MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-17 08:55:33+00:00
They had sumptuary laws.

https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-o...

> We have what looks to be a man, perhaps in middle age. A few things are notable. First, he wears a white toga (the standard formal Roman folded cloth garment, draped from the left shoulder) and a white tunic with a purple stripe (two, in fact, the other is concealed beneath the toga). When I show my students this picture, I joke that the man might as well have worn his, “I AM A ROMAN CITIZEN” t-shirt; the impact of the clothing here is similarly blunt. While a fellow might wear a toga in a variety of colors for fashion’s sake, this solid-white toga is the toga virilis: the distinctive formal dress of a Roman citizen. Meanwhile, that purple stripe on his tunic is the angustus clavus (or angusticlavius, literally ‘the narrow stripe’). That too was a bit of clothing reserved as a marker of status – whereas the toga virilis says “I am a Roman citizen” the angusticlavius says “I am of the equestrian order” (nothing to do directly with horses by this point, it merely indicates wealth and that the individual isn’t involved in politics in Rome). In short then, this man – or more correctly, his surviving family who commissioned the portrait – is telling us, in no uncertain terms, “I was a wealthy Roman citizen.” I want to stress that point: there was no real distinctive national appearance that indicated a Roman – no particularly Roman hair color or what have you – but there was a distinctive dress that indicated citizenship, which only citizens were entitled to wear and which was so important the Romans went so far as to call themselves the gens togata (‘the people of the toga’).

> of course that fact about clothing is really very handy for us if we want images from the provinces in color where we can know with a high degree of certainty that the subjects are Roman citizens, since anyone wearing either the toga virilis or a tunic with that clavus is declaring their citizenship (in a way that would get them in rather a lot of trouble if they were lying!)

This wasn't the space for subtlety; it was the space for strict formal legal controls. If the dodecahedrons were serving that purpose, we'd know about it.
by rollcat | 2025-07-17 08:55:37+00:00
curl wttr.in/London > london.txt open -a TextEdit london.txt

Witness the control code garbage.

IMHO you should not emit ANSII escape sequences until you at least call isatty, preferably also consult termcap. But also IMHO we should bury the terminals, and build better REPLs and lightweight GUI toolkits.
by dijit | 2025-07-17 08:55:56+00:00
I know there's all kinds of biases in what we see.

But, from a european gamedev standpoint, I have never worked in a company that professionally depended on github-actions.

All I ever saw was Gitlab-CI and Jenkins (and a small instance of buildbot).

So seeing the absolute dominance of github-actions is somewhat jarring to me and doesn't paint a picture of my lived reality.

That said; none of what I'm talking about is open source - but I would expect to see more gitlab-ci in this list.
by chneu | 2025-07-17 08:56:02+00:00
Autism wasn't redefined like that. Not by the medical community. Social media took hold and it became the new OCD. People think liking straight lines on their desk means they have OCD. Same with autism, people think not liking a loud noise is autism.

I think a lot of people confuse neurodivergent with autistic as well.

The whole field needs a reorganization anyway. I've talked to dozens of therapists about this and I've received wildly different answers on what autism even is.
by fredrikholm | 2025-07-17 08:56:51+00:00
This is overly simplified to the point of being wrong.

Water usage spent on watering crops used to then raise livestock (eg. alfalfa, soy) account for some 70% or more of total water usage in regions where this type of farming is done.

In arid regions (MENA, Saudi Arabia, Iran, California etc), a lot of that water is aquifer water. Aquifers take centuries, sometimes millennia to fill up.

The consequences of emptying these are rivers drying up, native flora dying off, topsoil being eroded and so on. In some cases, Tehran and Mexico City being prime examples, the depletion is sufficient to cause structural changes in the ground leading to literal collapses of land.

Growing food with an order of magnitude less inefficiencies means an order of magnitude less of these consequences.
by thrance | 2025-07-17 08:58:02+00:00
I believe there's a good argument to be made, yes. This video [0] by a philosophy teacher convinced me of it. Unfortunately, it's in french so most here probably won't be able to enjoy it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaVWbdlAiCQ

EDIT: he gives these sources that, fortunetaly, are in english:

https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEDOE.pdf

https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEDOE-2.pdf

https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEDOE-3.pdf

https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEDOE-4.pdf

Takes the form of a conversation between two people, like the texts of olde.
Show HN: A tool that helps users create viral videos to promote products
by zin9726 | 2025-07-17 08:59:03+00:00
Hi everyone, I am the founder of ViralCraftAI. I used to be a product manager of an Internet company, tired of office work, I want to build some tools that are really helpful to users and customers.

What ViralCraftAI does: • Analyzes competitors’ top 5 trending shorts to learn what works • Lets you plug in your product assets + choose an AI Actor • Generates ready-to-post, branded viral shorts in minutes

Why I’m building this: As an entrepreneur who has some understanding and knowledge of product growth, I think how to make a product go viral is the key issue that determines whether the product can grow and whether it can get benefits as soon as possible. Product growth and promotion are divided into paid channels and free channels. For small and micro enterprises that do not have a lot of promotion budgets and individual entrepreneurs like me, using free methods such as content marketing is a good choice. Short video platforms such as tiktok and reels are good ways to promote products. However, it is not easy to make viral videos. I can still recall that when I first wanted to use short videos to promote my products, I really had no idea. I didn’t know how to make videos, I didn’t know what kind of videos would help me promote my products, and I didn’t know how my competitors did it.. With the emergence and development of AI, AI tools have improved our productivity. I think AI can also help in the field of short video advertising. AI’s automated workflow can help us quickly find videos of competitors that have gone viral, and help us copy their models and apply them to the production of our own product promotion content.

Looking for early feedback: I’m opening waitlist, if you are interested in it, leave your email and I will contact you soon.

Who should join: - Shopify / Amazon sellers - Short-form content creators - Small marketing teams wanting fast, data-driven creatives - Anyone else who wants to make viral videos

Interested? Join the waitlist here: https://www.viralcraftai.com/

Would love your feedback on the idea or any suggestions—happy to answer questions!
by dijit | 2025-07-17 09:00:01+00:00
How can inefficiency lead to systemic collapse in a way that cannot be reversed inside of a year?

We're not talking about contributing to the carbon cycle anymore, we're talking specifically about converting rays from the sun into human consumable matter.

I think you've come into a reasoned conversation with an idealised take that meat consumption is inherently stupid, and this doesn't not necessarily make sense because inefficiency is totally acceptable as long as the needs of the system are met.

People use python for making websites, after all, one of the least efficient languages available. People move to higher efficiency languages when the system begins to demand it.
by TylerE | 2025-07-17 09:00:02+00:00
Yeah, there were times, even running a fairly busy site, that the bots would outnumber user traffic 10:1 or more, and the bots loved to endlessly troll through things like archive indexs that could be computationally (db) expensive. At one point it got so bad that I got permission to just blackhole all of .cn and .ru, since of course none of those bots even thought of half obeying robots.txt. That literally cut CPU load on the database server by more than half.
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-17 09:01:08+00:00
>I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.

How is that relevant ? Reading out loud is not the same as reading ? I struggle to keep pace with reading out loud - because I am just not used to it. I do better now that I read to my kids, but I don't think I have reading problems - reading out loud is a skill that's on top of reading. Speech patterns, words you're used to pronouncing, etc. all make reading out loud more difficult than speaking or just reading IMO
by jamesblonde | 2025-07-17 09:01:15+00:00
In June 2025, Apple published a highly controversial paper, "The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity" that claimed Large Reasoning Models (LRM) did very little reasoning (planning).

Anthropic's Lawson fired back, condemning the experimental setup as flawed and the conclusions overstated.

This paper provides evidence supporting Apple's take - "failures solving the Towers of Hanoi were not purely result of output constraints, but also partly a result of cognition limitations: LRMs still stumble when complexity rises moderately (around 8 disks)"

" we also identified persistent failure modes that reveal limitations in long-horizon consistency and symbolic generalization. Our analysis suggests that these reasoning breakdowns stem not only from architectural constraints, but also from the inherently stochastic nature of these systems and the optimization methods they rely on."
by autumnstwilight | 2025-07-17 09:01:15+00:00
> Licensed therapists need not possess a lot of shared experiences to effectively help people.

Sure, they don't need to have shared experiences, but any licensed therapist has experiences in general. There's a difference between "My therapist has never experienced the stressful industry I work in" and "My therapist has never experienced pain, loneliness, fatigue, human connection, the passing of time, the basic experience of having a physical body, or what it feels like to be lied to, among other things, and they are incapable of ever doing so."

I expect if you had a therapist without some of those experiences, like a human who happened to be congenitally lacking in empathy, pain or fear, they would also be likely to give unhelpful or dangerous advice.
by chneu | 2025-07-17 09:01:32+00:00
A lot of people are really desperate to be in groups. Humans do this naturally.

A lot of labels put people in boxes or limiting groups. This changes how they think about themselves. Instead of discovering new things people will reject/ignore new things that don't reinforce their labels/boxes.

The one constant in life is change. Putting yourself in self-imposed labels/boxes stifles ones ability to properly interpret change. Their viewpoints change to fit their labels.

Nobody is saying labels are bad. But letting labels define you? Thats often the issue.

Social media has made this problem much, much worse.

I think a great example is teenagers who are looking for their clique. We all look back on ourselves and laugh at how desperate we were to fit in and the silly things we did/wore/etc. Adults do the same thing but with much more severe consequences and the reflection often never happens.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-07-17 09:01:38+00:00
We had a few dozen customers, and "percent of wallet" (figuring out how much money they walk into the casino with vs. how much they leave with) is a standard metric in casino marketing everywhere. You can figure out their paycheck based on them coming the same day of the week and losing the same amount multiple times, and market to then to ensure they lose their whole paycheck more often.

It's trivially easy to spot gambling addicts in the data, and in markets with better protections for gambling addicts they have to approach marketing quite differently. In some places you're allowed to ban yourself from the casino, and it's super illegal for the casino to market to you, so there are tons of protections to prevent all emails, texts, phone calls from hosts, physical mailers, ads of any form from reaching you.

The suicide anecdote is what caused me to quit. I'm ashamed to admit I asked my team to use an "IsDeceased" flag in the calculation for host bonus compensation, for when a patron dies while assigned to them. After that, I tried to transfer to the non-casino corner of the business where they were trying to sell our software to sports stadiums, and when they killed that off a few months later, I left the company. This was circa 2016, at a casino in the rust belt, but I'm not going to get more specific than that.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-07-17 09:01:44+00:00
I assume you are talking about geographical distribution of the user base. I don't have experience implementing apps that require heavy geographical distribution, but why does REST/JSON work better for this?

I don't have experience with Wicket, but with HTMX, I have tried to make components very small. For example one switch button is one component. Loading that is very fast in my experience, as compared to reloading and rerendering all data with React etc.
by Timwi | 2025-07-17 09:01:53+00:00
Yes, I do think that people usually mean AHI even they say AGI, although they don't realize it because when asked to define AGI they talk about generality and not about mimicking humans. (Meanwhile, when they talk about sentience and consciousness, they will usually only afford that to an artificial entity if it is exactly like a human, and often not even then.)

> Or are you making a harder argument, that human intelligence may not actually have the ability to create AHI?

I wasn't, but I've pondered it since you brought it up. No, I don't think it's impossible to create a greater intelligence than oneself — in fact, evolution has already done it by creating animals, including but not limited to humans. I used to think it was impossible when I pondered science fictional characters like Data from TNG, but modern LLMs show that we can create it without having to understand how it works. Data is depicted as having been engineered, but machine learning is closer to evolution than it is to engineering.
by pavlov | 2025-07-17 09:02:40+00:00
> “Rust, from what I've heard, has a similar abstraction level as TypeScript, perhaps even closer to Haskell but that's good, I could do with a bit more help from the compiler. But it requires me to manage memory and lifetimes, which I think is something the compiler should do for me.”

The Rust compiler does manage memory and lifetimes. It just manages them statically at compile-time. If your code can’t be guaranteed to be memory-safe under Rust’s rules, it won’t compile and you need to change it.
by swores | 2025-07-17 09:03:54+00:00
They're sometimes used as scare quotes, but they're not scare quote marks they're just quote marks. If quoting a part of somebody's comment to ask about it you're supposed to use them. (That said, I don't know what they were asking about, but you're probably right that they wanted to know what kind of drug was being talked about, or weren't familiar with that word in a medical context at all.)
by Expurple | 2025-07-17 09:03:57+00:00
> Not really, because the crates they depend on cannot expose APIs with semantic changes across versions.

Not sure what you're talking about. Any specific examples?

> Also it requires everything to be compiled with the same compiler, from source code.

It's not related to editions at all. It's related to not having an implicit stable ABI.

It's possible have a dynamic Rust library that exposes a repr(C) interface, compile it into an .so using one version of the compiler, and then compile the dependent "pure Rust" crates using another compiler that's just going to read the metadata ("headers") of that library and link the final binary together. Same as in C and C++. You just can't compile any Rust code into a stable dynamic library, by defalut. (You can still always compile into a dylib that needs a specific compiler version)
by rafaelmn | 2025-07-17 09:05:06+00:00
I could write cursive when I was in school - my handwriting is shit because I write maybe 2-3 times a year since school - so 15 years now ? I went to recitation competitions (not sure what the exact English translation is) when I was in elementary school. I struggled reading children's books for my kids because I almost never read out loud anymore. Then I stopped struggling after I was doing it for a while.

So reading out loud is just a bad test of reading ability.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-17 09:05:37+00:00
I'm not sure all of the previous posters points were thought out.

The 1,000,000 casualties thing keeps popping up, but nobody can confirm this. We have to take Ukrainian sources at their word. Regardless of who you support, during a conflict you have to take BOTH sides claims with a pinch of salt. They are both producing fanatical numbers right now, because those numbers have the dual purpose of inspiring morale amongst those still fighting.

The brain drain caused by the mass exodus of Russians fearing conscription isn't permanent. Already many of these people have returned.

The Wagner Coup didn't amount to much. It got half way before they worked out they didn't have the means, stopped, and the leader was killed and the group restructured within the Russian military.

They lost influence with neighbours, but honestly did they ever really have much in Europe anyway?

In my view Europe loses, because it's completely beholden to Russian energy interests. Now that those are gone, they are paying higher back-marked rates for the same oil and gas (via other routes), or more expensive American energy. This is exacerbating cost of living crises continent wide and is boosting fringe political parties who will cascade the damage (and who are also, in many cases, Russian influenced and funded).

I don't have any stake or real investment in this (although I don't think invading forces should get what they want), but I feel the other poster does.
by everyyear | 2025-07-17 09:05:49+00:00
Every single time in the past 10 years that I have seen some software tech hyped here it has been the same. Look under the hood, it's just some over-engineered stab at vendor lock-in.

The tech industry has become a pyramid scheme to sell more computers. Everything feeds into that. "Cybersecurity", "cyberwarfare" scares, which are enabled by the over-engineering, will be solved by? Yeah more over-engineering. A boom of GPU farms where the answer to all shortcomings is using more GPU farms? First "agent"/mcp codebases I looked at were some naive reinvention of expert systems to scaffold and parse prompts and responses from some LLM endpoint.

It's transparent at this point.
by ZeljkoS | 2025-07-17 09:06:18+00:00
You can actually find small Android phones via excellent GSMArena phone finder: https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?nYearMin=2023&fDisplayI...

Quick search for just display size found these 10 phones released after 2023: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2023&fDisplay...
by defrost | 2025-07-17 09:06:30+00:00
There's a third way, at least. eg:

But even when the authors excluded embedded emissions from sources like transport and packaging, they still found that agriculture generated 24% of GHGs. According to the World Resources Institute, a research group, cars, trains, ships and planes produce a total of 16%. It finds that animal-based foods account for 57% of agricultural GHGs, versus 29% for food from plants. Beef and cow’s milk alone made up 34%. Combined with the earlier study’s results, this implies that cattle produce 12% of GHG emissions.

It also implies, by the accounting practices of these papers, that clean skins running feral in Northern Australia account for zero emmisions .. particularly if traditionally mustered.

They aren't fed farmed food, they forage and run wild in the Kimberley and Kakadu, and the environment is well served by routinely rounding them up for dinner and taking pressure from the grasslands.

More or less the same story for camels and wild donkeys.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-17 09:08:01+00:00
>we are really starting to embrace a culture of defining "normal" down

People forget that apsergers and autism as a subject were born from the eugenics movement. Asperger’s work on autism was shaped by the Nazi regime’s eugenics and race hygiene policies, which influenced his definitions and categorizations of autistic children.

These classifications serve only to justify atrocities.

There are folks out in the world today being repressed because they don't fit into some cultural ideal set in place by the totalitarian-authoritarian doctrine of eugenics, which has been used for nefarious purposes for over a century now.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-17 09:08:41+00:00
With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.

Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue

I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd
by wvh | 2025-07-17 09:09:42+00:00
I suppose, beyond making fun of which is unacceptable, that some behaviour is considered "bad behaviour" if it would come from a "non-particular" person. People are highly sensitive to eye contact, voice tone and other subtleties to gage how the other person is feeling and how much of a threat they are. Similarly, overtaking conversations or appearing disinterested are also faux-pas in normal conversation and may indicate bad will or even a personality disorder.

As somebody who occasionally struggles to fit in socially, I have come to understand that I might come across in ways that do not reflect my inner feelings and that I need to add a bit more context and explanation, and just be more careful in general. You sort of have to help people to see where you're coming from to help them tune their social barometer somewhat sort of speaking.

At the extreme, you'd just start any conversation with "hey, I'm autistic, so if I appear a bit weird..." to hard-reset people's expectations and sooth their inner alarms. That is assuming they're decent folks acting in good faith.
by cess11 | 2025-07-17 09:10:07+00:00
Yeah. I use the one in a neighboring country because they provide decent JSON and image API:s, unlike my local weather service.

In one use case I take 'https://api.met.no/weatherapi/locationforecast/2.0/compact?l...' and push through a jq incantation to format the prognosis for the coming five hours into a neat packaging for terminal viewing, then put that in a watch -n on five minutes. I'm not really interested in the escape sequences and ASCII art.