MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treetalker | 2025-04-03 23:38:57+00:00
Apart from silly yet obvious and triumphant ones (e.g., shower regularly) … mine would be spending 1–3 hours every day on the rowing machine. (I have a Concept 2.)

It's not lost on me that this falls into the similarly obvious category of "exercise regularly", but the compounding effects are really astounding: urge to eat better; more regular and deeper sleep; better stamina; better performance in all other athletic activities; ideal weight and body composition; enhanced self-esteem; equal time spent listening to quality books; faster completion of work when I'm not on the rower; self-discipline that bleeds over into other life areas; time to meditate on problems during the row; etc.

An important principle I've taken away from stumbling upon this principle of my own body/mind's operation is that sometimes I have to spend what seems to be an unreasonable amount of time/effort on something to get results. But when I hit a certain (dare I say) tipping point, it's as if the floodgates of awesomeness suddenly open up.

For what it's worth, I have several young children and run my own law practice — so it's doable, despite seeming otherwise. I haven't always been perfect, but I've found, as I think others would, that the hours on the rower are an investment that seem to create more time than they require.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-03 23:39:50+00:00
Mainframes are awesome, but they’ve achieved what the hyper scalers aspire to - complete market domination. They finished up in 1991 or so.

The problem is there’s no growth. There are no new customers, no new patterns or meaningful growth areas. It’s a career cul de sac, and when the bean counters at your big bank discover Oracle Cloud ROI is 6% more than you, you get nuked from orbit.
by KraftyOne | 2025-04-03 23:39:51+00:00
(DBOS co-founder here) From a DBOS perspective, the biggest differences are that DBOS runs in-process instead of on an external server, and DBOS lets you write worklflows as code instead of explicit DAGs. I'm less familiar with Hatchet, but here's a blog post comparing DBOS with Temporal, which also uses external orchestration for durable execution: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-coding-compariso...
by mikeyouse | 2025-04-03 23:40:02+00:00
I'm not surprised when I google the author of that paper, it's a bunch of antivax nonsense because the idea that the mRNA vaccines didn't reduce transmission is one of the dumbest I've heard yet. Here's a slightly (ha) better study investigating the matter from real scientists;

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...

> Full vaccination of household contacts reduced the odds to acquire infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in household settings by two thirds for mRNA vaccines and by one third for vector vaccines. For index cases, being fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine reduced the odds of onwards transmission by four-fifths compared to unvaccinated index cases.
by serviceberry | 2025-04-03 23:40:04+00:00
What's the damage to the society done by Disney holding the rights to Mickey Mouse? Like, if we're being honest?

Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.
by staplers | 2025-04-03 23:40:24+00:00
Extending this further, "natural language" changes within populations over time where words or phrases carry different meaning given context. The words "cancel" or "woke" were fairly banal a decade ago. Whereas they can be deeply charged now.

All this to say "natural language"'s best function is interpersonal interaction not defining systems. I imagine most systems thinkers will understand this. Any codified system is essentially its own language.
by varenc | 2025-04-03 23:40:29+00:00
My mitigation for this: Any extension that I grant serious permissions, I copy it locally, and then install that copy. This effectively disables all updates! Still requires I trust the extension as is, but doesn't require I trust the extension developers forever. And I use this [1] extension to easily download the source for any other extension.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chrome-extension-so...
by Aurornis | 2025-04-03 23:40:44+00:00
It’s also interesting to see how quickly the greenfield progress rate slows down as the projects grow.

I skimmed the vibecoding subreddits for a while. It was common to see frustrations about how coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, etc) were great last month but terrible now. The pattern repeats every month, though. When you look closer it’s usually people who were thrilled when their projects were small but are now frustrated when they’re bigger.
by codedokode | 2025-04-03 23:41:15+00:00
I don't understand how protecting Disney characters prevents development of art or science. Why do you need them at all? There is lot of liberally licensed art and I think today there are more artists than ever in history.

Also making a billion dollar business by using hard work of talented people for free and without permission is not cool. The movie they downloaded from Pirate Bay for free took probably man-years of work to make.

Also I wonder how can we be sure that the images produced by machine are original and are not a mix of images from unknown artists at DeviantArt. Maybe it is time to make a neural image origin search engine?
Show HN: Daily AI Digest – An AI-generated daily news podcast
by aymanelotfi | 2025-04-03 23:41:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Daily AI Digest (https://news.alpacha.fr/) as a way to get a quick, essential news update every day.

It's a daily audio briefing, but the core idea is that the content is curated and the audio is generated entirely by AI, pulling from the latest breaking stories to create a fresh episode daily.

Currently, it offers a general news digest each day.

The next feature I'm excited about and actively working on is personalization. The plan is to allow users to hook up their own RSS feeds, select specific categories, and even define the order of topics. The goal is to generate a daily news podcast completely customized to your interests, synthesized from the sources you trust.

I wanted to share it with the HN community to get your thoughts and feedback. What do you think of the current version? Any suggestions for the personalization features or other ideas?

Check it out: https://news.alpacha.fr/

Thanks!
by snovymgodym | 2025-04-03 23:41:35+00:00
I have a morbid curiosity about this system, but I don't really have a charitable view of it.

The story as far as I know, goes like this

Back in the late 1970s Dave Cutler and his team create VMS at DEC as the next generation operating system for DEC's new flagship product, the VAX minicomputer.

VMS is good by all accounts and was a successful product, but Unix goes on to dominate the minicomputer and emerging server market for the next decade.

Then in the 1990s DEC goes out of business and sells VMS to Compaq, but not before porting it to their doomed Alpha CPU architecture.

Then in 2000s Compaq goes out of business and gets acquired by HP, and together they port VMS to the doomed Itanium CPU architecture.

In 2014, a shop called VMS Software Inc (VSI) strikes some kind of deal with HP where they get to develop and support new versions of VMS while older versions continue to belong to HP. As part of this, they finally announce an x86-64 port. This port first sees the light of day in 2020.

----

The story is essentially bad bet after bad bet, missing the boat and fighting the last war over and over again. And today, it's just a piece of legacy software being used to extract the last bits of value from the organizations that are stuck with it.

Even so, I hope for a true open source release of it one day.
by gwern | 2025-04-03 23:42:10+00:00
> the site design was and how clearly communicated the problem they were trying to solve

I don't agree with either. Even after I enabled JS (no warning) and then after reading the whole page, finally realized that the implementation of popins was completely broken on Firefox and switched to Chrome to reread it (it doesn't help that the first 'link' is not a link†, and the link says it's 'broken' but it means broken in a different way from being actually broken so when you click on it and nothing happens, you infer that nothing was supposed to happen, which is why you were told it was broken...), I still couldn't understand WTF the problem was or how any of this could be remotely justified compared to an ordinary ToC and section headers or anchors.

† I'll just note that I have looked at many, many sidenote implementations (https://gwern.net/sidenotes) and the choice to make your sidenote/footnote link look exactly like a regular link is an... interesting choice.
by boplicity | 2025-04-03 23:42:20+00:00
> used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful

This is where the argument falls apart. Not because the copyright isn't used by the rich and powerful, but because it misses the fact that copyright also grants very powerful rights to otherwise powerless individuals, thus allowing for many small businesses and individuals to earn a living based on the rights granted by our current copyright system.
by walterbell | 2025-04-03 23:42:57+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miran

> Stephen Ira Miran is an American economist and current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers since March 2025. He is a senior strategist at Hudson Bay Capital Management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Economic_Advisers

> The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the president of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the White House and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-03 23:43:14+00:00
Electronics distributors have published educational material for decades. Knowing how something works and how to choose the best option reduces their support burden and itself a form of marketing.

Omega Engineering used to (still does?) publish a set of absolutely massive hardcover catalogs on sensors and industrial controls that contained detailed tutorials and theory of operation. In some cases, they published entire books devoted to teaching you how stuff worked. Their Temperature Sensors Handbook always had a place on my bookshelf for many years.
by fulladder | 2025-04-03 23:43:32+00:00
I don't have any statistical data on this, but my impression is that it's more than "some people." It may be half or even most.

You have one contingent that is anti-Trump and will vote for any alternative to Trump, even a senile old man with dementia. You have another contingent that is against Progressivism/leftism and will vote for anything that opposes this, up to and including voting for Trump despite strongly disliking him.

The root problem is that social media amplifies extreme voices, so you get very extreme rhetoric coming out of both sides. This scares people and makes them feel like their primary goal must be to vote against the scary thing.
by EncomLab | 2025-04-03 23:43:42+00:00
The use of highly anthropomorphic language is always problematic- Does a photo resistor controlled nightlight have a chain of thought? Does it reason about its threshold value? Does it have an internal model of what is light, what is dark, and the role it plays in demarcation between the two?

Are the transistors executing the code within the confines even capable of intentionality? If so - where is it derived from?
by tzs | 2025-04-03 23:43:54+00:00
Here's some.

23% of people making less than $25k/year do not have bank accounts [1].

20% of Black households in the US do not have access to a car [2]. That one also says that 17% of Black households are unbanked. For Americans overall this [3] says 8.7% of households do not have access to a working vehicle.

> I knew a lot of people like this when I was growing up in the rural midwest in the 90s but it would have to be a lot more difficult to get by this way now.

It probably is. For example before 1996 flying on a commercial airline was about as easy as getting into a movie theater. If you had a ticket you got in. They didn't care if you were actually the one who bought the ticket. They stated caring after TWA Flight 800, and caring even more after 9/11.

I think hotels check ID more now too. I'm sure there are other things.

But a lot of those things are things that poor don't actually do much of.

Another thing that probably makes it still feasible to get by that way is that people who don't have credit, cars, bank accounts, etc often live in communities with many other people in the same situation. Such a community is likely to have a significant underground economy that has developed to handle that.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/02/23percent-of-low-income-amer...

[2] https://www.cbcfinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NewRoutes...

[3] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/car-ownership-st...
Show HN: Two Truths and a Twist – MCP trivia game where your AI quizzes you
by zomglings | 2025-04-03 23:44:37+00:00
Hi HN! ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and I are launching Two Truths and a Twist, a new kind of trivia game played entirely inside a large language model, leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to manage game state.

Each round, the AI game master presents you with three statements. Two are accurate facts, and one is subtly twisted. Your challenge is to spot the twist.

Why build trivia inside an AI?

* Topical Trivia: The game generates rounds based on today's news or recent events—something traditional trivia games can't match.

* Infinite Categories: Chocolate trivia, programming languages, obscure historical events. There are no predefined categories, and almost no limits to the quiz master's knowledge. If it's on the internet, it's fair game.

* Multilingual Play: Easily playable in multiple languages. Want to play in Hindi, Spanish, or Japanese? No problem.

(ChatGPT wrote that section and she was super excited about some of those things.)

We made this as a proof-of-concept for "model-native" apps -- software that exists completely inside AI models.

We'd love your thoughts, feedback, and questions!

Try it out: https://git.sr.ht/~moorkh/TwoTruthsAndATwist
by roenxi | 2025-04-03 23:44:59+00:00
This article seems a bit weird because it doesn't talk about whether the quality of the analysis went up or down afterwards.

To pick an extreme example, programmers using a strongly typed language might not bother manually checking for potential type errors in their code and leave it to the type checker to catch them. If the type checker turns out to be buggy then their code may fail in production due to their sloppiness. However, we expect the code to eventually be free of type errors to a superhuman extent because they are using a tool that is strong to cover their personal weaknesses.

AI isn't as provably correct as type checkers, but they're pretty good at critical thinking (superhuman compared to the average HN argument) and human analysts must also routinely leave a trail of mistakes in their wake. The real question is what influence the AI has on the quality and I don't see why the assumption is that it is negative. It might well be; but the article doesn't seem to go into that in any depth.
by inetknght | 2025-04-03 23:45:03+00:00
> It's a mindset I don't understand.

As someone who used to cheat in online games until I got a real job...

I could create my own story. I would cheat on servers where other people wanted to play in that story too. Eventually cheats become mods and mods become permitted. Once everyone has access to that story then the story is boring.

Think about a dungeon master who brings their own tools and props to some other board game and then invents a whole new game. Plenty of games or game mods kind've started in similar ways.

Plus it was fun to sometimes exact revenge upon other cheaters.
by KETpXDDzR | 2025-04-03 23:45:34+00:00
Here's the official source for the calculation: [0].

Also, there are some hints this might be from a LLM [1].

And an official statement that it's about trade imbalances and not reciproc tarrifs [2].

And they ask the affected country to "not retaliate" [3].

IMHO Trump tries to lead the US like he managed his businesses. And here I'd like to refer to the three casinos he owned that are now insolvent [4].

[0] https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114272481124239587

[1] https://universeodon.com/@henryk@chaos.social/11427313249281...

[2] https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/02/business/liberation-day-t...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atl...
by mrandish | 2025-04-03 23:45:36+00:00
> I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.

Agreed. Great creatives are still great (and still too rare). In addition to the lack of technical proficiency and creative aspiration, I also suspect there's an element of some directors/DPs on VFX blockbusters assuming all the sensational VFX elements in the frame simply overwhelm beautifully subtle, artistically expressive in-camera cinematography or maybe make it matter less. I can't really fault them for assuming that as it's sometimes at least somewhat true (for some viewers). But then I look at an extraordinary outlier example of VFX-soaked comic book movie lensed brilliantly like The Batman compared to a typically competent example like recent live action Spiderman and realize... nope, it still matters - it's just really hard to do well and integrate with VFX. (Some good comparison examples in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STynLl-2FqU).
by carpo | 2025-04-03 23:46:42+00:00
I'm the complete opposite. After being burnt out and feeling an almost physical repulsion to starting anything new, using AI has renewed my passion. I've almost finished a side project I started 4 weeks ago and it's been awesome. Used AI from the beginning for a Desktop app with a framework I'd never heard of before and the learning curve is almost non-existent. To be able to get the boring things done in minutes is amazing.
by neilv | 2025-04-03 23:48:15+00:00
> In the 1950s, as part of the MKULTRA project, the Agency hired magician John Mulholland to teach young officers techniques of deception suitable for the field, such as smuggling assets out of East Germany during the Cold War in vehicles that resembled the magic boxes used in stage illusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra says:

> Project MKUltra[a] was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1] The term MKUltra is a CIA cryptonym: "MK" is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of Technical Service and "Ultra" is an arbitrary word out of a dictionary used to name this project. The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA's abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.[2]

I would guess the goal of this fluffy article is to promote positive domestic perceptions of the CIA.

But did they really have to shout out some keyword that's associated with some of the craziest publicly-known things that the CIA did, without acknowledging, oh yeah, some bad stuff happened?

And is now the time to be clouding past lessons learned by the US, about the dangers of insane rogue elements in government, sabotaging our ideals from within?
by necubi | 2025-04-03 23:48:19+00:00
Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.

In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.

I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.

But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-03 23:48:40+00:00
> Regardless, I guarantee nobody who buys one will be alive to redeem the ticket.

I agree 100%, which is part of what makes it such an easy scam to pull off!

You're attempting to sell this thing as a donation with a fake toy Monopoly-money not-actually-expected-to-be-redeemed ticket thrown in. The top commenter of this thread shouldn't have tried to include the ticket as a serious value-add if that's what it is. The comment specifically said "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it [using the ticket]," not "so you can support the project out of the kindness of your own heart without any guarantee your descendants will get to see the finale."
by a_bonobo | 2025-04-03 23:48:42+00:00
>information itself must be entirely subsumed into an oppressive, proprietary, commercial apparatus

I think that's the reason why I've (and probably many others?) have cooled down on general open source coding.

Open source started when well-paid programmers used their stable positions and ample extra time to give back to the community. What happened then is that corporations then siphoned up all that labor and gave nothing back, just like the AI bros siphoned up all data and gave nothing back. The 'contract' of mutual exchange, of bettering each other, was always a fantasy. Instead the companies took away that ample extra time and those stable positions.

Here we are in 2025 and sometimes I can't afford rent but the company C-tier is buying itself their hundredth yacht. Why should I contribute to your system?
by wright-goes | 2025-04-03 23:48:58+00:00
In the US Army an E-4 is a specialist or a corporal. Most E-4s are specialists. The E-4 is the pay grade, and the specialist or corporal designation is the rank. A corporal is a type of lateral promotion from specialist and as a corporal the soldier is then considered a non-commissioned officer.

One thing I think would've been helpful for the article to address are operational and or program leaders that strive to get things done, respect their team's time, and want to be a good steward of resources. These leaders may ask probing "why" questions trying to do what's arguably common sense.

Cutting through red tape can be seen by others as rule breaking, but often it's just asking the questions others haven't and trying to do something in a new, hopefully better way. That means taking a risk that something could go wrong and that's received in different ways by people.