MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m0wer | 2025-07-04 11:24:04+00:00
Would it change your view if they mined instead of buying?

If you were to create a decentralized and limited supply currency, how would you distribute it so that it's “fair”?

Sounds a bit like if the world was running only on proprietary software created by Microsoft and you criticized the move to open source because that would enrich Linus Torvalds and other code creators/early adopters.

Are people better off by continuing to use centralized broken software that they have to pay a subscription for (inflation) than if they did a lump sum buy of a GNU/Linux distro copy from a random guy and become liberated for the rest of their life?
by truculent | 2025-07-04 11:25:06+00:00
Isn't the issue that historical data is consistent with the overturning model, which adds weight to our assumption that it has previously been stable. These new measurements (and observations?) are consistent with the overturning circulation weakening.

I agree with you in principle - my impression (perhaps wrong - not an expert) was that there are additional data points supporting the idea of a consistent status quo.
by koolba | 2025-07-04 11:25:35+00:00
> An up-front depreciation deduction, a new accounting standard for interest deductibility, and expensing for research and development costs are also included. This trio of cuts has been avidly sought by business lobbies since they expired a few years ago.

Software companies should be cheering this as without it they would not be able to deduct their salary expenses.
by tetraodonpuffer | 2025-07-04 11:26:42+00:00
there will always be a market for exceptional artists, but what about the other 80-90% of people that used to be able to make a living and now can't anymore? What are they going to do? And without the possibility of a particular profession leading to gainful employment, very few people will even start it, making the funnel smaller and smaller until even exceptional artists won't be able to emerge at all.
by m0wer | 2025-07-04 11:27:30+00:00
Blockchains don't scale. But that's a feature, not a bug.

Great protocols are built in layers.

You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.
by Pixxelle | 2025-07-04 11:27:45+00:00
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by spankibalt | 2025-07-04 11:28:30+00:00
> "It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, [...]"

I beg to differ; in my experience, the Amiga who doesn't forget is an outlier. ;)

> "[...] the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards."

Once again: The context was the strictly technical, which was brought up by another poster. I am also well aware of the economical, and for specific usecases corresponding technical, realities. But that is best served by (comparative) market analysis and not just anecdotes. Which brings me to...

> "We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end."

In my little corner of East Germany, I didn't feel the same about Amiga users. For you simply were not relevant; I didn't know anyone with an Amiga until much, much later (2007!).

> "With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release."

It serves as an example of an arcade game with good production values, and many supported graphics and sound modes ("expandability"), for a PC of the era, i. e. the outgoing 80s.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-04 11:29:44+00:00
But ... the whole reason Trump got elected is the fact that the electorate has split into us-vs-them group identities, he works through polarization. And although this post captures how one group (let's call it the "internet generation") feels about the world, it's probably not helping with polarization.

You have to admire, in fact, how smart Trump is. Look at the central "problem" according to that post:

"But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were"

Holy crap this is polarizing. AND WE DON'T EVEN DISAGREE ON THESE. These sort of statements are the exact opposite of what we need to defeat Trump. Because no, this is NOT a difference between "smart" and "dumb". If you abstract just a little bit ...

Hillary Clinton is an unpopular war hawk. Would you like her as president? I wouldn't, just about the only big positive I see in her is that it's long past time for a female president. But please: not her. She IS an alien in that I don't know who this woman represents. Not me, certainly, and I frankly don't see or know any group that she does represent. I'd MUCH prefer AOC, but frankly, I'd prefer Nikki Haley over her.

"Global warming is a Chinese hoax". This is the one I would most describe as "dumb". But ... not really global warming policy has not worked for 50 years. This is, of course, not a reason to give up on it, but it probably is time to change course bigtime. And, sorry, the protests about global warming ... are equally dumb as Trump's (made-in-china) MAGA caps.

"what America needs most ... wall stretching from Texas to California". Obviously "dumb" Americans like this because life has become ever more difficult and immigration (specifically pressure on the job market and housing market) is a huge and growing problem. Trump only gets points because he does something.

The ("our") internet generation is getting old. Perhaps not dying yet, but we are not young anymore. And the train has definitely left the station: nobody's growing up to be internet generation anymore. The only thing that is happening to the internet generation is that people are leaving it. Not in great numbers. Not yet. But we'll only be shrinking from 5 years ago forward. Yet another reason to find a way to agree with Trump's electorate.

I feel like these viewpoints (I hope) represent "the internet generation". My conclusion is Trump got elected because he convinced me and the "real Americans" that we disagree. We don't. These are superficial, not worth having a fight over and CERTAINLY not worth having a president like Trump over.
by danaris | 2025-07-04 11:30:10+00:00
> Surely the executives at EA should know better.

This...

> Like it's literally their job to know better.

...does not follow from this.

And executives get where they are, at least in significant part, because they are good at telling boards what they want to hear. They are also, generally speaking, in the same class as the board members, and together they are very willing to blame failures on those darn workers just doing a bad job at stuff.

"What is going on" is that the executive class in America has been progressively getting more and more divorced from the reality of actual production, and treating their opinions and expertise as if they are somehow definitive on everything related to their domain is very dangerous.
by krisoft | 2025-07-04 11:30:25+00:00
> It is not polite to assume that you, after a brief amount of thinking with no background knowledge, have overturned centuries of empirical and scientific knowledge of canine heredity.

I do not claim any such thing. Simply that the difference in behaviour between two dogs of the same breed cannot be explained with genetics. Lenny and Arthur share a genetic background. They do not share the behaviour. There is some other difference between Lenny and Arthur (or between the two swimmers!) which drives the difference in the observed behaviours.

I'm not saying genetics is not a thing. It is simply not the right lens to inspect this situation here.

> And it is, indeed, peak HN arrogance to make that assumption.

Which I'm not making. In any of my comments. So we are good then. :)
by mtlynch | 2025-07-04 11:31:06+00:00
As a hobby Zig developer, it's a bummer to see a breaking change in something so fundamental, but I get that's what I accept when building on a pre-1.0 language.

I hope that the Zig team invests more into helping with migration than they have in the past. My experience for past breaking changes is that downstream developers got left in the cold without clear guidance about how to fix breaking changes.

In Zig 0.12.0 (released just a year ago), there were a lot of breaking changes to the build system that the release notes didn't explain at all. To see what I mean, look at the changes I had to make[0] in a Zig 0.11.0 project and then search the release notes[1] for guidance on those changes. Most of the breaking changes aren't even mentioned, much less explained how to migrate from 0.11.0 to 0.12.0.

>Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

>-Lord Farquaad

[0] https://github.com/mtlynch/zenith/pull/90/files#diff-f87bb35...

[1] https://ziglang.org/download/0.12.0/release-notes.html
by bawana | 2025-07-04 11:33:32+00:00
In the novel ‘the three body problem’ , aliens send an ai to corrupt the scientific method so humanity will remain conquerable by the time they arrive. Today our own creation , LLMs and other AI agents, is accomplishing this. I can hardly believe what i read anymore. Two forces are tearing at us. First, the output of ‘science’ is ‘click bait -ified’ for financial survival and AI is amplifying this process. Second, layers of abstraction and commenting on these ‘facts’ further clouds the discussion and prevents actual progress.

I feel like the aliens are here and have subverted humanity already. When will the ‘rest of us’ wake up to act instead of just talk?
by m0wer | 2025-07-04 11:34:17+00:00
Isn't being able of anonymously send you something of value that no one can take away from you a pretty big use case?

A third of the world is unbanked. A permissionless monetary system makes a huge difference for those.

When I was still very skeptical about Bitcoin, I met a guy in Turkey who was from a very poor African country and was just studying there. His father would buy Bitcoin in their home country with the local currency (P2P) and send it to his son, that would then convert it also P2P for Turkish Liras. They could do this securely an within minutes. The alternative was using Western Union and paying taxes in both countries, which in total added up to ~50% of the sent amount.

It's great not needing Bitcoin, as it is great not needing Tor. But that doesn't mean there's no use case for them.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-04 11:34:21+00:00
It’s not five seconds versus two; it’s fifteen, and with more mistakes remaining at the end (which will sometime waste hours down the line). Because your inferior typist can’t keep up with the phone number being told them, and lose their place in the digits; and are having to concentrate so much on their typing that they don’t correctly interpret what you say to them; and so on. It’s a compounding effect.

Poor typists always slow down processes, and frequently become a bottleneck, local or global. If you can speed up a process by only ten seconds per Thing, by improving someone’s typing skills or by fixing bad UI and workflow, you only have to process 360 Things in a day (which is about one minute per Thing) to have saved an entire hour.

It can be very eye-opening to watch a skilled typist experienced with a software system that was designed for speed, working. In more extreme cases, it can be that one person can do the work of ten. In more human-facing things, it can still be at least a 50% boost, so that two skilled people can beneficially replace three mediocre.
by eqvinox | 2025-07-04 11:34:59+00:00
> I have yet to hear a convincing case for why what the LLM vendors did/do is different than what humans do to learn and become proficient in producing their own work.

Humans don't read other codebases en masse. Hell, I haven't read the entirety of our own codebase. I learned by doing, from books (that I paid for or legally borrowed), and yes, by looking at a small amount of other people's code (permitted by the respective licenses).

Humans are not remix machines, AIs (currently) are.
by Kostarrr | 2025-07-04 11:35:12+00:00
If they didn't change it, Playwright uses the aria (accessibility) representation for their MCP agent. It strongly depends on the web page whether or not that yields good results.

We at Octomind use a mix of augmented screenshots and page representation to guide the agent. If Playwright MCP doesnt work on you page, give our MCP a try. We have a free tier.
by lloeki | 2025-07-04 11:36:25+00:00
> World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invented.

A very good example! (...although probably not how you think it is ;)

Indeed the world record is achieved by a very limited number of people under stringent conditions.

Meanwhile people by and large† take their cars to go to the bakery which by foot would be 10min away, to disastrous effect on their health.

And by "cars" I mean "technology", which, while a fantastic enabler of things impossible before, has turned more people into couch potatoes than athletes.

† Comparatively to world record holders.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-04 11:36:48+00:00
D'oh, yes? Simplistic ideologues proclaim that "democracy" is some fabulous thing, which will provide peace & prosperity & justice & happily-ever-after for everyone, if only we believe.

Meanwhile, it gets more and more obvious to the 90% that those proclamations are bullshit, and this magic "democracy" stuff is good only for the 1%.

Note that there is nothing special about "democracy" here. I could make the same arguments about "communism" in '80's-era Eastern Europe, or "theocracy" in modern Iran, or ...

Whichever -ocracy's and -ism's your society idolizes - behind the shiny facade, a whole lot of people have to give a crap about making it actually work for the vast majority of your citizens, then work hard at doing that. Complacent modern "gimme, now!" capitalism has largely optimized that work out of western societies, leading to obvious instabilities.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-04 11:36:50+00:00
Fortunately, most orca families appear to have very specialized tastes in food, different from family to family, and quite complex strategies for acquiring the exact kind of food that they prefer.

As long as they can still obtain their chosen food, it seems that they do not have any incentives for experimenting with alternative foods, like teeny humans.

When whales, seals, penguins, sharks etc. will disappear, that might change.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-04 11:37:08+00:00
None of my personal repositories are licensed with a permissive license. All of them are GPLv3, however I have found GPL licensed code in “The Stack”. Moreover, there’s an ancient and deleted tweet which confirmed GPL code (in fact any open repository) was used to train copilot in the beginning. As a result, I can’t trust anyone from now on.
by qn9n | 2025-07-04 11:37:08+00:00
Location: London/UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Postgres, Redis, Next.js, Docker, Source Control, CI/CD, Swift & SwiftUI.

Resume: https://tinyurl.com/ms2ne7hu

Website: https://maclong.uk (still kinda WIP)

Email: hello@maclong.uk

I build Full Stack solutions and iOS Applications.
by PoshBreeze | 2025-07-04 11:37:32+00:00
> The only browser with built-in tipping is the one spearheaded by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript and wanting to outlaw my marriage, and the token it uses apparently had 80 whole sellers in the past 24 hours. Sounds like all of that is going great.

Brenden Eich's beliefs about marriage aren't relevant. It been what well over a decade since he was ousted from Mozilla? Wasn't that enough? People constantly bring this up as a reason why you shouldn't use Brave. There are valid reasons not to use Brave Browser. Brendan Eich's beliefs about marriage isn't one of them. It some tired old jab at Eich who like most older people have beliefs that are considered backwards by today's standards.

> This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever.

People were cut and pasting Wikipedia articles into University work and doing zero effort back in the mid-2000s while I was in University. There is a deeper problem with education generally and it isn't people copying stuff with AI.

> The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.

This isn't what is meant when people say this.

What people typically mean is that people can cheaply create things in the AI that match what they have in their head.

e.g.

- There are parody songs / music videos made for internet streams I watch by other fans of the show. In the past people used to cheaply copy and paste stuff into a video editor and crudely animate it and they weren't great. I literally laughed a parody song that was done like a sea shanty that mocked a well known e-celeb.

- I make cheesy YouTube Thumbnails for my videos because I have zero budget for an artist and my skills with image editing software isn't stellar. I can use the AI to generate me some of the thumbnail and the rest I can do in GIMP. I get something that looks better than if I didn't have the AI IMO. This does democratise it, because I don't have to spend literally hundreds on a graphic designer.

- AI can help with animations. A friend of mind could take a 20 FPS animation and have the AI interpolate the animations accordingly. He has told me this saves him a huge amount of time.
by olpyhn | 2025-07-04 11:39:00+00:00
Mesh gradients are a powerful way to create smooth, organic color transitions. Traditional techniques like spline-based interpolation or multiple overlapping radial gradients can be effective—but they also come with trade-offs: visual artifacts, complexity, or the need for structured meshes.

In this article, I’ll show you how to use Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation to generate seamless gradients from just a set of colored points. This approach is portable, flexible, and simple to implement.
by mdiesel | 2025-07-04 11:39:17+00:00
There are a couple of key differences that I think could lead to a shift towards selfishness.

With the size of populations, there's less feeling of individual impact. If I don't do "my bit" then it's such a miniscule negative to society as a whole, it won't really matter.

We have a relatively new economic principle that if everyone acts in their own best interests, that will also further society's interests. That means there's no moral choice between what benefits me and what benefits others, I can always pick what benefits me.

These aren't universal, but are two simple reasons why selfishness could be more prevalent now than a lot of history.
by krisoft | 2025-07-04 11:39:58+00:00
Gets a face full of water and it stings its nose. Looses footing as it gets deep and doesn't like it. Hears the distant waves roaring and doesn't like it. Sees its human breath differently and move differently and doesn't like it. Looks at its owner and sees them getting small (just a bobbing head on the water) and doesn't like it.

Can be so many things.
by jefftk | 2025-07-04 11:40:20+00:00
> How do you use a book?

I think that's a great example, actually! Imagine a book with a license saying that you could only read it if your goal was to promote the specific ideology, and quoting was only allowed to support that ideology. Reading it and then quoting it to debunk that ideology would be both legal and ethical.

With books, once you buy the copy you are free to read it, lend it, or resell it: a license can give you additional rights, but not restrict you further, nor should it.

> To quote Feynman (<- look, I cited my work. I fulfilled the MIT license obligations!)

Huh? Feynman didn't say that under MIT license.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-04 11:40:35+00:00
Some people start abducting anyone off the streets and it’s called a “solution” so other people who don’t like it need to shut up or offer a better one? Well, we are each entitled to our opinion and I don’t agree with that one.

Anyway, here’s a better solution: let them stay. I can’t see how that would be nearly as bad as this. For me personally, for my neighbors, for the rust belt, indeed for anybody except those wanting to abuse power.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-04 11:41:40+00:00
Plus, humans do not remember any code base they read verbatim indefinitely, strip its license and mix into any codebase regardless of its license.

Moreover humans learn and evolve their knowledge from other experiences other than books and others’ code.

As you said LLMs just remix something semi randomly according to a weighted graph with no underlying knowledge or understanding whatsoever.
by tombert | 2025-07-04 11:41:50+00:00
It’s just why I have become disillusioned with it. I think companies exploit well-meaning people that should be paid for their work. I have used Linux and open source tools for roughly the last twenty years, a part of me loves open source, but I think that big corporations take advantage of this love and it devalues labor.

Which is why I have stopped participating in it. If I am doing work that provides value to a company then they should pay me for it.