MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-29 20:15:45+00:00
> They promise that their gadget will free us from technology

One cannot be free of technology by introducing more technology. To be honest, I think most of this recent junk we've been seeing hasn't really made life a lot better. It's almost as if we started a culture of innovation which was based on making life more comfortable, and now that we have, we have to keep the machine going but into the realms more and more pointless than ever before.

In fact, if I look back at the last 20 years, yes technology has gotten a little better, but very little of it (especially in the computer sphere) has really added new enjoyment to life. I mean, if computer innovation had stagnated 20 years ago, we wouldn't have as nice monitors, screens, or processors maybe, but would any of us be any worse off except for a few fringe cases?

And what did we get in return? A push for even more efficiency, which isn't even a good thing. AI datacenters that need gigajoules of energy to run when we desperately need to save energy.

People like Sam Altman and Jony Ive really are shining examples of the pathological sickness we have to ignore the good things in life for the trivial.
by jurgenaut23 | 2025-05-29 20:15:46+00:00
That’s also the very reason why it is an absolute madness to give up programming because AI is (supposedly) capable of doing it on your behalf.

We invented the car, the motorbike and the jetpack, yet people still hike and ride bikes. It would be dumb to stop doing things that you like just because one can do it better with a machine.
by panstromek | 2025-05-29 20:16:47+00:00
I wrote a nostalgic post on opera mini few weeks ago (https://yoyo-code.com/love-letter-to-opera-mini/) and somebody linked a project that does similar architecture but running chrome in the cloud instead, to enable feature phones to use the internet - https://developer.cloudfone.com/

Operators in India and some other countries sell phones where this is pre-installed and websites have to be specially adjusted for keyboard input and low resolution. It's pretty interesting, I want to try it out, they just don't sell those phones here.
by mingus88 | 2025-05-29 20:16:48+00:00
Right, this is business as usual on the internet.

And I guarantee we all have seen ads generated by an LLM already. The front page of Reddit is filled with LLM posts whose comments are similarly rich with bots.

One common one is an image post of a snarky t-shirt where a high rated comment gives you a link to the storefront. The bots no longer need to recycle old posts and comments which can be easily detected as duplicates when an LLM can freshen it up.
by wahern | 2025-05-29 20:17:10+00:00
Presumably the conflict between an ostensibly scientific, materialist, atheistic reality of modernity and the non-empirical, spiritual, theistic reality of their faith. Though I think it's implicit in the criticism of religious believers that they resolve the dissonance by, e.g., rejecting scientific truths. And arguably the other side does the same, by rejecting the metaphysical; compare atheism to agnosticism, where the former rejects what the latter says it cannot logically do as core religious beliefs tend not to be falsifiable. Personally, I like F. Scott Fitzgerald's perspective--"the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Dissonance is everywhere, including in the modern so-called evidence-based world, often inescapable, and perhaps even fundamental to the human experience.
by Neywiny | 2025-05-29 20:17:31+00:00
Good that the judge seems to recognize the importance of process. They're not saying Harvard is innocent or guilty, they're saying that there's a process for this that needs to be followed. Which is good, because if a school was guilty, we need that paper trail. And if they're innocent, they need the chance to prove it. Almost like the law is written for a reason...
by palmotea | 2025-05-29 20:17:38+00:00
> It is wise to work on your replacement...

Depends on the context. You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP.

Before software engineers go celebrate this tech, they need realize they're going to end up like rust-belt factory workers the day after the plant closed. They're not special, and society won't be any kinder to them.

> ...and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement.

You'll likely only get to do that if your boss doesn't know about it.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-29 20:17:53+00:00
> they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.

It's true that airlines wield pricing power but their Contract of Carriage, buried under more fine print than a payday loan agreement, does impose obligations. Rule 21 of United's Contract explicitly allows refusal of transport, but Rule 4 confirms that a ticket with a confirmed reservation constitutes a binding agreement to provide service, absent violations by the passenger (like failing to check in). Rule 25 further mandates denied boarding compensation when overselling occurs, because even in brutal airline economics, a confirmed reservation isn't merely a suggestion, it's a contractual commitment, however creatively airlines may interpret "commitment." Of course, involuntary bumping, force majeure, and the ever-convenient "operational decisions" let airlines off the hook. But to claim they have no obligations is not true.
by vel0city | 2025-05-29 20:18:42+00:00
Apologies, I guess I did misread the employees and customers part.

> I hope that you argue that the 5th amendment is immoral when anyone uses it, and not just pastors.

Once again, you're not understanding man's law isn't God's law.

And also he wasn't just not bringing it up, he was actively suppressing his victim from coming forward with the truth, having his lawyers tell her she would face jail time for bringing up the truth. If you don't see that as morally wrong I don't know what to tell you.

And I'm not against pastors being paid. Absolutely, they should be compensated for their work. Paul says this. But they shouldn't be living in mansions with fancy cars and private jets and living a life of opulence. If those around them are living homeless and hungry while they pull down millions, there's a problem.
by hinkley | 2025-05-29 20:19:00+00:00
I don’t talk about this often but I took seminary classes. Where they tried to explain away the incongruities. It mostly stuck until it didn’t and then the whole mess of it tore itself apart with tremendous violence. If I hadn’t had a friend who was into social justice at the time to hold onto like flotsam after a ship sinks I don’t know if I would be here today.
by tshaddox | 2025-05-29 20:19:36+00:00
I think even calling it "society incentivizing people to have children" is a bit of a stretch, since in most cases the tax advantages are unlikely to result in a net financial advantage given the financial costs of raising children. In most cases the thought isn't "I'm ambivalent about having children but I will do it for the financial benefits" and rather "I'd like to have children, but it's very expensive, and the tax advantages slightly lessen the expensive."
by timschmidt | 2025-05-29 20:19:37+00:00
ChatGPT says that such clauses are typically void in the EU, though they may apply in some cases in the US. Even in the US, the triennial DMCA rule-making has granted broader exemptions for good-faith security research every cycle since 2016.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6838c070-705c-8005-9a88-83c9a5550a...
by dbuxton | 2025-05-29 20:19:47+00:00
I find it weird that this is news and not:

- That it's still way cheaper in most instances to book a return (especially where the "trip" straddles a weekend) rather than a one-way fare when travelling long haul - even if you just throw away the return flight.

- That you can sometimes get access to totally different inventory by booking a package including accommodation, even if that accommodation is one night in a shared dormitory in a hostel (which you just don't go to).

At least group discounts have a recognizable economic rationale. But in these examples you are getting a strict superset of the same SKU (OK, maybe the change rules might be a little tighter, but not in a way that's perceptible) for less money.
by JSchneider321 | 2025-05-29 20:19:55+00:00
I'm not the author (though some are accusing me of being his alt, lol), and I'll agree that Gough doesn't go as deep into the evolutionary mechanism as needed to really sell the idea to someone NOT already looking for an alternative explanation to the current model. Smolin does a better job of this in The Life of the Cosmos, to a degree, but if you guys didn't like how wordy Gough was here, you'd HATE how repetitive Smolin gets with the idea.

That said, I don't think the evolutionary explanation is hand-waved into play at all. I see your point about how it's a reverse approach to how biological natural selection was discovered, but I don't think that decreases its merit in any way, either. Smolin especially takes a deep look at the star formation process, how galaxies work, the structure we see in the cosmic web (and that was 1997!) and makes the comparison to biological organisms in so much as they're dynamic, homeostatic, out-of-equilibrium systems that seem fine tuned to carry out a process of increasing complexification. This, combined with the understanding (just jump on board for the story, you can get off after if you don't like it) that universes reproduce through black holes/big bangs and the similarities are, I think, compelling.

I'm not saying this is 100% definitely the truth and everyone should abandon CDM and string theory. I just think it's a compelling idea that deserves to be considered and discussed honestly, or perhaps even earnestly.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-05-29 20:20:10+00:00
Hey if you enjoy it, go for it. I used to like it a couple of years ago too, but I found that more and more lately, it was neither entertaining nor reliably informative. The jokes/memes were lazy and recycled a lot, the tech content was often poorly researched, and it started feeling like content produced for the sake of having content.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-29 20:20:32+00:00
> I EXPECT them to be. After all, they are the reverse of one another.

That isn't how tokenized inputs work. It's partially the same reason why "how many r's are in strawberry" is a hard problem for LLMs.

All these models are trained for semantic similarity by how they are actually used in relation to other words, so a data point where that doesn't follow intuitively is indeed weird.
by lavelganzu | 2025-05-29 20:20:51+00:00
There's a plausible argument for it, so it's not a crazy thing. You as a human being can also predict likely completions of partial sentences, or likely lines of code given surrounding lines of code, or similar tasks. You do this by having some understanding of what the words mean and what the purpose of the sentence/code is likely to be. Your understanding is encoded in connections between neurons.

So the argument goes: LLMs were trained to predict the next token, and the most general solution to do this successfully is by encoding real understanding of the semantics.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-29 20:20:59+00:00
The "#" key on the phone is called the "pound key" in the US and Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Names

It still is, to this day: if you call an automated system such as voicemail, you may be prompted to "press 'pound'". This is really standardized, AFAICT, and no telephone system has told me to "press hash" or "press the 'number' key" [because that's ambiguous]

cks has a history of #! but not an etymology: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ExecAndShebang...

He links to Wikipedia which documents a good history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)#History

I was trying to recall what we called it. I used SVR3, so I would've been using "#!/bin/sh" as early as 1990, and even more on SunOS 4 and other Unix servers.

I can't recall having a name for it until "hash-bang" gained currency later. We knew it was activated by the magic(5) kernel interpretations. I often called "#" as "pound" from the telephone usage, and I recall being tempted to verbalize it in C64 BASIC programming, or shell comment characters, but knowing it was not the same.

"The whole shebang" is a Civil-War-era American idiom that survived with my grandparents, so I was familiar with that meaning. And not really paying attention to Ricky Martin's discography.

Wikipedia says that Larry Wall used it in 1989. I was a fervent follower of Larry Wall in the mid-90s and Perl was my #1 scripting language. If anyone would coin and/or popularize a term like that, it's Just Another Perl Hacker,

Likewise, "bang" came from the "bang path" of UUCP email addresses, or it stood for "not" in C programming, and so "#!/bin/sh" was ambiguously nameless for me, perhaps for a decade.

Come to think of it, vi and vim have a command "!" where you can filter your text through a shell command, or "shell out" from other programs. This is the semantic that makes sense for hash-bangs, but which came first?
by andrewla | 2025-05-29 20:21:03+00:00
> The essential nutrients that your body needs are

The article has an extensive discussion as to why this way of phrasing the problem is not only meaningless but actively harmful.

That's not to say your diet is necessarily bad; frankly by adhering to his "eat food, not too much" you're 2/3 of the way to what Pollan recommends. You're only missing "mostly plants", but you're doing better from his rubric than a diet consisting of mostly processed food products.
by ksenzee | 2025-05-29 20:21:06+00:00
There’s trust and trust. I have historically trusted Google to act in normal capitalist ways. For example, I trust them not to do things that would immediately lose them huge numbers of corporate customers as soon as the news broke, or get them shut down immediately by regulators in multiple nations. That doesn’t sound like it would cover much, but it does include things like “sell my company’s Google Sheets data to the highest bidder.”

I don’t trust LLMs even that far. Is it possible for “agentic AI” to send an email to my competitor with confidential company data attached? Absolutely it’s possible. So no, that statement doesn’t apply to Google as a company nearly as aptly as it applies to an agentic LLM.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Square Online for Quick Food Ordering?
by irangareddy | 2025-05-29 20:22:21+00:00
I’m helping someone set up an online ordering page for a small food business. Right now, they’re using Square Online, which works but feels a bit rigid and not very customizable.

Are there any other SaaS products that are simple to set up, mobile-friendly, and good for quick food commerce (think: daily menu, order ahead, pickup/delivery toggles)?

Bonus if they: • Don’t charge high transaction fees • Allow custom branding • Support Stripe or other payment providers • Are easy enough for non-technical users to manage

Any indie tools or hidden gems out there? Would love to hear what others have used.
by mysterypie | 2025-05-29 20:22:26+00:00
> As someone who worked in airline revenue management, it always seemed odd that the sales tactics people use everywhere else weren't being used by airlines

Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.

With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.

But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.
by dsekz | 2025-05-29 20:22:41+00:00
In its current state, the protections are pretty weak. I’m sure they’ll update it, and we’ll see what changes they bring. If this header is meant to serve as an anti-bot measure, then there’s a lot more work they need to do both on the JS and WASM sides. On top of that, processing fingerprint data on the backend, like building user/fingerprint profiles, analyzing detailed browser, device and low level connection info, and using AI to spot patterns, makes the system a lot more complex. However, based on the current implementation, I anticipate they’ll likely stick to a relatively simplistic approach.
by Izkata | 2025-05-29 20:22:51+00:00
> Is the propensity to generate IgG4 antibodies specific to mRNA vaccines? Is it a problem? It seems entirely plausible that an mRNA flu vaccine would look amazing for one season and less amazing years later. Or not.

Flu vaccine effectiveness has been trending slowly downwards for about a decade. I don't recall any established reasons for it, though.
by devday-admin | 2025-05-29 20:22:57+00:00
Fair points on several fronts:

You're right about the "10+ monthly" number - that was probably too high for most companies. More realistic is probably 3-5 monthly for growing startups, but your point stands.

On the tooling disputes - this is actually something we're grappling with. You're absolutely right that engineers want to pick their tools, and being forced into unfamiliar AI interfaces could be worse than a whiteboard. We're experimenting with letting candidates choose their preferred AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) rather than forcing our choice.

The cultural/social component point is spot-on. This isn't meant to replace human interaction entirely - more to supplement the technical assessment part. The in-person cultural evaluation is still crucial.

Curious: do you think there's any way to make technical assessment more realistic without introducing new tool friction?
by nickpinkston | 2025-05-29 20:23:14+00:00
Agree 100% - seems like they made Jony an offer that no one could refuse.

I also feel like Humane would've kept going if they really thought there was something there, and the fact they killed it makes me think they probably explored the idea space didn't find any easy wins.

Is Jony really going to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat when good founders couldn't find any?

Maybe, but I'd bet against it.
by marcosdumay | 2025-05-29 20:23:16+00:00
They are a low profit business, and that kind of liberty is stuff that pushes their profits even lower. They also always fail to differentiate from one another and are always competing on only price and how much fees they can keep hidden.

Personally, I do argue that it's worth it having tickets 10% more expensive and forcing the companies to always allocate all passengers, treat people humanely and etc. It's even worth it the 25% increase to make them let people carry luggage and avoid all the troubles that come with the optionality. But most governments seem to disagree.
by decimalenough | 2025-05-29 20:23:33+00:00
Singapore Airlines has been doing (used to do?) do this for ages: "GV2" was a Great Value fare for 2 people, "GV4" for 4.

I also don't find this particularly outrageous. Lots of companies do volume discounts, and traveling as a family gets very expensive very fast.

Finally, the fare bucket system used to price flights usually works the other way to penalize groups. If there's 3 seats left in the cheapest bucket, and you try to book for 4, you don't get 3 cheapest plus 1 more expensive, your entire group gets priced at the more expensive bucket.
by dangus | 2025-05-29 20:24:18+00:00
Your comment is a manifestation of this weird double standard that gets applied to atheists/agnostics where they’re supposed to be burdened to “find answers” and it’s a problem that they don’t have that religious burden.

It also manifests in this sort of insulted vibe that religious people get when their faith is questioned.

Basically, it’s socially not okay to question the faith of someone in a particular religion because it’s their culture, it’s their belief system, but the atheist/agnostic “belief” system isn’t respected in the same way. The person who has not found any evidence of god as described in various religions is told to seek enlightenment as if they are the ones who are incomplete.

People who use the scientific method don’t “pick at random” when there is no available answer. They test for answers and wait until they observe the answers and have the ability to reproduce those observations.

In short, the religious expect the non-religious to be afraid of dying and to be looking for a solution, when it’s completely valid and logical to have determined that there is no solution and therefore it is not worth spending time dwelling upon.
by nialse | 2025-05-29 20:24:40+00:00
> You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP.

We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-29 20:24:44+00:00
Airfare is the cheapest it has been in the entire history of commercial aviation except for immediately after 9/11 and the initial weeks of the global covid lockdown-- but both you and I know those periods don't count.

Most people are ok with terrible service because they save money.

Doesn't stop them from complaining, though.

And yes, "cheapest" includes taxes and all fees.

You can fly from New York to Paris non-stop for $150 if you are patient and flexible. (Please please please call me a liar.)

If you are not patient $500 is more typical.

Twenty years ago was a $800 ticket.

Thirty years ago that was a $1000 ticket.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-29 20:24:51+00:00
Does anybody remember Moxie? That little AI companion, designed to befriend children, teach them empathy, and listen to their secrets, until, of course, its parent company went bankrupt and left thousands of kids staring at a suddenly lifeless plastic husk. Poof. No warning, no explanation a five-year-old could understand, just the cold, abrupt silence of a product reaching its planned obsolescence.

What a perfect lesson in modern disillusionment. We're conditioning children to form emotional bonds with corporate-owned algorithms, only for those bonds to dissolve the moment the balance sheets tip the wrong way. Moxie wasn't a friend, it was a subscription service disguised as one, and when the servers shut down, so did the illusion. Imagine explaining to a child that their confidant, their playmate, their "someone who understands," was never real, just a temporary glitch in a venture capitalist's spreadsheet, and is now functionally DEAD.

And yet, this is the future we're barreling toward. AI therapists, virtual partners, digital pets, all of them promising connection while being one quarterly report away from vanishing. The psychological toll? A generation raised to expect abandonment as a feature, not a bug. They'll learn early that nothing is permanent, especially not the things designed to feel like they are.

The real mission Moxie and AI companions accomplish is that teaching kids that love, or something like it, can be discontinued without notice. Congratulations.