MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mouse_ | 2025-05-24 19:45:50+00:00
> According to academics, one risk scenario involves collaboration between AI bots. Just imagine: hundreds of AI-driven social media profiles begin to pop up online, weaving narratives about certain companies. The information spread isn’t necessarily fake, but may just be the amplification of existing news. In response, real social media users start to react, highlighting the bots’ chosen message.

...??? this is how the market has always worked, no? Bots or not, you've always been able to buy sentiment.
by hajile | 2025-05-24 19:45:51+00:00
The problem with US healthcare is bloat.

According to Google, person in Spain spends on average $4,432 per person per year with some $3,113 of that being paid by the government.

The US government pays out $6,000 per person per year or nearly TWICE as much.

The problem is that $6000 is still less than half of the $14,570 per person per year (2023) healthcare costs in the US.

And of course, the US government payments don't cover everyone equally. They only cover the elderly and some subset of the very poor (mostly kids).

The only fix is reducing US healthcare costs to something more like the rest of the world, but that requires sharing drug R&D costs evenly with other countries (raising your costs), reigning in insurance companies, eliminating over-credentializing of doctors and other medical professionals, fixing school cost/debt, and reducing/eliminating the massive amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy/paperwork (allowing doctors to reduce staff and see more patients per day which reduces overall medical costs).
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-24 19:46:00+00:00
Look at how quickly the cops tracked Luigi Mangione. It’s not clear how much face recognition (as opposed to manual search) contributed to that, but even for a person who wore a mask, all it took was a slip up where he took the mask off in one place.

I am not saying this is a bad thing in the case of a pre-planned murder. But it does make it obvious how hard it might be to evade notice in the future, assuming you are doing it for more legitimate privacy reasons.
by 13years | 2025-05-24 19:47:08+00:00
I think it is creating a growing interest in authenticity among some. Although, it still feels like this is a minority opinion. Every content platform is being flooded with AI content. Social media floods it into all of my feeds.

I wish I could push a button and filter it all out. But that's the problem we have created. It is nearly impossible to do. If you want to consume truly human authentic content, it is nearly impossible to know. Everyone I interact with now might just be a bot.
by toffeefinance | 2025-05-24 19:47:28+00:00
As a software engineer and aspiring entrepreneur, I found myself overwhelmed by the complexity of existing financial tools. They were either too simplistic or overloaded with features I didn't need. This led me to create Toffee, a minimalist debt payoff tracker designed for individuals who appreciate simplicity and efficiency.

The Problem Many financial tools focus on budgeting, expense tracking, or investment portfolios. However, I noticed a gap: a straightforward, user-friendly tool dedicated solely to debt repayment. I wanted something that would help me:

Visualize my debt payoff journey

Choose between different repayment strategies (e.g., snowball vs. avalanche)

Stay motivated with clear milestones

Existing solutions were either too complex, lacked focus on debt, or were not user-friendly.

The Solution Toffee is a web-based application that allows users to:

Input multiple debts with varying interest rates and balances

Select a repayment strategy (snowball or avalanche)

Track progress with visual aids and milestones

Receive reminders and motivational messages

It's built with a focus on simplicity, ensuring that users can start tracking their debt payoff journey within minutes.

Tech Stack Frontend: React Native with TypeScript

Backend: Supabase

Database: PostgreSQL

Hosting: EAS

The application is designed to be responsive and accessible across devices.

What's Next I'm currently working on:

Implementing user authentication for personalized experiences

Adding support for recurring payments and income tracking

Integrating with financial APIs for automatic data fetching

Feedback Welcome I'm sharing Toffee with here to gather feedback and insights. If you're interested in trying it out or have suggestions, please visit https://apps.apple.com/app/toffee-debt-tracker/id6743946913 and let me know your thoughts.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-24 19:48:03+00:00
It's a simple square pole lashing knot (also known as a japanese square lashing). It works well with almost any kind of cordage. The knot holds the poles in a 90-degree orientation and the finish of the knot tightens the main cord to lock it in place. Natural fiber actually locks better than nylon as it has more 'tooth'. The use of nylon is mostly to resist the elements, adds a bit more strength, is cheaper to manufacture and easy to cut for disassembly.
by antisthenes | 2025-05-24 19:48:35+00:00
> you're actually living off of the economic surplus of all the people working hard in the rat race.

That's one way to look at it.

Another way is that you're living off of the economic surplus you were producing while working a highly paid 9-5 job that paid a shitload of taxes. Now it's your time to live off the surplus you produced and take it easier.

> I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.

It's not a very positive lifestyle from the standpoint of increasing the GDP to some maximum amount, yeah.
by thayne | 2025-05-24 19:49:12+00:00
I agree with most of what you said, but json's numbers are problematic. For one thing, many languages have 64-bit integers, which can't be precisely represented as a double, so serializing such a value can lead to subtle bug if it is deserialized by a parser that only supports doubles. And deserializing in languages that have multiple numeric types is complicated, since the parser often doesn't have enough context to know what the best numeric type to use is.
by smcin | 2025-05-24 19:49:56+00:00
The US's first "Cop City", the $117m Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, officially opened April 29, 2025, despite years of opposition and a suppressed effort to get a referendum against it on the ballot. [0] Did not get any discussion here on HN at all. [1] characterizes it as "a massive, militarized police training compound in the Weelaunee Forest in the southeast outskirts of Atlanta" and lists its security partners as Flock Safety (automated license plate reader (ALPR) vendor, #58 fastest-growing company) and Motorola Solutions. [1] lists its Corporate and Nonprofit Foundation Donors and Sponsors: finance, real-estate companies, Acuity Brands, AT&T, Cushman & Wakefield, KPMG, McKesson, Invesco, Rollins, Synovus and others, Arthur Blank Foundation, The Bierenbaum Family Foundation, Connolly Family Foundation, The Goizueta Foundation, of Atlanta, Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, of Atlanta, O. Wayne Rollins Foundation, of Atlanta, J. Bulow Campbell Foundation and others.

(FYI the parent Guardian article is about England and Wales, not the US. There is a similar level of surveillance cameras but comparing use of force to the US, police in England and Wales only fatally shot 2 people in 2023/24 [2], 24 deaths in or following police custody and a further 60 fatalities defined as other deaths during or following police contact. for which [2b] is a report with demographics.)

[0]: "Atlanta’s controversial ‘Cop City’ training center opens after years of fighting" https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/at...

[1]: "The Companies and Foundations behind Cop City" https://afsc.org/companies-and-foundations-behind-cop-city

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/319287/deaths-during-or-...

[2b]: https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/our-work/research-and-stati...
by jfarmer | 2025-05-24 19:50:09+00:00
John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."

> The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.

> Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

> It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.
by SamuelAdams | 2025-05-24 19:50:58+00:00
Maybe, but the author is an experienced vulnerability analyst. Obviously if you get a lot of people who have no experience with this you may get a lot of sloppy, false reports.

But this poster actually understands the AI output and is able to find real issues (in this case, use-after-free). From the article:

> Before I get into the technical details, the main takeaway from this post is this: with o3 LLMs have made a leap forward in their ability to reason about code, and if you work in vulnerability research you should start paying close attention. If you’re an expert-level vulnerability researcher or exploit developer the machines aren’t about to replace you. In fact, it is quite the opposite: they are now at a stage where they can make you significantly more efficient and effective.
by patcon | 2025-05-24 19:51:44+00:00
Doesn't this assume one truth or one final answer to all questions? What if there are many?

What if asking one way means you are likely to have your search satisfied by one truth, but asking another way means you are best served by another wisdom?

EDIT: and the structure of language/thought can't know solid truth from more ambiguous wisdom. The same linguistic structures must encode and traverse both. So there will be false positives and false negatives, I suppose? I dunno, I'm shooting from the hip here :)
by mrob | 2025-05-24 19:52:15+00:00
I don't see a problem with that. If you are using the find in page feature then you are very likely going to type something. Your hands are already on the keyboard. The fact that you said "press Ctrl+F" instead of clicking the menus is evidence for this. All the options are best accessed with keyboard shortcuts, so Fitt's law is not relevant.

However, I just noticed one big UI flaw in this interface. The keyboard shortcuts for finding the next and previous occurrences of the search phrase (enter and shift-enter respectively) are not easily discoverable. They ought to be mentioned in the tooltips for those buttons.

EDIT: And another problem: the next and previous buttons aren't even correctly marked as buttons. It's worse than the "flat" buttons used elsewhere, it's "stealth flat" buttons that only appear when you mouse over them.
by randomor | 2025-05-24 19:52:28+00:00
Except we don't have any AI features yet although that's definitely part of the plan. :D

I'd recommend asking in the r/macapps subreddit for my diverse answers. Here are two of my picks:

- Raycast has a really nice AI feature.

- Aura by Meng To is one of my favorite LLM chat tool with a special prompt builder: https://aurachat.io/
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-24 19:52:42+00:00
The answer is that these databases are hugely valuable for targeted advertising and marketing, and if they’re relatively cheap to build then that makes everything even easier. Law enforcement gets access because in most countries the law allows them to make data requests to existing companies, and “we aren’t going to help the cops solve a murder” is bad PR when you’ve already collected the relevant data.
by antithesizer | 2025-05-24 19:53:20+00:00
Lacan developed the idea of "deferred understanding" in his clinical practice and (infamously) deployed it in his teaching as well. It sounds a little suspicious at first, but it's not difficult to grasp what it is or why it might be beneficial in certain contexts where repression is faced. For example, it's a cliche on the left that far more people like the idea of socialism when it's described to them piecemeal without being labeled as such than would be willing to endorse "socialism" by name. Drawing out that tacit endorsement is a matter of "deferring understanding"--bypassing someone's resistance to an idea they don't understand well, but nevertheless have strong feelings about, by introducing them to it in a somewhat confusing way, so that they come to understand it better before they realize what exactly it is that they're coming to understand. In Lacan's approach understanding is a specific process with its own benefits and drawbacks, rather than the universal purpose of all communication, nor beneficial for every purpose communication might be engaged in to pursue. Confusing writing is like the proverbial knife that can be used to injure or, in the hands of a surgeon, to heal. This is why art students sometimes practice drawing images that have been turned upside down, so that they can focus on the details that are there in front of their eyes without being distracted by their own comprehension standing in for the colors and shapes actually present: "this is an image of a cow and I know what a cow is supposed to look like, so once I have recognized that it is a cow, there is no longer any need to keep looking." One of the big leaps that art students make is in learning to rigorously look at what they're drawing beyond merely seeing and recognizing what it is, which is the usual everyday way of looking. In the same way Lacan taught his students to rigorously listen to their patients and all the little oddities in the way they describe their problems that might otherwise be dismissed out of hand by a less attentive doctor who too quickly decides they know what is going on. This way they might avoid being fooled by their own understanding before they've had a chance to engage with the irreducible complexity and uniqueness of this or that specific neurosis. Understanding is not always the right tool for the job, or at least not the right tool for every step of every communicative job.
by gavmor | 2025-05-24 19:53:33+00:00
Yes, it would—the dialogic interface is an anchor weighing us down!

Yes, yes, it's an accessible demonstration of the technology's mind-blowing flexibility, but all this "I, you, me, I'm" nonsense clutters the context window and warps the ontology in way that introduces a major epistomological "optical illusion" that exploits (inadvertently?) a pretty fundamental aspect of human cognition—namely our inestimably powerful faculty for "theory of mind."

Install the industrial wordsmithing assembly line behind a brutalist facade—any non-skeumorphic GUI from the past 20 years aughta do.

Check out eg https://n8n.io for a quick way to plug one-shot inference into an ad-hoc pipeline.
by threeducks | 2025-05-24 19:53:37+00:00
> But we have two Echo devices in our household and the data shows whether a request came from the Echo Plus in the kitchen or the original Echo on our daughter Coco’s bedside table, where it has sat since around her ninth birthday. [...] So I now know that it was Coco who wanted to know what it is to be omnisexual and what omniscient means.

Doesn't it feel wrong to the author to snoop through that private information? And publishing it in a news article definitely crosses a line.
by johnb231 | 2025-05-24 19:53:49+00:00
Their success with Doom and Quake was a confluence of things that cannot be replicated today. Carmack's programming talent gave them at least a year head start versus the competition. They introduced a new genre with no competition. Romero wrote game development tools that made them productive and able to deliver quickly. The artists and game designers created something innovative and fun to play, that stood the test of time.

Duke Nukem was released in 1996, then Unreal was released in 1998 and that's when they lost their technical advantage. The market became saturated with FPS.

Romero and Tom Hall founded Ion Storm which produced one successful game - Deus Ex. He gave up on AAA and went back to creating small games.

Carmack's licensed code was the basis of many successful games beyond the 90s, including Half Life 1 and 2 and the latest Doom games. We wouldn't have Half Life without id Software. Maybe Valve Software wouldn't exist.
by randomor | 2025-05-24 19:55:22+00:00
iOS doesn't have this clipboard magic of course, just relies on the regular share sheet. The most interesting part other than the waterfall layout is the swiping reader view, here is 30s video: https://x.com/randomor/status/1910111028865818664

Yes it's configurable, between 1-10s, defaulted to 5s.
by lisper | 2025-05-24 19:56:16+00:00
I think there may be a terminological disconnect here. S-expressions and canonical S-expressions are not the same thing. S-expressions (non-canonical) are a comparable to JSON, intended to be read and written by humans, and actually much easier to read and write than JSON because it uses less punctuation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression

A canonical S-expression is a binary format, intended to be both generated and parsed by machines, not humans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_S-expressions
by tocs3 | 2025-05-24 19:56:43+00:00
I had to idea how fast the O2 is depleted in some of the closed spaces (made of steel).

In closed containment, the time taken for oxygen level to fall to 19.5%, 10% and 6% at 10°C were 1.45, 18.08 and 25.3 h respectively whilst at 23°C the times were 0.3, 1.56 and 2.41 respectively.
by ivape | 2025-05-24 19:56:47+00:00
What are the incentives for sales for allowing you to do that? What incentives do people in agile or product development or management have to let developers partake? There's nothing to gain and everything to lose. See, I would love to live in Disneyworld too.

The only lesson to be learned from all of this is when you build your next company, don't allow these people in. I'll keep beating that drum to eternity, because I saw first-hand how the work of tech people is leeched off by so many.
by Mofpofjis | 2025-05-24 19:56:47+00:00
> "Maybe you haven’t really trusted anyone with your wins yet"

At the end of one of her interviews on youtbue, Kelly McGonigal explains that -- paraphrased -- being praised to the face creates an intimate context around the praiser and the praisee, in which it's the praiser that sets the tone and initiates the dynamics. In a way, they find themselves in a position where they evaluate you. This is why taking praise gracefully is not trivial; people being praised usually show bodily signs of stress. It takes a real effort for the praisee not to dismiss or belittle their own achievement, just to get out of those dynamics as soon as possible.

At the end of said interview, the host praised Ms. McGonigal to her face. In response, she drew his attention to the fact that while he was talking, speaking those words of appreciation, she swallowed. The act of her swallowing was a kind of stress-relief (IIRC). (I'm sure we can all relate to choking up slightly when praised to the face.) She highlighted the dynamics of being praised to the face live, mid-interview, through her own reaction.

You may be avoiding sharing your wins with others because you instinctively might want to avoid the situation where others qualify you. In that situation, you experience being the subject of an evaluation, and that -- i.e., being talked about -- might feel like a subordinate position to be in, even if the judging is 100% positive. My remedy is to just yield, lean back, give in, permit the other person to be in control, allow them to have all power in that context, and just bask in the glorious warmth they're sending your way. It can be an experience that you remember for decades after, and you're going to start to crave it. (Peer recognition can be a huge motivator, i.e., doing things for recognition. Whether that's good or bad, is a separate topic :))
by perrygeo | 2025-05-24 19:57:46+00:00
Frequentists stats aren't wrong. It's just a special case that has been elevated to unreasonable standards. When the physical phenomenon in question is truly random, frequentist methods can be a convenient mathematical shortcut. But should we be teaching scientists the "shortcut"? Should we be forcing every publication to use these shortcuts? Statistic's role in the scientific reproducibility crisis says no.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-05-24 19:57:56+00:00
There are quite a few practical problems that bother me with AI: centralization of power, enablement of fake news, AI porn of real women, exploitation of cheap labour to label data, invalid AI responses from tech support, worse quality software, lowered literacy rates, the growing environmental footprint.

The philosophical implications are maybe the least of my worries, and maybe a red herring? It seems like the only thing those in power are interested in discussing while there are very real damages being done.
Show HN: Validating DefendChurn – Early warning system for SaaS customer churn
by FlorinDobinciuc | 2025-05-24 19:58:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been observing a pattern in SaaS communities: founders discovering churn after it's too late to prevent it.

Common posts I see: • "Lost 3 customers to expired cards this month" • "Customer disappeared without warning" • "Realized my churn rate is 12%, not the 6% I thought"

The problem seems to be reactive discovery vs. proactive prevention.

Most churn appears to have warning signs 1-3 weeks early: - Failed payment attempts (during Stripe's retry period) - Login frequency drops 50%+ - Decreased feature usage - Support tickets about basic features

So I'm building DefendChurn: connects to Stripe, monitors these signals, sends daily Slack alerts for at-risk customers with pre-written save email templates.

Currently validating demand with a waitlist: https://defendchurn.space

Questions for HN: 1. Is this solving a real problem or am I imagining it? 2. What other churn warning signs should I track? 3. Any technical approaches you'd recommend for analyzing customer behavior patterns?

Built for micro-SaaS (simple setup, affordable pricing) rather than enterprise.

Feedback welcome – especially from anyone who's dealt with SaaS churn!
by Jolter | 2025-05-24 19:58:50+00:00
Ah, I see,,, Wikipedia tells us:

“While a majority of adult overdoses are linked to suicide attempts, many cases are accidental, often due to the use of more than one paracetamol-containing product over an extended period.[106] […] Overdoses are frequently related to high-dose recreational use of prescription opioids, as these opioids are most often combined with paracetamol.[110] The overdose risk may be heightened by frequent consumption of alcohol.[111]“

So, combination drugs being used recreationally, yeah I guess I can believe that would lead to not keeping track of how much paracetamol you took today. And especially over time.

I figured it would be pretty hard to accidentally exceed 4000 mg in a day, but if you’re high on some stronger painkillers, which you’re developing some tolerance for, then it’s easy to just keeping taking more than you did last time.
by rsync | 2025-05-24 19:59:18+00:00
I went down the acme/HiCA/RCE rabbit hole a year or so ago and, while I don't remember the specifics, my feeling was that the RCE was not that dangerous and was put into place by greedy scammers thwarting the rules of cert (re)selling and not by shadowy actors trying to infiltrate sensitive infra ...

Is there new information ? Was my impression wrong ?