MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by odo1242 | 2025-05-28 14:34:25+00:00
Not really, because it takes a LOT of hashes to actually get any crypto out of the system. Yes, you’re technically taking the user’s power and getting paid crypto, but unless you’re delaying the user for a long time, you’re only really being paid about a ten thousandth of a cent for a page visit.

Also virus scanners and corporate networks would hate you, because hackers are probably trying to embed whatever library you’re using into other unsuspecting sites.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-28 14:34:40+00:00
The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors, even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't support real journalism, why would anyone bother?

The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.
by mattmanser | 2025-05-28 14:34:59+00:00
Friendship groups are like mini echo chambers.

One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.

If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.

But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-28 14:35:01+00:00
>"Well, the truck plowed into a schoolbus full of middle schoolers, killing everyone, but at least all the families got a nice chunk of cash!"

The 16 year old kid driving the F250 on bald tires, whose driving experience is grand theft auto 4 could drive into that school bus as well.

Whereas you cant source a single story of any driverless vehicle crashing into a school bus.

Do you think we should hold drivers to a higher standard so that we can hold driverless vehicles to higher standard?
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-05-28 14:35:07+00:00
When I was using Windows many years ago, there used to be Sysinternals Autoruns[1] which could control your context menu entries. I have no idea whether it continues to work under Windows 11 though.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
by cladopa | 2025-05-28 14:35:11+00:00
> For me, the who cares part started with the latest election cycle and current president.

I would say it started before, when the supposedly most powerful country of the world was ruled by a senile person and it was not replaced immediately. Instead half the country negated the evidence that we now know was true.

I am not American so I observe those things with curiosity from outside and from inside only as a visitor.

But I don't know: the weapons of mass destruction, the too big to fail. Most people didn't care them unless it affected them personally, like savings.

My theory is the opposite, that people care too much. Company owners wanted free money so if the country gets destroyed in the process, they will "not care" as much for the people that printing money throws under the bus as the "care" about them and their personal proffit.

In a two-party system the same thing happens. They do "not care" about having a senile president as much as they "care" about not losing the power for "their" party. Now the same thing happens with Ukraine and Trump.

The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy competition for getting into power.
by ecshafer | 2025-05-28 14:35:24+00:00
The lack of knowledge of and application of fundamental engineering principles is a huge issue in the Software world. While its great that people can pick up programming and learn and get a job, I have noticed this is often correlated with people not having a background in Hard Science and Mathematics. Even amongst CS graduates there are a lot of who seem to get through without any mathematical or engineering maturity. Having a couple people in a team with Physics, Mathematics, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering backgrounds, etc. can really be a big asset as they can fight back and offer a classical solution that will work nearly 100% of the time. Whereas someone who just did a Bootcamp and no formal scientific training seems less likely to be able to grasp or have prior knowledge of classical approaches.

I think that this is one reason Software has such a flavor of the month approach to development.
Show HN: UpToWhere – Visualize What You Can See from Any Point on Earth
by tonvilro | 2025-05-28 14:35:24+00:00
The idea came to me after spotting the sea peeking through mountains on a drive near Barcelona. It left me wondering what else was visible from different locations.

Some of the features I later added include 3D maps, sun path calculation, adjustable elevation (calculate from a drone/plane POV), and mountain detection.

To celebrate the launch, the first 100 HN users can get 1 month of free premium access with the code: UTWfirst100.

I’d love your feedback, questions, and suggestions. What would you use this for? What features would you like to see?
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-28 14:35:26+00:00
Even "down" cushions in high-end couches today are usually a PU foam core wrapped in down batting. It's impractical, expensive and unnecessary to do otherwise.

And "down" pillows are often 95% feathers 5% down, unless advertised as 100% down (and will hundreds more)

Not that down is wool, obviously.
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-28 14:35:26+00:00
LLMs are great tools for assisting learning - but this is not an area where it's easy to extract large profits from users interested in learning. For example, if you want to understand the risks of floating point calculations given the limitations of computer hardware by analyzing how LAPACK and BLAS manage the problem, you can have an LLM write up a whole course syllabus on the subject and work your way through examples provided by the LLM with pretty good certainty that it's not hallucinating you into a corner. This is a well-studied topic, so one feels fairly confident that the LLM, properly prompted, is going to give you good information and if you cross-check with a textbook you won't be surprised.

In practice, I find this approach reduces productivity in favor of gaining a deeper understanding of how things work - instead of just naively using LAPACK/BLAS based libraries, one 'wastes time' diving into how they work internally, which previously would have been very opaque.

These are tools, it's up to you how you use them. Kind of like compilers, really.
by losvedir | 2025-05-28 14:35:31+00:00
Very cool!

I've wondered how exactly, say, Claude Code knows about and uses tools. Obviously, an LLM can be "told" about tools and how to use them, and the harness can kind of manage that. But I assumed Claude Code has a very specific expectation around the tool call "API" that the harness uses, probably reinforced very heavily by some post-training / fine tuning.

Do you think your 3rd party tool-calling framework using Claude is at any disadvantage to Anthropic's own framework because of this?

Separately, on that other HN post about the GitHub MCP "attack", I made the point that LLMs can be tricked into using up to the full potential of the credential. GitHub has fine-grained auth credentials, and my own company does as well. I would love for someone to take a stab at a credential protocol that the harness can use to generate fine-grained credentials to hand to the LLM. I'm envisioning something where the application (e.g. your `llm` CLI tool) is given a more powerful credential, and the underlying LLM is taught how to "ask for permission" for certain actions/resources, which the user can grant. When that happens the framework gets the scoped credential from the service, which the LLM can then use in tool calls.
by hk1337 | 2025-05-28 14:35:59+00:00
One more person confirming pen(cil) to paper helps make the connection.

I go through several different notebooks, none of which I keep what is in it because it wouldn't make sense to me now but writing it out helped for it to make sense to me then.

It's like those tv episodes with the kid making a cheat sheet on his shoe then never needs it because he remembered everything.
by ironman1478 | 2025-05-28 14:36:00+00:00
I think it's less that nobody cares, it's that more people who don't care think they can get into these jobs and they slip through due to sheer volume. There have always been this many people that don't care, but never had opportunities to enter certain jobs or those fields weren't as appealing at the time. Many in software engineering don't care about the actual field, but because it's become such a high paying job, we see many people who enter purely for the money.
Show HN: Lock – Unlock encrypted files using Bitcoin transactions
by bramk | 2025-05-28 14:36:43+00:00
I just released an open protocol called LOCK (Ledger-Originated Cryptographic Key).

It lets you encrypt a file (a SEAL) and require a Bitcoin transaction to unlock it.

No passwords

No accounts

No servers

Just sats, signatures, and a simple validation rule:

"This file unlocks if you prove you paid."

It introduces a Sovereign Access Layer — where access is enforced by proof-of-work, not permission.

GitHub: https://github.com/bramkanstein/lock-protocol/

Whitepaper included

MIT Licensed

Would love your eyes on it — feedback, audits, questions all welcome.
by TomIRN | 2025-05-28 14:37:12+00:00
We just published a comprehensive, cross-domain governance and deployment framework for Neuralink-compatible infrastructures on Zenodo. The document suite outlines scalable protocols, ethical safeguards, global integration pathways, and post-deployment strategies.

It’s an unsolicited, independent initiative — no affiliation with Neuralink, but built as a vision-aligned system blueprint for potential acceleration. Compiled in under 4 hours using structured AI orchestration and strategic simulation.

Full Publication on Zenodo

Would appreciate thoughts, technical critique, or even signals on how to get this across to the right people.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-28 14:37:20+00:00
It's quite a stretch to say that giving a legitimate gov't what it demands is "malicious compliance". How often might you openly break the law, out of principled concern for the public good?

"System should not be made" is more credible. But saying that huge for-profit corporations should have fiat licenses to say "no" to laws and regulations from legitimate governments is not. That's just trying to shift responsibility to some convenient victim or bystander, when you don't like what a policeman did.
by odo1242 | 2025-05-28 14:38:05+00:00
The company Coinhive used to do this before they shut down. Basically, in order to enter a website, you have to provide the website with a certain number of Monero hashes (usually around 1,024) that the website would send to Coinhive’s miner pool before letting the user through.

It kinda worked, except for the fact that hackers would try to “cryptojack” random websites by hacking them and inserting Coinhive’s miner into their pages. This caused everyone to block Coinhive’s servers. (Also you wouldn’t get very much money out of it - even the cryptojackers who managed to get tens of millions of page views out of hacked websites reported they only made ~$40 from the operation)
by lapcat | 2025-05-28 14:38:26+00:00
The author talks about the phenomenon like it's just an individual failing and exhorts people to "be human". But I think that "who cares?" is in fact a natural human reaction to the incentives. We need to look at how our society is structured and how the incentives are set up. I would highlight two factors that I think are consequential in the current economy: corporate consolidation and job insecurity.

Increasingly, we have larger corporations eating everything, including other companies, leaving consumers with fewer choices. In recent years there has finally been some pushback from the government—antitrust was more or less nonexistent ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist in 2001—but it remains to be seen whether this will end with more than just another wrist slap, and whether the new administration will roll back even the small progress made. When we have more competition, more economic choices, more companies, indeed more smaller companies owned by individuals rather than by collectives of fund managers (effectively a tragedy of the commons), we're more likely to have people in power who do care, and the people who don't care have to compete against the people who do, which incentivizes caring. On the other hand, corporate consolidation leads to a small number of people controlling everything, who care about nothing but profit.

At the lower levels, below the C-suite (with their golden parachutes rewarded regardless of success or failure), job insecurity has become a fact of life for everyone. The epitome of this situation is the so-called "gig economy", in which millions of people don't even have permanent employment or hours (or health insurance, for that matter) but are forced to live day-to-day with tenuous connections to giant corporations and the odd jobs those corporations may throw their way. Even people who do have full-time jobs can be tossed away unceremoniously like so much trash at any time in mass layoffs, for any reason or no reason. The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them. There was a time, many decades ago, when companies were more like families, felt some community responsibility, and an individual could work for the same company their entire career and retire there. The incentives were more aligned to caring about your job; it was similar to caring about your own family.

The way that humans behave depends crucially on the environment: place them in a healthy, supportive situation, and they'll tend to behave well; place them in a hostile situation, a war of all against all, and they'll tend to behave badly. We need to arrange our society intentionally so that the incentives are aligned for mutual benefit and caring. We primates are inherently imitative.
by moritonal | 2025-05-28 14:38:41+00:00
I got lost investigating the battery claim of a week because this seemed quite low for such minimum specs. But then noticed it has a range of Wifi features? If you're selling a product focused on privacy, isn't it a bit weird that it has WiFi?

The whole story around needing to know the time sounds like feature creep. If I wanted a clock in my bathroom it's trivial to hone, and I'd only have to charge it once a year. If I want a device that detect my literal movements during movements, then I'd really not want it to be hooked up to my Wifi? Worse, be burning power (and increased BoM) to have a wifi-radio and screen to do so.

If this was _just_ a motion detecting device that played nice music it'd likely be an easier sell?
by rubicon33 | 2025-05-28 14:38:54+00:00
This 100%. I was going to write something similar. In my entire 15 years in software engineering, the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger.

Has a notebook or a whiteboard been handy at times? Of course. But the rubber meets the road behind the IDE, and the tooling there is the story of the day.
by itishappy | 2025-05-28 14:39:01+00:00
I'm not sure I agree. The first few sections are clear, concise, supported by links to observations you expect, and cover exactly what you say is missing:

> THE PROBLEM

> THE CURRENT, PASSIVE, ANSWER

> AN ALTERNATIVE, ACTIVE, ANSWER

> A MORE FRUGAL ANSWER

> SUPPORTIVE EVIDENCE

Here's a direct link to that last section:

https://theeggandtherock.com/i/158515951/supportive-evidence

Edit: Alright, as I get further into the article I see more and more what you're mentioning...
by newpavlov | 2025-05-28 14:39:22+00:00
I meant the absorb and squeeze part. The permutation itself (or more specifically its round) could be efficiently implemented in hardware, but you can't mask latency by parallel application of the permutation. Yes, KangarooTwelve is an improvement in this regard, but the grandparent was talking specifically about Keccak/SHA-3.
by fragmede | 2025-05-28 14:40:52+00:00
Why whould a private equity investor who just wants a return care about what's best for a community a thousand miles away full of people they've never met? Looking at problems caused by bad private equity deals made public, sans regulation, that doesn't seem to have worked out well for the average American. Housing is too expensive and food prices have gone way up. Never mind the cost of healthcare, the level of service is no good.
by bwfan123 | 2025-05-28 14:41:08+00:00
> but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?

Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
by Arch-TK | 2025-05-28 14:41:13+00:00
I think it's more of an issue where the term "engineering" means something very different in the software world than it does in the rest of the world but I find it a bit difficult to take any such article seriously when it makes statements like: "LLMs can't replace human engineering." as a response to "If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view."

If you are able to make such deductions then you should also be able to deduce that almost nobody employed in a "software engineering" role is doing any actual engineering.

The article assumes that software companies are hiring software engineers (where "engineer" actually means what it does everywhere else) when in reality most software companies are not hiring any kind of actual engineer.

And if engineers can't be replaced by AI, but you're not actually an engineer, can you be replaced by AI?

Now I don't know the answer for sure, but I'd say for most people in "software engineering" roles the answer is still no, at least for now. But the reasons definitely can't have anything to do with whether AI can do engineering.

As a final note: I'd recommend anyone in a software engineering role, who thinks they do "actual engineering", to actually study some actual engineering discipline. You most likely have the necessary level of intelligence to get started. But you will quickly find that electrical engineering, electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, structural engineering, drainage engineering, etc, are nothing like your actual day to day job in _very fundamental_ ways.
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-28 14:41:33+00:00
Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow, some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an essential part of it. That's just how modern society works.

To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.

Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.
by GBintz | 2025-05-28 14:41:37+00:00
I don't understand the hesitation with existing large codebases. Maybe everything I work on is just easy compared to yall.

It has been unimaginably helpful in getting me up to speed in large existing codebases.

First thing to do in a codebase is to tell it to "analyze the entire codebase and generate md docs in a /llmdocs directory". Do this manually in a loop a few times and try a few different models. They'll build on each other's output.

Chunk embed and index those rather than the code files themselves. Use those for context. Get full code files through tool calls when needed
by justlikereddit | 2025-05-28 14:42:13+00:00
ΛCDM was the best model for a long while because it gave a free mystery variable to generously use as plaster to fill in an innumerable amount of yawing cracks.

The convenience provided by the Dark Plaster theory have meant that despite innumerable failures in actually detecting it have been handwaved off by an equally convenient "it's just a bit darker than expected".
by zinekeller | 2025-05-28 14:42:15+00:00
> Why not just use Firefox.

The reason why Servo has existed (when it was still in Mozilla's care) was because on how deeply spagettified Gecko's code (sans IonMonkey) was, with the plan of replacing Gecko's components with Servo's.

Firefox's automation systems are now miles better but that's literally the combination of years of work to modularize Gecko, the partial replacement of Gecko's parts with Servo's (like Stylo: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...), and actively building the APIs despite the still-spagettified mess.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-28 14:42:25+00:00
Home inspection is basically the tradesman version of how real-estate developers and GCs pretty much all try getting their realtor's license and dabbling in that at some point in their career and then rage quit because smiling and pushing papers is below them.

Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.
by energy123 | 2025-05-28 14:42:33+00:00
For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago:

> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.

Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.