MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bredren | 2025-06-07 20:27:11+00:00
This article seems to be three to six months past due. As in the insights are late.

>One animator who asked to remain anonymous described a costume designer generating concept images with AI, then hiring an illustrator to redraw them — cleaning the fingerprints, so to speak. “They’ll functionally launder the AI-generated content through an artist,” the animator said.

This seems obvious to me.

I’ve drawn birthday cards for kids where I first use gen AI to establish concepts based on the person’s interests and age.

I’ll get several takes quickly but my reproduction is still an original and appreciated work.

If the source of the idea cheapens the work I put into it with pencils and time, I’m not sure what to say.

> “If you’re a storyboard artist,” one studio executive said, “you’re out of business. That’s over. Because the director can say to AI, ‘Here’s the script. Storyboard this for me. Now change the angle and give me another storyboard.’ Within an hour, you’ve got 12 different versions of it.” He added, however, if that same artist became proficient at prompting generative-AI tools, “he’s got a big job.”

This sounds eerily similar to the messaging around SWE.

I do not see a way past this—-one must rise past prompting and into orchestration.
by zahlman | 2025-06-07 20:27:46+00:00
> The author says "It's deeply rooted in a fear...". Uncontrollable, continuous migration is a very bad thing. How is that not a bad thing?

When pundits in the modern era speak of this sort of fear, the point is not necessarily "the thing that others are afraid of would actually be good". The point is more likely "this won't happen, thus the fear is groundless and the people with the fear are irrational".

(Although I'm sure there are at least some people who consider that there is no good reason to put an upper bound on immigration, or ever turn anyone away; I'm not going to try to explain such a mindset, because it's beyond my own comprehension. In many cases, people may simply not have thought about - or not currently be thinking about - the numbers, and simply operating on a moral principle of uplifting people by admitting them into a geographic region with higher GDP/capita.)

Of course, the argument often depends on highly subjective definitions of "this". And of course, different people have their own reasons to extrapolate observable trends differently, depending on their own level of trust in institutions, which will depend at least a little on their personal history.
by snackbroken | 2025-06-07 20:27:55+00:00
It's already happening in the movie industry. Things like painstakingly hand-tracking an actor's face onto a body double vs using deepfake face replacement. A single vfx artist can now do this work much more quickly, pushing down the cost to do it. This in turn opens up new opportunities for work which were previously not economically viable, like splicing in retakes or making mouth movements match the voiceover dialogue.
Show HN: Wicketkeeper - A self-hosted, privacy-friendly proof-of-work captcha
by a-ve | 2025-06-07 20:28:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been using anubis (https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis) for some time and love its clever use of client-side proof-of-work as an AI firewall. Inspired by that idea, I decided to create an adjacent, self-hostable CAPTCHA system that can be deployed with minimal fuss.

The result is Wicketkeeper: https://github.com/a-ve/wicketkeeper

It’s a full-stack CAPTCHA system based on the same proof-of-work logic as anubis - offloading a small, unnoticeable computational task to the user’s browser, making it trivial for humans but costly for simple bots.

On the server side:

- it's a lightweight Go server that issues challenges and verifies solutions.

- it implements a time-windowed Redis Bloom filter (via an atomic Lua script) to prevent reuse of solved challenges.

- uses short-expiry (10 minutes) Ed25519-signed JWTs for the entire challenge/response flow, so no session state is needed.

And on the client side:

- It includes a simple, dependency-free JavaScript widget.

- I've included a complete Express.js example showing exactly how to integrate it into a real web form.

Wicketkeeper is open source under the MIT license. I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for taking a look!
by goatlover | 2025-06-07 20:30:13+00:00
Laypeople have always had in mind Data or Skynet for what's considered genuine AI. Spielberg's AI movie in 2001 involved androids where the main character was a robot child given the ability to form an emotional bond to a human mother, resulting in him wanting to become a real boy.

The moving goalposts come from those hyping up each phase of AI as AGI being right around the corner, and then they get pushback on that.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-07 20:32:05+00:00
Hmm, good points, but for the first one at least, the way I saw it was that the intended Soviet nuclear strike was supposed to be total, meaning hundreds of warheads for hundreds of targets, maybe even thousands for thousands.

That only a few actually landed was because of problems with Soviet strike capacity and of those few that got through, which ones actually did was mostly a question of random bad luck, so I just assumed that by said bad luck, one of them happened to be for San Antonio, which in a full, thousand-warhead strike, would almost certainly be one of the many targets chosen.

To elaborate a bit on that last point btw, I once saw a predictive map of all likely Soviet nuclear strike targets for a full-blown nuclear war in a military strategy book from the 80s (at the height of both countries' arsenals) that I used to have. It had hundreds of US cities and military installations with little dots over them, often just because they had even modest military or industrial significance. Apparently, if you're going to launch everything and have a lot to launch, might as well be generous with your delivery....

That's how I saw it at least, and at least it seemed like a fairly plausible justification for including San Antonio even though really, he just wanted to.

As for Manhattan, I also had a hard time believing it would be abandoned so totally, but the claim was that the bomb detonated especially dirty if I remember right, and bombs like that really can leave a place too contaminated to live in for many decades. There are atolls in the pacific where this happened from "mismanaged" tests in the 50s.

Either way, glad you (obviously) loved the book as much as it deserves!
by gnabgib | 2025-06-07 20:32:11+00:00
Past Discussion (141 points, 2013, 29 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156215

Related:

The idea maze of personal logging (2016) - pcmonk (136 points, 2017, 46 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676049

The idea maze for AI startups (2015) - cdixon (108 points, 2023, 41 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36507010
by Arch-TK | 2025-06-07 20:32:18+00:00
That's nice. In the UK, tap water tastes like chlorine. If you are unfortunate enough to have chloraminated water, just letting it sit is insufficient. You need a filter which can remove the chloramine. After this, the water is actually too hard to make good coffee with, so I either zerowater it or distill it and then mix it with the filtered water using a TDS meter to hit a rough reference point (EC meters are not accurate gauges of TDS, but that's fine, you just want a consistent TDS not a precise TDS).

So sure, if you live in a civilised country and your water doesn't taste like shit and doesn't make your coffee taste awful and you trust your government to not give you poison or have tested your water to ensure it won't hurt you, go right ahead, be my guest.

But I will continue filtering my water because I hate the taste of chlorine and want to make the best out of the expensive coffee I buy.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-07 20:32:18+00:00
I wish a good monochrome digital camera didn't cost a small fortune. And I'm too scared to try to remove the Bayer grid from a "color" CCD.

Seems that, without the color/Bayer thing, you could get an extra stop or two for low-light.

I had a crazy notion to make a camera around an astronomical CCD (often monochrome) but they're not cheap either — at least one with a good pixel count.
by aborsy | 2025-06-07 20:35:19+00:00
Restic is the winner. It talks directly to many backends, is a static binary (so you can drop the executable in operating systems which don’t allow package installation like a NAS OS) and has a clean CLI. Kopia is a bit newer and less tested.

All three have a lot of commands to work with repositories. Each one of them is much better than closed source proprietary backup software that I have dealt with, like Synology hyperbackup nonsense.

If you want a better solution, the next level is ZFS.
by torqueehmada | 2025-06-07 20:35:49+00:00
Incoming anecdata:

I'm in my 50's and consult consumer reports whenever I need to buy a white-box appliance. I've moved a few times so I find myself having to do this more than most people.

The qualm I have with CR goes back to the 1980's when I was a bike mechanic for many years. I had a broad knowledge of all the current brands, and knew which bikes were cheap junk. CR had incorrectly ranked the quality of the bicycles largely due to how they "felt" while riding them. One bike, which was actually good quality, got dinged because it wasn't adjusted properly ("Shifter did not engage lowest gears." or something like that). That one article tainted my opinion of them for anything that requires "tuning" by an expert.

YMMV. Mine has for 40 years. :)
by mixmastamyk | 2025-06-07 20:35:55+00:00
Funny.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/windows-recall-demands-an...

I could list another fifty examples if motivated.

Reminds me of this other funny comment as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727293

Truth is MS had several horrendous unrelated security breaches in the last years. Despite some scolding by senators it’s business as usual, profits up. So no, MS doesn’t care about trust of the little people and maybe never did.
by keybored | 2025-06-07 20:36:07+00:00
Look over the comment you replied to and you’ll see that they didn’t say that socialist movements have never been violent. Is a socialist revolution not violent?

Of course when people are confronted with the fact that the right-wing foment violence in order to protect their interests we’re right back to quasi-psychology about original sin à la some Canadian called Bernt. “It’s all the same man”
by eastbound | 2025-06-07 20:38:08+00:00
I think there was a Defcon where they showed that some ad networks let the advertiser themselves provide the image/video. By targeting only people who first visited a given website, they know who you are. And by adding selectors on the ad, they extract your characteristics, including location.

It looks very stretched, but the real magic happens when this data is sold in bulk. It allows recouping who is where. Your target person may or may not be in each dataset, their location isn’t known like clockwork, but that allows determining where they work, where they sleep and who they’re with. One ad is useless as a datapoint, but recouping shows reliable patterns. And remember most people on iPhone still don’t have an adblocker.
by seydor | 2025-06-07 20:38:43+00:00
The immigrants arriving to the south of italy/greece from libya are Egyptians, syrians, sudanese, afghans, bangladeshi etc. Not subsaharan.

There is no significant migration of subsaharan africans to the north of Africa. They want to go to europe, and pay smugglers to get them there.

The article is out of touch with reality. That said, mass migration due to climate change SHOULD of course be a great fear for europe.
by majormajor | 2025-06-07 20:40:21+00:00
> As has been said repeatedly in this thread, this change is purely a boon for existing big tech companies that now have even less to worry about from startups. It takes a startup 5 years before they'll be playing on an even field with big tech.

The article also blames it for 2022 mass layups at existing big tech companies with cash reserves.

That seems like a big stretch compared to the "oops we over-hired in 2021" theory, especially if it's net-advantageous for big tech vs up and comers.
by storus | 2025-06-07 20:40:59+00:00
After covid I noticed that drinking tap water was making me noticeably worse but buying packaged mineral water didn't (this was done over a few months). I later bought reverse osmosis and never hit that problem since. However, this year I learned that I live in a high-PFAS area (up to 300ng/L) so I am wondering if I was hitting PFAS overload somehow. Most of my flowers died quickly after watering them with the same tap water as well (when I still tried to have some house flowers).
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-07 20:41:28+00:00
Its extremely unlikely that German water isn't chlorinated. Perhaps you are thinking about fluorinated?

Chlorine in water is actually fine and tasteless at the concentrations it reaches at the taps - it's basically extremely diluted stomach acid.

The problem is chloramines caused by chlorinated organics. These give water the swimming pool smell and are bad for you.

The solution is easy - reduce the organics in the water before chlorination, and oxygenate (aerate) the water before delivery. But systems can get overwhelmed by too much rain and runoff.
by puffybuf | 2025-06-07 20:42:33+00:00
I've been using device mapper+encryption to backup my files to encrypted filesystem on regular files. (cryptsetup on linux, vnconfig+bioctl on openbsd). Is there a reason for me to use borgbackup? Maybe to save space?

I even wrote python scripts to automatically cleanup and unmount if something goes wrong (not enough space etc). On openbsd I can even Double encrypt with blowfish(vnconfig -K) and then a diff alg for bioctl.
by est31 | 2025-06-07 20:42:49+00:00
Tech companies love to show off that they are using AI, how they are embracing it, etc. Among engineers, there is also a growing community of folks who embrace tools like Cursor, Chat GPT, Gemini, v0, etc.

When it comes to artists, I have less insight but what I see is that they are extremely critical of it and don't like it at all.

It's interesting to see that gap in reactions to AI between artists and tech companies.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-07 20:43:06+00:00
Still my favorite B&W dither algorithm.

The university had a B&W flatbed scanner attached to a Mac running ... a Hypercard stack? that allowed you to scan an image and get a B&W image.

A clipart book I picked up from the college bookstore and a quick scan and I had a "logo" for the Mac shareware games I started writing in 1988 or so.

At the time I didn't;t realize how really ... nice .. Atkinson's algorithm is. But when, later, I tried dithering with other algos I saw how nice the diffusion was in Bill's code.

More recently I was playing with an eInk calendar project and wanted an "Atkinson-esque" series of images of the Moon in various phases. So I found a site very like the linked one to Atkinson-dither the moon photos I found [1].

[1] see the moon in screenshot: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SystemSix/blob/10f2332b5...
by throwaway743 | 2025-06-07 20:43:35+00:00
Hiding it? Are they supposed to slap on a disclaimer? Feels like one could safely assume they've been using it.

Anyways, AI generated media is gonna lead to hyper-personalized, on-demand, generated media for people to consume. Sure, hollywood will still be around, but once consumer computing power and the models catch up, there are gonna be a ton of people choosing their own worlds than the ones curated by an industry.
by the_angry_angel | 2025-06-07 20:43:56+00:00
Kopia is awesome. With exception to it’s retention policies, but work like no other backup software that I’ve experienced to date. I don’t know if it’s just my stupidity, being stuck in 20 year thinking or just the fact it’s different. But for me, it feels like a footgun.

The fact that Kopia has a UI is awesome for non-technical users.

I migrated off restic due to memory usage, to Kopia. I am currently debating switching back to restic purely because of how retention works.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-07 20:45:15+00:00
Or we'd have to raise taxes by 2.4T dollars. Which isn't as extreme as it sounds, since we're at the same time giving everybody money. If 2/3 of the amount of UBI is paid for with increased taxes, the average taxpayer will come out ahead. "We're raising your taxes by $10,000" doesn't sound as bad as when accompanied by "and here's a cheque for $13,000". Bill Gates' taxes will go up a lot more than $13,000, but the average taxpayer will see a very small benefit.

The other benefit of raising taxes is that it will control inflation.

And $13K/year isn't enough to live on, yet many disabled people do just that. 4 people each getting $13K can probably live together on that. Living alone is a luxury.

And with UBI, there are no limitations on you supplementing your income on the side. One of the biggest criticisms of UBI is that everybody will stop working. If UBI is $13K/year pretty much only those who are unable to work will not supplement their income with work.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-06-07 20:46:40+00:00
<< Do you seriously think hate speech policing was what led to Trump's government??

Interesting. I suppose I was not wrong with my assumptions. More to the point, what do you think led to Trump's government?

<< Fascists have been able to say whatever they want for ages now in this country.

You have some sort of a point which broadly happens to coincide with one the previous one's I have made. But I won't offer a rebuttal before you answer the question in the first paragraph.

<< Can this help you face ICE agents when they abduct you in the streets and ship you to a foreign black site?

You seem frazzled. My personal recommendation is to take a step back and reconsider your argument. I will offer a minor response here so you do not feel ignored. None of this should be a surprise to anyone, who has been paying attention. I will add that it does not escape me that current set of circumstances would not be quite so easily generated were it not for the oh so helpful hands of those, who cheerfully signed up for being able to silence dissent. Great job there.

<< You suggest nothing except "holding oneself to a higher standard" (whatever could that mean?)

I hate to repeat myself for fear of people accusing me of being formulaic, but what do you think it means?

<< You keep ignoring the basic material fact that respecting fascists' free speech is a sure path to losing it for everyone, as is the case in the US, and in many places before it.

Hmm? I deal with people as they are; warts and all. You seem to want to live in alternate reality pretending they ( and their opinions ) don't exist and have no bearing on you. I honestly do not think I am the one ignoring things. All I can say is, good luck.

<< Please stop it with your insufferable patronizing.

What would you like me to do instead?

<< This whole conversation is a waste of time.

I honestly disagree. I mean, maybe it was for you, but I did derive something useful from it.
by Lerc | 2025-06-07 20:46:42+00:00
>Treat prompts as version-controlled assets. Including prompts in commit messages creates valuable context for future maintenance and debugging.

I think this is valuable data, but it is also out of distribution data. Prior to AI models writing code, this won't be present in the training set. Additional training will probably be needed to correlate better results with the new input stream, and also to learn that some of the records would be of its own unreliability and to develop a healthy scepticism of what it has said in the past.

There's a lot of talk about model collapse with models training purely on their own output, or AI slop infecting training data sets, but ultimately it is all data. Combined with a signal to say which bits were ultimately beneficial, it can all be put to use. Even the failures can provide a good counterfactual signal for constrastive learning.
by zahlman | 2025-06-07 20:48:07+00:00
I have always considered that the term AI was inaccurate and didn't describe an actual form of intelligence, regardless of the problem it was solving. It's great that we're now solving problems with computer algorithms that we used to think required actual intelligence. But that doesn't mean we're moving the goalposts on what intelligence is; it means we're admitting we're wrong about what can be achieved without it.

An "artificial intelligence" is no more intelligent than an "artificial flower" is a flower. Making it into a more convincing simulacrum, or expanding the range of roles where it can adequately substitute for the real thing (or even vastly outperform the real thing), is not reifying it. Thankfully, we don't make the same linguistic mistake with "artificial sweeteners"; they do in fact sweeten, but I would have the same complaint if we said "artificial sugars" instead.

The point of the Turing test and all the other contemporary discourse was never to establish a standard to determine whether a computing system could "think" or be "intelligent"; it was to establish that this is the wrong question. Intelligence is tightly coupled to volition and self-awareness (and expressing self-awareness in text does not demonstrate self-awareness; a book titled "I Am A Book" is not self-aware).

No, I cannot rigorously prove that humans (or other life) are intelligent by this standard. It's an axiom that emerges from my own experience of observing my thoughts. I think, therefore I think.
Ask HN: How to Get Started with CUDA
by upmind | 2025-06-07 20:48:49+00:00
Hi all,

I was wondering what books/courses/projects one might do to learn CUDA programming. (To be frank, the main reason is there's a lot of starups I'd love to work at but they require CUDA experience - this shouldn't really change your answers hopefully, just wanted to provide some context.)
by righthand | 2025-06-07 20:49:12+00:00
Was it Firefox? I remember Firefox existing at the time but I don't think it's ever really had dominant market share, perhaps when it was Netscape? I do remember the IE campaign went on quite a long time to where eventually Chrome showed up to the party and people shifted over as well as shifted their family and friends over. You don't see that kind of active effort for Firefox ever.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-06-07 20:49:27+00:00
IMHO, before the end of the decade you will absolutely be able to generate entire long form movies just by writing a paragraph in a prompt. And people will not be able to tell the difference.

Hollywood might save money on the short run but they are doomed to irrelevance on the long run, because you'll have access to the exact same tools as they do.

Is it good or bad? I don't know, it just is...
60–70% of YC X25 Agent Startups Are Using TypeScript
by Arindam1729 | 2025-06-07 20:50:04+00:00
I recently saw a tweet from Sam Bhagwat (Mastra AI's Founder) which mentions that around 60–70% of YC X25 agent companies are building their AI agents in TypeScript.

This stat surprised me because early frameworks like LangChain were originally Python-first. So, why the shift toward TypeScript for building AI agents?

Here are a few possible reasons I’ve understood:

- Many early projects focused on stitching together tools and APIs. That pulled in a lot of frontend/full-stack devs who were already in the TypeScript ecosystem.

- TypeScript’s static types and IDE integration are a huge productivity boost when rapidly iterating on complex logic, chaining tools, or calling LLMs.

- Also, as Sam points out, full-stack devs can ship quickly using TS for both backend and frontend.

- Vercel's AI SDK also played a big role here.

I would love to know your take on this!