MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-04-08 14:37:16+00:00
"AI" is just a trick to circumvent the copyright laws that are the main brake in writing quickly programs.

The "AI" generated code is just code extracted from various sources used for training, which could not be used by a human programmer because most likely they would have copyrights incompatible with the product for which "AI" is used.

All my life I could have written much faster any commercial software if I had been free to just copy and paste any random code lines coming from open-source libraries and applications, from proprietary programs written for former employers or from various programs written by myself as side projects with my own resources and in my own time, but whose copyrights I am not willing to donate to my current employer, so that I would no longer be able to use in the future my own programs.

I could search and find suitable source code for any current task as fast and with much greater reliability than by prompting an AI application. I am just not permitted to do that by the existing laws, unlike the AI companies.

Already many decades ago, it was claimed that the solution for enhancing programmer productivity is more "code reuse". However "code reuse" has never happened at the scale imagined in the distant past, but not because of technical reasons, but due to the copyright laws, whose purpose is exactly to prevent code reuse.

Now "AI" appears to be the magical solution that can provide "code reuse" at the scale dreamed a half of century ago, by escaping from the copyright constraints.

When writing a program for my personal use, I would never use an AI assistant, because it cannot accelerate my work in any way. For boilerplate code, I use various templates and very smart editor auto-completion, there is no need of any "AI" for that.

On the other hand, when writing a proprietary program, especially for some employer that has stupid copyright rules, e.g. not allowing the use of libraries with different copyrights, even when those copyrights are compatible with the requirements of the product, then I would not hesitate to prompt an AI assistant, in order to get code stripped of copyright, saving thus time over rewriting an equivalent code just for the purpose of enabling it to be copyrighted by the employer.
by usagisushi | 2025-04-08 14:37:48+00:00
Here's a somewhat cyberpunk-ish fact I learned today: Back in '98 Taiwan, unbranded, mysterious desktop CPUs called Golden Soldier ("黄金戦士") were available in the street. It turns out they were actually modded mobile Intel CPUs installed in slockets.

https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/980618/parts4.ht... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BB%84%E9%87%91%E6%88%A6%E5...

BTW, speaking of repair culture, I love this idea of repurposed headless MacBooks.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Screenless-MacBooks-masqueradi...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-08 14:38:07+00:00
> It seems that we have very different types of businesses in mind. I really didn't consider tracking users and displaying ads, but I also don't think this is where these types of tools would be used.

I wasn't thinking primarily about tracking and ads here either, when it comes to B2B automation. What I meant was e.g. shops automatically scrapping competing stores on a continued basis, to adjust their own prices - a modern version of the old "send your employees incognito to the nearby stores and have them secretly note down prices". Then you also have comparison-shopping (pricing aggregators) sites that are after the same data, too.

And then of course there's automated reviews (reading and writing), trying to improve your standing and/or sabotage competition. There's all kinds of more or less legit business intelligence happening, etc. Then there's wholesale copying of sites (or just their data) for SEO content farms, and... I could go on.

Point being, it's not the people who want to streamline their own work, make access more convenient for themselves, etc. that are the badly-behaving actors and reasons for anti-bot defenses.

> If you have a sales funnel, as in you take orders and ship something to a customer, consumer or business, I almost guarantee you that you can request an API, if the company you want to purchase from is large enough. They'll probably give you the API access for free, or as part of a signup fee and give you access to discounts. Sometimes that API might be an email, or a monthly Excel dump, but it's an API.

The problem from a POV of a regular users like me is, I'm not in this for business directly; the services I use are either too small to bother providing me special APIs, or I am too small for them to care. All I need is to streamline my access patterns to services I already use, perhaps consolidate it with other services (that's what MCP is doing, with LLM being the glue), but otherwise not doing anything disruptive to their operations. And I'm denied that, because... Bots Bad, AI Bad, Also Pay Us For Privilege?

> When we're talking site that purely survive on tracking users and reselling their data, then yes, they aren't going to give you API access. Some sites, like Reddit does offer it I think, but the price is going to be insane, reflecting their unwillingness to interact with users in this way.

Reddit is an interesting case because the changes to their API and 3rd-party client policies happened recently, and clearly in response to the rise of LLMs. A lot of companies suddenly realized the vast troves of user-generated content they host are valuable beyond just building marketing profiles, and now they try to lock it all up in order to extort rent for it.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-08 14:38:16+00:00
So lets say Hyundai sets up a factory with such robots.

I am sure that Boston Dynamic robots have AI ,so we don't need humans but lets assume so for this moment. And they can be controlled (let's say with VR?) with Humans.

and those humans can be from different countries. So a US factory with workers from China?
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-08 14:38:17+00:00
> And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions.

I never said, it is. Did I?

A side quest is an optional thing you do while you complete the main quest. Mentioning it as a side quest serves as a link to the supposed Carlin quote.

I always considered the main quest of life is to promote more life. Multi-planetary life is life more resistant to medium to large cosmical calamities.
by simonw | 2025-04-08 14:39:11+00:00
One of the things I've been appreciating most about LLMs is how they accelerate my exploration of other languages.

I'm fluent in Python and JavaScript, but these days I'm using LLMs to help me get started writing code in AppleScript, Bash, Go, jq, ffmpeg (that command-line interface is practically a programming language just on its own) and more. I'm learning a ton along the way - previously I wouldn't have been able to get up the energy (or time) to climb the initial learning curve for all of those.
by dkobia | 2025-04-08 14:39:44+00:00
It is absolutely terrifying to watch tools like Cursor generate so much code. Maybe not a great analogy, but it feels like driving with Tesla FSD in New Delhi in the middle of rush hour. If you let it run ahead of you, the amount of code to review will be overwhelming. I've also encountered situations where it is unable to pass tests for code it wrote.
by awongh | 2025-04-08 14:39:45+00:00
My takeaway of the cool dynamic at work here is that universally (but particularly in Japan) no one wants to be seen promoting themselves. Especially for older people they've done so many cool things, and are currently doing cool things now that they're retired and have free time, but socially it's a bit awkward to just ask, what cool and interesting stuff can you tell me about.

And the physical / game medium helps connect intergenerationally as well. But actually I could see this kind of trading card dynamic working in other situations like business networking or speed dating or something.
by runarberg | 2025-04-08 14:40:26+00:00
I’m starting to suspect you are arguing in bad faith. Three hours after you posted this, you posted [1] a sibling thread citing older numbers from the same source. Why did you do that? Over there your narrative was that support for Palestinians weren’t as great as your parent was arguing, so instead of citing this poll from this year, you posted an older poll from 2024 where support for Palestinians weren’t as great. You knew about this newer poll, but you still choose to post the older one that just so happens to align better with your argument.

Also this poll doesn’t back up what you are saying. These protests are as much anti-israel as they are pro-palestine, and support for Israel has been consistently dwindling. The protests continued throughout 2024 especially leading up to the November election, yet in 2025 support for Palestine was in all time high. Most likely the support dropped in 2024 because the horrors of the 2023 oct 7 terrorist attacks were still in fresh memory, so support for Palestine, which had been steadily increasing, took a momentary dip, but quickly readjusted at an increasing rate as the accusations of the Gaza genocide became ever harder to deny.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43617196
by moefh | 2025-04-08 14:41:01+00:00
> once you send the money it is gone with no contest possible

That's not true; PIX requires your bank to provide a way (called "MED"[1]) for you to request a reversal up to 80 (!) days after a transaction. It can only be used in case of fraud, and it may take up to 7 days for the bank to analyze the situation and deny/allow your request. If it's allowed, you'll get the money back in up to 4 days.

If the bank denies the request (i.e., if they conclude there was no fraud) you can always sue the transaction recipient; you'll have access to all necessary information since they must be registered with some financial institution to be able to receive a PIX transaction.

So it's not as easy as a credit card, but I think it's fair for a free payment service.

[1] in Portuguese: https://www.bcb.gov.br/meubc/faqs/p/o-que-e-e-como-funciona-...
by goku12 | 2025-04-08 14:41:02+00:00
I agree with the basic premise of your argument. The reason why I dislike certain products like Apple's is because of my professional background in electronics. But the way you presented it is definitely not the way to do it - flipping people off most certainly won't convince people to reconsider their ways. Instead, if people could see the economic and environmental damage cause by such consumerism in person, I'm sure that many would have a change of heart. It just doesn't hit you until you see for yourself what you're contributing to.
by JimBlackwood | 2025-04-08 14:41:07+00:00
> * American companies dominate payment systems.

Which ones? I can't name a single American one that "dominates". Maybe that's just my perspective but the American payment systems feel decades behind.

At least in the NL we have iDeal and through EPI (European Payments Initiative) it should become the standard in the EU https://ideal.nl/en/epi-successfully-completes-acquisition-o...

Then there's Klarna as well, which I think is pretty big in the EU.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-08 14:41:13+00:00
It's an interesting point that passion-jobs that creatives take on (including game dev) tend to get paid less, and where the thrilling component is disrupted there could be less incentive to bother entering the field.

I think for the most part creatives will still line up for these gigs, because they care about contributing to the end products, not the amount of time they spend using Blender.
by yks | 2025-04-08 14:41:51+00:00
Most of the popular outfits are "designed to look good" to a high degree, and then humans are quite bad at fitting the garments on average. Poorly fit suits that don't look good on a male silhouette are absolutely a thing, and I'd posit that an unkempt male wearing a poorly fitting cheap suit looks "lower status" than a fit and well groomed male wearing a stylish t-shirt/jeans combo.

So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.
by infamia | 2025-04-08 14:42:07+00:00
> This is factually incorrect. Latency is limited by the speed of light and the user's internet connection.

This is a solved problem. It is simple to download content shortly before it is very likely to be needed using plain old HTML. Additionally, all major hypermedia frameworks have mechanisms to download a link on mousedown or when you hover over a link for a specified time.

> If you read one of the links that I'd posted, you'd also know that a lot of users have very bad internet connection.

Your links mortally wounds your argument for js frameworks, because poor latency is linked strongly with poor download speeds. The second link also has screen fulls of text slamming sites who make users download 10-20MBs of data (i.e. the normal js front ends). Additionally, devices in the parts of the world the article mentions, devices are going to be slower and access to power less consistent, all of which are huge marks against client side processing vs. SSR.
by maeln | 2025-04-08 14:42:12+00:00
Visa has to respect whatever laws apply in the country they operate in. So if the police want Visa info on whoever, provided that a legal framework cover this issue, Visa has to give it. It makes 0 difference if the payment system is government-operated or not. In any democratic country, the police would need the approval of a judge whether the service is public or a private company. And in dictatorship, the government will get the data or ban you from doing business in the country anyway.
by lolc | 2025-04-08 14:42:15+00:00
I can't take this article seriously:

1. Uncanny slop "photo" of people installing panels, not even labeled as generated. There is zero excuse for this.

2. No links to sources. Either they are lazy or just making things up.

3. Wild swings in context and sloppy usage of terms like "producing electrons". A sloppy style can be fun to read, but it doesn't work here because it is applied inconsistently.

I'd like to read an article on solar in Pakistan, but this source is no good. The whole site is suspect when this article is tolerated on it.
by g-b-r | 2025-04-08 14:42:45+00:00
> but I'm also really glad that VCS is for most people completely solved, there's nothing besides Git you have to pay attention to, you learn it once and use it your whole career.

From what I hear most current new developers never really learn git, they learn a couple features of some git GUI.

And it's understandable, you're really understating what learning git (one of the messiest and worst documented pieces of software ever) well entails.

I find it a disgrace that we're stuck at git, actually.
by borroka | 2025-04-08 14:42:50+00:00
A few months ago, the 60-year-old CEO of the previous company I worked for, employing 100,000 people, showed up at our satellite office with other senior executives and EVPs for an official visit.

He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.

In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.
by bmacho | 2025-04-08 14:42:50+00:00
It's not circular, it's just true in the purest sense. As all mathematical theorems are either tautologies or consequences of assumptions, therefore pure assumptions.

For me survival of the fittest just means that with high probability those genes will survive who have a high probability to survive in an evolutionary setting. Is this trivial? In this wording it is trivial. But it can be useful. (And also it is not that trivial in a different wording. Just like other theorems, e.g. the theorem about the perpendicular bisectors of a triangle's sides. If a point O is equal distance from A and B and B and C then it is equal distance from A and C. Tautology, circular, assumption, name it what you want, it's math.)
by EGreg | 2025-04-08 14:42:58+00:00
So ... pretty much none

Keep in mind, extensions can update themselves at any time, including when they're bought out by someone else. In fact, I bet that's a huge draw... imagine buying an extension that "can read and modify data on all your websites" and then pushing an update that, oh I dunno, exfiltrates everyone's passwords from their gmail. How would most people even catch that?

DO NOT have any extensions running by default except "on click".

There should be at least some kind of static checker of extensions for their calls to fetch or other network APIs. The Web is just too permissive with updating code, you've got eval and much more. It would be great if browsers had only a narrow bottleneck through which code could be updated, and would ask the user first.

(That wouldn't really solve everything since there can be sleeper code that is "switched on" with certain data coming over the wire, but better than what we have now.)
by freeone3000 | 2025-04-08 14:42:58+00:00
A state of mutual trust can be established, similar to driver’s licenses and passports: country A trusts you, they did all the legwork, we certify their endorsement, you’re fine. It won’t necessarily be possible between all pairs, but, SEPA and Interac should be theoretically interoperable; dozens of other friendly-country pairs can be thought of.
by simonw | 2025-04-08 14:42:59+00:00
I used Claude: https://claude.ai/share/6da6ec5a-b8b3-4572-ab1b-141bb37ef70b

One of the prompts was: "make the comments even shorter, and have everyone involved be a pelican (a bit subtle though)"

See also my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/llm-hacker-news/
by jowea | 2025-04-08 14:43:28+00:00
Thanks, maybe someday I will finally be promoted to Internet Shill First Class.

But seriously, it would still be a monopoly on the UPI-like segment. Visa and Mastercard charge fees that make them less attractive to some users and make it harder on some users. There are good reasons Pix replaced much of physical cash use that cards didn't. And Visa and Mastercard are also American companies. Don't they sell transaction data?

And meh, at least I can vote for my president, but not even the Facebook shareholders can vote Zuckerberg out IIRC. Although Zuck can't arrest me so I don't know.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-08 14:43:48+00:00
Synthetic wine is the name for people who are trying to create wine from its chemical ingredients rather than from the natural process of fermentation.

There was an article several years back about one of these groups trying to get regulatory approval to sell their product, and the stumbling block was the use of things that weren't approved additives. (I want to say it was tannins, since that's the most overtly problematic chemical in wine, but it has been several years since I've seen the article, so I could be mixing it up for one of the other carcinogens involved).
by lucasoshiro | 2025-04-08 14:44:15+00:00
Pix is basically a commercial name for two services:

- SPI: responsible for the payments

- DICT: responsible for mapping keys to accounts

The API documentation of those services are available, but only banks can use them. When a person wants to send money to another, there's an option in the bank app for sending through Pix.

Then you have many options to define to whom you'll send that money:

- typing the bank account information

- using the Pix key (which can be an phone, email, CPF/CNPJ (brazillian documents) or a generated key)

- scanning a QR code

Note that the two latter options don't require the account information. That resolution is done by DICT.

After that, you type how much you'll send (sometimes the QR code already contains this information). Then it'll send through SPI.

And yeah, it's really, really fast.
by esperent | 2025-04-08 14:44:15+00:00
I've used stock photo sites occasionally but I use vector art and icon sites multiple times a week. Even today, I used an few different sites while designing some stuff on Canva.

The reason I don't use AI is because it gives me far less reliable and impossible to specify results than just searching through the limited lists of human made art.

Today, for undisclosed reasons, I needed vector art of peanuts. I found imperfect but usable human made art within seconds from a search engine. I then spent around 15 - 25 minutes trying to get something closer to my vision using ChatGPT, and using the imperfect art I'd found as a style guide. I got lots of "huh that's cool what AI can do" but nothing useful. Nothing closer to my vision than what I started with.

By coincidence it's the first time I'vr tried making art with AI in about a year, but back then I bought a Midjourney account and spent a month making loads of art, then installed SD on my laptop and spent another couple of weeks playing around with that. So it's not like I'm lacking experience. What I've found so far is that AI art generators are great for generating articles like this one. And they do make some genuinely cool pictures, it blows my mind that computers can do this now.

It's just when I sit down with a real world task that has specific, concrete requirements... I find them useless.
by mindslight | 2025-04-08 14:44:22+00:00
I don't think there needs to be this hard distinction between saying a given thing won't work, and proposing specifically what I think will happen instead. On this topic I generally avoid saying what I think the overarching dynamics are, because being specific generally gets written off as a crazy-sounding straw man.

My initial point is that you answered someone's "why EU would tariff China just because they need export" with saying that the US would "ask" the EU to do this - implying that the EU would want to cooperate or is otherwise beholden to the US. That's thinking from within the fictional universe, which is what I called out.

Since you asked, what specifically I think will actually happen is that Trump will continue to alienate our allies, keeping them at the realization they have to go their own way rather than being able to rely on our military backstopping them. To the extent there is leverage Trump can force Europe to put tariffs on China, Europe will only do that as much and as long is required to decrease that leverage. About the only saving grace here is that the EU isn't the type of place that will agree to something de jure and then de facto allow those rules to be skirted.

I think a different administration that was open and friendly to Europe and other allies, reassured our commitment to NATO, increased support for Ukraine rather than turning tail, etc, might have been able to make the case for coordinated international action being necessary to maintain the military advantage enjoyed by the US and its allies. But a savvy administration wouldn't have started with the ham-fisted unilateral blanket tariffs either.
by incomingpain | 2025-04-08 14:44:42+00:00
This has been undeniably intentional. I think most agree but the reason isn't clear.

Is this a 'bread and circuses' type thing where they intend to distract us? Revolt against government being prevented?

Is this an 'attention economy' thing? Meta and friends have designed the perfect human trap and nobody like reality anymore?

My personal guess, this is about the next golden age. Automation is going to eliminate factory work. Optimus or boston dynamics will produce the goods. You need an army of bored people to produce the next economy.