MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tfourb | 2025-06-26 21:29:11+00:00
>I'll probably just have to bite the bullet and form an LLC with a rented address and phone number once I get ready to release a paid app, which unfortunately just increases my costs even more for what is most likely to remain just a small side hustle.

This is actually still not a valid solution. You'll have to provide an address where you can be physically reached, even if you publish your app as an LLC (at least under German law). A "rented" address won't fulfill that criteria. If you run your LLC out of your personal home, you'll need to publish your personal address (again, under German law, it may be different in other EU countries).

This does make sense in principle, as it allows your customers to actually track you down in case they feel the need to sue you.

You might get away with listing the address of a co-working space, if you are actually physically present at that address during normal business hours.

You might also get away with listing your legal name and the address of your lawyer. But your lawyer would need to agree with this and you'd have to have an arrangement in place that they will represent you in any and all future cases, which might be difficult. This doesn't seem to be a settled question in german jurisprudence.

Also, you could just chance it. Not listing an address will simply result in potential exposure to a cease and desist letter, which (under German law) only results in limited financial liability. I am not a lawyer, so please get a professional to check, but if you are really serious about not exposing your personal address, it might be simpler and cheaper to run the low risk of a cease and desist instead of making a big fuss about an alternative address.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-06-26 21:29:17+00:00
> I assumed, like President said, that it will be China, not me, who pays the tariffs. I was very much wrong.

Even if you assumed that, you started at step 1 and didn't think past that.

Let's assume China pays the tariff. Is China going to eat that? They will probably pass it onto the seller.

OK now what? Let's say before the tariffs, their total unit cost is $5, and they sell it to you for $10 (I'm just making stuff up here).

Tariffs were 145% at some point. So China pays $14.50. China passes it onto the seller, now the total unit cost is $19.50. They lost $9.50.

Are they in the business to lose money with every sale? No.

However, that presents a problem. The tariff they paid? It's higher than the price they sold it to you. That will remain the same regardless of the price you have to pay. Even if they charged you $1mil, they could not make a profit, because the tariff would be $1.45mil.

So, yeah, you were very much wrong. The idea is not only unrealistic, it is mathematically impossible if the goal is to actually make money when tariffs are 100% or more.
by Vegenoid | 2025-06-26 21:29:18+00:00
Take this too far and you run into a major existential crisis. What is the goal of life? Most people would say something along the lines of bringing joy to others, experiencing joy yourself, accomplishing things that you are proud of, and continuing the existence of life by having children, so that they can experience joy. The joy of life is in doing things, joy comes from process. Goals are useful in that they enable the doing of some process that you want to be doing, or in the joy of achieving the goal (in which case the joy is usually derived from the challenge in the process of achieving the goal).

> Want to make a movie? The goal should be getting the movie out, seen by people and reviewed.

This especially falls apart when it comes to art, which is one of the most “end-goal” processes. People make movies because they enjoy making movies, they want movies to be enjoyed by others because they want to share their art, and they want it to be commercially successful so that they can keep making movies. For the “enjoying a movie” process, do you truly believe that you’d be happy watching only AI-generated movies (and music, podcasts, games, etc.) created on demand with little to no human input for the rest of your life? The human element is truly meaningless to you, it is only about the pixels on the screen? If it is, that’s not wrong - I just think that few people actually feel this way.

This isn’t an “AI bad” take. I just think that some people are losing sight of the role of technology. We can use AI to enable more people than ever before to spend time doing the things they want to do, or we can use it to optimize away the fun parts of life and turn people even further into replaceable meat-bots in a great machine run by and for the elites at the top.
by PolyBaker | 2025-06-26 21:29:20+00:00
I think there is a fundamental non-understanding of power present in the post. By that I mean that the author doesn't appreciate that technology (or any tool for that matter) gives power and control to the user. This is used to further our understanding of the world with the intent of creating more technology (recursive process). The normies just support those at the forefront that actually change society. The argument in the post is fundamentally anti-technology. Follow this argument and you end up at a place where we live in caves rather than buildings.

Also the anti-technology stance is good for humanity since it fundamentally introduces opposition to progress and questions the norm, ultimately killing the weak/inefficient parts of progress.
by ben_w | 2025-06-26 21:29:33+00:00
> One thing I can hint at, but can't go into details, is that I personally know of at least one enterprise-grade project whose roadmap and scoping - and therefore, funding - is critically dependent on AI speeding up significant amount of development and devops tasks by at least 2-3x; that aspect is understood by both developers, managers, customers and investors, and not disputed.

Mm. I can now see why, in your other comment, you want to keep up with the SOTA.
by pierrec | 2025-06-26 21:29:59+00:00
I'm an HN regular so I kept in mind some people might have JS completely off. The page should correctly show the welcome screen and quick description even with zero JS (in fact those things should load instantly, everything else is deferred JS). "Loading" appears below that.

I tried to make wise use of my time, and test/fix functionality on popular browsers and platforms including mobile, this really helped me figure out which aspects of compatibility testing to focus on, otherwise it's an infinite task. I'm not sure how common it is to have everything required to run this but specifically not WebGL, but if it is, I'll check and give the correct error message.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-06-26 21:30:24+00:00
You might like my tool. It has the same general principle as LingQ - learning from content you actually want to read - except it applies it to all web browsing. It's a browser extension that finds sentences in webpages, scores them by difficulty, then translates the ones that are right at the edge of your knowledge.

https://nuenki.app

I haven't added Anki integration, though. A few people have asked for it, but it's a big time investment for something relatively niche.
by mandevil | 2025-06-26 21:30:47+00:00
International space law (starting with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) says that nations are responsible for all spacecraft they launch, no matter whether the government or a non-governmental group launches them. So a server farm launched by a Danish company is governed by Danish law just the same as if they were on the ground- and exposed to the same ability to put someone into jail if they don't comply with a legal warrant etc.

This is true even if your company moves the actual launching to, say, a platform in international waters- you (either a corporation or an individual) are still regulated by your home country, and that country is responsible for your actions and has full enforcement rights over you. There is no area beyond legal control, space is not a magic "free from the government" area.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-06-26 21:31:07+00:00
Politicians brag about the U-3 unemployment (that they've gamed), but actual economists look at U-6 (unless they need to do a comparison going back a century, when U-6 didn't yet exist).

During covid politicians bragged about covid attributed deaths, while public health experts were discussing all cause mortality.

This is the case everywhere. Quality metrics are absolutely out there - you just have to give enough of a shit to look at them.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-26 21:31:08+00:00
People stop using things which don't work or stop working on the regular.

Its not a marketing problem, its a market problem.

The only money in the current market is in ads/surveillance and that's basically a requirement to compete. They can't achieve the same level as MS or Google because of sabotage, and an adverse market.

In some circles its called tortuous interference of a contract, but the bar to prove it is impossibly high so companies can strategically make changes to dependencies that force costs on a competitor as a dominant market player.

Do you know how many times Firefox has had bug tickets opened for Google, and Cloudflare, and others where those companies basically broke the web for everyone on that browser because their silent internal changes to captcha's and other systems didn't play nice with competitors browsers which respect privacy more than others? Change management is a solved problem, so the only reason this happens is because of purposeful asymmetry here where FTC enforcement has failed.

These breakages happens a lot, every few months on the regular going back more than a decade.

How do you attract people's attention to use your browser and deal with the brokenness, when competitors constantly break it? These type of toy projects.
by tqi | 2025-06-26 21:31:27+00:00
> ... more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups... According to Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab and one of the co-authors of a new working paper documenting the experiment, the results from the analysis showed a dramatic discrepancy: subjects who used ChatGPT demonstrated less brain activity than either of the other groups. The analysis of the L.L.M. users showed fewer widespread connections between different parts of their brains; less alpha connectivity, which is associated with creativity; and less theta connectivity, which is associated with working memory.

Are we still treating low n-size fMRI studies as anything more than a clout-seeking exercise in confirmation bias?
by maxk42 | 2025-06-26 21:31:50+00:00
Rust is doing a lot more under the hood. C doesn't track variable lifetimes, ownership, types, generics, handle dependency management, or handle compile-time execution (beyond the limited language that is the pre-compiler). The rust compiler also makes intelligent (scary intelligent!) suggestions when you've made a mistake: it needs a lot of context to be able to do that.

The rust compiler is actually pretty fast for all the work it's doing. It's just an absolutely insane amount of additional work. You shouldn't expect it to compile as fast as C.
by palata | 2025-06-26 21:32:10+00:00
> I believe your prediction was "Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months."

There was a part before the "or" :-). I did not predict anything, I said "maybe, maybe not". And you told me it was "bad reasoning".

My point was that the article says that drones have a ton of limitations in 2025, and many comments here say "yeah but that's because it's just the beginning". Drone manufacturers have been looking at the military for longer than 3 years, because that's easy money. Saying that "this is just consumer shit thrown together" sounds like you haven't really followed the drone industry in the last 15 years.

Sometimes the problem is not time or money.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-06-26 21:32:13+00:00
>Shooting down a satellite is a major step that creates a mess of space junk, angering everybody.

unless everybody is angry at satellite in which case it is a price everybody is even eager to pay.

>Plus you can just have a couple of politicians from each major power park their money on that satellite.

I've long had the idea that there are fashions in corruption and a point at which to be corrupt just becomes too gauche and most politicians go back to being honest.

This explains the highly variant history of extreme corruption in democracies.

At any rate while the idea that the cure for any government interference is to be sufficiently corrupt sounds foolproof in theory I'm not sure it actually works out.

If I was a major politician and you had my competitors park their money on your satellite it would become interesting for me to get rid of it. Indeed if you had me and my competitors on the satellite I might start thinking how do I conceal getting my money out of here and then wait for best moment to ram measure through to blow up satellite.
by riobard | 2025-06-26 21:32:38+00:00
The 72 PPI number was used back in the days when typical resolution was like 640/800/1024 horizontal pixels and display less than 20 inch diagonal. It was the Golden Age of pixel art.

Apple had been experimenting with the idea of Resolution Independence during the transition to “high resolution” LCD displays (1280/1440/1680/1920 horizontal pixels) before giving up to integer 2x (and later 3x on iPhone to overcome deficiency of OLED sub pixels) scaling on what they now call Retina displays. This was the rapid transit to 100~110PPI for non-retina and 220 PPI for retina on desktop and over 300PPI on mobile.

Modern Mac can also do non-integer scaling (eg 1.2x 1.5x) well enough on retina displays if you need extra working area. For example all current Apple Silicon MacBook Air default to non-integer scaling on its internal screen.
by rendang | 2025-06-26 21:33:46+00:00
US has much higher tertiary education attainment than the OECD average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

People with tertiary education who paid a lot for it or are in debt for it do not commit large numbers of crimes!

Not sure what you mean by "illiteracy" which is measured in different ways. US PISA reading scores are higher than all but 2 EU countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
by tfourb | 2025-06-26 21:33:49+00:00
Couldn't the developer simply run a version check when the app starts and throw up a popup with the link to the app store to update the app? Sure, it will introduce some friction, but maybe it's worth it for some developers to pay a lower commission, i.e. if they plan to only rarely update their app.

But in the general sense I agree: it would be a much better user experience and contribute to safety if automatic app updates would be included in all tiers.
by skuxxlife | 2025-06-26 21:33:50+00:00
This is an extremely simplistic take that ironically ignores the human cultural context around these technologies.

For one, you, like many, misunderstand the Luddite movement. They didn’t break weaving frames because they were against technology, they broke them because they were being used to grossly devalue the work weavers used to earn their livelihood. There was a mass consolidation of textile manufacturing from small groups of tradespeople into a few very wealthy factory owners who used easily exploitable labor (like children) in very poor working conditions and paid unlivable wages to make low quality but cheap garments. The luddites weren’t against technology, they were against the way it was being used. They even only targeted factories that they thought were particularly exploitative, leaving the ones with fairer business practices alone. But they get mischaracterized as anti-technology, anti-progress…but maybe they just wanted to be able to live their lives well and support their families.

There’s really a lot to learn from the luddites and their historical context, and it really goes to show that history is truly cyclical.
by ololobus | 2025-06-26 21:34:28+00:00
Interesting point of view, didn't know about Jevon's paradox before. To me, the outcome still depends on whether AI can get superhuman [1] (and beyond) at some point. If it can, then, well, we will likely indeed see that suitable-for-human areas of the intellectual labor are shrinking. If it cannot, then it becomes an even more philosophical question similar to the agnosticism beliefs. Is the universe completely knowable? Because if it's not, then we might as well have an infinite more hard problems, and AI just rises a bar for what we can achieve by paring a human with AI compared to just human alone.

[1] I know it's a bit hard to define, but I'd vaguely say that it's significantly better in the majority of intelligence areas than the vast majority of the population. Also it should be scalable. If we can make it slightly better than human by burning the entire Earth's energy, then it doesn't make much sense.
by zackangelo | 2025-06-26 21:35:44+00:00
Yes, this is true. A lot of times labs will hold back necessary infrastructure pieces that allow them to train huge models reliably and on a practical time scale. For example, many have custom alternatives to Nvidia’s NCCL library to do fast distributed matrix math.

Deepseek published a lot of their work in this area earlier this year and as a result the barrier isn’t as high as it used to be.
by nullc | 2025-06-26 21:36:43+00:00
Not sure about that. Billionare Capitalists live in this world too. They might cause harm, sure, but that harm generally takes predictable form and is of finite magnitude.

AI behavior on the other hand can cause under-informed users to do crazy things that no one would ever want. The form of the harm is less predictable, the magnitude isn't limited by anything except the user's ability and skepticism.

Imagine whatever US president you think is least competent talking to ChatGPT. If their conversation ventures into discussion of a Big Red Switch That Ends The World, it's going to eventually advise on all the reasons the button should be pushed, because that's exactly what would happen in the mountains of narrative material the LLM has been trained on.

Hopefully there is no end the world button and even the worst US president isn't going to push it because ChatGPT said it was a good idea. ... But you get the idea, and there absolutely are people leaving their families and doing all manner of crazy stuff because they accidentally prompted the AI into writing fiction starting them and the AI is advising them to live the life of a fictional character.

I think AI doomers have it all wrong, AI risk to the extent it exists isn't from any kind of super-intelligence, it's significantly from super-insanity. The AI doesn't need any kind of super-human persuasion, turns out vastly _sub_-human persuasion is more than enough for many.

Wealthy people abusing a new communications channel to influence the public isn't a new risk, it's a risk as old as time. It's not irrelevant, by any means, but we do have a long history of dealing with it.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-06-26 21:36:54+00:00
> Most of the build time is spent in the code generation phase.

I can believe that, but even so it's caused by the type system monomorphising everything. When it use qsort from libc, you are using per-compiled code from a library. When you use slice::sort(), you get custom assembler compiled to suit your application. Thus, there is a lot more code generation going on, and that is caused by the tradeoffs they've made with the type system.

Rusts approach give you all sorts of advantages, like fast code and strong compile time type checking. But it comes with warts too, like fat binaries, and a bug in slice::sort() can't be fixed by just shipping of the std dynamic library, because there is no such library. It's been recompiled, just for you.

FWIW, modern C++ (like boost) that places everything in templates in .h files suffers from the same problem. If Swift suffers from it too, I'd wager it's the same cause.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-26 21:38:38+00:00
> we need a web of trust for the judges as well

I don't think there should be any judges (or to put it differently, I think every user should be a judge), nor any centralized database, no roots of trust at all. That way it doesn't present any high value targets for corruption to focus on.

The trustworthiness of a user in some domain (won't-DOS-your-page could be a trust domain, writes-honest-product-reviews could be a domain, not-a-scammer, etc) as evaluated by some other individual would have to do with some aggregation of the shortest paths (and their associated trust scores) between those to users on the trust graph.

There is no trust score for user foo, only a trust score for user foo according to user bar. User baz might see foo differently.

If you get scammed, you don't revoke trust in the scammer. Well, you do, but you also go one-hop-back and revoke trust in whoever caused you to trust the scammer. This creates incentives towards trust hygiene. If you don't want people to stop trusting you, then you have to be careful about who you trust. It's a protocol-level proxy for a skill we've been honing for millenia: looking out for each other.

But it doesn't work if there's just a single company that tracks your FICO score or something like that. Either that company ends up being too juicy of a target and ends up itself becoming corrupt, or people attack the weak association between user and company such that the company can't actually tell the difference between a scammer and a legit user (the latter is the case for the credit score companies, hence: identity fraud).

Attacks like that are much harder to pull off if the source of truth isn't some remote database somewhere and is instead based on the set of people you see every day in meatspace.
by gchamonlive | 2025-06-26 21:39:52+00:00
I'm talking about narcissism as in Burnout Society.

Give the book a go if you haven't. It lays out many of the fundamental problems of current social organization way better than I can.

> Oh, but you want the fancy stuff, don't you?

Just some food for thought, though. Is weaponizing hyperpositivity the only way to produce fancy stuff? Think about it, you'll see by yourself this is a false dichotomy embedded in a realism that prevents us from improving society.
by fuzztester | 2025-06-26 21:40:10+00:00
You can try to get a job at an investment bank, if you're okay with heavy slogging, i.e., in terms of hours, which I have heard is the case, although that could be wrong.

I heard from someone who was in that field, that the main qualification for such a job is analytical ability and mathematics knowledge, apart from programming skills, of course.
by vbezhenar | 2025-06-26 21:40:16+00:00
I encountered one project in 2000-th with few dozens of KLoC in C++. It compiled in a fraction of a second on old computer. My hello world code with Boost took few seconds to compile. So it's not just about language, it's about structuring your code and using features with heavy compilation cost. I'm pretty sure that you can write Doom with C macros and it won't be fast. I'm also pretty sure, that you can write Rust code in a way to compile very fast.
by lawlessone | 2025-06-26 21:40:58+00:00
bear with me for the tangent. And don't take what i say here as a reason you shouldn't try tools or try to build your own tools.

I used to try the Pomodoro technique it worked fantastic ...briefly.

Once the novelty wore off I stopped using it. It turned into an extra task I needed to do in order to do other tasks.

AI would probably follow the same trajectory for me unless you make it impossible to turn off.