MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-06-11 21:29:13+00:00
Yes, but traditionalist power structures are still authoritarian. Insamuch as they oppose autocracies, it is by virtue of having got there first and not yielding power to the new tyrant[0]. The problem is not the age of the ruler, or the legitimacy of the power structure, but the resulting distribution of power.

Insamuch as Confucian filial piety can be a check on upstart autocrats, that's useful, but not sufficient. There's nothing stopping the Maoist autocracy from embracing Confucius[1]; Mao just didn't want to for ideological reasons. Autocrats are ultimately building a coalition of scam victims that are all locked in the same room with one another. They don't care who's in the room as long as they won't unify against the leader.

In the US, we have Trump, the oldest US President in history, with, to put it mildly, "autocratic ambitions". His coalition includes old people, who vote early and often, and want to impose the social order of the 1950s upon the country. Almost[2] nothing about them suggests that they're going to meaningfully check Trump's power anytime soon; if anything, they're the only[3] faction of the Trump coalition that's gotten anything out of the deal.

[0] If the autocrat wins, they will eventually just become the new traditionalist power structure. Every pirate wants to become an admiral.

[1] Mussolini recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state purely to get the Pope to shut up about him.

[2] Insert clip of some old guy vandalizing a Cybertruck here.

[3] No, I don't count pardoning Ross Ulbricht. The Libertarian Party sold their soul for a donut.
by martinpw | 2025-06-11 21:29:33+00:00
> I know that when I have Alzheimer or ALS out similar stuff I will commit suicide, quickly.

One of the common features of dementia is that you don't know you have it. It is just that everyone else around you seems to start behaving weirdly while your own reality is unchanged. It is both a blessing and a curse, but it does mean you may not ever have that moment where you can make the choice.

My mother has been bedridden for a year, completely helpless, on a daily drug regimen, recognizes nobody, would absolutely not want to continue living in this state, but is no longer capable of making that choice and so will stay in this condition for potentially several more years until she finally dies. It's a horrific final chapter.
by couchdb_ouchdb | 2025-06-11 21:29:38+00:00
Best to you OP.

I always think of the Five Remembrances:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
by serf | 2025-06-11 21:29:44+00:00
Yes, steam locomotives are neat. Yes, Parton is a saint. Yes, Tennessee is better place because of her. Yes, she did good things with her money.

BUT the fact that we're all still so impressed by steam engines that we decided that 1000 tons of coal a year ( 622 cars worth of co2, the annual energy use of ~250 US homes a year) was a good value just to see an antique demo at the US's 30th (!!) most popular theme park bodes pretty poorly for us and our priorities.

Might not be nostalgic, but these things have huge steam stacks and exhaust output seemingly; is capture at all possible?
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-06-11 21:30:34+00:00
Did a test study in BabylonJS, and generally the subset of compatible features is browser specific.

The good:

1. Blender plugin for baked mesh animation export to stream asset is cool

2. the procedural texture tricks combined with displacement maps mean making reasonable looking in game ocean/water possible with some tweaking

3. adding 2D sprite swap out for distant objects is trivial (think Paper Mario style)

The bad:

1. burns gpu vram far faster than normal engines (dynamic paint bloats up fast when duplicating aliases etc. )

2. JS burns CPU cycles, but the wasm support is reasonable for physics/collision

3. all resources are exposed to end users (expect unsophisticated cheaters/cloners)

The ugly:

1. mobile gpu support on 90% of devices is patchwork

2. baked lighting ymmv (we tinted the gpu smoke VFX to cheat volumetric scattering)

3. in browser games essentially combine the worst aspects of browser memory waste, and security sandbox issues (audio sync is always bad in browser games)

Anecdotally, I would only recommend the engine for server hosted transactional games (i.e. cards or board games could be a good fit.)

Otherwise, if people want something that is performant, and doesn't look awful.... Than just use the Unreal engine, and hire someone that mastered efficient shader tricks. =3
by Toxygene | 2025-06-11 21:31:26+00:00
To access a private CodeArtifact repository, you have to first fetch a short-lived token, then supply that as the password when you access it via npm/yarn, poetry, etc. In most cases, this is an inconvenience that can mostly be paved over with the AWS CLI or a shell alias.

This quickly get messy though. We use AWS CDK and build our assets in a Docker container. Each time the token changes, Docker invalidates a bunch of layers and rebuilds the image. AWS CDK sees that and uploads a new .zip to S3 or an image to ECR. Then Security Hub sees a new Lambda function or image, scans it, and carpet bombs my email whenever a CVE is found.

It's ... not ideal.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-06-11 21:31:32+00:00
I'm confused by this response. I'm fascinated by the question because Joyce (and the other Modernists) are all dead, as you say.

Were they alive, it wouldn't be a question - we'd be able to see how they used new technologies, of which LLMs are one. And if they chose to use them at all.

I wasn't trying to provide an answer to that question. You're right that it's unanswerable. That was my point.

I also - of course - wouldn't presume to know better how to construct a sentence, or story, or novel, using any form of technology, including LLMs, than James Joyce. That would be a completely ridiculous assertion for (almost) anyone, ever, to make, regardless of their generation. I don't really understand what 'generations' have to do with the question I was posing, other than that its underscoring of the central ineffability.

I do, however, think it's valuable to take a school of thought (20th century Modernism, for example) and apply it to a new technological advance in an artform. In the same way, I think it's interesting to consider how 18th century Romantic thought would apply to LLMs.

It's fascinating to imagine Wordsworth, for example, both fully embracing LLMs (where is the OpenRouter Romantic? Can they exist?), and, conversely, fully rejecting LLMs.

Again, I'm not expecting a factual answer - I do understand that Wordsworth isn't alive anymore.

But: taking a new technology (like the printing press) and an old school of thought (like classical Greek philosophy) often yields interesting results - as it did with the Enlightenment.

As such, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with asking unanswerable questions. Quite the opposite. The process of asking is the important part. The answer will be new. That's the other (extremely) important part. How else do you expect forms to advance?

I'm not terribly interested in benchmarking LLMs (especially for creative writing), or in speculating about "explosions of narcissistic disorders", hence not mentioning either. And I certainly wasn't suggesting we attempt to reach a factually correct answer about what Joyce might ask ChatGPT.

(The man deserves some privacy - his letters are gross enough!)
by HenryBemis | 2025-06-11 21:32:27+00:00
I remember reading this piece of news some time ago[0]: “People may not know – BP sells coffee. We sold 150 million cups of coffee last year,” Bernard Looney said in an interview in August (2020), referring to beverage kiosks attached to the company’s fuel stations. “This is a very strong business. It’s a growth business.”

I remember I was impressed by this. The only country I drink gas-station-coffee is Finland (because where else can you find coffee in the middle of nowhere?). So right after I read that article, and the first time I saw a BP gas station I got a coffee. It was 'cheap' and I assume EUR per mg of caffeine was 'ok', but the quality/flavor.. omfg. Also, volcanic hot, so thanks but no thanks.

[0]: https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/433444/bp-doesnt-just...

With the hot-dogs, fries, pizzas, snacks, milk, cereal, alcohol (in some countries), they remind me of "The Profit" with Marcus Lemonis, where he is trying to use each square-inch from a retail store to sell stuff.
by Aeolun | 2025-06-11 21:32:34+00:00
Can anyone tell me why this would be as much of a problem for safety as they are saying?

The only thing I can see happening is easier selling of pads and tampons during a certain phase of the moon. Apparently this is what the article suggests too, that certain things are easier to sell at a certain point in the cycle.

It’d be embarrassing if someone knew, not dangerous. And even that much feels weird to me for a very well known biological function.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-11 21:32:36+00:00
Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow.

People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and every other disruptive technology. Yet, people found a way to be creative with them even before society accepted their medium.

Truth is, you don't get to decide what someone else's creative journey looks like.
by TonyTrapp | 2025-06-11 21:32:41+00:00
I think "zero-click" usually refers to the interaction with the malicious software or content itself, which in this case you don't have to interact with. I'd say the need to start an interaction with Copilot here could be compared to the need to log into your computer for a zero-click malware to become effective. Alternatively, not starting the Copilot interaction is similar to not opening your browser and thus being invulnerable to a zero-click vulnerability on a website. So calling this a zero-click in Copilot is appropriate, I think.
by didibus | 2025-06-11 21:33:02+00:00
Agreed, people often mix that up, but you have to adopt a probabilistic mindset, you can believe the coin with land on its head, but you also know that based on the weight and curvature of the coin it will land on its tail 68% of the time you flip it, etc. Then choosing tail is no longer a belief, it is simply going with the choice that is backed by prior observation, experiments, models, etc.

You might still lose, and so you might choose to also believe it will land on tail this time, but the rationale for choosing tail was not based on a belief system, but the going information and where it points too.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-11 21:33:57+00:00
Another area I'd be interested in is automatic document conversion between the IEEE and EN standards.

I know most of you guys have never had to deal with these, but I've spent my professional life in high-regulation fields. Documents which adhere to these standards are table stakes for getting software sold to, say, the freight train industry, but neither is a subset of the other. They're more like parallel universes, one from North America, the other from the EU.

Getting them to play nice in an automated, LLM + human aided review way would unlock an enormous amount of value for software firms looking to work across these two markets. I'm one of only a handful of guys in the world who understands this well enough to see the value add, and I don't know how I would convince anyone to help me go to market with this either. So I broadcast it here, in the hopes that some other capable software engineer with more time on their hands takes it off of my plate. Please build this business!
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-11 21:34:36+00:00
Developers are going to write code to do things for them, such as small utility programs for automating work. Each custom program is a potentially brand new binary, never sent before by the security auditing software. Does every program written by every dev have to be cleared? Is it best in such a system to get an interpreter cleared so I can use that to run whatever scripts I need?
by yyyk | 2025-06-11 21:34:48+00:00
Being an Open-Source, free OS was the Linux selling point, over commercial Unixes and Windows. That was the open lane with relatively little competition. Now that Linux and BSDs are there, it's no longer an empty lane but a tough one to compete in.

Granted FreeBSD could have picked up more instead, but it was almost as young and not to be due to a series of 90s decisions (BSD court case; Linux name being catchy; Linux running a bit better on 386 PCs?; GNU tools being the default?; IBM deciding to invest in Linux).
by BizarroLand | 2025-06-11 21:34:51+00:00
Unless there are sea changes in the global infrastructure of computing in the next 25 years, that 500gb AI fraud model would be hosted on a server and made available to debbie through a web connection.

Further, almost every person on an internal network still uses 1g, which has been going strong for 25 years so far and will likely only cease being the standard when it's no longer economical for manufacturers to produce 1g hardware.
by mrandish | 2025-06-11 21:35:19+00:00
The Magic Circle is a private magic club in London England. The Magic Castle is a private magic club in Hollywood California. The Magic Castle has a restaurant and regular magic shows by professional magicians in three theaters. The performers change weekly. Members of the Magic Castle can give anyone Castle guest passes to go for dinner and shows. In practice, this allows almost anyone who really wants to go to the Castle to get in as they aren't very restricted. I was a member of the Castle for over a decade until I moved out of the area and still have many friends who are members. I haven't checked lately, but in most eras, if you just called the Castle office and asked very nicely they'd send you a guest pass. I'm sure Penn and/or Teller have wanted to go to the Magic Castle, there'd be no issue.

The Magic Circle is quite different. It's not generally open to the public and is, frankly, quite old fashioned. It was only very recently that they even started permitting female members. For that reason alone I doubt that either Penn or Teller would ever want to go there. They'd probably be more likely to actively protest against the Magic Circle (at least until recently).
by spacechild1 | 2025-06-11 21:35:34+00:00
To be clear: I think Biden was a decent president, he just shouldn't have run for a second term. Sticking it out hasn't been an option for the Dems because Biden's mental and physical decline has become obvious by then. His poll results were already desastrous, there was no chance he could have won. If Biden had decided not to run for a second term early on, he would be remembered as the man who defeated Trump. Now he made history as the one who (unwittingly) enabled the second Trump administration. It's a tragedy.
Show HN: I built an MCP server for analyzing Facebook ads
by jake-qwokka | 2025-06-11 21:36:27+00:00
Hi HN – I built an open-source, self-hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Facebook's Ad Library: https://github.com/trypeggy/facebook-ads-library-mcp

It connects to Facebook's public ads database via the ScrapeCreator API (free tier available), allowing you to conduct deep competitive research on any brand's advertising strategy.

The MCP server can: • Research any brand's ad strategy and creative testing • Analyze messaging evolution and campaign history • Generate competitive intelligence reports

Why build this?

Ad research tools typically cost hundreds per month and require hours of manual work. This democratizes competitive intelligence – you can instantly analyze any brand's creative strategy and messaging patterns for a fraction of the cost.
by buonu | 2025-06-11 21:36:59+00:00
Yeah pretty sure CA suffers from humans not made up gibberish as you put it

Soon as you open the door to the conversation though your simple pipe dream is clogged by every land developer, US or overseas, environmental groups, etc

Because people outside the government exist and will engage. It’s opening a new lane on the freeway assuming it will help forever and it’s clogged in a couple years.

People flock to a void and a new set of states and legal boundaries is a knowledge void to fill with special interests.

But go ahead and forget every NGO, and people themselves and just put our agency at the whims of government. Not say government bad, just that no it won’t just be government dictating. And it should not be cause that’s how you get to “government bad”.
by strangattractor | 2025-06-11 21:37:29+00:00
> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all!

I remember when search was a free ride. The articles that I found in searches where relevant and there was no wordy boiler plate AI content specifically designed to get me to see all the advertising on the page. There is no free ride - AI will accelerate the enshittification of the Web by orders of magnitude. Barriers to garbage content generation are rapidly approaching 0.
by michaelbarton | 2025-06-11 21:37:41+00:00
I don’t disagree with your point. It’s not the US’s responsibility to supply malaria drugs. My point was that it is not for lack of an existing cure that people are dying of malaria or AIDS, in reference to the article.

Personally speaking I wish the US was drastically more involved with providing aid because it can help reduce the impact of individual catastrophies happening everyday.

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/02/04/beyond-rescue-why-huma...
by kod | 2025-06-11 21:38:03+00:00
Facts aren't copyrightable. Expression is. LLMs reproduce expression from the works they were trained on. The way they are being trained involves making an unlicensed reproduction of works. Both of those are pretty straightforwardly infringement of an exclusive right.

Establishing an affirmative defense that it's transformative fair use would hopefully be an uphill battle, given that it's commercial, using the whole work, and has a detrimental effect on the market for the work.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-06-11 21:38:21+00:00
I think it becomes more an issue when you consider that in these apps, people likely also enter things like prescription medications they take, what kind of contraception they use, if any. Additionally, if this data is being sold to advertisers, and a user of the app becomes pregnant, it is possible that data could be used to determine that the user might be pregnant before they even know. This has the potential by itself to become an issue, especially for teens and in cultures where people take having sex outside of wedlock to extremes (as in responding violently to it) by starting to show that person and potentially their other family members on the same internet connection ads related to pregnancy/baby stuff
by Morizero | 2025-06-11 21:38:39+00:00
Absolute entropy of a system is calculated either by integrating heat capacity/temp at constant pressure from 0kelvin to the measured temperature, or by calculating via Shannon's method using average amount of information in a discrete random variable.

There is no time factor in any absolute entropy equation.

Empirically, if you measure the entropy of a closed system at a given time, and you measure the entropy of that same closed system at a different time, then calculate the deltas of each, their signs match so long as the time delta is finite and the system isn't empty. So stated plainly, as time increases, so does entropy.

By combining these first principle formulae with the empirical results on entropy, you arrive at the second law of thermodynamics. However, like I said before, we're not really sure why the signs match and it's considered to be an unsolved problem in physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
by yencabulator | 2025-06-11 21:38:55+00:00
Hi. I used to live in Downtown Los Angeles, and would regularly walk a dog to where the protests are. My friends are saying the protests are roughly two blocks in size, in front of the administrative buildings and in the neighboring city park. Outside of that area, life goes on as normal. Inside that area, when the crowd builds up after work, people are playing music and dancing. Yes, some people (visibly different crowd than the protesters) have used that cover for some looting and vandalism. But the pretense of this needing the military is just silly. The most aggressive behavior I've seen is cops throwing flash grenades and shooting rubber bullets directly at people's heads.

Before Trump intervened, LA has had worse Superbowl afterparties than the protest was at that time. This is all very much manufactured rage.

Consider that your news sources are really biased.

Here's a live feed, watch for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6S_OwCgKOU
by nradov | 2025-06-11 21:39:41+00:00
That level of micromanagement can be quite sensible depending on the employee role. It's not needed for developers doing generic software work without any sensitive data. But if the employee is, let's say, a nurse doing medical chart review at an insurance company then there is absolutely no need for them to use anything other than specific approved programs. Allowing use of random software greatly increases the potential attack surface area, and in the worst case could result in something like a malware penetration and/or HIPAA privacy violation.
by xmprt | 2025-06-11 21:39:41+00:00
This is a strawman argument. If a developer writes code that does something malicious then it's on the developer. If they install a program then the accountability is a bit fuzzier. It's partly on the developer, partly on security (for allowing an unprivileged user to do malicious/dangerous things even unknowingly), and partly on IT (for allowing the unauthorized program to run without any verification).