MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by unnouinceput | 2025-07-17 14:41:39+00:00
Voting should not be a right!! Voting should be a privilege, like driving is, and should be a points based system.

Don't downvote yet, hear me out on this, ok?

Upon hitting the lawful 18 (or 16 or whatever) you automatically have the "privilege" to vote, and your voting power is 1 (single) point. Then you are obliged to vote on your local/national elections. Too many people currently shit on their right to vote and do their research like in the night before elections. Instead make it an exam, and with 3 fails to vote you lose the privilege. Also you take the exam about current politics and parties, and raise your points up to, let's say 10. You want to have more voting power? Get fucking involved in politics. Local administration involvement? Cool beans bro, your new threshold is 20. County? 40. National (like a senator?), 80. All the way to the top, where members of government (ministries, heads of national agencies, president) get their max at 100.

Why this rant? Because I see the argument regarding Brexit with young vs. old thrown around here and is all true. If you'd have voting a privilege then people would care about it, like you care about your driving license. Current society has all the tech to actually give people a real democracy on their hands. Get involved one hour in your country politics. No need for a parliament full of old farts that all they do entire life is polish the chairs while sleeping and vote on laws according to their paying masters. President and ministry heads encounter problems, raise them in public forums, ideas gets formed around, laws are then formed based on those discussions and then put to vote. National vote. Like a fucking app. Easy to vote. One fucking hour of your day goes to politics instead of the idiotic sports because we have the idiocy running around where stars of different shows are more important than the fucking tax that actually has a more important impact on your finance. But hey, what dress Kartrashian wore or what football pass Beckham did is more important than the highway you use to drive to work, right?

Now you can downvote me.
by pfisherman | 2025-07-17 14:41:57+00:00
Hindsight is 20/20. The company I worked at went under because people questioned whether enough people would ever buy stuff over the internet to make the business viable. It was very much not obvious then.

> Gen-AI may be useful to some people, but it's not going to be a central feature of most people's lives—at least not in the forms it exists in today, or what can be clearly extrapolated from them…

The problem is that you are going to have to compete with people who are using AI. There is a learning curve, and some people are better at using it than others. Some people know how to use it really well.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-17 14:42:24+00:00
Those are good points.

I got a bit carried away in my original statement and undersold data a little bit. I think the point of the statement at the time ("data is the new oil" as an article in The Economist) was mostly hinging on data for use in digital advertising, but I didn't provide any of that context in my original post, and I was mostly considering user data.
by _seiryuu_ | 2025-07-17 14:43:21+00:00
As a PC gamer, I'd definitely be interested in something like this!

I currently use a Legion Go with Bazzite installed, paired with a cheap AliExpress dock and an eGPU dock (also from AliExpress) housing a Radeon 7600 XT. Overall, it's been a great experience. With some minor tweaking, I can play pretty much everything you're describing – PC games via Proton, retro games, and PlayStation titles through emulators.

Given that my entire setup cost around $1200 (Legion Go, dock, eGPU enclosure, and Radeon 7600 XT), I would absolutely go for a pre-built system like yours if I didn't already have my current setup. It truly offers the appeal of a Nintendo Switch but with significantly more horsepower and flexibility (and none of the console vendor lock-in).

Based on my experience and what I've spent, I'd fall squarely into category C. $1000 - $2500 for such a setup. The convenience of having everything pre-configured and optimized for gaming right out of the box is a huge selling point.

It sounds like you've put a tremendous amount of effort into this, and the idea of a "best of many worlds" gaming OS with minimal setup is highly appealing to gamers. Good luck with your project!
by mvieira38 | 2025-07-17 14:43:35+00:00
It hasn't been redefined at all, you just weren't aware of all the intricacies and conflated every possible symptom into one large, uncommon stereotype, while in reality people in the spectrum are more common than you think but show some symptoms more than others and some not at all.

John, 38 yo virgin, spending 50% of his income on Gundam figurines while living with his aging mother and having no IRL friends is supposedly not "autistic enough" for you if he can hold a job, walk and talk normally? What about that one girl you went to high school with who couldn't stop talking about Supernatural and had a full-on meltdown in front of the whole class on more than one occasion, to the point where she had no friends by junior year and got severely depressed?

These characters were seen as "just weird" until actual scientists started figuring out they were autistic, and now they might have a better life with treatment and the necessary disability benefits
by danenania | 2025-07-17 14:43:51+00:00
Your concerns about centralization/monopolies are valid, though it's actually not very different than the situation with operating systems. As with Linux, there are open source LLMs which are very good, if not quite sota. There's also fierce competition between the commercial foundation model providers, so it's not like they can just raise prices whenever they want. So your criticism on this is fair but overly reductive and simplistic.

The idea that people using LLMs "won't learning anything" is just silly though. They're one of the best learning tools that humans have ever produced. You can use them to avoid learning, or you can use them to learn 10x faster.

Feel free to dismiss LLMs and write all your code by hand. It's up to you, and I'll even grant you there are some benefits, despite the significantly reduced productivity. But please don't act like doing so makes you a better progammer than others. That's the definition of gatekeeping. And again, we've been through all of this before with high level languages. It happens every time a new innovation makes programming more accessible and higher leverage.
Show HN: LazyDevHelper – Suggest and auto-install packages in Neovim
by Silletr | 2025-07-17 14:43:54+00:00
Plugin for Neovim that suggests and installs missing libraries based on their names. Works with Python(pip), Rust(cargo add), Lua(luarocks install), Node.js(npm install), will be added: C/C++ Example: :SuggestImports requests bs4 streamlit

Looking for feedback and contributors for C/C++ adding
by swat535 | 2025-07-17 14:45:09+00:00
Voting has a major impact on a nation's future.

I don't think children should have a say in the matter, they lack the critical thinking skills that adults do, which is why we limit their freedoms.

Granted, most adults also lack deep critical thinking skills but they have more capable brains than children.

Further, children are easier to manipulate than adults, which is very dangerous when it comes to something as critical as voting.
by cubefox | 2025-07-17 14:45:33+00:00
The case is arguably even more clear cut: copyright protects more-or-less exact copies. So copying old video games is not allowed. However, making something that is merely similar, but clearly different from the original, is not a copyright violation. For example, you are allowed to make a "Zelda clone" if you only copy broad game principles and vibes, but not specific art or level designs.

Generative AI mostly works by copying fuzzy styles instead of specific texts or images. There are some exceptions where models actually memorize specific material, but these seem to be relatively rare and probably require that the piece in question occurs frequently in the training data.

So in general, training on copyrighted material is probably legal as long as the model is not able to exactly reproduce the training data, while copying video game ROMs is clearly always illegal.

Of course, whether these things are morally okay or not is a different question...

Edit: Of course, to train on copyrighted material, you have to download it first. If you don't pay for the copies, this is arguably still illegal, even if the resulting model doesn't distribute any copies! (An exception might be content that is directly embedded in websites, because copying websites into the browser cache is allowed, even if they are under copyright protection.)
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-17 14:45:55+00:00
Keep an eye on FRAM storage devices. Currently you can buy a USB stick with 8 KB of storage, but that storage is designed to last 200 years (and should at least survive a few decades). You can even recover the data off it with a soldering iron and a steady hand if needed. Would be a neat solution for keeping a backup code in a safe long term (maybe once the price drops to be competitive with a laminated sheet of paper)
by ses1984 | 2025-07-17 14:46:07+00:00
I had something similar happen to me except it was for health insurance authorization, for a regular treatment. So, every two weeks they would call me and ask me for personal info, and refuse to explain who they were or why they called until I gave it to them. Every two weeks I would try to explain how dumb that was. No direct call back number, of course.
by Taiko3615 | 2025-07-17 14:46:10+00:00
We developed an AI capable of detecting counterfeit products from a picture of the box taken with a smartphone. I know it sounds like witchcraft, but after 6 years of research it actually works even on super fakes, even in tough conditions !

We're thinking on which product to protect next, the goal being to make an app available to the general US public to test the meds they buy online.

Do any of you buy Adderall online ? If yes how interested would you be in making sure that it's not counterfeit before using it ?

If anyone else buys medicine online but it's not Adderall, which medicine do you buy and are you interested in checking the authenticity ?

Thanks :-)
by MarkusQ | 2025-07-17 14:46:34+00:00
And if you _don't_ randomly assign, the effect is even stronger: students who are being well served by the standard/control school don't opt to change, while students who aren't are primed to jump as soon as the option is provided. So the alternative/trial school gets both ends of the bell curve on almost every metric (the main exception being athletic performance, since the larger school typically has more team sport options).
by musicale | 2025-07-17 14:46:38+00:00
Their prediction about rambus hasn't aged well, but the technical advantages vs. SDRAM of the time are still interesting:

https://www.hardwarecentral.com/sdram-vs-rdram-facts-and-fan...

Surprisingly enough the N64 used RDRAM (and supported a memory upgrade, lowering the cost of the console at launch but enabling an upgrade path for games that needed more memory.)
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-17 14:47:01+00:00
Oh, I agree that it's blatantly unconstitutional. I'm just not sure that a court will accept a facial challenge. Once someone's been arrested, though, a court is going to have a hard time turning it away.

In the ideal world, there would be a facial challenge and a temporary restraining order on implementation of the law, pending the challenge being finally decided. I'm just not sure that it will happen that way (or that quickly).
by stantaylor | 2025-07-17 14:47:07+00:00
I used to work for a financial services company that had a strong and well-managed security culture. The company got acquired, and afterwards, we kept getting emails from third parties for various things, all supposedly initiated by execs/groups at the parent company.

We employees of the acquired company discussed the emails in Slack: we were sure that these emails were legitimate, but acting on them would have broken our security policies, so we all decided to all report them as phishing attempts. We understood that we were engaging in malicious compliance, but our actions were also a best practice, so we couldn't technically be criticized for it.

After a while of this, execs at the parent company would send out sometimes exasperated-sounding emails ahead of time, alerting us to the email that we should expect to receive and how they wanted us to respond. Of course, that led to discussions of how we know that that pre-email emails were legitimate. After a while, we all lost interest in this malicious compliance and adopted the much laxer security culture of the acquiring company.
by xnorswap | 2025-07-17 14:47:11+00:00
I don't know, "random" wikipedia articles often pop up on the front-page.

It's been speculated that some groups use random wikipedia articles to test-run their botting. I think a more charitable explanation is often that it's something or relates to something that's going viral on other media, and we get to experience the wash of that, turning up here.

The HN ranking is also very enigmatic. You sometimes get articles whose presence you can't fathom, but by the time you refresh it's disappeared entirely. It feels like the live front-page is built for reactivity, not for stability.

That's perhaps for the best given there's no "recent trending" type page for that.

Edit: This one was submitted 2 days ago, and randomly got front-paged today. It shows "2 hours ago" but mousing over shows the original meta-data of 2 days ago, so this returned via the second chance pool.

Genuinely worthy or a fat-finger I wonder?
Ask HN : AI to Detect Counterfeit Adderall
by Taiko3615 | 2025-07-17 14:47:39+00:00
We developed an AI capable of detecting counterfeit products from a picture of the box taken with a smartphone. I know it sounds like witchcraft, but after 6 years of research it actually works even on super fakes, even in tough conditions : https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05969

We're thinking on which product to protect next, the goal being to make an app available to the general US public to test the meds they buy online.

Do any of you buy Adderall online ? If yes how interested would you be in making sure that it's not counterfeit before using it ?

If anyone else buys medicine online but it's not Adderall, which medicine do you buy and are you interested in checking the authenticity ?

Thanks :-)
by kevincox | 2025-07-17 14:47:42+00:00
I think there is a long standing question about what robots.txt is for in general. In my opinion it was originally (and still is mostly) intended for crawlers. It is for bots that are discovering links and following them. A search engine would be an obvious example of a crawler. These are links that even if discovered shouldn't be crawled.

On the other end is user-requested URLs. Obviously a browser operated by a human shouldn't consider robots.txt. Almost as obviously, a tool subscribing to a specific iCal calendar feed shouldn't follow robots.txt because the human told it to access that URL. (I recall some service, can't remember if it was Google Calendar or Yahoo Pipes or something else that wouldn't let you subscribe to calendars blocked by robots.txt which seemed very wrong.)

The URL preview use case is somewhat murky. If the user is posting a single link and expecting it to generate a preview this very much isn't crawling. It is just fetching based on a specific user request. However if the user posts a long message with multiple links this is approaching crawling that message for links to discover. Overall I think this "URL preview on social media" probably shouldn't follow robots.txt but it isn't clear to me.
by sfmz | 2025-07-17 14:47:51+00:00
Seems like a very good idea. Grandparents have a lot of money and not much stuff to buy. Do it quarterly instead of monthly (then it follows the seasons and doesn't create too much clutter). Its not clear if you are delivering a print magazine or a digital pdf. Upsell to a print magazine, if you are not already doing it. Seems like it could just be an app on your phone that gets access to pictures, like set-it and forget-it, idk if that's what's going on in your case.
by guywithahat | 2025-07-17 14:48:03+00:00
I would argue unions in particular destroyed Detroit, it's arguably even less complicated than Baltimore.

I think there was ~13 major auto factories in Detroit at one point, and what would happen is when the UAW would protest, they'd leave one factory and go to another, more important factory (often wherever they were producing engines) to apply pressure. The result is auto makers were forced to build new factories outside of Detroit, first in other MI cities and eventually in other states and countries. Now I think there's only ~three factories in Detroit, including for products that aren't really that exciting like spark plugs.

I didn't realize so many cities were referred to as an american Paris though, that is interesting. It was, certainly however, a beautiful city at one point.
by tzs | 2025-07-17 14:48:54+00:00
I remember at least one major US bank saying that the reason they only allowed short passwords was indeed that it was the limit for login passwords on their mainframe.

I was sure this was complete bullshit because even if everything is handled on the mainframe a user using their online banking would not be logging on to the mainframe. The online banking password is a credential for the bank's application(s) that run on top of the mainframe's system software.

When a new customer signed up for an account the bank would not create a new mainframe user account for that user. A bank customer account would just exist in the bank's database and would be completely independent of actual mainframe user accounts. If the online banking password needed to be stored on the mainframe it would be in one of the bank's tables, not wherever that mainframe's system software stores password.

I mentioned this somewhere and someone who actually worked on bank systems commented that some banks actually really do have a mainframe user account per bank customer account.

I think that doesn't actually change my point that blaming a short online banking password limit on mainframe system software limitations is complete bullshit.

Users are not asked for their password when they use non-online banking, such as at ATMs or through a teller at the bank. This shows that the bank does have interfaces that allow performing all the normal functions a customer needs to do without the customer needing to supply a login password.

Online banking is going through a web server. They web application should be using those interfaces that don't require a customer mainframe login to work. The password the customer supplies to the web interface should be a credential for the web interface and be completely separate from any mainframe login password.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-17 14:48:59+00:00
In the last month, bot traffic has exploded to 10:1 due to LLM bots on my forum according to Cloudflare.

It would be one thing if it were driving more users to my forum. But human usage hasn't changed much, and the bots drop cache hit rate from 70% to 4% because they go so deep into old forum content.

I'd be curious to see a breakdown of what the bots are doing. On demand searches? General data scraping? I ended up blocking them with CF's Bot Blocker toggle, but I'd allow them if it were doing something beneficial for me.
by Nasrudith | 2025-07-17 14:49:36+00:00
The whole 'undeveloped brains' thing is a myth. The brain is still developing and even then developing != deficient. As for improving the state of democracy? It seems like very much a good thing that they'll be able to have their interests represented, which is a rather stabilizing force. Especially when dealing with idiots who vote for Brexit and then think that literally enslaving the youth for the sake of 'instilling values' and calling it 'national service' is a great idea.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-17 14:49:56+00:00
A human hand is probably the most appropriate design for a robot to grip a variety of things that were designed to be gripped by human hands.

For any one specific thing, be it a doorknob, a rope, a sheet of paper or fabric, or a pair of scissors, there's probably a different design that's several orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper, and also much stronger and more reliable. Single-axis parallel grippers, circumferential chucks, vacuum cups/vacuum pads, electromagnets, cam lock and release mechanisms, and so on are common in industrial robotics.

Assume your robot's only task is to grab a spool with a 35 +/-0.5 mm ID core from from an infeed rack and place it on a spindle, you're not going to try to build a five-finger human sized servo-operated hand and tuck two of those fingers away to awkwardly pinch outwards from the inside, you're going to grab a Schunk JGZ concentric gripper off the shelf and plumb a pair of air lines to it. If it also needs to grab a tab from some tape on the spool and pull it into the machine, you're just going to add an asymmetric pincer like an angular tumor on two of the jaws - or graft on an entire separate parallel gripper like some polydactyl appendage, or tool-change, amputating and reattaching hands at will.

I have also observed that humans are quite good at anthropomorphizing robot arms: a small, well-tuned motion can be universally recognized as a nod of agreement, shrug of confusion, wave of acknowledgement, or sigh of disappointment, even if the equipment is a bright yellow 6-axis piece of cast iron with menacing claws where the hand (or face? they're often the same) should be. Googley eyes and a "Hi my name is" sticker make this even more convincing.

But if you need a single tool to grip a doorknob, a rope, a sheet of paper, a pair of scissors, AND an unknown variety of other arbitrary household objects... it's probably best to start with an approximation of the human hand. Also, while claws may be appropriate for a work environment with the robot inside a fence, in collaborative situations hands are just less intimidating.
by diggan | 2025-07-17 14:50:35+00:00
The problem is the bundling of consent. I understand they need to use that specific piece of data if I want to use that particular feature, but they could also have given the choice of "Let us use the data for the feature, but nothing beyond that", together with "Use the data for improving the services for everyone" and "Don't use the data for anything", just like it was before.

Instead, they're bundling "Use the data for the functionality" and "Let Google store the data indefinitely, and use for improving any other Google service", which is the part that leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth.

For reference, this is the help page the message was linking to: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322

Some relevant parts that many comments here seemed to have missed:

> When smart features are on, your data may be used to improve these features [...] To improve our services. If you have turned on any of the smart features settings, we may also process your Workspace Content & Activity to improve these features. [...] Developing new products and features [...] Performing research
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-17 14:50:54+00:00
Perl also lets you nest data structures, no brain twisting involved. Perl doesn't have Tuples natively but you can add them with a module. You can also nest objects in complex data structures.

perl <<'EOF' my $object = bless sub { my ($s) = @_; if ($s eq "thingy") { return("hello world!") } else { return("goodbye world!") } }; my %hash1 = ( baz => "here we go", foo => $object ); my @array1 = ( undef, undef, undef, \%hash1 ); my %hash2 = ( bar => \@array1 ); my $reference = \%hash2; print( $reference->{bar}->[3]->{baz}, "\n" ); print( $reference->{bar}->[3]->{foo}->('thingy') , "\n" ); print( $reference->{bar}->[3]->{foo}->('something') , "\n" ); EOF here we go hello world! goodbye world!

Perl being Perl, TMTOWTDI, but you can enforce your own style using linters and formatters.