MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antisthenes | 2025-06-04 19:22:59+00:00
It's pretty sad that loonies like this get a platform at all.

The ultimate irony is that New Yorker in this case is writing an article about him, mocking his views...yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all.

How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?

The only fascinating thing here is the phenomenon that no matter what nonsense you come up with, someone on the Internet will agree with you, think it's a good thing, and maybe even form a fan club.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-04 19:23:17+00:00
WebRTC actual's complezity is very high. WHIP seems to be the standard path for most apps to integrate, but it does rely on an exterior service to actually do anything.

Hypothetically ffmpeg could be an ICE server for peer-connecting, do SDP for stream negotiation possibly with a side of WHEP (egress protocol) as well, could do SCTP for actual stream transfer. Such that it could sort of act as a standalone peer, rather than offload that work to a gateway service.

Worth noting that gstreamer & OBS also are WHIP based, rely on an external gateway for their WebRTC support. There's not one clear way to do a bunch of the WebRTC layer cake (albeit WHEP is fairly popular I think at this point?), so WHIP is a good way to support sending videos, without having to make a bunch of other decisions that may or may not jive with how someone wants to implement WebRTC in their system; those decisions are all in the WHIP gateway. It may be better to decouple, not try to do it all, which would require specific opinionative approaches.
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-06-04 19:23:33+00:00
> It also axed research on Covid-19, including studies that could have helped the nation respond to many infectious disease threats. Among them: a grant to Emory University and Georgia State University, where researchers had developed three potential drugs that showed promise against many RNA-based viruses, including coronaviruses, Ebola, avian influenza and measles, said George Painter, a pharmacologist at Emory who was co-leading the research.

Just to reiterate a few things, while estimates vary, every $1 spent on medical research returns multiple dollars of economic value. One study out of England suggest that for ever pound invested in medical research, the return is .25 pounds every year after, forever. [1] The cost of these cuts, as others have said, is quite large.

In addition, these grants are peer reviewed by expert panels, and only grants that score within certain top N percentiles which are determined each year. For the marquee grants, you have to score in the top ~10th percentile (see [2], for example.) This scoring is done by expert panels, which are composed of leading experts / professors from around the country. While one can adjust funding priorities, part of the price to pay for having cutting edge basic research always available is that there will be certain things one disagrees with.

There is plenty of room for a discussion of how to increase the efficiency of scientific funding, and if the current science-funding institutions are at... 'a near-optimal position in tradeoff space.' However, taking a chainsaw to the agencies to punish them is like blaming doctors for outbreaks of diseases, the latter being sadly predictable.

[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/health-research-offers-a-big-retu...

[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines
by _Algernon_ | 2025-06-04 19:23:46+00:00
For a healthy individual it might not make a difference, but increased insulin sensitivity may help in (pre-)diabetics for instance.

>Studies have shown intermittent energy restriction to be efficacious in preventing and managing prediabetes and DM, with remarkable improvements in the metabolic and cardiovascular biomarkers of individuals with DM.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9534344/
by quesera | 2025-06-04 19:24:00+00:00
That's awful. I've recently gone through a similar process with an aging relative.

Two takeaways for me:

The things the medical industry will do to keep people "alive" are extraordinary, and expensive, and (in some cases) abuses of the concept of "living".

Moving to a sane jurisdiction where assisted suicide is legal is the only possible (but not guaranteed) strategy to approach this problem in a dignified way.

(OK, some people will argue that suicide is never dignified or moral or whatever, but I am not interested in their opinions about what I can do with my body in this situation, or really any others)
by BHSPitMonkey | 2025-06-04 19:24:08+00:00
• IRS Direct File launched in 2024 after being created via the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act in 2024.

• The Trump administration is preparing to sign into law a new budget that orders the immediate termination of the Direct File program (see SEC. 112207 "TASK FORCE ON THE TERMINATION OF DIRECT FILE").

• 18F, the agency within the federal government probably most responsible for championing and promoting open source development (and just all-around providing good digital services at a significantly lower cost), was eliminated by the Trump administration in March.

I know that you are probably a busy person, like many of us here; Still, I would encourage you to take some time each week to become informed about what is (or isn't) happening in politics rather than just offering knee-jerk reactions based on partisan feelings. It really is important.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-04 19:24:23+00:00
I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum.

I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.

In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-confluence?r=h8x

There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
by robwwilliams | 2025-06-04 19:25:12+00:00
Interesting article but incomplete in important ways. Yes correct that embodiment and free-form interactions are critical to moving toward AGI, but what is likely much more important are supervisory meta-systems (yet another module) that enable self-control of attention with a balance integration of intrinsic goals with extrinsic perturbations. It is this nominally simple self-recursive control of attention that is what I regard as the missing ingredient.
by pyoo | 2025-06-04 19:25:28+00:00
Last week Invariant Labs discovered a vulnerability in the Github MCP that lets you exfiltrate data from private repos via a public issue through prompt injection.

At the root of the issue was the lack of implemented granular permissions. Claude Desktop authenticates to Github via a personal access token (PAT) and over permissive PATs are what allowed the prompt injection.

When digging deeper, the challenge you face is that the permissions allowed by the base system (e.g., Github) does not allow you to implement least privilege. An agent that creates and commits PRs must also be given the ability to approve and merge them. This makes you choose between enforcing least privilege and increasing the value an agent can provide.

You may have guessed it, but I believe the solution is to have a decoupled centralized permissions layer on top of what the system natively gives. This way you can ensure an agent can create PRs without ever approving or merging them.

The goal is to not limit the ability of the agent but to provide the right guardrails in which it can operate. You can read the blog to see how we we're able to achieve this!
by dmbche | 2025-06-04 19:25:33+00:00
I'm having a hard time understanding what kind of jobs you are speaking of that are both hourly, off site and bring in a low margin? Not a jab genuinely not clear to me!

Edit0: after reviewing the article, it's very amusing to me that as an employee I had an app for my last desk job that demanded all those except possibly (not certain) for GPS, it might just have identified my location from the wifi connection I was using, as punching would only work on work wifi. And I work in Canada!
by taosx | 2025-06-04 19:25:43+00:00
That's exactly how I started using them as well. 1. Give it just enough context, the assumptions that hold and the goal. 2. Review answer and iterate on the initial prompt. It is also the economical way to use them. I've been burned one too many times by using agents (they just spin and spin, burn 30 dollars for one prompt and either mess the code base or converge on the previous code written ).

I also feel the need to caution others that by letting the AI write lots of code in your project it makes it harder to advance it, evolve it and just move on with confidence (code you didn't think about and write it doesn't stick as well into your memory).
by cosmicgadget | 2025-06-04 19:26:47+00:00
Apple's grift is convincing consumers they are buying into superior technology. Iphones are the best phones, Macs are the best PCs, iGoggles are the best headset. Despite substantial limitations on all these products, they create the mystique of superiority.

If Apple bought a carrier, they'd need to sink insane capital into making it noticeably better (than others and itself before acquisition). And if they did, how noticeable is a little extra bandwidth? Not very considering everyone is offloading to wifi anyway.
by drdaeman | 2025-06-04 19:27:14+00:00
I wonder if the scope of "diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of digital electronic products" is extensive enough to be usable for requesting protocol documentation for purposes of integrating products with systems from different vendors (such as DIY). Plenty of IoT stuff has proprietary "hubs" or "cloud services" (that frequently pose reliability, privacy and security problems), and I'm really curious if this law could be used to repair this design defect.
by elliotbnvl | 2025-06-04 19:27:38+00:00
One-time world chess grandmaster, who lost to Deep Blue (a chess AI) in 1997 after beating it in 1996. This marked the first time an AI beat a human on the world stage in a game of pure reasoning.

I don't believe AI will cause the world to stagnate at all. I think it will unleash humanity's creativity in a way orders of magnitude greater than history has ever seen.
by mc007 | 2025-06-04 19:27:39+00:00
Hi there, we're working almost 10 years on the subject, also dealing with PreciousPlastic designs, users and problems on a daily basis. From what we can tell, its an extremely violent and fraudulent organization. None of the designs actually worked, nor any of the bold statements can be backed up with evidence. See here the full report : https://forum.osr-plastic.org/t/preciousplastic-review/11066

Its a scam after all, we know also well from others.
by mc32 | 2025-06-04 19:27:44+00:00
Check out the young turks. They will tell you that the Dems undermined themselves by trying to gaslight people into voting for Kamala and to believe that Joe was dynamic and had more stamina than his staffers. Now you have the mainstream try to say that the party pulled the wool over their eyes and fooled them. A few will say that everyone knew he was senile —but somehow still thought it was cool to trot him out till the first debate when for most people, except msnbc and kin, saw the man behind the curtain. MSNBC tried to portray the first debate as a draw. Everyone else saw how pathetic the performance was. Then the machinations began and Joe endorsed Kamala despite Obama and the rest of the mainstream dems wanting an open primary. It was doomed with word salad Kamala who could not relate with regular folks. She was stilted and unauthentic.
by tensor | 2025-06-04 19:28:12+00:00
Knowing the enterprise space, my guess is that the only real changes are hardcoding continue to use only Mistral, and tying it into some sort of central enterprise licensing service. Holding back some novel models just for enterprise use seems unlikely, as does developing some novel agentic capabilities within Continue.

Enterprise deals are usually around compliance and security primarily. Companies want centralized billing and to be sure that their developers only use "sanctioned" AI and other tech.

Who knows though with that contact us sales wall.
by baobun | 2025-06-04 19:28:30+00:00
> At what point does “responsible disclosure” allow for going public, even in a limited, non-technical way, for the sake of transparency and user safety

Given context, sounds like you should have gone public half a year ago. Some people think you should to give them a heads up first ("this will go public in 20 days") but this is up to you. At 9 months without follow-up you owe them nothing and it is clear that they are malicious.
by xmprt | 2025-06-04 19:28:41+00:00
Maybe I'm just extremely fast but I can't imagine it taking that long because like I mentioned, it's just those 3 steps for most taxpayers. It's hard to explain unless you've actually filed taxes in the US which most foreigners haven't.

The estimates you shared are based on survey responses so you'd have to take them with a grain of salt. All the other websites are repeating the same survey.
by runako | 2025-06-04 19:28:42+00:00
> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn

This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.

Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
Show HN: Smart Palette – Reimagining AI Art
by nick_stam | 2025-06-04 19:28:50+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Nick. Over the last 6 months I’ve been building Smart Palette – a platform to help anyone create unique, wall-ready art without needing to be a prompt expert.

I started this because I wanted to unleash creativity in anyone and help them bring their art ideas onto their wall through a simple, guided and inspiring process.

Instead of figuring out the “right” words to use, you just select your interior design style, room, art style, theme, and color palette. You can simply describe what you want to see and add your desired colors — or let Smart Palette handle it for you.

Smart Palette uses a streamlined UI that my backend then translates into optimized, detailed prompts. A lot of the work went into this "translation" layer to ensure optimal model selection, settings and generation techniques depending on the user’s creative context.

It also has a full print-on-demand (UHD) integration including various cusotmization options and an art preview feature.

This is an early version, and I'd be very grateful for any feedback you have on the concept, the UX, or any technical aspects. Happy to answer any questions!

You can try it out with a free trial and generate your first artwork.

Here’s a quick walkthrough: https://www.loom.com/share/68514ee21fb14a0abf5513e07e48a270?...
by deepsun | 2025-06-04 19:28:59+00:00
In other words, think of Copyright. A Copyright holder can apply any license they like, and change the licenses for new versions whenever they like. Public Domain is explicit forfeiting the Copyright, which means authors cannot enforce any license (and anyone can just take their work and declare it it's theirs, apply licenses etc).

PS: AFAIK, however, Authorship rights are different from Copyright, and cannot be given/passed as Copyrights, at least in US.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-04 19:29:13+00:00
That Rian Johnson interview got milked to high heavens for clickbait. Genius marketing by him, especially since he makes mystery movies.

Plenty of examples of bad guys using iPhones here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/13hrdak/comment...

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/13hrdak/rant_ap...
by mystraline | 2025-06-04 19:29:15+00:00
A large portion of antibiotic resistance comes from patients taking a partial prescription, feeling better, and discontinuing the rest of the pills.

In that situation (the only one at this time), is the majority of resistances are made.

Controlling the supply, especially if you know you have a bacterial disease, can be solved readily.

In fact, on a camping trip, I was bit by 15 ticks. Was bad. When I got back to civilization, I started getting spots all over my body. Surprise, it was rocky mountain spotted fever. But if I could determine the 2 drugs for curing spotted fever and Lyme, I absolutely would have did both. But the shitty gatekeeper (doctor) wouldn't do Lyme course. Again, logically made a lot of sense, especially that Lyme tests are 60% accurate. And, 15 ticks.
by dogleash | 2025-06-04 19:29:48+00:00
> counterculture influence on professional norms

> disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability

I wonder what world you think used to exist.

"I don't want to X, but this time it's different and my hand is forced." That's a millenniums-old cope for doing shit you always wanted to do, but needed a way to not feel bad about.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-04 19:29:52+00:00
> The US basically has none outside of banking and healthcare

This isn't even remotely true. Heavy regulation is actually one of the reasons why it's so hard to do things like build new housing or get high-speed rail, for two popular examples.

Anyone who has worked in regulatory compliance at software or hardware companies will also roll their eyes at the claim that the United States has basically no regulation.
by verisimi | 2025-06-04 19:30:00+00:00
"We" is highly ambiguous. It ranges from 'me and my dog', to 'humanity', to anything in between. It's of course fine to us once the group has been defined.

That it invokes the idea of a consensus humanity, that one group can speak and decide for everyone (say, scientists or politicians) is a psychological trick, imo, in that it presumes a consensus.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-04 19:30:08+00:00
https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538

> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
by xpe | 2025-06-04 19:30:21+00:00
In case it got lost from several comments higher in the chain, there is/was an "if" baked into my statement:

>> If one is motivated by ethics, I think it is morally required to find effective ways to engage to shape and nudge the future.

Put another way, the claim could be stated as: "if one is motivated by ethics, then one should pay attention to consequences". Yes, this assumes one accepts consequentialism to some degree, which isn't universally accepted nor easy to apply in practice. Still, I don't think many people (even those who are largely guided by deontology) completely reject paying attention to consequences.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-04 19:30:55+00:00
A huge part of that increase in 5 year survival rate is just earlier detection, though.

I fully acknowledge that we've made large strides in understanding and treating breast cancer, but in most cases, once it spreads it's still "game over", and so it is still an immensely fearful experience for people to go through. Contrast that with, for example, HIV. 35 years ago it was probably the scariest disease there was, considered a guaranteed death sentence. Now it is largely preventable with PrEP, and treatments are so good that it is a manageable condition with lifespans on par with HIV-negative people for most of those who diligently follow their treatments.
by haswell | 2025-06-04 19:31:25+00:00
This is a fairly cynical way to frame this. There is absolutely bad behavior in the enterprise software space, but that is certainly not universal, and is not inherent to the "call us" approach.

> If you're too small, they won't even talk to you.

This is often true. Some of the software I worked on was extremely expensive to host, and there was indeed a minimum threshold that was many multiples of $10K.

It's not that the company didn't want smaller players to use the software, but that smaller players just weren't large enough to benefit from the minimum buy-in, and selling the software at a lower cost for those smaller customers would have just been pure loss. Over time, they were able to lower the minimum threshold due to improvements in the architecture and economies of scale, but the point here is just that these minimums often exist for good reasons.

> Knowing your client happens regardless of showing pricing or not.

It really does not. Many software companies have a minimal relationship (if any) with their customers. For some customers and some product types, this is perfectly fine. But when a company is buying software that will cost the company millions/year, having a direct line to a real person who in turn can arrange conversations with product management, customer success, etc. is table stakes, and is often not possible or available with smaller vendors.

You can dislike the model, but I'd suggest digging in to some of the why before dismissing it too reductively.
by marc_abonce | 2025-06-04 19:31:32+00:00
Tangential comment, about this "background check" tools that the article briefly mentions:

> Latin America, where labor laws are less strictly enforced [...]

> in Mexico, provides identity verification tools that do various checks including biometrics, and also cross-check against government databases and blacklists.

These two issues are closely related. Here in Mexico, a lot of companies share "blacklists" of ex-employees that have gone to labour court, regardless of the reason or the result. Because of this, very few people ever go to labour court against a company here, even if they know that they're legally on the winning side.

Fortunately not all companies are like that, but the chilling effect still remains.

Source in Spanish: https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/el-preguntario/2023/09/02/qu...
by overfeed | 2025-06-04 19:31:41+00:00
> ... the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.

I'll bell the cat - Capitalism is the source of the problem, specifically the strain championed by American companies. It's the root of surveillance tech, and why medical systems can act in ways that result in terrible medical outcomes which deteriorate to emergencies.

Please don't bother to reply whinging about communism. Capitalism may be the best system humans have adopted, but it's far from perfect.
by drob518 | 2025-06-04 19:31:41+00:00
Yea, good call. My books were all published back in the 1990s, back when paper was still king and you really couldn’t self-publish. Today, I’d probably look much more heavily at the self-publishing route, unless I wanted to write something uber-commercial. What was your experience with the order volume you could drive via self-publishing? Did you do any of your own marketing, or did you just list it in LeanPub and Amazon and let search engines lead people to it organically. If your subject was niche, there isn’t much volume in any case, but you want to get all you can of that small market.