MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-19 16:39:45+00:00
Just my opinion, but the dependency on Chromium is a problem in itself. You don't need a full-blown browser to render HTML email. The fact that it is no more viable for a client to ignore HTML nowadays is something unfortunate, to say the least. Real people only need Emoji support at best (or at worst), because nowadays every from your bank to your local security expert tells you "don't click on links in emails", and your local privacy expert tells you to turn off every convenience feature related to HTML.

On another note, TFA talks about a "GNOME toxic development culture", which looks like a blanket statement. Does it really exist?
by mango7283 | 2025-07-19 16:39:48+00:00
From heise

"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany."

So, I hear Europe doesn't have these problems about puritanical censorship in games......
by MrDrDr | 2025-07-19 16:39:58+00:00
I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss. Yes there is a donor (egg) and yes the new child will pass on the mitochondria to her children. But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.
by tom_m | 2025-07-19 16:40:02+00:00
To be honest, I used Stackoverflow less and less over the years. Not sure that was because I learned more. I just think most times I went there I was looking for snippets to save time with boilerplate. As better frameworks, tools, packages, languages came along I just had less need to go to Stackoverflow.

But yes, AI put the nail in its coffin. Sadly, ironically, AI trained off it. I mean AI quite literally stole from Stackoverflow and others and somehow got away with it.

That's why I don't really admire people like Sam Altman or the whack job doomer at Anthropic whatever his name is. They're crooks.
by al_borland | 2025-07-19 16:40:04+00:00
Even ignoring the compounding of learned skills over time, I've noticed that when relying on AI that my brain switches off and I stop thinking critically. This is a bad habit, and works against the idea of checking the AI results for quality. When things don't work, why turn on the brain to figure it out, when you can just ask the AI to try harder. This is often where a lot of time is spent. I once went back and forth with the AI for quite a while trying to solve a little bug in a script I wanted, but didn't know the language that well. It was a helper tool for me personally, not a deliverable for my job. After getting fed up, I finally looked more at the code and saw that it was an off-by-one error. Even telling the AI this, it couldn't fix it. I ended up fixing it myself. I had written a similar script in another language in the past. Mine had less error handling, and was a bit less fancy, but it was good enough for what I needed, I understood what the code was doing, and I didn't get stuck on any silly errors along the way. Debugging other people's code is not fun, and that's mostly what AI coding turns into.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-19 16:40:04+00:00
> The self taught developer will eventually figure it out, if they are intelligent enough to approach the given problem.

> The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory.

This is interesting because I have seen the exact opposite. It could be different circles we run in, but I've seen a lot of self-taught people who are in it for the money and couldn't care less about doing anything novel. Where a lot of my college colleagues (mind you, this is from the 1980's) were in it because they loved it, and look for new stuff to learn.

I suspect the distinction here is not self-taught vs. college, but rather do it at least partially for passion vs. the job benefits.

I'd bet we both have confirmation bias to our own backgrounds here.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-19 16:40:09+00:00
> has never done and will never do anything in the general public's interest

I'm no Meta apologist, but haven't they been at the forefront of open-source AI development? That seems to be in the "general public's interest".

Obviously they also have a business to run, so their public benefit can only go so far before they start running afoul of their fiduciary responsibilities.
by piker | 2025-07-19 16:40:44+00:00
I think you're missing the point that the "G" in WYSIWIG is "when printed". Everybody wants uniform rendering across applications in the way that, say, websites render uniformly across browsers. But fewer people care today what it looks like when printed--they're never going to print it anyway. They're just going to docusign it and call it a day.

In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important or as magical today as it was in 1984.
by facefactsdamnit | 2025-07-19 16:40:48+00:00
You raise a far point. These criticisms based on "it's merely X" or "it's not really Y" don't hold water when X and Y are poorly defined.

The only thing that should matter is the results they get. And I have a hard time understanding why the thing that is supposed to behave in an intelligent way but often just spew nonsense gets 10x budget increases over and over again.

This is bad software. It does not do the thing it promises to do. Software that sometimes works and very often produces wrong or nonsensical output is garbage software. Sink 10x, 100x, 1000x more resources into it is irrational.

Nothing else matters. Maybe it reasons, maybe it's intelligent. If it produces garbled nonsense often, giving the teams behind it 10x the compute is insane.
by zettabomb | 2025-07-19 16:41:11+00:00
I wasn't aware of Balsa or Geary, but it's interesting to note that the author has mentioned that they are affected by GNOME's culture. I also have found the GNOME devs to have issues with admitting any fault at all, security or otherwise, but I wasn't aware of them being linked to any email clients other than Evolution - which I have been using.

What's a good app for Exchange on Linux? I could use the web app, which my company has available, but I do appreciate having a dedicated email client sometimes, particularly for OS notifications (which will work without having the browser open).
by kbelder | 2025-07-19 16:41:27+00:00
"For example: let's agree for the sake of argument that a newborn has moral rights, and that gametes do not. It doesn't make much sense to give the fetus moral rights only based on its physical location, therefore at some point between conception and birth the fetus gains moral rights. No matter what point n we choose, the objection "why is one day earlier any better" seems pretty persuasive. Therefore, by induction, the only point for assigning rights which can't be argued against in that way is at conception. Thus, we should disallow abortion so we aren't depriving the fetus of its rights."

That's roughly my position, as an atheist libertarian. although I don't back it up all the way to conception, just to a point in early pregnancy where it seems overwhelmingly clear the fetus has no attributes which could reasonably demand respect for rights.

Abortion has been conflated with feminism, like how, say, tariffs are conflated with Republicans right now, but there's no ideological necessity for that. Just cultural trends.
by mango7283 | 2025-07-19 16:41:33+00:00
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Steam-Payment-providers-force-V...

Please explain.

"In 2020, following a complaint from the Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority, Valve blocked all titles that were labeled as “adult” and did not have an age rating. To be able to offer them, the US company would have to integrate a reliable age verification system into Steam in Germany. Because Valve has not yet implemented such a system, sex games remain blocked in Germany. "
by j_m_b | 2025-07-19 16:42:02+00:00
So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.
by andersmurphy | 2025-07-19 16:42:18+00:00
If the last few years of the AI hype cycle has taught me anything is there's massive late movers advantage.

Anyone who spent time learning the AI tools over that period of time has basically wasted their time. Working with agents is nothing like prompt engineering. I imagine whatever comes after will be nothing like agents etc. Sounds like those who try to keep up with AI will be equally unemployed.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-19 16:42:36+00:00
> We're not that smart.

How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.

> Everything has unintended consequences.

People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.

I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.
by vladms | 2025-07-19 16:42:50+00:00
So how does the US deal with age restricted games? I find this much more related to actually willing to implement a rule, rather than having rules for the sake of it (like the US buying alcohol rule - it is forbidden for people under 21 to drink but 40% of the people between 18 and 21 drink ?! source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_by_youth_i...).
by hollerith | 2025-07-19 16:43:01+00:00
New England is perceived as less religious than the South, but one reason for that is that New England's moral perceptions had a strong influence on US political beliefs. In other words, the Puritans morphed into the Congregationalists who morphed into the Unitarians, who basically took over (in the 19th Century) US political thinking (or at least the Left side of it), giving the appearance that New England does not having any particular or special moral or religious beliefs (at least to those on the Left half of the US political divide).

I grew up in New England and have lived in the South and in California, and IMHO morality is a bigger determinant of the behavior of the average person in New England than it is in the other places I've lived (all in the US). The South and California are more pragmatic, less moralistic.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-19 16:43:17+00:00
> "Marginalization" is a systemic issue; its reality isn't dependent on anecdotes or your particular happiness with your lot in life.

Sure but observations conducted over decades isn't an anecdote. It isn't even just one person's conclusions because it includes the observations and analysis done by other personally-known people. And their conclusions are augmented with my direct observations of their lives.

> You've got to look at differential statistics between men and women to see if either (or both!) are marginalized.

Stats give you direct measurements and from those we can make reasonable inferences. Stats are valuable; they tell us that women make less and are under-promoted. From that we can make inferences about women's work environments. We can confirm the inferences by listening to women.

Women fully know they struggle for equal pay and opportunity. Marginalization is indicated and confirmed all around.

Objective, reasonable women know they're marginalized.

Objective, reasonable men know we're not.
by clickety_clack | 2025-07-19 16:43:43+00:00
There’s an efficient way to serve the results, and there’s an efficient way for a human to consume them, and I find LLMs to be much more efficient in terms of cognitive work done to explore and understand something than a google search. The next thing will have to beat that level of personal mental effort, and I can’t imagine what that next step would look like yet.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-07-19 16:44:23+00:00
If the library they depend on isnt getting fixed then it needs to be worked around (doable with HTML sanitisation) or use another library that's usable for the purpose of an email client.

If neither of those are doable, the software needs a warning that it's vulnerable to a such a terrible privacy exploit. People over however many years this has been possible deserve to know that their email client has been allowing any random person in the internet to easily get their IP address or know they're on their computer.

If you can't do this why are you maintaining software, it's unmaintained at that point. The replies to the bug report are just terrible attitude even if factually correct.
by agent327 | 2025-07-19 16:44:50+00:00
Since we are talking about hotel-related scams, I might as well mention getaroom.com and hotelreservations.com. These scum duplicate entire hotel websites (including logos and everything), and will claim to reserve a room, but when you click on the "go to confirmation page" link, they will quickly up-charge you by hundreds or even thousands of dollars - and they will charge that before you have a chance to confirm. And while some people apparently managed to get a reservation this way, there are also reports of people ending up without any reservation. In other words, they are a full-on scum. Check trustpilot if you don't believe me.

So to summarize:

- Massive unexpected up-charge. - Credit card gets charged before you even click the final confirmation button. - Doubtful if you even get a reservation.

Stay away from these sites, and others like them, at all cost.

In case you wonder how my adventure ended: they added $800 to a $1600 reservation. I complained, and was eventually told that they would refund me, _if_ I did not do a charge-back on my credit card. A few days later they, amazingly, kept their word, so I didn't lose any money.
by saidinesh5 | 2025-07-19 16:45:30+00:00
> Gravel or other slippery surface where the front wheel would just skid? You're toast. Ride slowly instead

Yup! Can't stress this enough. The last big crash was literally slippery road and a speed bump. The bicycle did a full 180. I'd have probably been better off if i just didn't brake at all... Didn't notice the speed bump in the darkness and when i suddenly did The front brake was on, the bike hit the speed bump after skidding.
by pndy | 2025-07-19 16:45:36+00:00
Between '06 and '19 I was a client of bank that proudly bear the title of "pioneer of online banking" here and tbh, they actually were. You won't met anybody in Poland who wouldn't have contact with that brand one way or another.

I opted-out for all marketing purposes once they allowed to do so but yet, I was getting random calls from bank and 3rd parties. One day I called them because I had login issues on Windows Phone. I did mention to consultant that I was getting these calls and in return lady hit me with quite a revelation: they had a single opt-out that was only available if you called them.
by logicchains | 2025-07-19 16:46:20+00:00
The are around three Golang HTTP2.0 servers on Github, but it wasn't just regurgitating the application from memory, as if it was then it would have been mostly correct first try, and it wouldn't have needed to spend 80%+ of the development time in a code-compile-test cycle of fixing bugs identified by integration tests and spec conformance tests.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-07-19 16:46:44+00:00
This goes both ways. I think the vast majority of my colleagues who got into CS later post-college did it because they needed a job, and that's where jobs were.

> Self Taught -> Already is curious, be default, so 99%-100% are curious.

There is some of this but IME that % is half your estimate, if not lower.

It could be different in today's market because CS IS NOT where a lot of jobs are, and my observations are based on when it was very very hot, so there's that.

But, no matter what you or I say anecdata is not data, but in my 30+ years of doing this, I find these broad generalizations mostly wrong.
by maqnius | 2025-07-19 16:47:37+00:00
I agree that people are using it for things they would've googled, but I doubt that it's a good replacement.

To me it mostly comes with a feeling of uncertainty. As if someone tells you something he got told on a party. I need to Google it, to find a trustful source for verification, else it's just a hint.

So I use it if I want a quick hint. Not if I really want to have information worth remembering. So it's certainly not a replacement for me. It actually makes things worse for me because of all that AI slop atm.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-19 16:47:49+00:00
>I think they don't even know the term "model" (in AI context), let alone which one's the best. They only know ChatGPT.

They don't know how torrents work either, but they always find a way to pirate movies to avoid Netflix's shitty policies. Necessity is the mother of invention.

>However I don't think many will make use of that.

You underestimate the drive kids/young adults have trying to maximize their grades/output while doing the bare minimum to have more time for themselves.

>Additionally, AI companies could quickly get in trouble if they accept payments from EU credit cards.

Well, if the EU keep this up, that might not be an issue long term in the future, when without top of the line AI and choked by regulations and with the costs of caring for an ageing demographics sucking up all the economic output, the EU economy falls further and further into irrelevancy.
by mrdependable | 2025-07-19 16:47:55+00:00
I like how they always say AI will advance science when they want to sell it to the public, but pump how it will replace workers when selling it to businesses. It’s like dangling a carrot while slowly putting a knife to our throats.

Edit: why was my comment moved from the one I was replying to? It makes no sense here on its own.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 16:48:41+00:00
I think Photoshop is a good guide here.

Famously complicated interface with a million buttons and menus.

Now there's more buttons for the AI tools.

Because at the end of the day, using a "brush" tool to paint over the area containing the thing you want it to remove or change in an image is MUCH simpler than trying to tell it that through chat. Some sort of prompt like "please remove the fifth person from the left standing on the brick path under the bus stop" vs "just explicitly select something with the GUI." The former could have a lot of value for casual amateur use; it's not going to replace the precise, high-functionality tool for professional use.

In software - would you rather chat with an LLM to see the contents of a proposed code change, or use a visual diff tool? "Let the agent run and then treat it's stuff as a PR from a junior dev" has been said so many times recently - which is not suggesting just chatting with it to do the PR instead of using the GUI. I would imagine that this would get extended to something like the input not just being less of a free-form chat, but more of a submission of a Figma mockup + a link to a ticket with specs.
by zkmon | 2025-07-19 16:49:16+00:00
Not sure what the complaint is about. If the coding work has to be thrown away, we need to do that and move on. We did that many times earlier. We have thrown away hunting, farming, calculations by hand, cameras and so on. Coding work might get extinct for some use cases. Nothing wrong with it. Learn how to use your tools, assistants and godzillas.

The bigger issue, would there be a need for coding and software? Who would use them? Why are they using it? Are they buying something? searching for info? The usecase will see a revolution. The new usecases won't need the traditonal kind software. But AI can only produce traditional software.

Can I ask Claude to code up its clone for local use?
by toast0 | 2025-07-19 16:49:17+00:00
Modern TLS adds one round trip, unless you have TCP fast open or 0-RTT resumption; neither of which are likely in a browser case, so call it 1 extra round trip. Modern TLS includes TLS 1.3 as well as TLS 1.2 with TLS False Start (RFC 7918, August 2016).

And TLS handshakes aren't that big, even with certificates... Although you do want to use ECC certs if you can, the keys are much smaller. The client handshake should fit in 1-2 packets, the server handshake should fit in 2-3 packets. But more importantly, the client request can only be sent after receiving the whole server handshake, so the congestion window will be refreshed. You could probably calculate how much larger the congestion window is likely to be, and give yourself a larger allowance, since TLS will have expanded your congestion window.

Otoh, the important concept, is that early throughput is limited by latency and congestion control, and it takes many round trips to hit connection limits.

One way to apply that is if you double your page weight at the same time you add many more service locations and traffic direction, you can see page load times stay about the same.
Show HN: Canyoulook.at – A Daily Photo Challenge
by boo-ga-ga | 2025-07-19 16:49:51+00:00
I had an idea to create a simple web app that gives people a challenge of finding a particular thing somewhere nearby or in their photo gallery.

The app has two "modes":

1. Shows a daily challenge preselected for each day. Just open the home page https://canyoulook.at to see it

2. Any user can create their own challenge and share link with friends, like the one in the post URL here

After the image reveal you can share result in text, inspired by Wordle:).

The app works by generating image description with Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct and comparing the result texts with MiniLM-L6-v2 run on DeepInfra.com as it seemed the simplest way to have an LLM API running for me.
by mnky9800n | 2025-07-19 16:50:02+00:00
I think the agent stuff is impressive because we are giving the AI scaffold and tools and things to do. And that is why it is impressive because it has some directive. But it is obvious if you don't give it good directives it doesn't know what to do. So for me, I think a lot of jobs will be making agents do things, but a lot won't. i think its really strange that people are all so against all this stuff. it's cool new computer tools, does nobody actually like computers anymore?