MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cardiffspaceman | 2025-05-05 19:49:03+00:00
As a juror I saw a Johnny Cochran-like attorney defend against a Marcia Clark-like prosecutor, in the early 21st century. The judge was nothing like Judge Ito though. There was a car chase, there were videos from the scenes, and DNA evidence was criticized unsuccessfully by an “expert.” Isn’t that what they have on LA Law?
by swivelmaster | 2025-05-05 19:49:13+00:00
The reason that I dislike Human After All is that, quite simply, it's not fun.

It's dour. It's depressing. And it's repetitive in a way that feels tiresome; You can't dance to most of it or even really tap your foot to it.

What happened was that Daft Punk challenged themselves to make an album in six weeks and ended up with a showcase for a few neat guitar pedals and two fun songs (Robot Rock and Technologic), one of which consists almost entirely of a barely-changed sample (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFwGQAEYqHs).

Electronic music certainly evolved in ways that made it less warm, but that didn't make it less fun. Case in point, Skrillex's early music is weird and playful despite relying on 'cold' synth sounds. Human After All is just cold.
by mdhb | 2025-05-05 19:49:14+00:00
I’m saying this as someone who almost certainly has a lot more knowledge about intelligence and the US / Israeli relationship than you do.

While some of the points you make are indeed correct it actually paints an inaccurate overall picture.

For example: not widely known but 100% true, Israel is and has been for a long time classified as the highest level of counterintelligence threat to the US on par with China, Russia, Cuba and others.

I assure you, this is a big fucking deal and not something to be waved away with “everyone’s intel, don’t worry it’s probably nothing”.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-05 19:49:43+00:00
That world never existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0 onwards was all about centralization, surveillance, advertising, and manipulation of the populace at scale - and that intent was never really a secret to those who bothered to pay attention. While the world was reeling from Cambridge Analytica, us pre-1.0 farts who cut our teeth on Telnet and Mosaic were just kind of flabbergasted that ya'll were surprised by overtly obvious intentions.

That doesn't mean it has to always be this way, though. Back when I had more trust in the present government and USPS, I mused on how much of a game changer it might be for the USPS to provide free hosting and e-mail to citizens, repurposing the glut of unused real estate into smaller edge compute providers. Everyone gets a web server and 5GB of storage, with 1A Protections letting them say and host whatever they like from their little Post Office Box. Everyone has an e-mail address tied to their real identity, with encryption and security for digital mail just like the law provides for physical mail. I still think the answer is about enabling more people to engage with the internet on their selective terms (including the option of disengagement), rather than the present psychological manipulation everyone engages in to keep us glued to our screens, tethered to our phones, and constantly uploading new data to advertisers and surveillance firms alike.

But the nostalgic view that the internet used to be different is just that: rose-tinted memories of a past that never really existed. The first step to fixing this mess is acknowledging its harm.
by wormius | 2025-05-05 19:49:57+00:00
Not particularly relevant to the core article, but just a dumb thought re: the LSP/LS annoyance mentioned in the intro.

I think maybe some of it stems from 'ls' the command. If I saw something called py-ls instead of py-lsp, I may think it's a python based ls command. "Name Collision" as it were.

Anyways off to read the rest of the article...
by zoogeny | 2025-05-05 19:50:38+00:00
In addition to choosing languages, patterns and frameworks that the LLM is likely to be well trained in, I also just ask it how it wants to do things.

For example, I don't like ORMs. There are reasons which aren't super important but I tend to prefer SQL directly or a simple query builder pattern. But I did a chain of messages with LLMs asking which would be better for LLM based development. The LLM made a compelling case as to why an ORM with a schema that generated a typed client would be better if I expected LLM coding agents to write a significant amount of the business logic that accessed the DB.

My dislike of ORMs is something I hold lightly. If I was writing 100% of the code myself then I would have breezed past that decision. But with the agentic code assistants as my partners, I can make decisions that make their job easier from their point of view.
by drewbeck | 2025-05-05 19:50:42+00:00
No I don't think it is. I DO think those two people want to be in charge (along with other billionaires) and they want the rest of us to follow along, which is in my book an authoritarian POV. pmarca's recent "VC is the only job that can't be done by AI" is a good example of that; the rest of us are to be managed and controlled by VCs and robots.
by esafak | 2025-05-05 19:51:03+00:00
If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack Europe, they can invest in defense without unleashing AI domestically. And I don't think China will become a utopia with unregulated AI. My impression after having visited it was not one of a utopia, and knowing how they use technology, I don't think AI will usher it in, because our visions of utopia are at odds. They may well enjoy what they have. But if things go sideways they may regret it too.
by bdangubic | 2025-05-05 19:51:52+00:00
the coolest thing "the big tech" was able to do is convince a whole bunch ridiculously smart people that they only place they can make $500k is with them. I personally (I am just one person) know more than 10 people not working for big tech making (some significantly) north of $500k as SWEs and doing awesome sh*t (unlike I would un-intelligently guess most of big tech employees)
Show HN: Tired of bloated time trackers? Here's a dead-simple, free one I built
by vikmex | 2025-05-05 19:51:53+00:00
Hey HN!

I made TimeAnt because my dad needed a simple way to track his time at work and he didn’t like the other apps out there because they were too complicated or had way too many features. So, I built an app that just does the basics: track work hours, meetings, breaks, lunch and optionally lets you add notes - and that's it.

It’s totally free, works both online and offline, and doesn’t require an account (but you can create one if you want). The goal was to keep it super simple and let you focus on tracking time without all the fluff.

It also gave me a chance to learn Swift and build my first native iOS app! I’d love to hear what you think!

Best, Viktor
by importantbrian | 2025-05-05 19:52:04+00:00
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.

In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.
by diggan | 2025-05-05 19:52:06+00:00
> And for me, past a certain point, even if you continually report back problems it doesn't get any better in its new suggestions. It will just spin its wheels. So for that reason I'm a little skeptical about the value of automating this process.

It sucks, but the trick is to always restart the conversations/chat with a new message. I never go beyond one reply, and also copy-paste a bunch. Got tired of copy-pasting, wrote something like a prompting manager (https://github.com/victorb/prompta) to make it easier, and not having to neatly format code blocks and so on.

Basically make one message, if they get the reply wrong, iterate on the prompt itself and start fresh, always. Don't try to correct by adding another message, but update initial prompt to make it clearer/steer more.

But I've noticed that every model degrades really quickly past the initial reply, no matter what length of each individual message. The companies seem to continue to increase the theoretical and practical context limits, but the quality degrades a lot faster even within the context limits, and they don't seem to try to address that (nor have a way of measuring it).
by fckgw | 2025-05-05 19:52:18+00:00
Exactly. And when you try and help these people and explain that you didn't actually call Ticketmaster support they will tell you that they found the phone number on the official Ticketmaster website and Google said it was a verified link.

Here's a real example from the same thing happening on FB (don't call that number) https://i.redd.it/w9htjqflgjle1.jpeg
by jmmv | 2025-05-05 19:53:34+00:00
Happy to see this shared again!

The previous submission was ~1 year ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39292990, although it did not spark significant discussion threads.

Also, here are the related articles from this series:

* https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos

* https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/running-gnu-on-dos-with-d...

* https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/dos-memory-models
by paulcole | 2025-05-05 19:53:40+00:00
> Anyone else give up on trying to get rich?

How hard were you actually trying when you were trying to get rich? How close did you come to getting rich?

Why didn't you start a plumbing business or become a dentist or something?

Did you ever have a concrete definition of "rich" or was it always some nebulous "more" amount compared to what you had at any given time?
by sneak | 2025-05-05 19:53:48+00:00
Living off grid means off the electrical and water/sewer/gas utility grid.

In almost no case does it mean off the internet now given Starlink; thus I think it’s silly to assume that a) being connected to the internet and b) having to admin all of your own utilities and associated equipment means you’re going to have fewer demands on your time. :D

Separately I love cooking as recreation, but don’t have much recreation time these days given my project-load (most of my projects being a form of recreation notwithstanding).

One of the reasons I am building a (mostly) off-grid place is because I like adminning infrastructure recreationally. I can’t wait to hook up my solar system to Home Assistant and Prometheus/Grafana.
by mandevil | 2025-05-05 19:53:53+00:00
But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-05 19:54:00+00:00
I agree. I really wanted to like python-lsp-server (aka pylsp), but I felt it's kind of a mess getting everything set up and configured. Loathe as I was to configure a server running in Node to help my editor with Python code, it's far and away the best option I've found so far.

I do hope "ruff server" will do for Python LSPs what ruff did for linting and formatting.
by nearbuy | 2025-05-05 19:54:52+00:00
I suppose if both you and the recipient have cloud backups disabled, then Apple can no longer view your messages.

But outside of that scenario, is there any advantage to iMessage using e2ee instead of just regular TLS?

Edit: Apparently it's up to you whether you want your iCloud backups to use e2ee. There's an account setting: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651. Standard protection is a sensible default for regular who aren't tech-savvy, as with e2ee they're at risk of losing all their iCloud data if they lose their key.
by danenania | 2025-05-05 19:55:05+00:00
Right, my workflow to get even a basic prompt working consistently rarely involves fewer than like 10 cycles of [run it 10 times -> update the prompt extensively to knock out problems in the first step]

And then every time I try to add something new to the prompt, all the prompting for previously existing behavior often needs to be updated as well to account for the new stuff, even if it's in a totally separate 'branch' of the prompt flow/logic.

I'd anticipate that each individual MCP I wanted to add would require a similar process to ensure reliability.
by plam503711 | 2025-05-05 19:55:19+00:00
Sure, let me explain it a bit better. It's more like in the sense of the "stack" is very deep now. Clearly, we have/hire Xen/hypervisors specialist, and we do not ask them to be CSS experts. However, deeper in the stack (at lower levels) harder it is to find them, because of the lack of expertise in universities and/or appeal of doing such job.

And if you find or train those low-level/system-oriented people, they also need to understand how a feature they build will be exposed functionally to a user (and why they need it in the first place). Because things are not make into thin-air but required to work in a bigger picture (ie: the product).
by paulcole | 2025-05-05 19:55:30+00:00
> But I have something that he doesn't have - time

No, both of you have the exact same amount of time each day.

But it seems like he has more freedom in how he spends that time? It's just that you don't agree with how he chooses to use it? The reason I say that is that you say spend your time "largely doing what I want." Doesn't your rich relative spend ALL their time doing what they want?
by brian_cloutier | 2025-05-05 19:56:04+00:00
You might consider reading Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology. It gives an argument for studying math for the sake of math. Personally, reading a beautiful proof can be as compelling as reading a beautiful poem and needs no further justification.

However, there is another reason to read this essay. Hardy gives a few examples of fields of math which are entirely useless. Number theory, he claims, has absolutely no applications. The study of non-euclidean geometry, he claims, has absolutely no applications. History has proven him dramatically wrong, “pure” math has a way of becoming indispensable
by WillAdams | 2025-05-05 19:56:08+00:00
Nice! (starred and forked so I'll be more inclined to try it)

What projects do you feel this would be esp. well-suited to?

(your doing a "To-do" app where a list would normally appear was a fun bit)

Are there projects which you feel this would absolutely _not_ work for? In particular, I have an itch to do a line/arc drawing program w/ a canvas...
by azaydak | 2025-05-05 19:56:51+00:00
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by progbits | 2025-05-05 19:56:53+00:00
Because most of the ads are created by external ad agencies, and the people involved are not competent enough to do any verification.

Source: I've also thought this was ridiculous and asked someone working on the adsense team. Apparently tried enforcing some domain verification mechanism in an experiment, but most companies and agencies struggled to get the verification done and of course the $ metrics on this launch dropped, causing execs to force them to stop.
by drewbeck | 2025-05-05 19:56:59+00:00
correct. "liberal" as in the general ideas that ie expanding the franchise is important, press freedoms are good, that government can do good things for people and for capital etc. Wikipedia's intro paragraph does a good job of describing what I was getting at (below). In prior decades Republicans in the US would have been categorized as "liberal" under this definition; in recent years, not so much.

>Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.
by rightbyte | 2025-05-05 19:57:02+00:00
> When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly as the server delivers it and not some other page that my ISP thinks is how the website should look.

You could have some hash check to prevent hijacking. The old method would be naive today.

There would be some privacy concerns I guess. But it could be opt-in on the site owners part. I think caching some videos and pictures would save a lot of power.

> Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway.

Sure but they are some switches away.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-05-05 19:57:05+00:00
AI companies are already automating huge swaths of document analysis, customer service. Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients. I know it’s fun to imagine AI is some big scam like crypto, but you’d have to be ignoring a lot of genuine non hype economic movement at this point to assume GAI isn’t making any money.

Why does the forum of an incubator that now has a portfolio that is like 80% AI so routinely bearish on AI? Is it a fear of irrelevance?
by iramiller | 2025-05-05 19:57:46+00:00
What I want is something that amounts to a stateful firewall/allow list on top of PiHole ... if a device is attempting to connect to an ip address which was not resolved by PiHole then it gets blocked ... Similarly if the RDNS for an address resolves to a domain PiHole would block it gets dropped as well.

Far too many apps/IoT/appliances have gotten smart and use DoH (or similar methods of circumventing network control). Despite that they all require routing and can still be forcibly cut off.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-05 19:58:04+00:00
> A pile of evidence refutes your statement. There is more if you need.

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

Of course some people are going to complain about Rust (for many various reasons, and had you read the links you posted, you'd have noticed that they all moved to a different one: C++, Zig or C#), the question is which share of it do, and the answer is a smaller one than in other mainstream languages.

> "Rust has peaked"

You wish.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-05 19:58:24+00:00
I think it is pretty simple: people tried it a few times a few months ago in a limited setting, formed an opinion based on those limited experiences and cannot imagine a world where they are wrong.

That might sound snarky, but it probably works out for people in 99% of cases. AI and LLMs are advancing at a pace that is so different from any other technology that people aren't yet trained to re-evaluate their assumptions at the high rate necessary to form accurate new opinions. There are too many tools coming (and going, to be fair).

HN (and certain parts of other social media) is a bubble of early adopters. We're on the front lines seeing the war in realtime and shaking our heads at what's being reported in the papers back home.
by heraldgeezer | 2025-05-05 19:58:44+00:00
In Sweden we all get this. Saying you should have water, food, radio and cash and more so maybe Spain or EU needs this too :) Now do I have this, no. But we are further.

https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30874.pdf

EU has started this a bit, we are waking up. EVROPA.

https://www.dw.com/en/european-union-response-disasters-war-...
by jjani | 2025-05-05 19:58:55+00:00
The comparison of Chrome and IE is much more apt, IMO, because the deciding factor as other mentioned for social media is network effects, or next-gen dopamine algorithms (TikTok). And that's unique to them.

For example, I'd never suggest that e.g. MS could take on TikTok, despite all the levers they can pull, and being worth magnitudes more. No chance.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-05 19:59:18+00:00
Yeah but I remember when search first started getting integrated with the browser and the "switch search engine" thing was significantly more prominent. Then Google became the default and nobody ever switched it and the rest is history.

So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?

I have my own answers for these, and I'm sure all the smart people figuring out strategy at Open AI have thought about similar things.

It's not clear if Open AI will be able to overcome this commodification issue (personally, I think they won't), but I don't think it's impossible, and there is prior art for at least some of the pages in this playbook.
by neiman | 2025-05-05 19:59:31+00:00
Many countries still have problems with organized crime, and it's getting worse even though they have aggressive KYC and AML. Israel is one example I'm familiar with. So it's a bit more complicated than that.

I understand the goal of KYC/AML, and maybe in some places it's implemented correctly. But from my limited experience in the EU, it can be easy for criminals to avoid it, but it makes my life difficult for no good reason (both for privacy violation and for times when it is simply fails).
by markbeare | 2025-05-05 20:00:10+00:00
I work for a cybersecurity company, and I think that the method they used to check these links with the mentioned security companies was not a reflection of how they detect. I'm sure that many of these companies do not have these domains in their DBs of bad sites but if you were to run these products and then visit the site then heuristic detection would have likely flagged the sites.
by tverbeure | 2025-05-05 20:00:23+00:00
Using your comment as a crutch to post a link to my Eye of Sauron function generator story: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2023/01/02/HP33120A-Repair-Shu.... That was an incredibly satisfying repair if you ignore days of dealing with after effects of burnt PCB material in your lungs.
by megous | 2025-05-05 20:00:25+00:00
What makes you think it didn't already do so in the past and thus is a new thing? Allies spy on each other all the time.

I guess US gov would not like to have it be out publicly, but they must understand that this is being at least attempted and US likely does it to Israel, too.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-nsa-document-highlights-is...