MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ath3nd | 2025-06-21 10:01:40+00:00
> Ultimately, we seem to be headed toward a future where we spend an extraordinary chunk of our economy on data centers and AI infrastructure

When climate-disaster-induced fires or tornadoes or tsunamis hit the data centers, I like to think that we'd like to spend a bigger chunk of our economy on food and housing. But who cares four us plebs if Sam Altman finally gets an (AI) girlfriend.

> Employers are testing replacements for workers, not just systems to augment them

That's a tale as old as time. One has to hope that capitalists would cling to oppressing humans out of habit and nostalgia and still employ us. Because, as we know from all modern economy books, if one is not in gainful employment, they are useless to society. We always have the "sell your blood" option until AGI invents cheap synthetic 3 printed blood, which, if you trust people like Elon, should happen aaany moment now.

After all, making an AI work overtime to create shareholder value has to be less satisfactory to the current Amazon RTO-policy makers than forcing real humans be stuck in traffic for no gain on productivity.
by padjo | 2025-06-21 10:01:55+00:00
My country switched to reusable bags almost 25 years ago by introducing a levy on their use. Plastic bag litter has basically been eliminated by this change. I don’t know what alternative you have in mind but the research and experience is there to say levies work to reduce litter.

I’ve been using the same bags for about 20 years and they will probably last until I die. The alternative would be around 20,000 disposable bags. I have a hard time believing the lifecycle cost of my 3 bags is higher.
by jnkl | 2025-06-21 10:02:02+00:00
I grew up in Hamburg (mostly Harburg) for twenty years and am back now after nearly twenty years away. You are absolutely right. The (mostly unsubstantiated) arrogance is hard to miss out. But I love Harburg. Harburg is the mostly overlooked, sometimes ignored and always looked down upon, a bit dirty southern part, which slowly grows it's own self-esteem. All in all I just don't like Hamburg.
by mrob | 2025-06-21 10:05:27+00:00
I trust software more if it's ugly. Desktop software interfaces were pretty much solved by the late 90s. The majority of changes since then have been aimed at either dumbing down the software to better appeal to people who are easily manipulated and exploited, or just change for the sake of change so designers can justify their jobs. And I choose to avoid mobile devices because every one of them is slow and frustrating compared to using a keyboard and mouse.

I believe modern UI designers provide me negative value on average. Ugly software is a good sign because tells me no designer was there to ruin it.
by torginus | 2025-06-21 10:05:35+00:00
Just buy a 5 year old iPhone - it's likely to be still better than the cheapo phone, and will get longer support as well, while being sold at rock bottom prices.

I just replaced my iPhone XS, not out of necessity, but I wanted to see what the new ones were like. The 16 is barely better and I was suprised to find just how little the old one was worth second hand, considering it still runs circles around most midrange Android handsets.
by labster | 2025-06-21 10:06:32+00:00
AI Luigi is real

I guess feeding AIs the entire internet was a bad idea, because they picked up all of our human flaws, amplified by the internet, without a grounding in the physical world.

Maybe a result like this might slow adoption of AIs. I don’t know, though. When watching 80s movies about cyberpunk dystopias, I always wondered how people would tolerate all of the violence. But then I look at American apathy to mass shootings, just an accepted part of our culture. Rogue AIs are gonna be just one of those things in 15 years, just normal life.
by userbinator | 2025-06-21 10:08:44+00:00
but by and large provide what's known as "Trusted Computing Base".

In other words, DRM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing#Criticism

(I knew from the beginning that this was known as the Palladium project, and until recently, a search for "Palladium TCG" would find plenty of information about that history, yet now references to that group and its origins in DRM have seemingly disappeared from Google. Make of that what you will...)
by kjksf | 2025-06-21 10:08:47+00:00
For some it's stupidity. For others it's brilliance.

It's one of many examples of 80/20 design in Go: 80% of functionality with 20% of complexity and cost.

Struct tags address an important scenario in an easy to use way.

But they don't try to address other scenarios, like annotations do. They are not function tags. They're not variable tags. They are not general purpose annotations. They are annotations for struct fields and struct fields only.

Are they are as powerful as annotations or macros? Of course not, not even close.

Are they as complex to implement, understand, use? Also not.

80/20 design. 80% of functionality at 20% of cost.
by CrossVR | 2025-06-21 10:09:09+00:00
> As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker.

I don't care if the fake buffering is 100% of the ad length. Not having to see the pre-roll ad and no ad breaks during the video is worth the wait.
by endoblast | 2025-06-21 10:09:18+00:00
I used to think the same when people spoke of social media being addictive, but not any more. Drugs aren't autonomous either, however they clearly do remove some people's autonomy. I can well imagine now that a person could be addicted, particularly if he's grown up with it and has used it in the past to avoid facing his problems.

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” ― Augustine of Hippo

(Not saying anybody around here is wicked just remembering a striking quote)
by jijijijij | 2025-06-21 10:11:04+00:00
Your mental idea of "desktop pc" probably doesn’t consider monitor, speakers, keyboard, touchpad, camera and most importantly battery. It isn’t mobile, wear risk of damage is limited. The case of a desktop pc is merely an afterthought, in a laptop it’s protection and interface, basically the thing. A desktop pc is usually also rather overpowered, since heat/energy demands and high component costs are of less concern, where laptops are often defined by compromise between physics, costs and tech at a certain time. Why would you bother upgrading an overpowered desktop CPU/RAM for slightly better energy efficiency, where in a laptop a „node size jump“, or even new ISA can mean double battery life, or less thermal throttling.
by ocfnash | 2025-06-21 10:11:33+00:00
I'm a bit surprised nobody seems to have mentioned http://fixyt.com

I have a bookmarklet:

javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.toString().replace(/^https:\/\/www.youtube\./,'http://fixyt.');})()

and whenever I want to watch a YouTube video, I just click that and enjoy an ad-free experience.
by bluebarbet | 2025-06-21 10:13:29+00:00
Why would I choose to get my information from this random website, which is clearly not a reputable source (or else I would have heard of it)? Have you considered the possibility that you're reading it and sharing it mainly because its author articulates your prejudices better than you can yourself? Have we - STILL - learned nothing about information hygiene in this era when anyone can quickly find an outlet online that tells them that they're right for thinking exactly what they already thought?
by phoe-krk | 2025-06-21 10:14:33+00:00
Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point.

Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checking system, compared to millions and more that need to learn a given piece of "evolved" language as it becomes impossible to avoid learning it. It's not only fast enough to do this manually, it also takes much less work-intensive and more scalable.
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 10:16:48+00:00
Depends on the use case, right? I don’t accept traffic from random Hetzner IPs — only Cloudflare’s IPs are allowed.

The only potential indirect risks is if your Hetzner VPS IP range gets blacklisted (because some Hetzner clients abuse it for Sybil attacks or spam).

Or if Hetzner infrastructure was heavily abused, their upstream or internal networking could (in theory) experience congestion or IP reputation problems — but this is very unlikely to affect your individual VPS performance.

This depends on what you are doing on Hetzner and how you restrict access but for an ISO-27001 certified enterprise app, I believe this is extremely unlikely.
by AngryData | 2025-06-21 10:18:31+00:00
Wouldn't nutrition, diet, and lifestyle changes be a far more likely explination than evolution? What mechanism within the last 80 years could possibly be the driving factor behind evolutionary changes in peoples feet size? Its not like people in the 1930s were dieing due to overly large feet, nor has foot size been a significant factor in mating sucess. People are taller today too, but that isn't because tall people use to die more often or was once considered unattractive, it is mostly because of better nutrition thanks to far more varied and reliable diets.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-21 10:18:48+00:00
It’s not an unknown niche.

Land cost depends on the location. You can find an acre of rural land for $1K. Or an 1/8th acre for $1M or more in a city.

For a cheap parcel of land in an unincorporated area with no building permit process, but with existing grid power, you can buy and build quite reasonably. (There are several YouTube channels covering builds like this.) In these areas, I wouldn’t overlook existing properties as well.
by npteljes | 2025-06-21 10:18:55+00:00
Words don't just have a literal, technical meaning. If the phone itself doesn't allow a straightforward, user friendly happy-path for removal, it might as well be "unremovable" in a sense that it is indeed unremovable for most users. "adb shell etc" implies that one has a PC with this tool correctly installed, and many people don't even have a PC in the first place. Then comes the case of installing adb, setting it up correctly, and having a cable to connect the two, enabling debug mode, and doing the thing. This is much more like a service thing, than a do it yourself at home thing. Not much unlike "chip tuning" for cars.
by 57473m3n7Fur7h3 | 2025-06-21 10:20:02+00:00
> Of the poor image, Steyerl wrote:

> it’s really that deep is a reader-supported publication so i can keep it ad-free and bullshit-free. consider becoming a paid subscriber to support! <3

Had to read this five times before I realized that it was just a poorly placed call to action, and not the quote itself. The quote follows right after, hah.

I’m on mobile, and it was confusing because of that. On desktop it’s a lot more visible that this is not the quote.
Show HN: Drone Swarm Control with RL in AirSim and SB3
by Lauqz | 2025-06-21 10:20:32+00:00
I built an open-source project that uses reinforcement learning to train and control a swarm of drones in Microsoft's AirSim simulator in Unreal Engine 4. It leverages Stable-Baselines3 for training policies and includes multi-agent custom environments with PettingZoo, and logging with Tensorboard. GitHub: https://github.com/Lauqz/Drone-Swarm-RL-airsim-sb3

Would love feedback from anyone into robotics, AI, or simulations; especially ideas on improving swarm coordination, generalization or scaling!
by bondarchuk | 2025-06-21 10:20:49+00:00
You can be emotionally affected without being fooled. Just like with other types of art. Indeed there is a lot of capital and marketing behind it, but that's true of other types of art too (like, idk, American war movies). You said "I'm always amazed that people feel anything when chatting with an AI bot", I am just trying to take away your amazement by pointing out the similarity with other cases in which people feel things due to art or entertainment.

By the way, you also said "Don't people realize it's a machine "pretending" to be human?" so I don't think it's true that as you now say "I never said AI itself is pretending".
by codethief | 2025-06-21 10:20:57+00:00
> Technically speaking the elements in the supertype are all distinct from the elements in the subtype and viceversa.

Emphasis on "technically". The embedding is trivial. The Lean docs linked by the GP suggest to put those technicalities aside:

> Even though they are pairs syntactically, Subtype should really be thought of as elements of the base type with associated proof obligations.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-21 10:21:17+00:00
Again I'm not here to praise SRP, though I will mention that when I think of you and and dumb crypto for a full bypass I always think of your surprise that Microsoft shipped a broken ECC implementation in Windows some years back. It's hard to dig a pit of success deep enough that everybody falls in, and that's why I like systems where we don't tell people things they don't need in the first place.

We didn't end up path dependant on RC4 for example, even though it's in SSLv2. RC4 is similar to SRP in some ways because nobody was ever comfortable with it but people kept trying to patch the known issues until eventually we gave up on it entirely.
by polonbike | 2025-06-21 10:21:18+00:00
N>1, proportion of colourblind people depends on the origin, but there are many of us. In Europe, nearly 10% of males are impacted by one of the colourblind variant, aka millions of people. Some of those people are dev, designers, or working alongside some sort color requirements, but none of them are graphists and can choose colors. Having a tool to provide a name instead of an hex code is useful to discuss colors with other stakeholders (customers, colleagues, etc...)
by acdha | 2025-06-21 10:21:57+00:00
> A normal person does not have secret agents attempting to flash malicious images to his phone while he's in the shower.

No, but millions of women have controlling partners or friends who betray their trust and, for example, many people going through U.S. Customs are being asked to surrender control of their devices so they can be used without their knowledge. There’s a well-funded malware industry with a lot of customers now.
by burch45 | 2025-06-21 10:22:32+00:00
I think the false advertising does great disservice to Clair Obscur. It turns off people who don’t like turn-based combat and ends up disappointing people who do like turn based combat. I very nearly bounced from what is a great game because it was not at all what I was expecting with respect to combat.

Clair Obscur’s combat would be better described as dodge and parry based as that is the primary mechanic. In terms of lineage, the combat is much closer to PunchOut than Final Fantasy 6.

It’s really fun if that is what you are expecting though.
by brulard | 2025-06-21 10:22:42+00:00
Your Python / TypeScript etc. argument is a strawman, thats why it sounds absurd. Your arguments would hold better if an average person was good and very quick at learning and memoizing complex new things. I don't know if you work with people like that, but that's definitely not the norm. Even developers know little SQL unless it's their specific focus.

In the original comment you said:

> I guarantee you, anyone who knows any other language could learn enough SQL to do 99% of what they wanted in a couple of hours. Give it a day of intensive study, and you’d know the rest. It’s just not that complicated.

Well your "guarantee" does not hold up. Where I live, every college level developer went through multiple semesters of database courses and yet I don't see these people proficient in SQL. In couple hours? 99% of what they need? Absurd
by jnkl | 2025-06-21 10:23:06+00:00
I am from Hamburg, white and really don't like Hamburg, but I am surprised that no one mentioned the difference in subtile and public display of racism. I have foreign non-white friends who studied in northern Germany, moved to Munich/Bavaria to earn good money in tech and left or plan to leave again just because of that. My girlfriend is from Nuremberg and the open extreme right-wing and racism there is on another level btw.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-06-21 10:25:07+00:00
Many places have mandatory deposits on them, ranging from ineffective (California - you pay 5 or 10 cents but there is no practical way to redeem it so it's just an extra tax and there's no extra incentive to dispose of it properly) to very effective (Germany, 25 Eurocents, IIRC any shop that sells drinks in PET bottles has to accept returns of PET bottles).

The German system has interesting side effects: If you litter, a homeless person will soon pick it up, making this double as an additional social system with a built-in needs test. However, a downside is that if you know you won't be returning it, it's actually cheaper to buy and trash a reusable bottle because the deposit on a reusable beer bottle is 8 cents, vs. 25 cents on a can. The production cost for the bottle is around 35 cents I think.

The deposit was introduced as a punitive measure for the industry for failing to keep the percentage of drinks sold in reusable bottles high enough. As soon as the barrier was broken and the threat/incentive gone, glass bottles almost disappeared for anything except beer (and maybe some mineral water).

Even with one of the main benefits (easy disposal) removed - since you can't crush the bottles before returning them and have to drag them back to a store - they are much more popular than glass because unless you go shopping with a car (uncommon in cities in Germany), having to carry twice as much weight (and then drag the heavy packaging back) matters.
by vincejos | 2025-06-21 10:25:55+00:00
While I agree with everything said here about making backups etc. and which I have done in my career at later stage companies, when you are just starting out and building MVPs, I'd argue (as I do in the newsletter) that losing 2 weeks to setup CI/CDs pipelines and backups before you can pay the rent is a waste of time! I was a Supabase noob back then so I had not explored their features for local development, which is the learning I try to share in this post.
by tiew9Vii | 2025-06-21 10:26:11+00:00
Being dyslexic, I was an avid Grammarly user. Once it started adding "AI features" the deterioration was noticeable, I cancelled my subscription and stopped using it a year ago.

I also only ever used the web app, so copy+pasting as installing the app is for all intentness and purposes is installing a key logger.

Grammar works on rules, not sure why that needs an LLM, Grammarly certainly worked better for me when it was more dumb, using rules.
by xg15 | 2025-06-21 10:27:24+00:00
> Devices should be allowed to display a different logo at boot time depending on whether the software is manufacturer-approved or not.

Not sure how to phase this legally, but please also add a provision against manufacturers making the "custom firmware" logo hideously ugly on purpose to discourage rooting - like e.g.Microsoft did for Surface tablets.

> 3. Users should have the ability to opt themselves into cryptographic protection, either on the original or modified firmware, for anti-theft reasons.

Full agreement here. I very much would like to keep the bootloader locked - just to my own keys, not the OEMs.
by cesarb | 2025-06-21 10:28:09+00:00
> I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. [...] The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.

I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.
by freedomben | 2025-06-21 10:28:53+00:00
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, if the price is highly elastic, this results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise. Governments have typically expected efficiency gains to lower resource consumption, rather than anticipating possible increases due to the Jevons paradox.[1]

I do think there will be some Jevons effect going on with this, but I think it's important to recognize that software development as a resource is different than something like coal. For example, if the average iPhone-only teenager can now suddenly start cranking out apps, that may ultimately increase demand for apps and there may be more code than ever getting "written," but there won't necesarily be a need for your CS-grad software engineer anymore, so we could still be fucked. Why would you pay a high salary for a SWE when your business teams can just generate whatever app they need without having to know anything about how it actually works?

I think the arguments about "AI isn't good enough to replace senior engineers" will hold true for a few years, but not much beyond that. Jevon's Paradox will probably hold true for software as a resource, but not for SWEs as a resource. In the coal scenario, imagine that coal gets super cheap to procure because we invent robots that can do it from alpha to omega. Coal demand may go up, but the job for the coal miner is toast, and unless that coal miner has ownership stake, they will be out on their ass.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
by sheepscreek | 2025-06-21 10:28:55+00:00
I wouldn’t specifically criticize the third world for this issue. It’s a problem we’re all contributing to in different ways. Also, let’s not forget that a lot of first world waste gets shipped off to the third world for “recycling”, some of which inevitably ends up in the waterways and into the ocean.

For instance, one of my favorite pens is from a Japanese company that has consistently resisted making it reusable. Therefore, Japan, known for its cleanliness, indirectly contributes to a significant portion of avoidable waste. Of course, North America has its own equivalent, such as Bic pens. Not to mention the vast amount of wasteful toys. The third world, on the other hand, faces a slightly different challenge, primarily centered around plastic bags, bottles and containers.

On a slight tangent, maybe the real problem is consumption. But good luck taking that up with pro-capitalists!
by AlienRobot | 2025-06-21 10:29:56+00:00
>All this would create value because people would actually watch much more ads.

I'm very skeptical about this statement.

There is a simple way to stop watching ads: pay for premium. It's 100% effective and works right now.

What you are saying is that you want Google to make your ad experience better because you don't want to pay money to use their service.

You somehow use it enough for ads to bother you but not enough to pay for it.

This paradoxal type of user is too common and makes no sense to me.