MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-06-28 21:23:06+00:00
The idea of actual AI being used by governments (or just rich people) to spy on everyone, profile them, shape their ideas through targeted manipulation[0] and eliminate undesirable ones through social (destroying reputation), psychological (driving to suicide) or physical (killbots) means is way scarier than being turned into a paperclip.

[0]: Not just or fake videos or comments. Do you have someone on the internet you consider a friend but have never met in person? In the future, rich people or governments will be able to plant ideas in people and influence their thinking by generating fake friends.
by lormayna | 2025-06-28 21:23:28+00:00
> That was a generation ago.

Some surveys estimated that Hamas consensus was more than 60% before the 7/11. And this is the main reason why there is no other elections in West Bank since than: Fatah leadership is scared to lose elections.

> you see similar dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israelis today

I have many colleagues and friends in Israel and nobody of them is cheering about the civilian killings. At the opposite, they just demand peace and freedom for hostages. This is the main difference: while in Israel a large part of population is against war and atrocity, Hamas is still supported by an huge part of Palestinian population.

> But I would push back on the notion that a plebiscite today requiring recognition of Israel as a sovereign state within its current borders in exchange for a Palestinian state (with West Bank settlements transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction) wouldn’t pass.

This was mostly the proposal of Oslo agreements and Arafat, as Palestinian representative, refused that. Do you really think that a public opinion supporting Hamas() , will accept that now?

() Hamas wrote in his statuta that any sionistic state must be unacceptable and Israel must be erased from the heart.
by KaiserPro | 2025-06-28 21:23:37+00:00
> Britain has a very generous welfare system

Its more generous than the USA. but its not generous. You try living on benefits

> 1.15 million foreign born individuals claiming some form of in-work benefit.

Indeed, but working age foreigners are way cheaper than boomer pensioners. The problem is, a large proportion of those foreigner are working to wipe the arses of said pensioners.

Moreover those benefits are a a state subsidy for cheap workers.

> Irrespective of one's views on the migrant question, this is unsustainable. For instance, the National Health System (NHS) has recently been sending patients to Poland and Lithuania to try to relieve pressure on the waiting lists.

Which is ironically unrelated to foreigners.

firsly, if your stuck on a waiting list not being able to work, you're not claiming in work benefits.

second the NHS has been chronically mismanaged for about 14 years, and needs staffing reforms to stop it bleeding staff (and driving up immigration)

thirdly sending people abroad to get treated is cheaper, and should return them to the workforce quicker, so reducing load on the benefits system

Lastly, immigrants are overwhelmingly young and free of chronic diseases. Its super hard to work an emigrate, find and keep a casual job if you need dialysis every week. Moreover, you don't get access to benefits instantly, and you run the risk of going undocumented which means no bank account, no public services and no legitimate housing. Its not like the states where you can carry on as normal. You're basically reduced to living on the streets or at the hands of organised crime.
by encom | 2025-06-28 21:24:32+00:00
>1999 was the pinnacle of engineering

Typing words to strangers online, worked just as well using IRC in 1999 as it does today. However my issue with Discord isn't the rich text, it's that Discord is a proprietary, centralised, CIA honeypot and a garbage company. Their Electron client is the least of their sins.

>Rich text emails are great.

They can be. They usually aren't. Yesterday I got a marketing email from an electricity provider. The unsubscribe link was 1302 characters of obfuscated Sendgrid bullshit. And it was full of tracking images and all links had click tracking. I wonder how this crap is GDPR compliant, because I'm fairly sure I never consented to any of this.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-06-28 21:24:52+00:00
The problem is not the apps, the problem is the users. Which means the problem is human nature.

Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against.

Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion.

The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror.

There are no solutions.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-28 21:25:28+00:00
> Do you really think that a public opinion supporting Hamas() , will accept that now?

I think it’s worth a shot. (I wouldn’t put much worth in any polling in Gaza, let alone recent polling.)

One could even throw in a reparation fund for the lands Israel conquered since ‘48 as well as those which the French and British gave away. (Hell, eminent domain the West Bank settlers and pay them out, too.)
by lucas_membrane | 2025-06-28 21:26:04+00:00
Fear? I suppose that any negative evaluation can be stereotyped as fear or lack of intrepidity, but perhaps that repeated use of that label is projection -- that the article was written by an AI believer who fears that AI might have to recognize some realities beyond its purview. Or maybe the article was written by AI that has learned that fear is what we fear.

Human thought is implemented by a system that has adapted for hundreds of millions of years in diverse environments. We are adapted to huge variations in resources, threats of innumerable kinds, climates, opportunities, social and ecological relationships, etc, and many of its adaptations may be adaptations to control, balance or modify its other adaptations. It would be crazy to expect human intelligence to be what we could describe as optimized for something, and it would be crazy to expect humans to be able to figure out what that something is even if that were true. Perhaps our minds have gotten us here, and they cannot get us out of here, but they maintain some pretty strong links to our natural environment, which is still our landlord.

AI, OTOH, is a new kind of creature of a single time and a monoculture -- the internet. I don't talk to AI; perhaps someone has asked AI how much fear we should have of AI, and what the odds are.
by beefnugs | 2025-06-28 21:28:02+00:00
I can't believe there isn't a universal "api/firewall" by now. You know like a middle program that can convert any input api to any output api. With middleware features like logging/firewall/stateful denial and control.

Once cryptocurrency was a thing this absolutely needed to exist to protect your accounts from being depleted by a hack. (like via monthly limits firewall)

Now we need universal MCP <-> API to allow both programmatic and LLM to the same thing. (because apparently these AGI precursors arent smart enough to be trained on generic API calling and need yet another standard: MCP?)
by martin-t | 2025-06-28 21:28:44+00:00
> companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library

Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing.

Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
by rpdillon | 2025-06-28 21:29:39+00:00
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I am a customer of System76 several times over. I just purchased a laptop for my 15-year-old that runs Pop_OS and has an NVIDIA card, and he has been doing both AI on it as well as high-end gaming, all is zero assistance from me in getting things set up. I also worked on self-driving cars and maintained fleets of hundreds of machines with H100s, all running Ubuntu.

I don't feel like a complete idiot, but now you're making me wonder. What's your experience been?
by mrexroad | 2025-06-28 21:31:47+00:00
ST:Voyager had a similar episode. The Commander gets captured and subjected to brainwashing to hate a specific group in effort to make him a foot soldier in a war. After being rescued and treated, the Commander still felt immense hatred at sight of the group he was told to hate, even though they helped rescue him. It closed with him making a remark about wishing it were as easy to stop hating as it is to start.

Unfortunately, we are where we are today. “Modern media” (whatever that is) and amplification from social media has allowed hate/outrage evolve from being a sledge hammer (e.g. “USSR is evil!”) into being a scalpel for daily governance and policy setting. Just look at how many people suddenly advocated for jailing (or executing, as I overheard at my kid’s baseball game) a specific former immunologist and presidential advisor. We’re tribal by nature and all too eager to treat the out-group as “less” than we are.
by ksec | 2025-06-28 21:32:14+00:00
>although MySQL's development have stalled during the past few years.

9.0 is finally released and we are now at 9.3. While nothing big or exciting with every release but development is steady. MySQL 8.0 will reach EOL in April 2026 so every should move to 8.4 LTS soon(ish) and 9.7x should also be LTS by then. I know most on HN is about Postgres but modern MySQL is decent. I think a lot of people still have MySQL from 5.0 era. Which is also somewhat true with Java as well.

I think Oracle do contribute lot of open source code, they just dont get the credit or brag about it.
by poly2it | 2025-06-28 21:32:19+00:00
On the flip side, this is not as controversial (or even at all in western media) when done by the Ukraine military (not specifically nuclear scientists). This is not a justification, but I think some characteristics of conflict are less interesting/important to focus on when trying to formalise critique against an assailant. This would be more important if contrasted with for example a conflicting ideological narrative.
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-28 21:32:31+00:00
Caching and reuse broadly yes. Getting cross attention to work mathematically correctly by stitching the pre computed KV cache for snippets of text is not that unless you’ve redefined what classical systems engineering is.

Again, the novelty is in getting cross attention to work correctly despite the fact that you’re stitching together arbitrary caches together. It’s akin to taking snippets of compressed portions of random compressed files and reconstructing a new correct plain text. That’s obviously not possible but clearly this has been accomplished with the KV cache for arbitrary models (ie not trained for it) despite the KV cache working like decompression where all the preceding bytes have to be computed correctly for the subsequent token to be correct.
by drmpeg | 2025-06-28 21:32:48+00:00
I had the equipment. 2-meter SSB/CW receiver, 70cm SSB/CW transmitter, large 2-meter and 70cm yagi antennas and an azimuth/elevation rotator.

Oscar 10 and 13 were amateur satellites in HEO (Molniya) orbit. They were super fun to operate since the passes lasted for hours.
by abeppu | 2025-06-28 21:33:31+00:00
So, this article describes the sequence of events as the Trump administration attempting to replace the librarian of congress, and Trump's named replacement saying he was replacing the Copyright Register with a Trump DOJ person.

I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).

https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
by Aurornis | 2025-06-28 21:34:06+00:00
> People pay for software all the time.

Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs.

Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.

> but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work

Even large, free, well-funded social networks are failing to get significant traction or running into echo chamber problems (Bluesky).

I've been hearing for years that a paid social network would work, but if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?

If you want to see a real-world example of people squirming out of their claims that they'd pay for ad-free services, take a look at any HN thread discussing YouTube premium or their ad-block evasion efforts. The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it, yet when cornered the same audiences who claimed they'd pay for an ad-free version suddenly come up with a multitude of new excuses for why they're refusing to pay. My personal favorite claim (which invariably surfaces in every thread) is when people say they would happily pay for YouTube premium if they weren't so aggressive about adblockers.
by cdrini | 2025-06-28 21:34:17+00:00
Based on that last sentence I'm not sure if this is meant to be a serious argument or if you're being sarcastic. But assuming good faith, I would argue that there's nothing inherent to conservatism as it's defined that would logically lead the to the things you are describing. What you're describing is effectively corruption and authoritarianism. I think those things are elements that arise from overly centralised power and power imbalances. That is why one observes those things often in extremist governments where a large amount of power is centralised. It exists on a different axis to conservative vs liberal. Looking back on the 20th century, we can see both liberal and conservative governments that have had those traits.

For reference, here is the Wikipedia definition of conservatism:

"Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears."

Overall: I would argue that conservatism is a confounding variable in the events you're observing. What's actually causing the things you're observing is centralised power and authoritarianism.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-28 21:34:32+00:00
> you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things

This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
by martin-t | 2025-06-28 21:34:53+00:00
I admit, rewarding work fairly is very difficult with perfect information, much more with proprietary models and training data.

With code, some licenses are compatible, for example you could take a model trained on GPL and MIT code, and use it to produce GPL code. (The resulting model would _of course_ also be a derivative work licensed under the GPL.) That satisfies the biggest elephant in the room - giving users their rights to inspect and modify the code. Giving credit to individual authors is more difficult though.

I haven't been following the lawsuits much, I am powerless to influence them and having written my fair share of GPL and AGPL code, this whole LLM thing feels like being spat in the face.
by BuckRogers | 2025-06-28 21:35:15+00:00
No one is pro diversity. Including Google, Microsoft and Apple. They just think it’s good publicity to make more money. And getting women and immigrants put to work drops drive down wages. More workers equals less pay.

You can see this by how those companies operate with their divisions in the Middle East. You won’t see a pride flag. If you were really taking a stand, you’d fight the hard fights, lose money. Not just do things where you think you can get away with it.

In fact, if I’m not mistaken, most of those companies changed their policies on DEI hiring as soon as Trump said anyone with contracts with US government could not participate in DEI or they lose those contracts. But there is no uproar all.
by smikhanov | 2025-06-28 21:35:32+00:00
Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building a "100 year company".

Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on.

I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product.

Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.
by oc1 | 2025-06-28 21:35:35+00:00
Now all the big three cloud providers (amazon, microsoft, google) have moved away from supporting startups without investor affiliations. This weakens the bootstrap landscape and gives even more power to investors (like YC) over startup success which means less founder diversity. A sad reality. Even more when you think about that most investors have stopped investing in B2C. YC is a joke at this point.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-28 21:36:21+00:00
> They did nothing to remedy the situation. Customer service didn’t even understand what my problem was.

I don't understand. If I want to return an Amazon product for any reason I just return it. You don't have to explain the driver situation to customer support.

This is what I'm talking about when I say internet comments feel like people are operating in a different world: If you get a counterfeit product from Amazon, you just return it.

You can even return a product if you just decide you don't want it.
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-28 21:37:59+00:00
On this sliding scale you insist on, I think most would agree with if we’re insisting on being pedantic which isn’t a great place to have informal discussion. Regardless, correct me if I’m wrong - on the sliding scale Zig isn’t actually that far away from C/C++ whereas Rust is more like C#/JS/Java etc. it also broadens the definition of memory safety to include race conditions whereas Zig is still like C/C++ there (and indeed I can’t think of another language that provides the safety against races that Rust does). Moreover it does this without sacrificing any performance.

Look, Zig has neat ideas. No disputing that. But on the sliding scale there’s a threshold where people are comfortable classifying something as being memory safe to avoid perfect being the enemy of good. And by that classification criteria, Zig falls well below the bar and Rust clears it easily.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-28 21:38:19+00:00
> by your company themselves making it hard for candidates to have multiple offers, as you seemed to imply in another comment that you shorten the timeline near the end

There's no "shortening" of anything. If we have multiple candidates in the pipeline, I can't tell candidate #2, #3, and #4 to just hang on for a month or two while candidate #1 shops around to decide if they want to take the offer.
by ath3nd | 2025-06-28 21:38:34+00:00
> Just because I can’t do anything to improve the situation does not mean that I am in favour of the status quo. That does not make me evil either.

It does. The Germans who stood aside when the Nazis rose to power and the soldiers just "executing orders" were as much to blame for the rise of Hitler as the ones supporting it. Not taking a side against evil is taking evil's side. And you of all peoples should have learned from your history. Genocide is bad.

> How does Germany end apartheid in the West Bank?

By applying pressure on the international community to boycott Israel. Same way Germany is applying pressure on the international community to boycott Russia.
by kgeist | 2025-06-28 21:38:43+00:00
I gave ChatGPT the project's README and asked it to write Go code based on it. The code it produced was very similar in structure to the original, with many parts almost identical.

For example, what ChatGPT gave me:

func (q *Queue) Enqueue(b []byte) error { if len(b) > maxBodySize { return fmt.Errorf("payload too large") } q.mu.Lock() defer q.mu.Unlock() if len(q.data) >= q.maxMsg || q.bytes+len(b) > q.maxB { return errors.New("queue full") } cp := append([]byte(nil), b...) q.data = append(q.data, cp) q.bytes += len(cp) atomic.AddUint64(&q.enqueueCnt, 1) return nil }

The project:

func (q *queue) enqueue(b []byte) error { if len(b) > maxBody { return errors.New("payload too large") } q.mu.Lock() defer q.mu.Unlock() if len(q.data) >= maxMsgs || q.bytes+int64(len(b)) > maxBytes { return errors.New("queue full") } cp := append([]byte(nil), b...) q.data = append(q.data, cp) q.bytes += int64(len(cp)) atomic.AddUint64(&enqueueCnt, 1) return nil }
by hamburglar | 2025-06-28 21:39:01+00:00
The quality of engineering varies wildly within Oracle, to the point that entire divisions can be relied on to produce absolute garbage because longevity completely trumps talent. Oracle Cloud has great engineering (which these days is quite hampered by bureaucracy and misplaced frugality, in my opinion), but outside OCI and a few small select orgs, the situation is dire.

At a couple points my org had hiring crunches and leadership’s short term solution was to find employees from other orgs that could be “loaned” to us. The quality was universally jaw-droppingly low. I had to do code reviews and they would do the craziest junior-developer no-standards stuff that would cause their PRs to get rejected repeatedly, because not only did they make dumb decisions, they didn’t even understand the explanations of why they were dumb decisions. It was infuriating and a horrible waste of time, and the second time around, we tried to say we don’t want that kind of help, but leadership insisted that the free manpower was not optional.