MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by low_tech_love | 2025-05-03 06:44:42+00:00
I still hope there is a future where the slop becomes so blatant that the majority (or at least a good portion) of the users lose interest, or something like that. The world is harder to predict than our brain wants us to think (at least I hope so). The more I think about AI the more it sounds like the problem is that companies wanted to put out whatever random crap they had cooking as quickly as possible just to try to win some race, but we have still not converged to the actual real, paradigm-changing applications. And I’m not sure that the answer is in the big corps because for them maybe it’s easier/more profitable to simply keep giving people what they want instead of actual useful things.
by nikkwong | 2025-05-03 06:45:21+00:00
I'm not saying it's going to replace it fully—the bigger the budget, the more room there could be allotted to artists like the ones you've mentioned. Yes, I enjoy their music with my entirety—Hans Zimmer especially. But on the margin, human artist will definitely be replaced. Think lower budget films/shows/games.

As you get higher up the ladder budget wise, quality wise; I think it's an open question as to what will happen. Working with humans introduces another variable, adds expense, time complexity, and so on. Not every producer, 100% of the time, is going to think this tradeoff is any longer worth it, when they can generate something of similar quality without much effort. Universal has already announced they're doing something similar for script writing. It just seems natural that human-made music is also on the chopping block.

Yes this does sound like the enshittification of everything; and I'm certainly not advocating for this course of events at all. But granted how capitalism works, how the human mind works, it just seems like the direction things are likely to go, given how capable this technology is.
by sans_souse | 2025-05-03 06:46:45+00:00
I wish that same judge were handling consumer rights right about now, because someone needs to put a proverbial foot down and curb what advertising has become.

Stop Purple Dragon Cartoons from popping up while I'm reading an article.

Stop the 15 second Purple Dragon commercial that plays every G D time I watch an online video.

Stop screaming at me to buy Purple Dinos while I'm pumping gas that already I'm paying out the A on to fill my tank.

(I'd be curious to know if anyone lives next door to one of these gas stations; it must be obnoxious being subjected to that 24/7.)

It's not professional - It's a bad look. Liberty Mutual - I'm talking to you. Et al. Y'all have gone off the rails.
by waterhouse | 2025-05-03 06:49:21+00:00
"There are those who tell us that any choice from among theoretically-equivalent alternatives is merely a question of taste. These are the people who bring up the Strong Church-Turing Thesis in discussions of programming languages meant for use by humans. They are malicious idiots. The only punishment which could stand a chance at reforming these miscreants into decent people would be a year or two at hard labor. And not just any kind of hard labor: specifically, carrying out long division using Roman numerals." — Stanislav Datskovskiy
by arp242 | 2025-05-03 06:49:39+00:00
I used it a few weeks ago to track down a weird regression/bug in Firefox. A few years ago I used it to track down a regression in Wine.

That's probably the most important case: large complex codebases with lots of changes where "wtf is going on" isn't so obvious from just the code.

I've never used it for any of my personal projects or even at my dayjob, because they've much smaller with far fewer changes (relatively speaking).
by pogue | 2025-05-03 06:52:11+00:00
While you might be able to get the purity of the compound itself tested, the user buying it ready for injection or even homebrewing it themselves can still have serious sterility issues, heavy metals contaminates and other nasty leftovers in the batch itself from shady companies that sell these "peptides" and etc.

When a low quality lab in China is producing something that normally costs such a high amount there are always corners cut, quality issues and people manufacturing it that are not using the same quality control and standards you would even get from a compounding pharmacy.

Author William Llewellyn's talk on how the black market of anabolic steroids evolved over the years explains how things like this are made and what sort of contaminates get into gray/black market injectables (regardless of oil or water based).

Anabolic Steroids: an evolving black market (28mins) https://youtu.be/0LL7bL4F9G4
by cubefox | 2025-05-03 06:54:19+00:00
> However, on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet, a chantress of Amun-Re who lived some 3,000 years ago, Nut's appearance deviates from the norm. Here, a distinctive, undulating black curve crosses her body from the soles of her feet to the tips of her fingers, with stars painted in roughly equal numbers above and below the curve.

> Dr. Graur said, "I think that the undulating curve represents the Milky Way and could be a representation of the Great Rift—the dark band of dust that cuts through the Milky Way's bright band of diffused light. Comparing this depiction with a photograph of the Milky Way shows the stark similarity."

The stars around the arch are strange. As far as I know, the discovery that the Milky Way consists of stars was made only much later, after the invention of the telescope.
by jonpemp | 2025-05-03 06:54:36+00:00
We’ve been working on StockPenguins.com, a stock investing platform designed specifically for equity analysts, small funds, and independent investors who want professional-grade tools without the Bloomberg price tag.

Seeking for feedback to improve!

Our Unique Selling Point:

StockPenguins combines AI chat with clean, visualized company financials, a powerful stock screener, and tools like peer comparison, earnings calendars, and top company dashboards — all tailored to help analysts go from research to insight much faster.
by istjohn | 2025-05-03 06:54:51+00:00
I disagree. Most people will go through a time in their life where they could benefit from a therapist--maybe to cope with bullying in high school--perhaps to mentally and emotionally process a terminal illness or the loss of a spouse or child.

And then some people will benefit from just having someone to talk to about the stresses of daily life. I don't think that means they have an inadequate social network or that it reflects poorly on modern society. We should be happy to live in a time where we have the resources and ability to proactively care for our mental health just as we do our teeth.
by demosito666 | 2025-05-03 06:56:20+00:00
But this money won’t probably be spent further in any ”productive” way, they will be locked in some financial tools that will only help extracting funds from the real sector, which is what one probably really cares about when they say that “money should work”. It’s not similar to a government investment in building a bridge which, while it’s also spending state money, creates ripples of economic activity involving thousands of people and dozens of industries.
by jbm | 2025-05-03 06:57:55+00:00
Strange, my copy of fitbox died after about 2-3 years of occasional use without any abuse.

To be fair, this was the case for my Joycons too (Calling it drift is branding, they are effectively unusable)

I like Nintendo's games but their QC has always been a little off. I got bad joypads even in the 80s when we got a NES. (Not having the internet and being a dumb kid I thought I was only limited to moving up and left on Zelda for whatever reason)
by psgdev | 2025-05-03 07:01:41+00:00
People regularly test black/gray market peptides in labs for both heavy metals and sterility (USP 61 or 71 I believe). The production of something like Testosterone/anabolic steroids is completely different has higher risks of contamination than peptides which use recombinant DNA or solid phase peptide synthesis.

That video is literally about anabolic steroids not peptides. Not to mention there was 0 testing labs in 2012 that users could send their items to, to get tested while there is many now a days. Back then in 2012 unless you had a friend at a University lab that knew analytical chemistry you were out of luck to get anything tested.

You aren't wrong about a lab in China cutting corners, having quality issues and low quality control standards but people don't care if they see 10,000+ people using peptides for decades without a single complaint about infection or real problems.

"is producing something that normally costs such a high amount" the cost has very little to do with the chemicals themself, the cost is about recouping R&D costs and having a 90% profit margin.
by feverzsj | 2025-05-03 07:02:28+00:00
No one says companies should lose money. The government can cover the price for everyone just like they did for covid vaccines. Considering obesity adds between $147 billion and $210 billion to annual U.S. health-care expenses[0], it would cost much less.

[0]: https://theweek.com/articles/870872/americas-deadly-obesity-...
by crote | 2025-05-03 07:07:36+00:00
Rather the opposite in Europe, actually.

The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway.

The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
by PostOnce | 2025-05-03 07:11:41+00:00
It's no moral stretch to say that if society pays tax to provide police and courts to enforce intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals to encourage production of pharmaceuticals (note: not because of some "moral right" of a chemist), and you the pharma co don't hold up your end of the bargain (producing the pharmaceuticals), then we as a society need not hold up ours (enforcing the limited rights we granted you with our courts and police).

That seems like a straightforward deal. You provide us benefits, we provide you benefits. A one sided deal like you propose (we protect "your" medicine and yet get none ourselves) is the real moral stretch.
by quails8mydog | 2025-05-03 07:12:12+00:00
People aren't forced to pay for the BBC though. Public funding is through a TV licence rather than tax, with the licence being "required" only if you watch live TV or use the BBC streaming service. Given the other streaming services available it's very easy to watch TV without it. I've never paid.

Not really sure why skewing left would improve trust ratings either, unless you're suggesting that people on the right don't trust any media, or only trust media that is right wing coded. The BBC is definitely not a left wing outlet by the standards of the UK.
by photonthug | 2025-05-03 07:12:41+00:00
> Who is anyone to say that this use case is wrong?

So when faced with an important question, you've decided to opt for an indifferent shrug, which is frustrating. But the usual answers apply here so you're in luck. As with most other things.. one should probably consult with experts or practitioners in the field, governments, family or human friends you trust, or shit just poll society in general if you don't trust any of the other people.

I think if you want to consult desperate and vulnerable people, or a random company who stands to profit from "anything goes!", then you already know you're not going to get a very well-considered kind of response
Show HN: InkTodos – calm, distraction free todo list for Kindle
by asaddhamani | 2025-05-03 07:13:59+00:00
InkTodos is a calm, distraction free todo list optimised for e-ink readers like Kindle and Kobo. There are no login walls, no cloud sync, no fancy features. Just a simple checklist that you can keep open on your e-reader while you focus on what matters - your work, not a fancy todo-list app.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-05-03 07:16:43+00:00
:) I'll bite...

https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c0cb1fd881919867820db3ee3850 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c027e10c8191936ac1e86adb5bcd https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815bf6174488191b2b93498059c4352 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815be7921b4819191544de9f06b336f https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815bf16568081918ef3d26d0572701d https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c00655888191a717f4ef8f895af3 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c0583198819184c4f01b8fa26ae0 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c0acb6fc8191a8a2ec0c71df307a https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c233ef00819189e0713abd0f3080 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c265b0948191801b5c970451d705

For bonus points.. the tail-less crocodile.. https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c29c1bf081918c791447441c400e

You just lack imagination, like I said.. there are almost no limits but pixel density and aspect ratio currently.
by dmurray | 2025-05-03 07:19:16+00:00
It's exactly at the level I thought was communicated by the title and introduction.

"Human level competitive", "solidly amateur-level human performance", "beat 100% of beginners and 55% of intermediate players". That robot would definitely win some games in your local club league, except that it doesn't serve, and unless it's cheating in ways the announcement glosses over like extra cameras - DeepMind have some history here so I reserve the right to be skeptical.

The only thing I'd take issue with in the abstract is "Table tennis... requires human players to undergo years of training to achieve an advanced level of proficiency." While that sentence is true, it's irrelevant to this robot since this robot only plays at intermediate proficiency, a level reachable by a moderately athletic human with some practice.

By contrast, the AlphaGo [0] AlphaZero [1] and AlphaStar [2] papers claim "mastery", "superhuman", "world champion level", "Grandmaster-level", "human professional" ability - all defensible claims given their performance and match conditions in the respective games.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292074166_Mastering...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1724-z
by RobinL | 2025-05-03 07:19:25+00:00
https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115?lang=en-GB

It's personal taste, but this is significantly better than the last couple of fiction books I've read (which were both well reviewed).

I think it's good enough that it's hard to argue is emotionally vacuous, unless you define that to mean 'it was written by a machine'

I think increasing we'll find AIs are extremely good at emotional 'manipulation' (which I mean in the same sense has how a good tearjerker is in some sense emotionally manipulative).
by tpmoney | 2025-05-03 07:19:35+00:00
It's easy to feel like you have a responsibility to be informed, and as a result you have to be drinking from the fire hose all the time. I noticed myself getting into that habit and that it was dragging me down to places I didn't want to be. After spending some time thinking about it I came to the conclusion that there are very very very few things that happen in this world that would change for the worse if I didn't find out about it until a week later. As a result there's no need to be plugged in 24/7. I can get updates on things once or so a week and the world will go on exactly as it would have if I was plugged in every day, but my mental health will be much better. Bonus is that I don't have to wade through the fog of "breaking news", I can get a more accurate and complete picture the first time rather than drips and drabs over a week.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-03 07:22:32+00:00
> The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job.

That the promise but is it the reality? Deaths of despair suggest it isn't.

Deindustrialization is an issue once you move supply chains overseas or to the robots, with it whole parts of country die. No truck drivers means less money spent on truck stops, motels (for sleep), and in their local economy (no pubs, bowling alley, etc.)

But the threat isn't just replacing drivers, it is replacing entire eco systems of jobs.
by jwarden | 2025-05-03 07:23:43+00:00
The way, I understand it is that with a Poisson process, at every small moment in time there’s a small chance of the event happening. This leads to on average lambda events occurring during every (larger) unit of time.

But this process has no “memory” so no matter how much time has passed since the last event, the number of events expected during the next unit of time is still lambda.
by autoexec | 2025-05-03 07:25:17+00:00
People's 3DS games are already being found to be unplayable after sitting on the shelf and switch games will meet the same fate. Nintendo has been failing both paying customers and preservationists for a very long time now. Piracy will again be the only way people will have to play many Nintendo switch titles. In other cases, people will have to wait for nintendo to release a limited selection of overpriced (and sometimes edited/censored) versions of certain older games on whatever future platform they're currently pushing.
by vidarh | 2025-05-03 07:25:57+00:00
Computer science is math in the same way that physics is philosophy, in that computer science certainly started as math, just like the natural sciences used to be subdisciplines of philosophy.

But it's hardly a useful grouping any more. You can study and do well in computer science with minimal knowledge of most of the core mathematical subjects.

While graph theory certainly crosses over into math, you can cover most of the parts of it relevant to most computer science as a discussion of algorithms that would not be the natural way of dealing with them for most mathematicians.
by crote | 2025-05-03 07:26:10+00:00
Don't forget geography, and by extension type of freight.

The United States doesn't have a lot of navigable waterways, and none go east-west. This means that any bulk goods you want to transport have to go via rail. There is no other option. As a result the railway network has been optimized to do bulk transport at the lowest price possible, even if it means sacrificing speed and quality. After all, coal doesn't care if it sits in a siding for several days.

It's true that the US is shipping an awful lot of tonnes via rail, but this doesn't say anything about its ability to ship regular goods. Getting a single wagon from point to point in a timely manner is significantly more complicated than doing the same with an entire train.
by tpmoney | 2025-05-03 07:27:35+00:00
> Improvements rarely start with "I'm satisfied with this". Writing off complaining because one conflates complaining with misery is silly.

I've found improvements rarely start with complaining either. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that people I know that are complainers are rarely the source of improvements. They're usually too busy complaining about the situation and the proposed solutions to pick one.

Improvements most often come from a mindset of "this thing is not the way I want it to be, so what am I going to do to change that?" Sometimes "complain to someone with the ability to change it" is the right answer, but usually you have some degree of agency yourself and it's a lot more effective to exercise that agency than to get someone else to act on your behalf in response to your complaints.
by mort96 | 2025-05-03 07:27:59+00:00
I find it disgusting that our society invests so much effort into manipulating everyone, companies spend billions on armies of psychologists, computer science experts and data centres whose only job is to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. Targeted advertising is even more disgusting than non-targeted advertising, because there you're trying to find an individual person's weaknesses for more effective manipulation. It's simply evil.

That, and the existence of targeted advertising incentivises collecting and correlating as much data about people all the time. If it wasn't for targeted ads, I'm sure that Google would've actually just used data from their city-wide surveillance networks for improving their cars (at least until a government would've asked for the data, which is also an issue). But with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.
by buovjaga | 2025-05-03 07:28:49+00:00
> Reported in 2011, still not fixed: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673

Perhaps spurred by this comment, there was new discussion in the report and it turned out Microsoft has fixed the issue in Windows 11: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42673#c8...

Quote:

"I was one of the many who reported this problem in one from or another. The problem is Windows-specific. I have found out that the problem actually comes from the Windows print system. There is no way to check that a printer is actually active or working or even present without incurring a long time-out in case the printer is not present or powered. Trying to check the defualt printer will incur the same time-out.

Calc apparently wants to check the printer to know how to construct its layout, and has to wait for the time-out to continue.

Some of the comments that claim that Calc hangs and never returns have probably not waited long enough for the timeout.

On my new Windows 11 computer, this printer system behavior has been changed and I no longer experience a delay while opening Calc."
Social Game Idea: A prize pool runs forever
by xingwu | 2025-05-03 07:29:37+00:00
I got a crazy idea:

- there's a prize pool holding $10000 - anyone who put $0.1 into it will win the full prize, if nobody else participate within 5 min

All logic in an open-source smart contract.

What will happen?

It won't make any money but might gain a lot of traffic, worth building?
Show HN: Community Ninja – Discover and Engage with Communities Using AI Agents
by shashanoid | 2025-05-03 07:30:04+00:00
Hey everyone! I’m excited to share Community Ninja -- a tool I built to make finding and engaging with online communities way easier. If you’ve ever struggled to keep up with communities on Reddit, Facebook, or X to promote a project or connect with users, this might be for you.

Here’s what it does:

Community Discovery: Scans Reddit, Facebook, and X using agents to find active groups talking about your niche or product. No more manual hunting.

Smart Engagement: AI analyzes conversations and suggests posts or replies that fit the group’s vibe, so you’re not just spamming links.

Multi-Platform Posting: Write a post once, and the AI tweaks it for each platform’s style, letting you share to multiple groups in one go.

I started this project after burning hours trying to promote my tennis app across Facebook groups. It was a mess—too many communities, too little time. Community Ninja now pulls in hundreds of users a week for me with way less effort.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! What’s your biggest pain point with community engagement? Any features you’d want to see? Let me know what you think or if you run into any bugs.
by autoexec | 2025-05-03 07:30:48+00:00
> Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy?

I agree. It should be a requirement to receive copyright protection. The US Copyright Office should also make those copies available for download on their servers the moment that the work enters the public domain.