MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tclancy | 2025-07-26 13:22:32+00:00
“Because we've created a world where effort gets treated like a disease to be cured.”

That pretty much sums it up for me. Well put. I am at a point where I am trying to acquire hobbies to improve my happiness and there is a difficulty modifier now on a lot of things where it’s like “what’s the point”. It reminds me of when X-Box first offered the ability to watch other people play. I was grinding to get like five more points on a course to hit the 200 point requirement, so I downloaded the top ghost video for the course. That person and I were not even playing the same game; they were orders of magnitude better than I was and all I wound up learning was I would never be that good at it.
by heikkilevanto | 2025-07-26 13:24:18+00:00
Not true in all of Europe. Here in Denmark you need to have the state-issued identification app MitId ("My Id"), and most (all?) banks use it for authentication. Both for websites, and even when making a (larger?) transfer in their own app. You practically need that MitId app anyway, it is used for so many things, from the tax office to online payments to library cards.

Things are the other way in Finland, where each bank has its own identification app, and many official sites require you to use one for identifying yourself.
by threecheese | 2025-07-26 13:24:47+00:00
One of the two medical networks in my area just locked their EHR portal down and require the mobile app, there is no way to access it from their website on mobile or desktop.

I wouldn’t care, except they require it for payments and in 2024 they auto-enrolled us in “paperless”. Fixable - by using the EHR systems configuration (needs a mobile app to access) back to mailed bills.

Major issue is though, I was sending their voluminous useless survey emails to spam, as they do not allow patients to unenroll their email address (it’s the primary key essentially), and their unsubscribe is essentially useless, and so I did not see repeated requests for payment.

This resulted in a $90 copay *going to collections*. Which of course sent me a paper bill, thankfully, and I got to it before it impacted our ability to access credit.
by cellular | 2025-07-26 13:25:30+00:00
Long ago i made a paper airplane simulation also in anger!

My inspiration was a fun game on 1980s intellivision!

That side view game had momentum and stalling airplane physics that aren't in any arcade game since that I've found.

Dogfights were hilarious because each player would risk stalling so they'd have more momentum to maneuver an attack.

Did you play that old game?
by mystraline | 2025-07-26 13:25:36+00:00
And as a man, do you know what happens when you report sexual assault?

You get laughed at. Hard.

So yeah, I'd like to see these broken down between cis-, hetero-, homo-, and trans-.

And why are cis-lesbian-women also reporting higher numbers of sexual assault than man/woman relationship? No men in that relationship.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5511765/

The rainn articles are propaganda with a specific slant.
by close04 | 2025-07-26 13:26:04+00:00
I’m not sure diamonds are popular because of what they are but what they represent.

Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.

If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.

I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-26 13:27:06+00:00
Like payment processors threatening the largest game platform on the planet for decades would, right?

There are no legal protections, it needs to be fixed at the government level with payment neutrality policies. Steam has hundreds of millions of users and couldn't fight it. Itch had to go nuclear and kill every single NSFW game ever put on their platform, likely affecting millions.
by logicallee | 2025-07-26 13:27:23+00:00
In this presentation, July 26 2025, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini were asked to add a requested feature to an existing single-file application. ChatGPT, and Claude broke the application, whereas Grok and Gemini succeeded at adding the feature.

Gemini's completed version is available here: http://taonexus.com/chess-with-fen.html
by gedw99 | 2025-07-26 13:29:12+00:00
I am over joyed to see this.

They are doing a huge service for developers that just want to build stuff and not get into the platform wars.

https://github.com/cogentcore/webgpu is a great example . I code in golang and just need stuff to work on everything and this gets it done, so I can use the GPU on everything.

Thank you rust !!
by kelthuzad | 2025-07-26 13:29:55+00:00
>That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.

Discord and Visual Studio Code are among the most popular apps on mac, those are electron apps. None of that is relevant to the core issue either way. It's not up to Apple to decide any of that, that's what the market and regulators are for. Apple uses and pushes self-serving and false narratives as pretext to engage in anti-competitive business practices.

>Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at.

That statement might have been true in 1995, but today it's categorically false.

> Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.

I've already debunked this manufactured, reductionist and false narrative above.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-07-26 13:30:10+00:00
When you place all the requirements on a software product like what the government has to, then it’s going to be expensive. Anyone who thinks that the total cost of a privacy protecting, government accredited, widely available, reliable, audited, and domestically produced age verification system isn’t going to be in the hundreds of millions has never actually shipped something comparable.

It is literally illegal to slap a few lines of glue code and say “there’s your age verification, look how cheap it is.” The public would be happy about saving money right up until there’s a massive privacy breach and all the ways you cut corners are exposed.

I don’t know if leaving the standards unspecified is the right thing to do (it’s probably not), but don’t pretend like a government verified solution could ever be cheap when dealing with citizens’ identities.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-07-26 13:30:26+00:00
Haven't read this yet, but I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that none of those "current studies" mentioned in the literature review were RCTs, because an RCT would entail deliberately exposing people with a predisposition towards paedophilia to CSAM, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would ever be allowed by an ethics board.

If that's the case, then all these studies were observational studies, which lack the ability to infer causality. They can at best hint at directions to pursue for studies that can infer causality.

As a concrete example of the way that observational studies can go wrong despite good intentions: It was believed for a long time that paedophiles have lower average IQs than the general population. This was based on the observation that a larger fraction than would be expected of those caught and sentenced for sexual crimes involving children were of low IQ. Of course, a better explanation of this observation is that paedophiles with higher IQs are better at covering their tracks and evading suspicion.
by mrintegrity | 2025-07-26 13:30:46+00:00
I wrote a "funny" email to a colleague who asked for a formal request to do a task I asked him for. I took it seriously and wrote extremely formal ("Dearest Steven... " Etc). He laughed and said "did chatgpt write that?".

It made me irrationally angry, no, I spent two minutes of my own brain power to come up with those five sentences. This kind of thing happens constantly now, everyone assumes everyone else uses gpt's for everything and I find it a bit depressing to be honest.
by Incipient | 2025-07-26 13:31:51+00:00
I'd disagree with that. The prospect of a natural diamond is that it's unique (I mean, not visibly I suppose) and millions of years old.

I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.

I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...
by RyukuLogos | 2025-07-26 13:32:00+00:00
I'm an independent thinker, not an academic. This all started as a theory about how AI might perceive the world — but somewhere along the way, it turned into something... bigger.

The basic idea: "Meaning" comes from rhythms that close; "space" comes from rhythms that don’t — and escape, interfering with others.

The more I explored it, the more it seemed to connect things I didn’t expect: neural oscillations, toroidal brain topology, wave interference, even the structure of the cosmos.

It's far from perfect. Some parts are rough, maybe even wrong. But I felt like it was worth putting out there.

I'd genuinely love feedback — especially from people in neuroscience, physics, or just curious minds.
by ajross | 2025-07-26 13:32:01+00:00
> Ah yes, the 0.001% of apps

A small fraction of WEB PAGES, not "apps". Like half the apps installed on my phone have some behavior not purely connected to internet communication!

You just don't think that's a problem and like installing apps from the store and using iOS as your only gateway to the world and think "browsers" are crufty and silly. But that's a taste issue not a technical one. "Because I don't personally like it" makes an extremely poor argument against the embrace of open standards.

Basically you're the person in 1998 arguing for Win32 apps everywhere and that the HTML/JS/Java platforms were inherently inferior. How'd that philosophy work out?
by depr | 2025-07-26 13:32:11+00:00
There has arisen this strange obsession on this website with every page having to explain what a project is about. This makes some sense for the marketing of the project, if there is for example a new version of some software. But for a personal blog it really does not. If a reader of a technical website is incapable of searching for "openbsd pf" then maybe they are indeed inadequate and are better off reading something else.
by mystraline | 2025-07-26 13:32:19+00:00
How fast would an app for men, to identify false accusers, liars, afterwards regret, baby-trapping attempt, sabotaging contraceptives, and other false claims, get shut down for 'evilness towards poor innocent women'?

Just as Parieto indicates that the bulk of male sexual assaults are done by a few, also indicates that the bulk of female assaults and claims of sexual assault are also done by a few.

Apps like Tea only paint all men as abusive thugs. If this were done, say to black people, this app would have been shut down and a lawsuit in federal court filed. But men are OK to harass, libel, and demean.

Good on anonymous for exposing this obvious double standard. And I hope they get sued by everyone.
by ddtaylor | 2025-07-26 13:32:36+00:00
There actually was no e-mail, I just re-checked. I did a search for:

- usernotice@google.com - Legal Investigations Support - Google received and responded to legal process

Nothing from any of those =( It's been years, but there were two search warrants executed and both are in my discovery, but I was not notified of either via Google directly.
by ada1981 | 2025-07-26 13:32:37+00:00
Why does the author use a computer and the Internet to write and distribute his thoughts?

Certainly it would be more rewarding to create paper from scratch and walk the earth handing his ideas to people? He could even create his own written language from scratch!

The way to get the most out of AI is not to simply automate away things you love; it’s to go bigger and try to solve bigger actual problems while using AI.

I teach an advanced university level course in how to write books with AI. It’s amazing to watch students (some traditional published authors) unlock new levels of flow and creativity.

It’s not the tool. You’re just using it wrong.
by roxolotl | 2025-07-26 13:32:51+00:00
Yes that has been the case since at least Reagan. The deficits go up under republicans more than democrats. The fiscal conservatism is a marketing ploy.

Paper from 2004 on the topic: https://shapiro.macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files...

Paper from 2022 on the topic:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01603477.2022.20...

Wikipage with just economic indicators by party:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
by bluemanshoe2 | 2025-07-26 13:33:04+00:00
Using the API, the total contributions people have made here for all time are $67,323,122.88. Meanwhile, the Debt-to-the-penny api (https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/d...) tells us that (as of 2025-07-25) the public debt is $29,361,169,407,599.91 whereas the day before it was $29,332,905,580,399.32, meaning the one day increase was $28,263,827,200.59.

So, the publics total contributions amount to 0.24% of the increase from Thursday to Friday last week. One part in 400 of the one day change, or about ~3 minutes worth.
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-07-26 13:33:51+00:00
Not sure if others mentioned this but one can abstract away the configuration and sys-admin type tasks using a declarative language. Then the setup can be recreated effortlessly by others, reviewed and verified on an ongoing basis.

If the author found a self-hosting setup that works, it should be packaged and automatically reproduced elsewhere. It is always 10% of the work to make something work, 90% of the work is arranging it to be self-reproducing, self-maintaining, and self-documenting without excessive toil. I call this "self-*" computing.
by gametorch | 2025-07-26 13:34:10+00:00
I'm so so so glad I didn't spend my twenties working and saving.

I've lived a thousand lives, spent most of the time as true quality time with people I love, and I still have a few years left in this decade of my life.

And I'm still further ahead, financially speaking, than >99% of other people my age. (To those asking, I tripled down on life after getting a remote job.)

The one year I spent 9-5 in an office as a traditional SWE was by far the quickest and least eventful year of my life. Also probably the saddest.

I'm very glad I just said "no" and walked away and simply lived. It was absolutely worth the risk. I would never trade these years for the ability to buy a house in the Bay Area suburbs.

I probably will be able to do that anyways, if I want to, even though I don't.
by tucnak | 2025-07-26 13:34:16+00:00
I must agree that for numerical computation (and downstream optimisation thereof) Julia is much better suited than ostensibly "systems" language such as Rust. Moreover, the compatibility matrix[1] for Rust-CUDA tells a story: there's seemingly very little demand for CUDA programming in Rust, and most parts that people love about CUDA are notably missing. If there was demand, surely it would get more traction, alas, it would appear that actual CUDA programmers have very little appetite for it...

[1]: https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA/blob/main/guide/src/fe...
by westurner | 2025-07-26 13:34:33+00:00
"Ocean Sugar Makes Cancer Cells Explode" (2025) https://scitechdaily.com/ocean-sugar-makes-cancer-cells-expl... :

> In research published in The FASEB Journal, investigators purified a long-chain sugar molecule, or exopolysaccharide, from deep-sea bacteria and demonstrated that it triggers pyroptosis to inhibit tumor growth.

> The compound, called EPS3.9, consists of mannose and glucose and is produced by the Spongiibacter nanhainus CSC3.9 bacterial strain and other members of the genus Spongiibacter. Mechanistic analyses showed that EPS3.9 can directly target 5 membrane phospholipid molecules and exert tumor toxicity by stimulating pyroptosis in human leukemia cells. EPS3.9 also had significant anti-tumor effects in the mice with liver cancer and activated anti-tumor immune responses.

“A Novel Exopolysaccharide, Highly Prevalent in Marine Spongiibacter, Triggers Pyroptosis to Exhibit Potent Anticancer Effects” (2025) DOI: 10.1096/fj.202500412R https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fj.2025004...
by danaris | 2025-07-26 13:34:52+00:00
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.

Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:

- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).

- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.

- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.

I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
Ask HN: Why don't LLM dev tools used by "vibe coders" enforce main/develop?
by consumer451 | 2025-07-26 13:35:21+00:00
That viral replit story [0] is stuck in my head. Even if we had AGI vibe coding nirvana, we would still need at least a main/develop branching strategy, wouldn't we?

This feels like such an obvious self-own on the part of the tool devs, that I feel like I must be missing some level of complexity in the implementation.

Why do seemingly all of these LLM-based dev tools appear to default to developing in prod?

For a moment I thought that merge conflicts were the reason, but a single dev and simple main/develop git branching strategy, would never have merge conflicts if hot-fixes were not allowed, correct?

Am I missing something, or are these currently caveman dev tools?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119
by pjmlp | 2025-07-26 13:35:57+00:00
Khronos APIs are the C++ of graphics programming, there is a reason why professional game studios never do political wars on APIs.

Decades of exerience building cross platform game engines since the days of raw assembly programming across heterogeneous computer architectures.

What matters are game design and IP, that they eventually can turn into physical assets like toys, movies, collection assets.

Hardware abstraction layers are done once per platform, can even leave an intern do it, at least the initial hello triangle.

As for who seats as president at Khronos, so are elections on committee driven standards bodies.
by stillsut | 2025-07-26 13:36:27+00:00
Great point, I've found Sonnet really can't be beat on many tasks, but increasingly finding Gemini-Pro and o3 handle the tough bugs and refactors best.

That's why I've been using agro to launch agents from each of the main LLM vendors and checking their results when I'm stuck: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/index.md
by typewithrhythm | 2025-07-26 13:39:08+00:00
The statistics are hard to come by, but at a glance the rate of successful rape convictions is similar to the rate of proven false allegation. And both are in the single digits.

So how to neutrally approach this? If you ignore cases without a conviction it's close to 50/50. Seems implausibly high though.

And then how do you factor in everything that didn't go to court?
by brandonpelfrey | 2025-07-26 13:39:43+00:00
The issue in my mind is that this doesn’t seem to include any of the critical library functionality specific eg to NVIDIA cards, think reduction operations across threads in a warp and similar. Some of those don’t exist in all hardware architectures. We may get to a point where everything could be written in one language but actually leveraging the hardware correctly still requires a bunch of different implementations, ones for each target architecture.

The fact that different hardware has different features is a good thing.
by vijucat | 2025-07-26 13:39:47+00:00
Programming is in a niche in comparison to other hobbies / professions in that it is a creative process where you can repeat the experiment endlessly and without physical costs or destruction (assuming your code is not operating a robot or something in the physical world). Re-writing pieces of your code and re-running never fails to bring joy to me. Painting, carpentry, racing, etc; do not have an analogue. Producing digital art (music, for example), writing and tinkering with mathematics come close.

Researchers in chemistry and biology may enjoy a similar joy, but I assume it is much more difficult to re-run your experiment with slightly different ingredients. One aspect where these fields are leaps ahead of code is "code producing code": chain reactions are common in the real world and in fact, probably key to the whole thing.
by getnormality | 2025-07-26 13:39:51+00:00
Why does the perfect note-taking system seem to be such blogging catnip? And the post always basically says "here's my system", never "here's why taking notes is valuable" or "here's something objectively valuable that was enabled by my note-taking system".

By the way, here's my note-taking system: https://renormalize.substack.com/p/my-markdown-project-manag...

All joking aside, append-and-review does seem like a nice pattern for maintaining attention on a big heap of odds and ends, which is probably useful for a researcher like Andrej Karpathy.