MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gambiting | 2025-04-08 13:09:54+00:00
>>Sticking with front door analogy, what if there were a master key that could open up all door locks that the police held.

That's exactly what I said I don't want Apple/Google/MS to have - a master key that opens all locks is unacceptable imho.

>> What if that key was leaked and now you knew that multiple gangs and criminals had the key and were breaking into houses.

I'm sure I used this exact analogy in another comment, that's why no one should have a master key.

>>I don't trust my bitlocker key to Microsoft.

And neither do I - but overall on balance I think this is a good thing. I do like that my mum's laptop is automatically encrypted, if it gets stolen her data is safe, and if she forgets her password there is some pathway to recovering it. I like that. It's nice convenience for "regular" people. I don't do it myself because I have an alternative backup of my encryption keys. And yes, I do like that if someone is under criminal investigation that the key can be obtained from MS when a valid warrant is produced. I see that as a good thing personally.

>> There is no such thing as a magical backdoor that only good guys can use but is secure against everyone else.

Well, good thing it's not a backdoor then.

>>A backdoor is a vulnerability that puts everyone using it at risk.

Again, MS having a copy of your bitlocker key is not a backdoor.
by haswell | 2025-04-08 13:10:01+00:00
What if the real quest is to collectively find ways to coexist without destroying the only planet we know to be fully capable of supporting human life richly?

And this doesn’t have to be at odds with our space ambitions.

But framed the way you framed this, it somewhat reminds me of the religious perspective that this world is just prep for what is to come. As a consequence, they see the harms we’re doing as inconsequential.
by bluGill | 2025-04-08 13:10:15+00:00
Most open source projects don't really need an income stream. It only becomes an issue when the project is large enough that there is desire for someone to work on it half time or more. Smaller projects can still be done as a hobbyist thing. (the project I "maintain" only needs a few hours of my time per year, but since I no longer use it I can't be bothered - there is a problem for those who still use it). Of course it is hard to say - curl seems like it should be a small project but in fact it is large enough to support someone full time.
by simonw | 2025-04-08 13:10:24+00:00
This plugin is built on a new feature I added to my LLM command-line tool yesterday called "fragments", designed to make LLM a better tool for working with long context LLMs like Gemini and Llama 4. I described fragments in the annotated release notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/7/long-context-llm/

Normally fragments are specified using filename or URLs:

llm -f https://simonwillison.net/robots.txt "explain this policy"

Or:

llm -f setup.py "convert to pyproject.toml" -m claude-3.7-sonnet

I also added a plugin hook that lets you do this:

llm install llm-hacker-news llm -f hn:43615912 -s 'summary with illustrative direct quotes'

Here the plugin acts on that hn: prefix and fetches data from the Hacker News API, then applies the specified system prompt against LLM's default model (gpt-4o-mini, unless you configure a different default).

I wrote more about the Hacker News plugin here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/llm-hacker-news/

It uses the Algolia JSON API https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/43615912 and then converts that into a (hopefully) more LLM-friendly text format.

Another neat fragments plugin is this one, which grabs a full clone of the specified GitHub repository and dumps every non-binary file in as a fragment at once: https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github

Example usage:

llm install llm-fragments-github llm -f github:simonw/files-to-prompt 'suggest new features for this tool'
by zip1234 | 2025-04-08 13:10:49+00:00
Totally agree on taxing undesirable behavior--everyone complains about 'traffic' and the potential traffic impacts of something. If noise/pollution was taxed appropriately perhaps traffic would be less of a concern. A government needs to get revenue somehow and wages are just a very convenient way to do so. However, with all the modern technology that we have now, I think there are options available that are not being taken (such as fair land use tax with computer calculated values)
by dematz | 2025-04-08 13:10:53+00:00
"Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment."

Feels similar to a point in a larger rant about bloated page sizes:

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

"I think we need to ban third-party tracking, and third party ad targeting.

Ads would become dumb again, and be served from the website they appear on.

Accepted practice today is for ad space to be auctioned at page load time. The actual ads (along with all their javascript surveillance infrastructure) are pulled in by the browser after the content elements are in place.

In terms of user experience, this is like a salesman arriving at a party after it has already started, demanding that the music be turned off, and setting up their little Tupperware table stand to harass your guests. It ruins the vibe."
by pllbnk | 2025-04-08 13:11:00+00:00
Just today I have been looking through old photos of mine and saw a few pictures from a team building night in one of my previous workplaces 9 years ago. Out of around 10 people I only remembered the names of two, and then two more after some thinking. I don't keep in contact with neither of them.

Meanwhile, over the years I have managed to form connections and friendships with some people both, in office, and working remotely.
by justonceokay | 2025-04-08 13:12:25+00:00
I’ve always been the kind of developer that aims to have more red lines than green ones in my diffs. I like writing libraries so we can create hundreds of integration tests declaratively. I’m the kind of developer that disappears for two days and comes back with a 10x speedup because I found two loop variables that should be switched.

There is no place for me in this environment. I’d not that I couldn’t use the tools to make so much code, it’s that AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production. The solution to bad code is more code. AI will never produce a deletion. Publish or perish has come for us and it’s sad. It makes me feel old just like my Python programming made the mainframe people feel old. I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old…
by alright2565 | 2025-04-08 13:12:37+00:00
> To transfer money to a broker, I need to pay around $5 in transfer fees via ACH or wire

I suggest switching to a better bank. This is unreasonable, my ACH transfers are free.

> I want to change the custody of my stock market assets from one broker to another

$75 sounds like a bargain, given the complexity it involves: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-acats-transfers-w...

But anyway, I recently transferred some assets between brokers. It was free because the sending broker's fee to transfer assets out only applies when transferring the whole account. The receiving broker is happy to receive the assets, and shouldn't be charging any fee.
by bsenftner | 2025-04-08 13:12:41+00:00
Advertising is not the problem. The problem, the issue is human civilization is facing a situation we've never dealt with before, and that situation is all the ramifications of our population size.

The human race and every individual of that race has no background to understand how to operate in an environment where the magnitude of the number of others that can do everything they can do, can do it better, and for less salary creates a new situation we as a society do not know how to manage.

The situation has created billionaire oligarchs with more wealth and power than any individual that has ever lived. These powerful individuals are without the foundation nor maturity to navigate themselves without large amounts of self serving immaturity.

We need to, as a group large enough to make a cultural difference, acknowledge that all our evolutionary preparation and modern educations do not prepare us for what we face today, and our institutions we use to govern our civilization are not prepared for the power weld by modern oligarchs. They have the resources to perform selfish and shortsighted changes to all of society for their benefit alone. If history teaches the human race anything, situations such as this create monsters. We need to acknowledge we are creating monsters and they are our leadership class.
by amiga386 | 2025-04-08 13:12:47+00:00
A tax is a price.

A fine is a price.

If it's just a price, it's acceptable to do it. People who can afford it will do it. People who profit more from doing it than they're fined or taxed will do it forever.

The only way to stop a harm is to have a population that's on board with criminalising it, a law system that's empowered to stop it and prosecute it, and have a chain of escalating remedies all the way up to physical prevention (e.g. incarceration, or corporate death penalty)

We don't let people shit in the river. We don't let companies shit in the river. We know the harms. Advertising is shitting in your brain.
by beejiu | 2025-04-08 13:13:03+00:00
That was the intent, but in reality the tax is fully remitted to Google's customers. I'm a small UK business and it appears on my invoice, so I'm effectively the one being taxed. This is why I object to the campaigners calling for 10% DST. They don't realise the tax is mostly remitted back onto UK businesses, not the trillion dollar giants.
by nilkn | 2025-04-08 13:13:28+00:00
I don't have much sympathy for this. This country has long expected millions and millions of blue collar workers to accept and embrace change or lose their careers and retirements. When those people resisted, they were left to rot. Now I'm reading a sob story about someone throwing a fit because they refuse to learn to use ChatGPT and Claude and the CEO had to sit them down and hold their hand in a way. Out of all the skillset transitions that history has required or imposed, this is one of the easiest ever.

They weren't fired; they weren't laid off; they weren't reassigned or demoted; they got attention and assistance from the CEO and guidance on what they needed to do to change and adapt while keeping their job and paycheck at the same time, with otherwise no disruption to their life at all for now.

Prosperity and wealth do not come for free. You are not owed anything. The world is not going to give you special treatment or handle you with care because you view yourself as an artisan. Those are rewards for people who keep up, not for those who resist change. It's always been that way. Just because you've so far been on the receiving end of prosperity doesn't mean you're owed that kind of easy life forever. Nobody else gets that kind of guarantee -- why should you?

The bottom line is the people in this article will be learning new skills one way or another. The only question is whether those are skills that adapt their existing career for an evolving world or whether those are skills that enable them to transition completely out of development and into a different sector entirely.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-08 13:13:29+00:00
I like to see multiple ideas or opinions on a subject. LLMs seem to distill the knowledge and opinions in ways that are more winner-take-all, or at most only the top few samples. Even if you prompt for a deeper sampling it seems it seems the quality drops (like resolution reduces for each) and its still based on popularity vs merits for some types of data.
by simonh | 2025-04-08 13:14:06+00:00
Anyone from any country could be a state asset. That's all entirely hypothetical though. Maybe the universe is all a simulation! There's no limit to where you can go with hypotheticals.

The article, and linked sources, cite evidence from 6 named private citizens, each that have personal experience of multiple cases of exposing actual North Korean infiltrators posing as citizens of other countries to try and get tech jobs. Including one guy who infiltrated such a team of North Koreans. Then there are two successful convictions in court of US citizens aiding and abetting active cells of infiltrators.

So, these are not at all hypothetical and they're not just unsubstantiated claims by US agencies. In fact this issue is also reported by the United Nations.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-08 13:14:09+00:00
> you to some extent want that activity to occur otherwise you've got budget issues. Now what is the incentive?

I was just talking with some friends recently about an instance of this: distilling, which is still federally illegal in the US for the primary reason that it provides a lot of tax income if you charge for licenses and tax sales, which is incredibly frustrating because it's easy and safe to make yourself high-quality liquors at a fraction of the price that you'd pay at the store and have a fun hobby to boot.

(pedants: please don't bring up safety issues - it's trivial to realize with five minutes and internet access that distilling isn't significantly less safe than many other unregulated activities in the world as a whole)
by recursivedoubts | 2025-04-08 13:16:54+00:00
I teach compilers, systems, etc. at a university. Innumerable times I have seen AI lead a poor student down a completely incorrect but plausible path that will still compile.

I'm adding `.noai` files to all the project going forward:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm...

AI may be somewhat useful for experienced devs but it is a catastrophe for inexperienced developers.

"That's OK, we only hire experienced developers."

Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?

Again and again in this AI arc I'm reminded of the magicians apprentice scene from fantasia.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-08 13:16:57+00:00
Rivian seems like the one that is going to have a lasting footprint. Much, much slower growth, but the How I Built This podcast episode with RJ Scaringe[0] convinced me that he's the real deal and all the things that people thought Musk was. Scaringe is an actual engineer and has plodded a careful, sustainable path for Rivian. We'll see how it works out, but I was pretty impressed by the interview.

[0] https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-riv...
by ryandvm | 2025-04-08 13:18:02+00:00
I love seeing the anti-advertising sentiment bubbling up. Social media addiction, 24 hour political news bubbles, pharmaceutical companies spending more on ads than R&D, consumership-based lifestyles, etc. All of it is driven by advertising being an acceptable business model. And we haven't even touched on the aesthetic crime of fucking ads being pasted on every surface in public.

But here's a different take: unsolicited advertising is theft. It is the "fractional penny" heist perpetrated by the industrial advertising complex upon all of us, all of the time.

Hear me out. You have a finite amount of mental attention that you can give in any given environment. Advertising companies are selling access to bits and pieces of this finite resource of yours. Sometimes they do this with your consent in advertising supported products you seek out (e.g. free YouTube or Spotify) and this is fine.

But often you have not consented to spend your attention on their ads. You probably weren't laying on the beach, staring into the sky hoping to find the phone number of a personal injury attorney being towed behind an airplane. Or the latest weight loss drug plastered on the side of a city bus. Or 15 garbage pamphlets jammed into your mailbox.

There's a reason all the dystopian, sci-fi media shows the beleaguered protagonist assaulted with personalized ads in holograms and on every surface. Because that is exactly where we're headed just as soon as they figure out how to do it if we don't legislate this shit away.
by wavemode | 2025-04-08 13:19:41+00:00
It's a bit of ambiguity of grammar.

"X don't Y" generally means "X never Y" (ex: "Grapes Don't Grow On Trees").

However, adding Why to the front of X Don't Y ("Why X Don't Y") does not necessarily mean "X Don't Y. Why?" - rather, sometimes it's actually asking "In cases when X do not Y, why not?"

In other words, you can't necessarily parse the sentence by simply parsing "X Don't Y" by itself and then applying "Why" as a question to that. That was what I was trying to illustrate.
by cturner | 2025-04-08 13:19:54+00:00
Some themes I think about,

1. Distinct prod and non-prod environments. I think you should have distinct Lab and Production environments. It should be practical to commit something to your codebase, and then test it in Lab. Then, you deploy that to Production. The Github actions model confuses the concepts of (source control) and (deployment environment). So you easily end up with no lab environment, and people doing development work against production.

2. Distinguish programming language expression and DSLs. Github yaml reminds me of an older time where people built programming languages in XML. It is an interesting idea, but it does not work out. The value of a programming language: the more features it has, the better. The value of a DSL: the fewer features it has, the better.

3. Security. There is a growing set of github-action libraries. The Github ecosystem makes it easy to install runners on workstations to accept dispatch from github actions. This combination opens opportunities for remote attacks.
by voidhorse | 2025-04-08 13:20:12+00:00
I think the software industry will look just like the material goods space post-industrialization after the dust settles:

Large corporations will use AI to deliver low-quality software at high speed and high scale.

"Artisan" developers will continue to exist, but in much smaller numbers and they will mostly make a living by producing refined, high-quality custom software at a premium or on creative marketplaces. Think Etsy for software.

That's the world we are heading for, unless/until companies decide LLMs are ultimately not cost beneficial or overzealous use of them leads to a real hallucination induced catastrophe.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-08 13:21:09+00:00
"Deep Past" by Eugene Linden is an entertaining novel, even if it is not a work of high literature.

It is science/speculative fiction, that started from the author wondering about a scenario in which humans had gone extinct 10k years ago, before we developed much, if any, material culture. He felt that had that happened another intelligent species 1M years later would have no idea that we had even existed (different story now, of course).

In the book, a discovery on the steppe of Khazakstan leads to revolutionary discoveries about very, very old intelligence.

The author has written several non-fiction books on animal intelligence.
by bko | 2025-04-08 13:21:12+00:00
As of April 1, 2025, approximately 60,000 federal employees have been forcibly terminated or laid off as part of the Trump administration's workforce reduction efforts. These terminations primarily targeted probationary employees—those hired, promoted, or transferred within the last year—who lack full civil service protections.

There are about 3m employees so this is about 2%.

This is pretty normal course of business for most organizations. Meta laid off 13% of workers in 2022-2023 and an additional 5% in 2025. Other tech companies did similar numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...
by voidUpdate | 2025-04-08 13:21:22+00:00
Yeah, I'm not sure this is following the HN guidelines, judging by the parts about IP Rights...

> Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, [...] or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, [...]. In connection with your use of the Site you will not engage in or use any data mining, robots, scraping or similar data gathering or extraction methods

Though I guess this is a tool to produce such content, rather than the author doing this themselves, its ok?
by stareatgoats | 2025-04-08 13:21:27+00:00
Yanis Varoufakis is one of the few that can credibly remove the veil of apparent insanity behind the current tariff policies and explain the logic of it instead (whether those goals will be accomplished is another matter). Not because he is a supporter, but because he understands macroeconomics and modern history from that perspective. A welcome break from the current hysteria, which assumes it knows something but doesn't understand anything.
by Sharlin | 2025-04-08 13:21:46+00:00
According to one of the most prescient of all fictional depictions of the future, Deus Ex, the first human-level, agentic AI was used by the puppet masters behind the US government to monitor all of Internet traffic for signs of “terrorism” (yes, this was before 9/11). Problem is, the instructions given to the AI caused it classify the puppeteers themselves as a terrorist organization.
Ask HN: Ask HN: working on a tool to launch AIs locally – I'd love your feedback
by enzo_ghll | 2025-04-08 13:21:47+00:00
Hello everyone !

I recently posted in this forum about creating the easiest tool to launch AI models locally and if you're interested ?

I've had some return from some of y'all and so as not to go in the wrong direction, I've come to ask your opinion once again.

The existing tools (LM Studio, Ollama, etc.) are powerful... but not necessarily easy to use for everyone (choice of model, complicated interface, lots of options, etc.).

I'd like to make it as simple as an iPhone app.

I'm trying to understand :

- Is this a real problem for you?

- What's stopping you from using these tools today ?

- What would your ideal solution look like ?

I look forward to hearing from you in the comments, and if you'd like to become a beta tester later on, I'll be waiting for you in DM !
by DanielHB | 2025-04-08 13:23:37+00:00
Yes BankID is the real MVP of digital systems, I heard some talks about the EU making one valid for the whole block. Hopefully it will fix all the countries.Everything is done through BankID in swedish-only institutions.

Put house on sale? bankid. Book a doctor appointment? bankid. Login to bank? Bankid. Open bank account? bankid. Sign contracts? bankid.

Heck I moved my pension (like a lot of money) to a different institution by just using BankID. Didn't have to call/email anyone, the process took 5 minutes (with about a month to actually process the transaction).
by haswell | 2025-04-08 13:23:55+00:00
But surely you’d agree that “vat of chemicals” is not the only metric by which to evaluate a substance, and that not all vats of chemicals are strawberries.

You can play this game with everything that exists. Everything is just a concoction of atoms. But some arrangements of atoms result in nuclear weapons. Others make up the breakfast I ate this morning.

The fact that they’re all just atoms doesn’t mean they share other properties like: safe to eat, tastes good to humans, etc.
by okayokayokay123 | 2025-04-08 13:24:12+00:00
Switched over to DuckDuckGo a month ago. Results aren’t always great but it works 90% of the time.

I use perplexity pro + Claude a lot as well. Maybe too much but mostly for coding and conversations about technical topics.

It really depends on intent.

I have noticed that I’ve started reading a lot more. Lots of technical books in the iPad based on what I’m interested in at the moment.