend.
The bill was introduced by Boris Johnson.
My solution is just to play an extremely loud and annoying tone over the phone (such as a siren sound), not only do they hang up extremely quickly. They never call again.
This happens all over the place already. I see apprentices blindly throwing prompts at ChatGPT á la "how do I accomplish [X] in [library I have no expertise in]?.

The biggest problem is: it doesn't even force you to form a coherent question. You can just throw word salad at it and feel "understood" in response.

I don't have the phantasy to imagine how this will impact the loops of, for example, confirmation bias - for basically anyone who isn't a deeply critical thinker/engineer. The dim and the loud are about to get even more confident _and_ even more shallow at the same time.

They don't need to be fully convinced of AI's sentience for this dynamic to become very problematic very quickly. They just want to feel "understood", and that's exactly what they will feel like.
From the early '80s, I have nostalgia for "talk" and "finger".
You can’t compare spot rates like that to a sustained income. A huge part of high-end consulting is doing administrative, marketing, and sales work that’s unpaid.
Try to change the title to exactly "Show HN: Convert sketches into images using ControlNet", so it's shown also in the special section.
Regarding 4) among the pros, jOOQ does this (opt in):
https://www.jooq.org/doc/dev/manual/sql-building/queryparts/....

It's being done at runtime, thus probably not to be done in production, but during your integration tests as part of the diagnostics feature set: https://www.jooq.org/doc/dev/manual/sql-building/dsl-context...

Regarding 2) among the cons: The recommended approach is to use testcontainers: https://blog.jooq.org/using-testcontainers-to-generate-jooq-...

Reverse engineering a SQL script is also possible, though limiting in terms of what syntax is available in DDL: https://www.jooq.org/doc/dev/manual/code-generation/codegen-...

If your cons are too much to handle, then you can still revert to using native SQL and profit from 1) and 4) by using jOOQ's parser: https://www.jooq.org/doc/dev/manual/sql-execution/parsing-co...

Escape hatches are simple, too: https://www.jooq.org/doc/dev/manual/sql-building/plain-sql-t...
Last time I checked I wasn't get any ads in my RSS reader though
could u describe the finetuning. im a bit confused about the JSONL data and howto retrain it, etc
Dude, you literally took his words out of context to disagree. Both of you are making the same point.
Remember that they passed an online snooping bill which requires ISPs to log everyone’s internet activity and made it available to all kinds of organisations? They made MPs exempt.

They don’t want to - or have to - live under their own rules.
> rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it

One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.
Trademark sounds like a good route to be safe, but you will most likely win all UDRP cases regardless.
Google's business model is absolutely not built around privacy invasion, and their model is built around data collection of public data. If, for some reason, they couldn't use personalized ads anymore, they would simply earn less, but their business model would be the exact same as before.

Mozilla business model is entirely built around their market share. As such, they are in a much more difficult situation than Google's Chrome team.
If Mozilla has a difficult time (financially), they are more likely to do shady things than the Chrome team which has no such pressure. For example, the Chrome team would never accept any cryptocurrency deal; something that I have no difficulties imaging Mozilla to do.

Obviously, Chrome will not actively hurt Google's other businesses (specifically ads), but Chrome's primary goal is to make the web a better place. The worst case scenario for Google is that the web (and thus their revenue stream) disappears.
> Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video

And twitch.
Oh for sure, no question about that.

Where VR fitness does shine is the social aspect without the social anxiety.

Doing an intense full body workout with people across the globe and seeing other express their movements without having to show themselves leads to a much more relaxed an fun experience than for example a Zoom workout.

I am fully aware that this is not for everyone, that's why it's good to have options. I for one wouldn't even have the space or money to put up a peloton bike but I can temporarily allocate 2 square meters between our living room and kitchen for my calisthenics exercises in VR. And by using mixed reality I can even shrink that a bit further.

It's probably a bit hard to explain with only words so here is a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WGOZlFXjQU
How many impressions or clicks without a sale would it take to make the scammer's Google ads non profitable?
Telegram I think is considered safe?

But TBF signal is end to end encrypted which means at least the content if your chats are safe. This is in my opinion safe enough, but YMMV I guess