MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by docmars | 2025-07-19 14:03:11+00:00
Get this - they power the payments infrastructure for OnlyFans, which to many people is arguably more degenerate than a few adult-themed games.

People can also buy TV shows and movies in which their content is far more grusome and disturbing than the video-games targeted by the activist groups putting pressure on payment processors.

I noticed someone else posted a list of other groups, but another one is called "Collective Shout", who censors their own ads because their subject matter is considered harmful.
by randint01 | 2025-07-19 14:03:24+00:00
when you say "i did lots of unsafe operations", i think it contractions the claim that you "followed the rust way of doing things". what's the point of using a "memory-safe" language if you just gonna use unsafe blocks and ignore that? i agree with you point that there's some operations that rust sucks and c is a better option although. but my claim is that writing unsafe rust and safe are diferent things, for example they created a book talking just about unsafe rust -> https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-19 14:03:34+00:00
I actually think this “cheating” is fine. In fact it’s preferable. I don’t need an AI that can act as a really expensive calculator or solver. We’ve already built really good calculators and solvers that are near optimal. What has been missing is the abductive ability to successfully use those tools in an unconstrained space with agency. I find really no value in avoiding the optimal or near optimal techniques we’ve devised rather than focusing on the harder reasoning tasks of choosing tools, instrumenting them properly, interpreting their results, and iterating. This is the missing piece in automated reasoning after all. A NN that can approximate at great cost those tools is a parlor trick and while interesting not useful or practical. Even if they have some agent system here, it doesn’t make the achievement any less that a machine can zero shot do as well as top humans at incredibly difficult reasoning problems posed in natural language.
by ryeats | 2025-07-19 14:03:40+00:00
Yep you are also right, some amount of boilerplate code is perfectly reasonable since some problems are similar but just different enough and unique enough they don't merit designing an architecture that gets rid of the boilerplate. this is probably the most useful thing that AI could do for us. I think I am more worried as a maintainer that we won't see that we are copying all that boilerplate too often and it's subtle bugs are multiplied and now we have to maintain all that code because AI doesn't yet do that.
by jml78 | 2025-07-19 14:03:46+00:00
Which is crazy to me. I had purchased international airline tickets 9 months prior to COVID.

Covid happened and everything was cancelled. The airline refused to refund, only give credit. The issue is that it was on an airline that was useless to me because this trip was cancelled and we were going to be rescheduling.

Did a chargeback with Apple even though I was past the date, they still gave me my money back. I was shocked
by zkmon | 2025-07-19 14:04:48+00:00
I see each part playing a functionality role, instead of safety-related role. A broken functionality might cause a safety issue. but it is still a functionality issue. A rider could fall off when a pedal is broken. That's just an undesirable consequence of broken functionality. A broken functionality always means things not working as expected, and naturally causing unexpected results. Most unexpected results can be safety issues, unless it is a win of a lottery.
by ksec | 2025-07-19 14:04:54+00:00
I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist for AI. I would likely be called both by the opposite parties. But the fact that AI / LLM is still rapidly improving is impressive in itself and worth celebrating for. Is it perfect, AGI, ASI? No. Is it useless? Absolutely not.

I am just happy the prize is so big for AI that there are enough money involve to push for all the hardware advancement. Foundry, Packaging, Interconnect, Network etc, all the hardware research and tech improvements previously thought were too expensive are now in the "Shut up and take my money" scenario.
by westurner | 2025-07-19 14:04:56+00:00
"Quantum Dot DBR Lasers Monolithically Integrated on Silicon Photonics by In-Pocket Heteroepitaxy" (2025) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10944565

"Scalable and Monolithic Integration of Quantum Dot Lasers for Silicon Photonics" (2025) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11081542
by singleshot_ | 2025-07-19 14:06:34+00:00
> This has nothing to do with a surveillance state

My claim: there was not a surveillance state in the 1880s, because it was impossible, because they were missing the entirety of the surveillance apparatus. Now that apparatus is omnipresent.

Did you think I thought coldplay was the government? It's clear you understand what the surveillance state is and that we are in one -- you even suggest that I should fight it (I do).

The coldplay event does have something to do with state surveillance: it relied on all the same infrastructure.
by xg15 | 2025-07-19 14:06:42+00:00
From the thread, it sounds as if they don't even pretend this is about cleaning, they're just saying "we're a smoke-free hotel, so smoking costs $500 as a punitive measure, period".

I wonder if they could legally separate this from any real-world activities completely? During check-in, put a clause in the contract "if our partner company says so, you have to pay $500 extra. By signing, you agree to that" - without any reference to smoking at all.

I hope this wouldn't be legal, but it sounds like it could be.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-19 14:06:49+00:00
I feel that Penn explained this incredibly well in one of my favourite magic tricks:

https://youtu.be/Jko5BGhc-Ys?si=Uz6jvQ5voEYAxg8W

We have such a weird relationship with the spectacle of risk. As he says, a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height. The only need to make it dangerous is because the audience wants the circus.

And I think somewhat implicit in the point he’s making is that he believes that while the audience wants the spectacle, the performers have a responsibility not to give it to them.
by potato-peeler | 2025-07-19 14:06:57+00:00
> accepting payments is still too expensive,

This completely depends on the mdr agreement between seller and network/bank. It is pretty standard to see 2-3%, anything more than that is purely markup added by the seller. Anything less than that is based on transaction volume, even small business are eligible based on viable business model.

> no reliance on legacy systems like Visa, Mastercard

Legacy systems still thrive because their TPS is the highest among any payment rail. Crypto based payments is not novelty, it’s just slow due to their time taken to verify a transaction, and it’s nowhere close to what visa can do.
by sneak | 2025-07-19 14:08:16+00:00
You should see the hilaribad basis given in affidavits for search warrants that get rubber stamped by judges.

There is no burden of proof and no consequence for perjury. 100% of the search or seizure warrants I have read have had obvious perjury in them.

I encrypt my data at rest not because I fear a burglar breaking in, but because I fear the FBI coming in the front door on some trumped up bullshit. Everyone has a right to privacy, even (and perhaps especially) if they are doing nothing wrong.

I’ve read too many stories of writers and activists getting bogus warrants and charges and arrests thrown at them to inconvenience and harass them to ever have a single unencrypted disk in my house.
by snickerbockers | 2025-07-19 14:08:29+00:00
There were those but there were also a lot of surprisingly high-effort drawings; Archiverse (https://archiverse.pretendo.network/) has a lot of them archived. It wasn't in any way dead or unpopular.

And if people weren't using it, then why would they backport it to the 3DS three years after release?

And the worst part is, it was still young when they ended it. The Wii U wasn't even five years old and there were still games coming out with miiverse integration a year before it ended. And ultimately Nintendo were the ones who decided to make this into a central feature of their platform. They didn't have to sell people a twitter clone if they didn't even intend to support it for the duration of a single game-console generation. They didn't have to populate the home-menu of the Wii U with miiverse posts or make it central to games like splatoon and mario maker only to end it less than two years from release date.
by dragontamer | 2025-07-19 14:08:40+00:00
Don't you see that the future is XML SOAP RPCs? If you don't master this new technology now, you'll be left behind!!

Then again, maybe I'm too old now and being left behind if I remember the old hype like this....

The entirety of the tech field is constantly hyping the current technology out of FOMO. Whether or not it works out in the future it's always the same damn argument.
by grep_name | 2025-07-19 14:09:04+00:00
This is kinda similar to something I'm trying to setup. I have most of my self-hosted infrastructure running in docker containers, but I want to put some stuff on a nixOS ec2 instance. Mostly services I want to never go down or be affected by my local network (uptime kuma) and chat stuff (irc bouncer, conduit, soju, etc etc).

I use nixOS on my laptop but don't make many nix projects, and TBH I have no idea how to test this setup locally before deploying it. I have some nix stuff setup that spins up a VM and exposes the ports on localhost, but it's brittle and rapidly spaghettifying. Do you have any tips for testing this stuff as part of a local project?
by jjcob | 2025-07-19 14:09:05+00:00
Austrian newspaper Der Standard [1] is reporting that he was using a camera attached with a string, and authorities are considering the possiblity that it got caught in the propellor, leading to a collapse of the parachute.

Allegedly he tried to open the emergency chute, but was already too low.

[1]: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000280134/justiz-in-ita...
by DudeOpotomus | 2025-07-19 14:09:25+00:00
If I got one of these I'd pay it and never, ever, ever stay at any hotel owned by the entity again. Being that I spend $25k-50k a year on hotels, their loss is a small hotel's gain.

In fact, whoever does this will lose my business ahead of time as I will never stay at any hotel that uses this service. A few minutes on Tripadvisor and you'll know.

Such incredible business myopia. Hotels are one of the few businesses that loyalty is not only a boon, but a necessity for survival. Without brand loyalty, hotels suffer.
by dangus | 2025-07-19 14:09:39+00:00
I saw a little quote about the modern business landscape that seems to apply here:

“Save a few pennies by destroying trust.”

The Hyatt franchise needs to shut this down ASAP. Most hotels are independently operated or operated by franchise groups. Not many hotel brands actually own the hotels and essentially act as marketing firms.

If I were to give this the “never assign malice to that which can be adequately explained by incompetence” benefit of the doubt, I think some bozo hotel manager got sold this innovative “solution” and implemented it without thinking much about it. Then they got their revenue and probably thought to themselves “Wow I knew the smoking problem was bad but I didn’t know it was this bad!!”

Meanwhile they are slow rolling the death of their location by tainting guest reviews, which are the lifeblood by which you justify your room rates.
by cardanome | 2025-07-19 14:10:07+00:00
Generative AI is like micromanaging an talented Junior Dev that never improves. And I mean micromanaging to such a toxic degree that not human would ever put up with that.

It works but it simply not what most people want. If you love to code then you just abstracted away the most fun parts and have to only do the boring parts now. If you love to manage, well managing actual humans and seeing them grow and become independent is much more fulfilling.

On a side note, I feel like prompting and context management is something that is easier for me personally as a person with ADHD as I am already used to working with forms of intelligence that are different to my own. I am used to having to explicitly state my needs. My neurotypical co-workers get frustrated that the LLM can't read their minds and always tell me that it should know what they want. When it nudge them to give it more context and explain better what they need they often resist and say they shouldn't have to. Of course I am stereotyping a bit here but still an interesting observation.

Prompting is indeed a skill. Though I believe the skill ceiling will lower once tools get better so I wouldn't bank too much on it. What is going to be valuable for a long time is probably general software architecture skills.
by atemerev | 2025-07-19 14:10:32+00:00
...and, besides that, most of the "wow kitty" factor activates after small cats (not necessarily domestic cats). European wildcat: yes. Sand cat: yes. Pallas cat: absolutely. Ocelot: kitty! gimme gimme gimme. Lynx: maybe. Leopards, tigers, jaguars: beautiful, but dangerous, interesting to watch, but no oxytocine release.

So I am still not convinced.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-07-19 14:11:01+00:00
Applying the phrase "designed" to C is already dubious. It's a language that evolved from a very minimal and not terribly "designed" thing based off predecessor languages whose primary selling point was basically "it's easier to write a compiler for than Algol"

I don't hate C, but we can do a lot better with hindsight and at this point the amount of damage caused by foisting null terminated strings on the world is inexcusable.
by the_af | 2025-07-19 14:11:20+00:00
In which part is Noel disagreeing? He didn't write his own engine either, he just didn't use one (but didn't write everything from scratch either, note he uses lots of game/graphics frameworks, which in a sense is like using a "meta engine").

He's also making a 2D game, which traditionally is closer to game making of old (think 8 bit home computers).

Finally, he's not arguing against engines like Godot or Unreal, he says those are acceptable but he just didn't need them. Much like he doesn't need Windows and finds coding with Linux more comfortable.

PS: out of curiosity, which one is the popular game you mentioned? Looking through his portfolio I see lots of interesting games I'd like to play :)
by andersmurphy | 2025-07-19 14:11:52+00:00
Doesn’t have to be a choice it could just be the default. My billion cells/checkboxes[1] demos both use datastar and so are just over 10kb. It can make a big difference on mobile networks and 3G. I did my own tests and being over 14kb often meant an extra 3s load time on bad connections. The nice thing is I got this for free because the datastar maintainer cares about tcp slow star even though I might not.

- [1] https://checkboxes.andersmurphy.com
by andsoitis | 2025-07-19 14:12:36+00:00
> Good riddance! Does anybody like the super rich, apart from the super rich?

Presumably, Ann is not NOT liked:

Canadian Ann Kaplan Mulholland moved to the U.K. in 2022 after selling her medical-loan business and her youngest child started college. She bought a rundown 13th-century castle and spent £15 million, equivalent to $20 million, to make renovations and build restaurants and a wedding business on site.

Mulholland hired a staff of roughly 100, joined her local church and started doing her grocery shopping at the retailer Marks & Spencer. But she is now on her way out. She and her husband, a plastic surgeon, applied to move to Italy, which charges a flat fee of about $230,000 a year for expats in lieu of tax on foreign income.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-07-19 14:12:57+00:00
There's a level of economic coercion involved though as well - "going pro" is only possible by pushing for riskier and riskier stunts. If you want to get paid to ski, skateboard, etc you need to be doing increasingly extreme things to risk your own health and safety. The companies do lots of risk mitigation once you're filming a TV spot, but to get to that level you already had to be putting your body on the line for years.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-19 14:13:06+00:00
But this is exactly my point. Some dependencies don't actually save you any time, they're trivial to write yourself, so there is no point in getting them (perhaps the most absurd and infamous example of this being left-pad). Other dependencies are extremely hard to write, so finding a version someone else built, even if they are not maintaining it anymore, is worth it.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-19 14:13:19+00:00
Why is that less exciting? A machine competing in an unconstrained natural language difficult math contest and coming out on top by any means is breath taking science fiction a few years ago - now it’s not exciting? Regardless of the tools for verification or even solvers - why is the goal post moving so fast? There is no bonus for “purity of essence” and using only neural networks. We live in an era where it’s hard to tell if machines are thinking or not, which for since the first computing machines was seen as the ultimate achievement. Now we Pooh Pooh the results of each iteration - which unfold month over month not decade over decade now.

You don’t have to be hyped to be amazed. You can retain the ability to dream while not buying into the snake oil. This is amazing no matter what ensemble of techniques used. In fact - you should be excited if we’ve started to break out of the limitations of forcing NN to be load bearing in literally everything. That’s a sign of maturing technology not of limitations.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-07-19 14:13:23+00:00
An open source cocaine production machine is still an illegal cocaine production machine. The fact that it's open source doesn't matter.

You seem to not have understood that different forms of appliances need to comply with different forms of law. And you being able to call it open source or not doesn't change anything about its legal aspects.

And every law written is a compromise between two opposing parties.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-07-19 14:13:38+00:00
Remember when hotels charged outrageous fees to make a phone call from your room? That scam no longer works because everybody has a cell phone. Then they tried charging high fees for watching movies on the room's TV, and high fees for wifi. Those no longer work because everybody expects hotel wifi to be free and unlimited LTE is a thing now and nobody uses the TV in a hotel room any more.

Obviously this is just the latest such scam. Accuse people of smoking, refuse to show them the evidence, and charge them $500 to be split between the hotel and the sensor company.

Reminds me of the UK post office scandal where hundreds of innocent people went to prison because of software errors when the powers that be insisted the software was perfect and no auditing was possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Yet again we have normies believing marketing bullshit that says "our proprietary algorithms are foolproof." We need laws that say any algorithm that can accuse a person of wrongdoing must be auditable and if it harms innocent people, the CEO of the company is both civilly and criminally liable.
by bix6 | 2025-07-19 14:14:19+00:00
“Are you going to save the beach house, or do you want to save the beach?”

Obviously the beach. How this is even still debated is ridiculous. One rich persons house or everyone’s beach. It’s really not that hard to build a quarter mile inland and let natural sand dunes etc do their job. It’s just selfish, stupid, and silly. Some forethought would’ve gone a long way here.
by blantonl | 2025-07-19 14:14:24+00:00
Between this and Hertz's new AI damage detection models, we're seeing the enshitification of business travel reaching a new level, and also doing a great job of really ticking off a group of customers (business travelers) who are already irritated enough.

Rest markets itself as a way to "unlock a new revenue stream"

Leave it to the bean counters to see this as an opportunity to generate new revenue streams from customers while simultaneously pissing them off.
by decasia | 2025-07-19 14:15:21+00:00
I was trying to reinstall my rear wheel the other day after removing a bike trailer. I apparently didn't tighten it down enough and the wheel came out of the brackets as soon as I started to ride, causing an instant crash and a lot of bruises.

Things like that make me feel apprehensive about trying to learn more bike maintenance stuff myself. It's almost inevitable to have to patch flat tires though so you're always going to be reinstalling the wheel yourself, but I don't touch the brakes even if it seems like an easy fix.
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 14:15:32+00:00
honestly OOXML looks a loot like someone took a non XML format and gave it a XML encoding

like XML is a mark up language so it _should_ interleave quite "naturally" and well for text formatting tasks (i.e. see OpenDocument example or supper simple "ancient style" HTML)

but OOXML looks more like someone force serialized some live OOP object hierarchy with (potential cyclic) references and tone of subclasses etc.

tl;dr: i.e. it looks a loot similar to a simplified form of how text editors internal represent formatted test

like w:r looks like a text section, you could say a r_ow of wide characters or words, w:p looks like a subclass of a implicit type which is basically a `Vec<w:r>`, w:pPr looks like ".presentation" property of w:p, same for w:rPr, probably both being subtypes of some generic Presentation base class. w:t looks like a generic `.text: String` property. w:pStyle looks like a property of Presentation or it's ParagraphPresentation sub-class, it's `w:val` property makes it look like it's a shared reference which can be looked up by the key `"Para"`. w:b is just another subclass of Presentation you can use in any context etc.

which opens the question

"do they mostly just dump their internal app state"?

and did they make their format that over-complicated and "over" flexible so that they can just change their internal structure and still dump it?

which would also explain how they might have ended up with "accidentally" incorrectly implementing their own standard around 10 years ago during early OOXML times

and if so isn't that basically "proof" that OOXML isn't really an open format but just a "make pretend" of one?
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-19 14:15:47+00:00
Yeah, that’s totally fair. At least they’ll have testimony that the smoking was actually witnessed. Most people aren’t going to even bother fighting that since it actually happened. I just worry about abuse cases and the most obvious one here is false positives being assumed true by everyone who profits from them.

Edit:

Sorry, that’s from the wrong point of view but I don’t think the answer changes. It seems Rest will have to change a lot of their marketing language to really avoid liability but if someone is actually caught smoking then it’s not likely to manifest.