MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-04-11 06:34:47+00:00
The dystopian era of SF movies started in 1972 with Silent Running.[1] That was the first "grubby future" Hollywood movie, and is an obscure but notable milestone in cinema history.

There was early dystopian SF. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine ends with a dystopia. E. M. Foester's The Machine Stops (1909) was way, way ahead of its time.

Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.

Social media. 1909.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
by doctoboggan | 2025-04-11 06:35:18+00:00
This is an excellent essay, and I feel similar to the author but couldn't express it as nicely.

However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the advice and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. The author indicated they stepped away from a high paying finance job for moral reasons, which is admirable. But wallstreet continues on and does not lack for people willing to play the "make as much money as you can" game.
by silisili | 2025-04-11 06:35:25+00:00
One interesting thing I've noticed in my life is that everyone that I've known personally preferred their early life and thinks the world is getting worse. From my great grandparents to me today. And each have their reasons, which sound valid, but probably have a bit of rose colored glasses and yearning for youth attached.

So is it that people prefer the world they are born into and hate change, or is life for an average person getting worse in some less tangible respects? Is fondly remembering the family bonding over radio broadcasts worth more than being able to afford every member of the family having their own TV, for example? It seems hard to judge.

We often define 'best it's ever been' by the poor being able to afford iPhones and the marginalized having more rights, which are both valid points.

But is it better for the majority common person? Are there people who are constantly in awe of how great things are, or are we doomed to miss what we had as kids and focus on the negative? Because I find myself falling into that trap often.

One thing that sticks in my head is that as a kid, my dad worked for a soda company and my neighbor worked for Lowes. Neither wife worked, both had 3 kids, and could afford a house and 2 cars. That seems like a fairy tale to young people today.
by darkwater | 2025-04-11 06:35:30+00:00
Oh and I forgot to mention the mobile app! When I did the switch the difference was like night and day. Actually Photoprism didn't even have an official mobile app, you could just sync photos in the background with SyncThing for example and keep using your phone's photo galley app, although there was a Photoprism app as well. Immich is just a backend service like a mobile app, it's only current big defect is that it's useless if it cannot contact the server on start-up
by jjcob | 2025-04-11 06:37:10+00:00
Coquinas are clams that bury themselves in the sand very close to the surface [1]. The author worries that while they are playing with the sand, they might accidentally bury coquina clams too deep and kill them because they can no longer reach the surface.

Anthropic apparently is starting to notice the possible danger to others of their work. I'm not sure what they are referring to.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZUlf7quu3o
by antfarm | 2025-04-11 06:37:13+00:00
” When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.”

Cory Doctorow - The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#your...
by unwind | 2025-04-11 06:37:31+00:00
Ah, this [1] meaning of tillering (bending wood to form a bow), not this [2] (production of side shoots in grasses). The joys of new words.

[1]: https://www.howtomakealongbow.co.uk/part-5-tillering

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiller_(botany)
by mariusMDML | 2025-04-11 06:39:14+00:00
Hello ! Thanks a lot for the feedback. I totally understand, even if it's a wild claim the thing is really to start doing everyday and practicing. It's a lot connected to the 1% rules where you improve 1% everyday. At the end of the year you're in theory 37x better. My goal here with this notion template is really to help people start doing what they want to do everyday and giving them the framework to change. (I'll take a step back and think of the price also)
by TylerE | 2025-04-11 06:40:13+00:00
It matters because we’re the one that has to deal with ticket when user complains that their tweaked-to-within-an-inch-of-its life system inevitably breaks the world.

The problem isn’t you per say, it’s the 5000 people that mis-follow some YouTube video because it looks cool without it actually understanding what they’re changing , how to undo it, or what the implications are.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-11 06:41:49+00:00
Sure. Lots of Canadian dealers rushed to get them in. 72 million in rebates were claimed in the 48 hours after the government announced the program would close, and 40% of that was other dealers.

Tesla isn't the bad guy in this situation, the government is. The government is the one stiffing dealers for the rebate on cars already sold.
by nandomrumber | 2025-04-11 06:42:03+00:00
I’ve met a handful of technicians who have been somewhere up and to the right on the skill / experience axes, and they’ve typically know what the problem is immediately upon listening to, or otherwise observing, a machine, or plant / equipment in general.

They’re usually a pleasure to work with, and I’ve found they’re typically the sort of people who are more than happy to share their knowledge.
by zcorpan | 2025-04-11 06:42:57+00:00
To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config.

Rolling out potentially risky changes in this way is not new, and is also a strategy that other browsers employ. It allows for course-correcting if necessary and is less disruptive than shipping to 100% of users directly.
Show HN: I was tired of forgotten charges – so I built a subscription tracker
by artemovandrei | 2025-04-11 06:43:44+00:00
I kept getting charged for subscriptions I forgot about. Free trials, monthly plans, yearly renewals – they just kept piling up. So I built a simple tool to help me (and hopefully you) keep track of everything in one place.

It’s still early, and I’d love feedback:

What features would you want?

How do you currently track subscriptions (if at all)?

Is this something you'd actually use?
by low_tech_love | 2025-04-11 06:43:48+00:00
There was no insult. The point is very clear if you are not trying to intentionally make him look bad. He said that Vance would never send his kids to a hospital in Hungary; he never said hospitals in Hungary are bad, or that Hungarians are peasants, for example. What he’s trying to show you is that you’re being manipulated, that what they say is not what they do, so you shouldn’t believe them. But I guess most people prefer to trust the snake oil sellers than open their eyes.

Edit: and by the way Orbán is not Hungary, in the same way that Trump is not America, although they would very much like you to think so. I wonder why?
by kbouck | 2025-04-11 06:43:58+00:00
Did same but for Asteroids. Had a working wireframe version after only a couple of prompts! I think using the term "Asteroids" in my original prompt was a bit of cheat/shortcut.

My lessons learned for prompting were to have project broken down into clearly defined modules (duh...), and to constantly feed the latest module source back in as context along with the prompts. This helps ground the responses to only adjust the code related to the prompt, and to not break stuff that was already working.
by mariusMDML | 2025-04-11 06:44:07+00:00
Hello ! Thanks for your feedback ! I can understand what you're saying, I'm usually more like you but I feel like in today role if you don't market people just don't really care. The goal with the 30 days method is really to take the first step and do everyday. IF you want to do woodworker, the program will tell you what you need to practice in the first 30 days to develop your skills. I know you wont be the world woodworker master in 30 days but I've been myself impress of how much we can learn a new skill by doing it every day. It also give you the discipline and habits to do it everyday which help you continue during the rest of the year with less struggle. :)
by bawolff | 2025-04-11 06:44:26+00:00
I understand that is the goal. I just don't think it succeeds.

To show darkness you have to have light. You can't cast a shadow if its pitch black.

In terms of black mirror, they show a society devoid of humanity, true. But in most episodes (there are probably some exceptions) it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters. As a result, it doesn't effectively show the dehumanizing power of technology.

When watching an episode - ask yourself, would these characters still do monsterous things without the tech premise? If the answer is yes, then its not really about the tech.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-11 06:45:24+00:00
> Most tourists head to an exchange window, turn their USD into the local currency, and therefore those exchanges have got our genuine Benjamins to do whatever with.

… Wait, really, in 2025? You’d likely be far cheaper using an ATM (tip: get a Wise or neobank account; they’ll generally give better rates on this. Revolut FX is _free_ except on weekends). Physical currency exchange has never been cheap, but these days it’s a serious ripoff.

> And USD is highly-favored, highly-negotiable money everywhere in the world, as of April 2025 anyway.

It fell 2.5% vs the Euro yesterday. Which is going to make the physical currency places into even more of a ripoff, because they’re going to have to significantly increase their risk premium; it has become rather volatile over the last month.
by mandevil | 2025-04-11 06:46:40+00:00
It's kind of a chicken and the egg, but I feel like 1966 with Vietnam, race riots across the US, the Cuban Missile Crisis only four years past, and everything else was hardly a time that people would have been optimistic.

But you had a guy who had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and flown combat missions against the Japanese, who desperately wanted to put a (gay) Japanese-American who had spent the war in an internment camp into his show, and a black woman (and have her kiss his white male lead star!), and later on, when people seemed to not be getting what he was trying to say, even added a good Russian character (played by an actual Russian-American). Because the point was to show, just like Verne a century earlier, that if truly all of humanity worked together, we could accomplish anything, for example travelling the stars. And so many people were inspired by his vision, and wanted to build his vision, to make his dreams real.

And nowadays the dreams that I see, both in stories and made manifest, seem drab and small and more than a little evil by comparison. And I do think that story-tellers (of whatever medium- very much including start-up founders) need to be aware of the power of their stories, that their myths become real, and have a responsibility to use that power for good and not for evil.
by lazide | 2025-04-11 06:47:00+00:00
It would need to be a 6A fuse in the US. Watts = Amps * Volts, or Watts / Volts == amps.

US (and really, everywhere except the UK/Singapore/Malaysia, and I think HK) doesn’t use plug fuses, preferring circuit level protection, because they typically have non-insane circuit power levels.

It does result in more branch circuit wiring (albeit thinner gauge) and breakers though, and saving on copper post WW2 was the primary motivation for UK style ring circuits anyway.

Many houses in the US were 50A/120V (for the whole panel/house!) until the 60’s, because that was a lot of power - 6kw. It wasn’t until electric appliances that it started to change, and the modern 200A split phase panels (typically 22/44kw)didn’t start to become the norm until whole house HVAC became normal. Think 80’s/90’s. A lot of houses still don’t have modern panels.

A single UK ring circuit at 32A@220v is 7kw, or more than enough to run a very beefy welder, and more than a whole house service in the US at the time.

A breaker on each of those ring circuits is essentially a ‘whole house breaker’, and would not trip on a whole host of ‘everything is melting’ situations.

So you need per-appliance fuses to protect the wiring for appliances and not burn the place down, or run 6 gauge wire everywhere in your appliances too, which would remove any cost savings in material.
by nandomrumber | 2025-04-11 06:47:14+00:00
What is an appropriate fee to charge any particular customer when what you’re billing for isn’t necessarily time and materials, but more so the skill / experience required to diagnose and rectify an issue, or otherwise provide a solution, in a timely manner?

I’d argue the most correct answer is: up to the customers ability to tolerate, such that they’d be inclined to want to become repeat customers.
by KronisLV | 2025-04-11 06:47:27+00:00
> For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week.

In my country, the tax system (EDS, Electronic Declaration System) is down pretty much every single year on the day when tax declaration submissions start.

2020: "SRS: Significantly increasing EDS capacity is expensive and not cost-effective" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...

2022: "SRS urges not to rush to submit annual income tax returns so as not to overload the EDS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...

2023: "The SRS urges not to rush to submit income tax returns in the first days of March" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...

2025: "A virtual queue will be open this year for submitting annual income tax returns to the SRS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/28....

So basically their "solution" for the longest time was to just tell people that it's too expensive to make it have high availability and that they shouldn't use the system on the first days of the period when you can submit the data and eventually just adding a queue in front of the system to manage the concurrent users.

It seems that taxes still get handled correctly and that nobody really cares that much. Found this to be an interesting example of going against the established culture of trying to go above and beyond for availability, even if I scoffed at it a few years ago.

It definitely wouldn't be horrible to live in a world where a prod outage doesn't mean "Sorry wife, I'm not coming home today, will be stuck in some random war room for hours and then fudge up the groceries massively due to sleep deprivation" but rather "Sorry boss, the system is down, what a bummer. I'll look into it tomorrow at 9 AM." for pretty much anything aside from truly critical and time sensitive systems (e.g. air traffic control, as opposed to your music streaming app).
by dwattttt | 2025-04-11 06:47:34+00:00
No: the language defined that e.g. a NonZeroU8 can't contain 0, and the only way it could is via illegal means. You don't need a formal proof to describe that.

To try to characterise what any compiler, hypothetical or not, does if you nonetheless produce one (again, via means that aren't valid) isn't meaningful.
by eknkc | 2025-04-11 06:49:21+00:00
This is impressive honestly.

I also find it interesting that the ai code submissions like this one are generally vague about the process.

This seem to be created using Cline on VsCode, prompting to Gemini 2.5 Pro using OpenRouter.

The commit history implies that a crude version was created by the LLM using an initial prompt and then gradually improved with features, fixes etc. Assuming ongoing conversations with the AI agent.

All code in a single index.html file which might not be great for human coders but who cares to be fair.

All in all, a prompt history would be really educational if anyone thinks about doing something similar.
by namaria | 2025-04-11 06:50:03+00:00
I metrics fetish might be quite widespread. Why would anyone need an app to tell them how well they've slept? I can feel how well I've slept when I wake up.

But this can be used to great effect. Make an argument and people will agree or disagree based on their beliefs and feelings towards you.

Draw some graphs and most will go with whatever you want them to agree with.
by thowawatp302 | 2025-04-11 06:50:11+00:00
> Waiting ages for basic serif pages to load over your 56k (or 128k connection if you were rich and had ISDN)? Nope.

> Downloading tracks from KaZaa/WinMX/Limewire/Napster for a million hours only for them to be some warped shit that the studios planted? Nope.

I was there too, and realized that these sort of reductions in speed made one far more mindful of what one was doing

> Almost everything about using the Internet is better today IMO. Faster, prettier, more secure and more cross-platform

This too is particularly debatable. Applications are thin wrappers around web browsers, there are constant annoyances (want to receive notifications for this webpage? Not now? We’ll ask you later.) I bet if I pulled someone from 2005 they’d look at a lot of things on a current website and see malware. And is it really more cross platform when we’ve achieved that by having less platforms?
by Ekaros | 2025-04-11 06:50:14+00:00
ML algorithm probably could do parts of the job. The tap and sound.

But there is most likely also large amount general QA of environment going on. Are things done right, is temperature right, is humidity right, is there weird touch. And so on.

All of this is much harder to understand and gather under scope of AI... Lot of it is likely not even conscious...
by somenameforme | 2025-04-11 06:50:28+00:00
It extrapolates broadly. It's kind of a funny thing. When somebody doesn't know much about something but wants to pretend they do, their vocabulary comes off sounding like a thesaurus of vernacular, but when you speak to somebody who genuinely knows something, to the point of having an intuitive feeling/understanding of it, they could easily explain, at least roughly, even the most esoteric topic in a relatable enough language that a high schooler could understand.

Space stuff is another domain that's just chock full of this.
by rzzzwilson | 2025-04-11 06:50:46+00:00
I've experimented with a few things but haven't looked at my public IP. I don't think it changes that often and I don't access reddit through a VPN. I'll have to write some code to check my public IP address and see how often it changes. I connect through an ISP in South East Asia and do have problems with my IP address being on a black list occasionally, but turning the modem off overnight usually fixes that, or at least shakes things up.
by maxglute | 2025-04-11 06:51:48+00:00
More of a tongue in cheek comment. Gone are the days of "designed" in California "assembled" in China. There's a lot of Chinese designing to get the assembling part done now. If the only way you can goto market in reasonable timeframe is to have PRC iterate your design by rapidly leveraging their supply chains and human capita, then it's not really Made in USA Phone.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-11 06:52:07+00:00
>It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size

Things in the past look simple only if we look at them through today's lens.

The apparent complexity was the same.

Today I work with microservices, on top of Kubernetes on top of cloud services and I have to know a gazillion things. But I don't have the feeling that I had an easier time when I was a kid playing with C/C++ under DOS, learning assembly, writing terminate and stay resident programs, trying to write simple device drivers or trying to program the graphics hardware using whatever limited info I had access to. When I started doing desktop application using Win32 and Qt, it didn't seemed more simple than now. Learning how to use Linux syscalls, how to program for X11 in 2000 didn't seem simpler.

Of course, software was much more simpler but now we have better tools, a lot of more easy accessible information, we have developed practices, standards and methodologies to help. And since we have huge resources, we don't have to extract every last drop of performance from the hardware.

So, I don't think the life of average programmer in 70s,80s,90s,2000 was easier than now.

It only seems easy if we have to resolve problems from 40 years ago using the knowledge, tools and the hardware we have now.
by mandevil | 2025-04-11 06:52:48+00:00
Law does not work like engineering does. Lawyers, judges and juries understand the intent of the law, and are not bound like we software engineers are to the exact commands in front of them.

You could try to convince a jury of this argument, sure. Do you think it will work? And if you do go with that argument then are you actually convincing the jury of your guilty conscience- often an important part of a white collar crime where state of mind of the defendant is very important?
by cogman10 | 2025-04-11 06:52:57+00:00
Asbestos is chemically inert. Yet it causes lung cancer. Why?

The answer is simply that it continually damages the cells in the lung due to it's needle like structure.

I assume (but critically don't have proof) that if we find a cancer link to plastics it will be due to a similar sort of structural interaction. I don't think the specific type of plastic matters, though I'm sure some will be worse than others.