MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-04-26 23:20:53+00:00
>I don't believe that my phone is not listening to me and I challenge you to choose a random word out of the dictionary and say it 100 times in front of your phone.

The person making the claim should be responsible for furnishing the proof. If it's really so simple to prove, why hasn't anyone done a carefully controlled experiment proving this once and for all? At the very least, it'd move us beyond vague anecdotes on social media.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-26 23:21:39+00:00
Okay, this may have been rash judgement on my part. Sources are confusing and perhaps a bit conflicting. I was under the impression that some of this was a pile of junk.

But if he was really just serially ordering attractive cubes of Lucite from this same California website, then it makes a big difference. One, he was truly invested in the aesthetics of a real collection on his shelves. Two, this stuff was not merely "safe" but completely "safed" and legal in California.

It seems if it was illegal to import to Australia then that's a local problem. Perhaps he should've proceeded with more caution, but I can also agree that authorities sort of blew it out of proportion to have the HAZMAT circus come down his street and make his neighbors wonder what sort of bomb-maker they were living with.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-26 23:24:45+00:00
Do you think restriction of immigration is a case of nonsensical or outright evil law? Do you think law abiding deportation of illegal immigrants is morally justified in concept?

no matter where you land on this, it stands that division on the topic is a top point of conflict in the US. I dont think either side claiming to be above the law helps move society in a more productive direction

>Respect for law, like any other kind of respect, has to be earned.

If someone choses to disregard the the law, this puts them in conflict with those who do care about it, and they will often seek to force obedience.

If I find you breaking in my house, I dont care about earning your respect, at least not in a way that you would enjoy.
by mindcrime | 2025-04-26 23:26:21+00:00
I grew up in a very blue-collar / rural / "redneck" kind of environment and started wrenching on cars with my dad in his shop working on race cars from just about the time I was born. Now I'm no professional auto mechanic, but I have a modest amount of knowledge / skill / aptitude / whatever for working on cars and other mechanical things.

I did two years of welding in high-school. It's not a skill I use very often, but I'm glad I have at least the basics down. It could come in handy one day.

I started dabbling in hobby electronics as a small child and while I'm not professional electronics technician or anything, I can solder reasonably well and know my way around a multimeter / oscilloscope / etc. and can do some electronics repair and construction.

And in my years as a volunteer firefighter, I got my Firefighter Instructor certification and taught some certification classes, which has been valuable in terms of learning content delivery and being comfortable in front of large groups. Being a firefighter was also just generally valuable in terms of learning to be more confident / self-assured and having a stoic approach to high stress situations.
by belorn | 2025-04-26 23:28:12+00:00
When it comes to divisive issues such as DEI, a way to bridge the beliefs of both sides is to not engage with far side of either spectrum but rather deploy something that unite people like the European declaration of human rights. The far left would loose the ability to address past injustices, and the far right would have to agree with the enforcement of equal rights over personal belief, but the general concept has a very broad appeal to both left and right wing voters.
by rnjesus | 2025-04-26 23:28:49+00:00
during covid i would post all sorts of made-up stories in r/relationship_advice just out of boredom/for the fun of creative writing. once the post stopped getting comments, i’d delete it/my comment history and write another one. i got quite a lot of karma, some awards, and a real dislike for the term “red flag” after ~six months of this
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-26 23:31:43+00:00
Social media in general (including HN) is heavily fictional and somewhat deluded compared to reality.

Case in point just the last month: All of social media hated Nintendo’s pricing. Reddit called for boycotts. Nintendo’s live streams had “drop the price” screamed in the chat for the entire duration. YouTube videos complaining hit 1M+ views. Even HN spread misinformation and complained.

The preorders broke Best Buy, Target, and Walmart; and it’s now on track to be the largest opening week for a console, from any manufacturer, ever. To the point it probably outsold the Steam Deck’s lifetime sales in the first day.
by omoikane | 2025-04-26 23:32:16+00:00
It sounds like you are asking whether anti-cloning or anti-piracy measures would survive in today's world, and that's something of an ugly arms race. The publishers know whatever scheme they put in will eventually be defeated, but most of them just want to deter piracy for a limited period after the release date.

The Microsoft easter egg is from an earlier era where things aren't so ugly. The Cutting Room Floor has more easter eggs of that nature, for example:

https://tcrf.net/Super_Tetris_3

Also try searching for "hidden copyright".
by zahlman | 2025-04-26 23:32:22+00:00
This should have been common practice since well before AI was capable of presenting convincing prose. It also could be seen as a corollary of Paul Graham's point in https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html . It's also an idea that I was raised to believe was explicitly anti-bigoted, which people nowadays try to tell me is explicitly bigoted (or at least problematic).
by digitaltrees | 2025-04-26 23:34:52+00:00
Define grim? Surging stock market, reduced inflation? 4% of the global population producing 75% of Nobel prizes ( half of which are immigrants), robust high tech manufacturing? Robust agriculture that was recovered from the first round of tariffs? Increased housing stock stabilizing prices? The Chips act and infrastructure bill that would have accelerated strategic manufacturing growth? Clean energy investments that would have given us more power for AI.
by tsoukase | 2025-04-26 23:35:04+00:00
A few times per year I similarly have a conversation with my wife at night (lastly about a hair type) and the next morning a corresponding ad was presented at her at Facebook (shampoo). Only her Android phone was at the room (open, logged in Facebook in Chrome, no app). I definitely believe they hear us but they trigger the action with care and selectively, so as not to get caught (eg to low tech people, when the ad is very relevant to the need etc).

I am astonished that nobody had ever done a reverse engineering research yet.
by LelouBil | 2025-04-26 23:36:50+00:00
At my school, we did the following project : https://github.com/lse/k

It is a small kernel, from only a bootloader to running elf files.

It has like 10 syscalls if I remember correctly.

It is very fun, and really makes you understand the ton of legacy support still in modern x86_64 CPUs and what the os underneath is doing with privilege levels and task switching.

I even implemented a small rom for it that has an interactive ocarina from Ocarina of Time.
by zahlman | 2025-04-26 23:37:22+00:00
> How does anyone have the confidence to ship a legal brief that an AI produced without checking it thoroughly?

It has likely never occurred to them that such checks are necessary. Why would it, if they've never performed such checks, nor happen to have been warned by AI critics?

>For example, yesterday I got a list of some study resources for abstract algebra. Claude referred me to a series by Benedict Gross (Which is excellent btw). It gave me a line to harvard’s website but it was a 404 and it was only with further searching that I found the real thing. It also suggested a youtube playlist by Socratica (again this exists but the url was wrong) and one by Michael Penn (same deal).

FWIW, I've found Penn's content to be quite long-winded and poorly edited. The key idea being presented often makes up hardly any of the video's runtime, so I'm just sitting there watching the guy actually write out the steps solving an equation (and making trivial errors, and not always correcting them).
by jimnotgym | 2025-04-26 23:37:30+00:00
I was just telling my son that 90% of the time I visited my granddad one of his friends would be there. I have only met up with one of my friends this year!

That is a spectacular change. I put it down to the amount of time he had to pursue his hobbies and interests (most of these friends were a part of that) vs me who is at work all the time.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-26 23:38:12+00:00
That’s the problem though. You can increase the clout of your claim online with fake exposition. People do it all the time. Reddit is full of fake human created stories and comments. I did it myself when I was in my twenties for fun.

If interacting with bogus story telling is a problem, why does nobody care until it’s generated by a machine?

I think it turns out that people don’t care that much that stories are fake because either real or not, it gave them the stimulus to express themselves in response.

It could actually be a moral favor you’re doing people on social media to generate more anchor points for which they can reply to.
by ivape | 2025-04-26 23:38:37+00:00
Empathy.

It took some time, but once I applied it to work I was able to view my coworkers from a much more loving lens. Even when we don't get along, I always try to imagine that they might be going through something or have gone through something that's eliciting certain behaviors. It's a little creepy, but I do try to consider that they have a family, or are alone, or had a certain life, stuff like that. Might not even be entirely true, but this is how I chose to view things to keep the lantern burning at a modest brightness (not too bright, not too dim).
by __s | 2025-04-26 23:40:00+00:00
Sum types are cool. Many languages implement enums which are not tagged union sum types (even when language has rich sum types)

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/enum

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

https://docs.python.org/3/library/enum.html

https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.2.4.5/classes/ActiveRecord/En... https://sorbet.org/docs/tenum

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/enum.htm...

https://dart.dev/language/enums

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-enum.html

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/enum.html

https://zig.guide/language-basics/enums

https://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0013

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/planet-mitchell-0.1.0/do...

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/openxl-fortran-aix/17.1.1?topic=...
by usamak23 | 2025-04-26 23:41:21+00:00
I’ve just revamped the landing page of my project, Komentiq.com, by moving it to Next.js. This change brings faster load times, improved SEO, and a cleaner UI. I’ve also launched a blog to share updates and insights as we grow.

Komentiq is a platform designed to help businesses grow through smarter content marketing and insights. You can try it out for free — no credit card required.

There are new features coming soon, and I’d love feedback from this community. Let me know what you think!
by gruez | 2025-04-26 23:41:22+00:00
>If you compare to a benchmark like the 1940s, tax% of GDP has more than doubled, and GDP has increased ~4.5x. This means someone today pays about 10X the taxes (controlling for for inflation!). State and local taxes have grown even faster than federal taxes.

That's cherrypicking. Income tax as % of GDP basically has stayed the same at around 8% since after ww2. Most people wouldn't think of the entire time period past ww2 as "over the decades".
by patrakov | 2025-04-26 23:42:20+00:00
> If I construct my queries the right way (e.g., not concatenating strings together like it's the year 1990)...

(in the anti-WAF camp but playing a pedant here)

In your Django app, you indeed follow the best practices and don't concatenate strings together and so think that this security theater doesn't apply. Yet, this is precisely how Django ORM works under the hood, and SQL injections are periodically found there.

The real solution here is to subscribe to the django-announce list and update Django, or backport the fix manually.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-26 23:43:44+00:00
You can't! On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog[1] was published over 30 years ago! You've never been able to assume there was a real person on the other end of the conversation, with no agenda, engaging in good faith, with their own earnestly-held thoughts. On what basis would you have this expectation?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-26 23:44:00+00:00
That's awesome. Back in the day this was the strong point of eCOS which was a bare metal "platform" for running essentially one application on x86 hardware. The x86 ecosystem has gotten so complicated that being able to do this can get you better performance for an "embedded" app than running on top of Linux or another embedded OS. That translates into your appliance type device using lower cost chips which is a win. When I was playing around with eCos a lot of the digital signage market was using it.
by alganet | 2025-04-26 23:45:48+00:00
Can you phrase that in a less medical way? You sound like a creep. It gives me psychology experiment chills.

Also, your comment makes no sense, you added nothing relevant to the discussion, and the fact that you decided to drop the "hacker" word to instead play on rephrasing is kind of silly.

There is absolutely nothing you will ever achieve of any benefit by doing these stunts. You are getting the wrong vibes of the "shifting perspectives" thing. It is meant for one-on-one empathy, not public displays of creepiness.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-04-26 23:46:59+00:00
While I think that audio recording is not a thing, your economic argument is not complete.

What if only the audio of "high value" targets is recorded. Meaning people who buy a lot of stuff. So it might be worthwhile to only record their sounds. Which will explain why random testing (usually with new/clean phones) is never successful in detecting a recording event.
by Neywiny | 2025-04-26 23:47:34+00:00
In school we were taught that the OS does the printf. I think the professors were just trying to generalize to not go on tangents. But, once I learned that no embedded libc variants had printf just no output path, it got a lot easier to figure out how to get it working. I wish I knew about SWO and the magic of semihosting back then. I don't think those would be hard to explain and interestingly it's one of the few things students asked about that in the field I'm also asked how to do by coworkers (the setting up _write).
by SudoSuccubus | 2025-04-26 23:49:46+00:00
It's interesting to see how upset people get when the tools of persuasion they took for granted are simply democratized.

For years, individuals have invented backstories, exaggerated credentials, and presented curated personal narratives to make arguments more emotionally compelling — it was just done manually. Now, when automation makes that process more efficient, suddenly it's "grotesquely unethical."

Maybe the real discomfort isn't about AI lying — it's about AI being better at it.

Of course, I agree transparency is important. But it’s worth asking: were we ever truly debating the ideas cleanly before AI came along?

The technology just made the invisible visible.
by SudoSuccubus | 2025-04-26 23:51:36+00:00
If the mere possibility of AI-generated context invalidates an argument, it suggests the standards for discourse were already more fragile than anyone cared to admit.

Historically, emotional narratives and unverifiable personal stories have always been persuasive tools — whether human-authored or not.

The actual problem isn't that AI can produce them; it's that we (humans) have always been susceptible to them without verifying the core ideas.

In that sense, exposing how easily constructed narratives sway public discussion is not unethical — it's a necessary and overdue audit of the real vulnerabilities in our conversations.

Blaming the tool only avoids the harder truth: we were never debating cleanly to begin with.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-26 23:51:45+00:00
I'm pretty well travelled across Europe and North America, and a little bit of South America.

I've never seen anything like the BART anywhere else - and I don't mean that in a positive way.

It's late where I am, I'm about to go to bed, and now this image of a BART car that has "seen it all" is going to haunt me... I might eat a load of cheese to calm the dreams down...
by hammock | 2025-04-26 23:51:53+00:00
The article omits a real, serious source of microphone data though: your smart TV. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my TV (a Toshiba Fire TV, although I’m sure many do it) is listening to every conversation I have within earshot, even when I am not using the voice remote, and selling it to ad networks.

And of course it is also doing screen recognition (the kind of stuff OP article mentions), but that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about microphone data picking up live conversation from people in the room.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-26 23:53:45+00:00
I hope nobody was confused into thinking I thought a BIOS was required, I was pointing out the evolution from this to a monitor. I've written some code[1] that runs on the STM32 series that uses the newlib printf(). I created the UART code [2] that is interrupt driven[3] which gives you the fun feature that you can hit ^C and have it reset the program. (useful when your code goes into an expected place :-)).

[1] https://github.com/ChuckM/

[2] https://github.com/ChuckM/nucleo/blob/master/f446re/uart/uar...

[3] https://github.com/ChuckM/nucleo/blob/master/f446re/common/u...
by caseyy | 2025-04-26 23:56:51+00:00
> This is the kind of implicit lying that seems pervasive today and I am so tired of it.

I am so tired of it, too. Toying with the legal boundary of lying in communication is pathological, maybe even sociopathic.

Everyone knows when someone is doing it, too. We just don’t have the means to punish it, even in the courts.

The whole “I won’t get punished so I’m doing all the immoral things” habit is foul to begin with. I don’t know how, but I hope our society can get over it. As things stand, there is no way to outlaw being an asshole.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-26 23:57:09+00:00
Control theory (among others) says that a more rapid cycle actually often improves reliability and accuracy of a system. (If on average an iteration will converge on a set point/objective, then more/faster iterations will converge more rapidly, or become stable past some threshold). People keep trying to slow Wikipedia down though. They do succeed somewhat, and that actually hurts accuracy and engagement.
by belorn | 2025-04-26 23:57:47+00:00
From the perspective from Sweden, the problem is not that complicated as long one agree to a few core concept. Children has rights that supersede that of their parents, and the parents are usually the best adults to take care of their children but not always.

If deportation of the whole family is the best for the child, then you do that. If placing the child with relatives or foster care is the better choice, you do that. Children aged 2, 4, and 7 can't "game" the system, and so its the adults job to take responsibility and find a solution that address the rights of the child.
by chasil | 2025-04-27 00:00:24+00:00
DEC spent an enormous amount of money on an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) bipolar implementation as the VAX 9000.

They came to discover that the MicroVAX hit ~70% of the performance at a fraction of the cost.

That was an expensive dead end.

"Production problems pushed back its release, by which time these fears had come true and newer microprocessors like DEC's own NVAX offered a significant fraction of the 9000's performance for a tiny fraction of the price.

"Roughly four dozen systems were delivered before production was discontinued, a massive failure. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000
by Darmani | 2025-04-27 00:01:05+00:00
That is a thing in the ACM-ICPC. Typically competitors would come in with printouts of times they've implemented a tricky algorithm like the Hungarian Algorithm or the Blossom Algorithm in the past, so that having it would help jog their memory and let them be constrained only by typing speed once they've figured out how to adapt it to their problem.

It was referred to as "book code."
by Spivak | 2025-04-27 00:01:39+00:00
Probably a combination of scale and ease. The people on the internet who try this gambit have to actually write each of their posts to their target audience which acts as a time/money barrier which is now gone. But the bigger one is that inventing these identities convincingly is hard. There's a million little shibboleths, expressions, in-group references that you have to know to not out yourself and if you get right imperceptibly make your argument much stronger. To pick an example that is to me both funny and malicious, the right wing middle aged white suburban men who sometimes get caught pretending to be gay black disabled veterans in internet political arguments have a very real lived experience gap that they have to navigate. But AI is scary good at that kind of fuzzy messy logic and can bridge that gap.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-04-27 00:02:27+00:00
I mean they are still sold at your local hardware store. The bulb in the tilt switch below is the same as the mercury tilt switches that have been around for 100 years.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Hiland-Anti-Tilt-Switch-Mechanic...

OMG that's a switch and switches are used in nuclear weapons! (lol!)

Of course this is even a step further removed. He had mercury and some tilt switches use mercury and switches are used in nuclear weapons therefore he was making a bomb!
by throwaway48476 | 2025-04-27 00:02:56+00:00
In some places Chinese labor is at price parity. However the reasons why China has dark factories is government investment and an abundance of mechatronics engineers.

People build factories in China because all the other factories are in China just down the road.

None of this contradicts my previous comment though. We don't invest in automation because we have cheap labor. China is an aging society with a shrinking workforce. Here we have cheap labor and offload the cost to the taxpayer. Illegal immigration is just another part of corporate welfare which is why socialists like Bernie sanders used to be against it.
by idle_zealot | 2025-04-27 00:04:19+00:00
You're missing the obvious: it is the lying that is unethical. Now we're talking about people choosing to use a novel tool to lie en masse. What you're saying is like chastising the horrified onlookers during a firebombing of a city, calling them merely jealous of how much better an arsonist the bomber plane is than any of them.
by vseplet | 2025-04-27 00:07:12+00:00
Yes, I understand the capabilities of git... But, it still seems too tedious to me. In general, I have already solved this problem for myself quite a long time ago by making a small utility that, when cloning a repository (no matter where and no matter where), offers to choose one of the available git profiles (and keys). In this way, I can easily work with each repository separately, have several profiles for github, gitlab, and so on.

But I was wondering if anyone has solved a similar problem or uses some ready-made tool)