MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mminer237 | 2025-07-15 21:14:36+00:00
Essentially, yes, it's to increase stock value, but generally the courts are to defer to executives' judgment on such decisions as long as the executive is acting in good faith. So in practice you don't have to, like, exploit people or anything as long as you say not exploiting people is good for the long-term health of the company's good will or something.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-15 21:15:02+00:00
> This framing risks getting it backwards and disempowering people, doesn’t it? Technology does not make its own choices (at least not yet).

It doesn't but we rarely chase technology for its own sake. Some do, and I envy them.

However, most of us are being paid to solve specific problems usually using a specific set of technologies. It doesn't matter how much I love the Commodore or BASIC, it'll be very hard to convince someone to pay me to develop a solution for their problem based on it. The choice to use nodejs and react to solve their problem was.... my choice.

Will there be a future where I can't really justify paying you to write code by hand. instead I can only really justify paying you to debug LLM generated code or to debug a prompt? Like could we have companies selling products and services with fundamentally no one at the helm of writing code. The entire thing is built through prompting and everynow and then you hire someone to take the hammer and keep beating a part until it sorta behaves the way it sorta should and they add a few ALL CAPS INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AGENT NOT TO TOUCH THIS!!!!!
by encom | 2025-07-15 21:15:04+00:00
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/google

Anyway, few examples of many:

>A teenager who posted rap lyrics which included racist language on Instagram has been found guilty of sending a grossly offensive message.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

>A man has been accused of sending a "grossly offensive" tweet in which he claimed "the only good Brit soldier is a deed one" the day after fundraising hero Captain Sir Tom Moore died.

https://news.sky.com/story/man-accused-of-sending-grossly-of...

>UK police arrest veteran because anti-LGBTQ post 'caused anxiety'

https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-police-british-army-veteran...

>Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023 [over offensive posts on social media], the equivalent of about 33 per day.

https://archive.ph/Yk6Bo
Show HN: Tell the world why you unfollowed/muted a social media account
by abzgupta | 2025-07-15 21:15:59+00:00
this is a simple CRUD app that I built with supabase and bolt dot new. (I probably messed up somewhere)

inspired by: a "fitness" influencer spreading dangerous and false information on youtube. he had thumbnails of attractive women to lure in viewers, and if the viewers actually implement what he is doing, it could be seriously detrimental to their health.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-07-15 21:16:21+00:00
> The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together).T

The Internet is just a commercialised ARPANet. ARPANet was designed to survive bombs taking out a fair percentage of it's nodes. The Internet still has that robust resistance to damage. You can see it in action when anchors cut ocean cables - barely anyone notices. And as the old saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

However, the commercial enterprises built on top of the internet love centralisation. CloudFlare is an interesting case in point. They have been champions of an uncensored internet for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons they grew to their current size. That growth was always going to compromise that core principle, because once a significant amount of traffic passed through them they would become an attractive target for groups wanting to inflict their views of what's proper viewing for the rest of the world.

But while CloudFlare can't exist without the internet, the internet will continue on without CloudFlare. So while the self appointed gatekeepers have indeed blocked the large hole in the sponge that is CloudFlare, underneath the sponge is still a sponge. Information people find interesting will just take other routes.

Or to put it another way, if they think they have stopped or even appreciably slowed down teenage boys from accessing porn, they are kidding themselves.
by chowells | 2025-07-15 21:16:29+00:00
Yeah, it's a hard case in general. But C's idioms really don't encourage you to think about it. You really need to default to a loop structure that checks the termination condition after the loop body but before the increment operation for inclusive end coordinates.

It's easy to think that's what do/while is for, but it turns out to be really hard to do the increment operation after the conditional, in general. What you really want is a loop structure with the conditional in the middle, and the only general purpose tool you get for that is a break. C (or any language with similar syntax) really doesn't have an idiom for doing this correctly.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-15 21:16:43+00:00
This is outright laughable. You're being sarcastic right? If you think better morale is going to save you from being chopped by a company with some harder new twist on improving its bottom line, you're in for a rude little surprise.

I'll hope you're not one of those who actually believe the nonsense corporations spew when they say things like "we're a family here and we look out for our own". (They don't, unless "our own" means maintaining executive salaries and perks)
by asdff | 2025-07-15 21:16:53+00:00
IMO actual quality components are still just as remote as 20 years ago. A proper setup is more or less the same technology as it has been for decades: good speakers, good amplifier, placed appropriately, and none of this has really seen any democratization. People buy sound bars and such but these are a far cry to what an actual sound system is like that you probably need to spend in the 4 figures to achieve. Buy enough sound bars that fall apart in a couple years for a couple hundred dollars and you could have bought a proper amplifier, speakers, in a setup that is actually modular, expandable, upgradeable, and serviceable.
by nonconstant | 2025-07-15 21:17:01+00:00
Ruby coming at #3 Most Loved and #5 Most Used is dope. I read it as: people you should care about are on Ruby + Rails, today.

Bring on those missing Ruby SDKs and Active Record drivers!

And join us at the San Francisco Ruby conference in November (sorry for self-promotion but I’m very happy to see this).
by gwintrob | 2025-07-15 21:18:29+00:00
I'm biased because my company (Newfront) is in insurance but there are a lot of great points here. This jumped out: "By 2030, global AI data centers alone are projected to require $5 trillion of investment, while enterprise AI spend is forecast to reach $500 billion."

There's a mega trend of value concentrating in AI (and all the companies that touch/integrate it). Makes a ton of sense that insurance premiums will flow that direction as well.
by coldtea | 2025-07-15 21:18:37+00:00
It's a false dichotomy. Something that s "just another tool" can still have the capacity to end the world as we know it.

Steam engine and electricity ended the world as 99% of human history knew it. Nuclear bombs can very well end the world as we know it, or even end it altogether literally.

When we constraint the scope to coding, AI can very much end it, if not for everybody, for the huge majority of current professionals - they'll either be out of a job, or glorified prompt jockeys, and both cases would be "the end of coding as we know it" for them.
by Lerc | 2025-07-15 21:20:16+00:00
The Wachowski's once commented that the Red Pill movement was a message to them telling them to never be subtle again.

Another data point. Most people seem to think that replicants are detected because they are unemotional.

I would prefer filmmakers not assume the least of their audiences, but I would also rather that audiences not give them reason to.
by algorithmsRcool | 2025-07-15 21:20:32+00:00
If you look at Garnet's source code it is very non-idiomatic C#. It goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid the garbage collector. Almost all memory management is done with unmanaged memory and pointers.

They also have a very clever internal design and do some other tricks like strategically avoiding async/await and moving I/O operations onto the network request thread.
by erulabs | 2025-07-15 21:20:40+00:00
I think it takes a lot of temerity and hubris to look at a 2B raise and assume it's all hype. A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product they're showing behind closed doors that makes this round much more reasonable than it appears from the outside.

If something makes no sense, seems totally crazy, and is being done by a crowd of extremely smart people, you can only assume one of two things: they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype or, just maybe, there's something we're not aware of. If there are only two camps: optimistic and naive or pessimistic and dismissive, I'll choose naive every day of the week.

Anyways, congrats to Thinking Machines and here's hoping they do have something awesome up their sleeve!
by skmurphy | 2025-07-15 21:20:45+00:00
Key graf:

"The Bay Area is getting old fast, and it’s accelerating. Though aging is a global trend, the San Francisco metro area — which includes San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin counties — is already the third-oldest among 20 of the largest regions in the U.S., trailing only two places in Florida. And no other region is growing older at a quicker pace."

More context from 2013 Chronicle article https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/families-exodus-leave...

"Just 13.4 percent of San Francisco’s 805,235 residents are younger than 18, the smallest percentage of any major city in the country. By contrast, San Jose’s percentage of children is 24.8 percent, Oakland’s is 21.3 percent, Boston’s is 16.8 percent and Seattle’s is 15.4 percent, according to Brian Cheu, director of community development for the Mayor’s Office of Housing. Even Manhattan is composed of roughly 15 percent children, according to Dan Kelly, director of planning for San Francisco’s Human Services Agency. In 1970, children made up 22 percent of San Francisco. In 1960, they constituted 25 percent."
by criddell | 2025-07-15 21:21:24+00:00
> depends on your definition of AGI

What definition of AGI is used at OpenAI?

My definition: AGI will be here when you can put it in a robot body in the real word and interact with it like you would a person. Ask it to drive your car or fold your laundry or make a mai tai and if it doesn’t know how to do that, you show it, and then it can.
by viccis | 2025-07-15 21:21:33+00:00
>It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI

>...

>OpenAI is also a more serious place than you might expect, in part because the stakes feel really high. On the one hand, there's the goal of building AGI–which means there is a lot to get right.

I'm kind of surprised people are still drinking this AGI Koolaid
by jordanb | 2025-07-15 21:21:35+00:00
Another thing is that working on a large codebase is not even mostly about writing code it's about verifying the change. There are a lot of tickets in our backlog that I could roll through "fixing" by just joyriding my IDE through the codebase but verifying each of those changes will in some cases take days (I work on a platform supporting most of the company's business).

I guess the AI folks will insist that the next step is "agentic" AIs that will push the changes to a test environment that it keeps up to date, adds and modifies tests ensuring that they're testing intent creates a MR argues with the other agents in the review, checks the nightly integration report and supports it into production.
by asdff | 2025-07-15 21:21:59+00:00
Anime is going to explode. Just did some google fu and apparently 50% of millenials and gen z watch anime weekly. Boomers probably watch almost zero anime so once the demographics shift in 30-40 years, you might expect half of all americans to watch anime weekly by these trends. And this is just considering present rates not the fact that these rates have been increasing over time.
by ICBTheory | 2025-07-15 21:22:43+00:00
5. On “Kolmogorov and Chaitin are misused”

It’s a fair concern.Chaitin does get thrown around too easily — usually in discussions that don’t need him.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

– Kolmogorov shows that most strings are incompressible. – Chaitin shows that even if you find the simplest representation, you can’t prove it’s minimal. – So any system that “discovers” a concept has no way of knowing it’s found something reusable.

That’s the issue. Without confirmation, generalization turns into guesswork. And in high-K environments — open-ended, unstable ones — that guesswork becomes noise. No poetic metaphor about the mystery of meaning here. It’s a formal point about the limits of abstraction recognition under complexity.

So no, it’s not a misuse. It’s just the part of the theory that gets quietly ignored because it doesn’t deliver the outcome people are hoping for.
by Jyaif | 2025-07-15 21:24:08+00:00
FWIW 119 unique @apple addresses appear in Webkit.git in the last year.

( `git log --since="1 year ago" --pretty="%cn <%ce>" | grep "apple" | sort -u | wc -l` )

Of course there's more to Safari than just Webkit, and there's more than just committers. So yes, the number may be close to 500 in total.

Assuming a generous 500k cost per employee, we reach 250 million USD, which is less than 2% of what they get for Safari.

Safari is essentially pure profit.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-15 21:25:21+00:00
Yes but if it were to be a pure antimeme, wouldn't being able to communicate about it be irrelevant, since it would remove itself from both your memory and that of whoever described it to you, as if nobody had ever described anything? I at least see it this way, and believe that if we were ever confronted with such a thing in the real world, all references to it would be imperceptible in any normal non-momentary context.
by bcrl | 2025-07-15 21:26:02+00:00
I wasn't confusing anything. To interoperate with industry standard fibre optic cables it should have a multiple of 12 or 24 cores, not the complete oddball number of 19. Yes it's cool that it's that small, but that is not the limiting factor in the deployment of long haul fibre optic telecommunications networks.

Sumitomo sells a lot of fusion splicers at very high margins. It is in their best interest to introduce new types of fibre that requires customers to buy new and more expensive fusion splicers. Any fibre built in this way will need rotational alignment that the existing fusion splicers used in telecom do not do (they only align the cores horizontally, vertically and by the gap between the ends). Maybe they can build ribbon fibres that have the required alignment provided by the structure of the ribbon, but I think that is unlikely.

Given that it does not interoperate with any existing cables or splicers, the only place this kind of cable is likely to see deployment in the near term is in undersea cables where the cost of the glass is completely insignificant compared to everything that goes around it and the increased capacity is useful. Terrestrial telecom networks just aren't under the kind of pressure needed to justify the incompatibility with existing fibre optic cables. Data centers are another possibility when they can figure out how to produce the optics at a reasonable cost.
by layer8 | 2025-07-15 21:27:02+00:00
> I stumbled on this elegant [lockable] box you put phones into and it blocks all radio communications.

If you truly want to block yourself from using your phone (or similar) for some amount of time, the Kitchen Safe time-lock boxes are great. They don’t look particularly elegant, nor do they block radio communication, but their unique feature is that you’d have to irreversibly physically break them to access whatever you locked inside before the timer has elapsed. There are many similar products, which however usually have an “emergency” mechanism to preempt the timer, which defeats the purpose.
by ben_w | 2025-07-15 21:28:38+00:00
> Aside: you know "the customer is always right [in matters of taste]"? It's been weirdly difficult getting bosses to understand the brackets part, and HN folks the first part.

Something I struggle to internalise, even though I know it in theory.

Customers can't be told they're wrong, and the parenthetical I've internalised, but for non-taste matters they can often be so very wrong, so often… I know I need to hold my tongue even then owing to having merely nerd-level charisma, but I struggle to… also owing to having merely nerd-level charisma.

(And that's one of three reasons why I'm not doing contract work right now).
by darqis | 2025-07-15 21:28:58+00:00
Man, instead of going to some discord channel, asking waiting for some human to respond, if they do, then potentially misunderstand the question, maybe even cause drama, or using a search engine to crawl, tediously through SO and Reddit posts, because Google favors those 2, or wading through pages of potentially badly written documentation, I just turn on github and ask copilot. And it responds in most cases, and I can even chat with it ask for alternatives or better approaches to my problems.

And then I needed a logo for my new service I'm building. Search for AI image generator, input the prompt and a few seconds later I have my really cool image. Time saved -> infinity.

But I also thought, all this problem solving done by the machines, leaves my brain unemployed, well not exactly, I can focus on solving issues that usually take hours to solve and get on with it. However those hard nuts are no longer cracked by me, and I focus on the lighter cognitive load.

Probably not good, but idk, I don't have the luxury to be picky, being an unemployed freelancer on social security
by tsunamifury | 2025-07-15 21:29:17+00:00
Quoting your college classes is the first sign of inexperience but I’ll Share some modern concepts.

In Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity.

He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups.

He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos.

Giving yourself up to something. Specially something that doesn’t work is very much “believing in a false god.”
by namcheapisdumb | 2025-07-15 21:29:18+00:00
Most of these can be accomplished by 2B models running on top-of-the-line consumer phones. That's the damning stuff! The real pale horse is HBR reporting that most people use chatbots to chat. Reasoning models are pointless for most people. LLM initiatives are seeking its wide adoption, at the same time, the business models collapse if they become too commoditized. The entire industry undermines itself.
by dpatterbee | 2025-07-15 21:29:33+00:00
Honestly, I don't think this is a big deal. I use helix as my primary editor, but when I'm on another machine and it only has vi or whatever I just use that and I can mentally switch to using the vim keybinds with little issue. Like sometimes I'll mistakenly `m-i-w-c` instead of `c-i-w` or `d` instead of `x`, but then I just hit `u` and continue.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-15 21:29:34+00:00
>Edit: If you just have clock output in ticks, you also need enought time to elapse to get a deviation of at least one tick between both bot clocks you are comparing. This is a big limitation, because at a clock rate of 1GHz you are still waiting for like 30 years (!!). (In practice you could probably cheat a bit to get around this limit)

In practice with this level of precision you are usually measuring the relative phase of the two clocks, which allows substantially greater resolution than just looking at whole cycles, which is 'cheating' to some degree, I guess. (The limit is usually how noisy your phase measurement is)

(To give some intuition, imaging comparing two pendulum clocks. I think you can probably see how if you take a series of pictures of the pendulums next to each other you could gauge whether one of them is running fast relative to the other, and by how much, without one completing one full swing more than the other)
by tetris11 | 2025-07-15 21:30:22+00:00
The SCP universe is what made the antimemetics so unique though - that you had an entire forgotten department, doing heavy lifting Slow Horses style, keeping the whole operation running.

It's important because SCP is important, i.e. it borrows its greatness from the success of the normal day-to-day SCP operations.

Without it, it's just a story about amnesia at a government facility, and those kind of books are a dime a dozen.
by gwbas1c | 2025-07-15 21:30:22+00:00
I should add: Many years ago I used to read a news site that was modeled after slashdot. One day the person running it decided to switch it to be community-moderated.

Every day it was the same discussion over again, from someone who didn't bother to do a Google search or look at what was posted the day prior. After a week or so of seeing the same discussion over and over again, I stopped reading the news site.

Needless to say, it's important to occasionally have discussions like this. I also think we under-appreciate the amount of moderation that goes on here. Sometimes I look at the "new" feed and it is just loaded with lots and lots of nonsense, so I get that someone has to put their finger on the scale to keep the quality up.
Ask HN: Stylography, AI and an impending privacy nightmare?
by forevernoob | 2025-07-15 21:30:24+00:00
From what I've understood, we can make modern day computer systems exceedingly effective in recognizing patterns in (vast amounts of) data.

However, one of the ways this can be (ab)used is the de-anonymization of people through stylography. Since (plain)text datasets are relatively massive (in variety and density, not necessarily in size), one would assume that those systems (or similar ones) can also be used to analyze patterns within text and correlate those patterns with other pieces of text written by the same person.

I suppose one can mitigate this using AI / LLMs to rewrite the original source text (perhaps even multiple times), but wouldn't even better AI systems (in the future) be able to account for this and still be able to de-anonymize?

Are we transitioning towards a giant privacy cat & mouse game? Are we creating a real-life TrollTrace.com from South Park S20?

If my concerns written above are valid, then what potential solutions would you all suggest?
by jcgl | 2025-07-15 21:30:33+00:00
In a world where DANE catches on on the web, I don't see why Google and Mozilla couldn't do that again. I mean, presumably there'd need to be some evidence of malfeasance, like there was with Web PKI. I don't see why Mozilla alone couldn't start by putting the screws to a smaller CCTLD and some medium-sized DNS hosts for instance.

That said, I don't particularly see DANE growing on the web.
by _rpxpx | 2025-07-15 21:30:35+00:00
Articles like this always start with such radical criticism, and end with such dismally modest proposals: "try not to look at your phone for 1 hour after you wake up", "before you pick up your phone, try counting to 100 first", "move 'instagram' away from your homescreen", etc. What about just getting rid of your smartphone? Who really needs anything beyond calls and text messages...? You can get a GPS map, and a camera. Complete freedom is right there for the taking.