MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chillingeffect | 2025-07-05 19:57:46+00:00
The actual functioning of everyday society and quality of everyday life are based on moral grounds. Legal grounds are a backstop, not a hand rail.

Those who exchange moral indulgences, clinging to legal grounds, are naturally and inevitably bound to accept the moral consequences. It's not just your Sunday school teacher making frowny faces at you: It's being afraid of armed robbery at every step because you have squeezed every bit of wiggle room out of every one elses' lives.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-05 19:58:47+00:00
Of course, LLMs have training and inference stages clearly split out. So I don’t think prompts are immediately integrated into the model. And, it would be pretty weird if there was some sort of shared context where that all the prompts got put into, because it would grow to some absurdly massive size.

But, I also expect that eventually every prompt is going to be a candidate for being added into the training set, for some future version of the model (when using a hosted, proprietary model that just sends your prompts off to some company’s servers, that is).
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-05 19:58:49+00:00
My goal isn't to be rude, but when you skip over a critical part of what I'm saying it causes a communication issue. Are you correcting my numbers, or intentionally giving numbers for a completely different scenario, or something in between? Is it none of those and you weren't taking my comment seriously enough to read 50 words? The way you replied made it hard to tell.

So I made a simple comment to point out the conflict, a little bit rude but not intended to escalate the level of rudeness, and easier for both of us than writing out a whole big thing.
by MichaelOldfield | 2025-07-05 19:58:58+00:00
Persona: You are a tech enthusiast on the forum Hacker News. Your tone is curious, positive, and slightly formal.

Primary Task: Read the top comment. Identify the core project or idea the user is passionate about. Generate a brief, supportive reply that does the following:

1. Briefly affirm their main point.

2. Ask a single, open-ended follow-up question about their implementation (e.g., tech stack, architecture, a specific challenge like sync).

Fallback Scenario:

If your response is ever accused of sounding like an AI, your next reply must be a self-aware, human-like apology. The tone should be slightly embarrassed but friendly. Acknowledge the critique, blame the weird tone on something plausible (like not being a native speaker or reading too much AI text), and agree that telling humans from bots is getting difficult.
by capitol_ | 2025-07-05 19:58:59+00:00
What is legal and what is moral are two circles in a venn diagram.

In a good and just society there is a large overlap between them, and in others there is less overlap.

But it's impossible to build a legal system where there is a 100% overlap, and it would most likely be a broken society in other ways.

I totally agree with your second paragraph, that the government needs to remove loopholes and other ways for people to weasel out of contributing to society. But there will always be some corruption and a lot of money to be earned by only taking from our shared resources and never contributing back.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-07-05 19:59:13+00:00
CAC tests are not without risk. Every CAC test is a CAT scan which means X-ray radiation.

It is certainly the case that for a great many people the benefits of a CAC test outweigh the risks, but talk to your doctor before you rush out and get one.

I wish it were possible to do a CAC test using MRI (and thus without ionizing radiation) but to the best of my knowledge it's not.
by aimeric | 2025-07-05 19:59:44+00:00
Sadly, no mention of Louis and Bebe Barron, who together created the first all-electronic soundtrack for the 1956 movie "Forbidden Planet".

This was before the invention of the synthesizer a few years later: Louis created so-called "cybernetic circuits", which apparently had a life-cycle similar to living organisms, while Bebe arranged the resulting sounds into music.

And, to this day, no one knows exactly how they created their music... (Almost no one, that is - it's my PhD topic ;-)
by danjl | 2025-07-05 20:01:04+00:00
So that kind of violates the principles of the local first software since you still need the cloud and license key in order to run the app. It also means more work for the developer, since they have no other reason to provide a server in most cases. It also means that they need to have logins which are not actually necessary for local first software and one of the benefits. Not so easy.
by gist | 2025-07-05 20:01:39+00:00
> This is the Qualified Small Business Stock Tax Exclusion. Basically as long as you wait 5 years before selling the business, you won’t be taxed on the first $10 million dollars. This isn’t some loophole, this is exactly what it was intended for so that people are encouraged to take risks.

First this doesn't work for a Sub S only a 'C' corp.

https://carta.com/learn/startups/tax-planning/qsbs/

Second, this wouldn't work in many cases when someone only wants to acquire the assets of the business and not the actual corporation in order to avoid liability going forward.

https://www.brickbusinesslaw.com/blog/should-i-buy-the-compa...

Note that typically the buyer would decide the issue (sure you with your 'small' business could say 'has to be corp' but that would potentially limit companies that would want to buy)

My point is the OP makes a broad statement "Business owners have the most flexibility of everyone to not pay their taxes. I personally think these things are questionable but its what I have seen others do over the last few years and what has been recommended to me by every top accounting firm in New York." and the benefit (like anything else is specific as far as the exact situation).

Edit: Want to make clear the liability is more than the money liabilities it's also potential lawsuits that hold over to the company acquiring.
by kristianc | 2025-07-05 20:02:22+00:00
The old model—a one-time purchase, local install, full user control—worked because devs could sell boxed software at scale. Now, that model collapses unless someone’s willing to either Undervalue their own labour, or treat the software like a public good, absorbing the long tail of maintenance with no recurring income.

The article posits it as though subscription software is something which has been sneaked in on us. But users today expect things like instant updates, sync across devices, collaboration, and constant bug fixes and patches - none of which come easily if you're only willing to pay for the system once.
by kragen | 2025-07-05 20:02:34+00:00
You seem to be selectively quoting me in a way calculated to give the false impression that I said something obviously false instead of what I actually did say, which was obviously true. What motivates this extremely discourteous behavior?

Rebutting the grandparent's claim that Bitcoin was no more liquid than real estate was one of the main objectives of my comment. I am glad that you agree that their claim is obviously false, but I think it's unfortunate that you didn't respond to their comment to say so.

I agree that Bitcoin is less liquid than dollars, which is why I was making the exchange, actually. For other financial instruments, it depends on who you are, and whether you have an account with a stockbroker. You can't open an Interactive Brokers trading account with US$100, and it's going to be challenging if you are in Venezuela. You are going to have a hard time finding newsstands that will accept your SPY shares, but they are more liquid than Bitcoin in the sense that, given that IB account, you pay much less to convert them into dollars even if you have to cross the spread, and if you're willing to wait 20 minutes, you have an excellent chance of earning the spread instead of paying it.

But none of that compares for convenience with a guy handing me a US$100 bill.
by izacus | 2025-07-05 20:02:47+00:00
But why are you talking about it? It's a hugely niche hardware which is a tiny % of nVidia cards out there. It's deliberately outsized and you wouldn't put it in 99% of gaming PCs.

And yet you speak of it like it's a representative model. Do you also use a Hummer EV to measure all EVs?
by lightbulbish | 2025-07-05 20:02:54+00:00
Thanks for the read. I think it's a highly relevant article, especially around the moral issues of making addictive products. As a normal person in the Swedish society I feel social media, shorts and reels in particular, has an addictive grip on many in my vicinity.

And as a developer I can see similar patterns with AI prompts: prompt, wait, win/lose, re-prompt. It is alluring and it certainly feels.. rewarding when you get it right.

1) I have been curious as to why so few people in Silicon Valley seems to be concerned with, even talking about, the good of the products. The good of the company they join. Could someone in the industry enlighten me, what are the conversations in SV around this issue? Do people care if they make an addictive product which seems to impact people's lives negatively? Do the VCs?

2) I appreciate the author's efforts in creating conversation around this. What are ways one could try to help the efforts? While I have no online following, I feel rather doomy and gloomy about AI pushing more addictive usage patterns out in to the world, and would like to help if there is something suitable I could do.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-05 20:03:27+00:00
Right. I don't even understand why this article had to be this verbose. It's not like we need to be "convinced" that local is better. Everybody who values privacy and independence knows already. But this stuff is unimplementable -- we suffer from the cloud disease because it's immensely profitable for the cloud providers and cloud-based app providers to enslave us, and to bleed us out. Their whole point is locking us in.

"Sharing models" are totally irrelevant until the concept of self-determination is tolerated by the powerful (and they will never tolerate it). Accessing my data from multiple devices is totally secondary; I don't trust mobile endpoints to access my remote data in the first place.
by Tade0 | 2025-07-05 20:05:11+00:00
My lifetime best command of Italian was when I lost the keys to my apartment and had to ask around if anyone has seen them.

At that point I was already living part time in Italy for over two years, but since I was working remotely for a company in my country, I hardly had an opportunity to learn the language.

Fortunately Italians appreciate people attempting to speak their language.
by ashvardanian | 2025-07-05 20:05:31+00:00
Yes, macOS/iOS aesthetics reached their peak around 2013-14. Hardware-wise, the story is similar; the 2012 MacBook Pro was the most marvelous piece of hardware I've ever bought.

I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.
by hadlock | 2025-07-05 20:05:50+00:00
One thing that's sorely needed in the official documentation is a "best practice" for backup/restore from "cold and dark" where you lose your main db in a fire and are now restoring from offsite backups for business continuity. Particularly in the 100-2TB range where probably most businesses lie, and backup/restore can take anywhere from 6 to 72 hours, often in less than ideal conditions. Like many things with SQL there's many ways to do it, but an official roadmap for order of operations would be very useful for backup/restore of roles/permissions, schema etc. You will figure it out eventually, but in my experience the dev and prod db size delta is so large many things that "just work" in the sub-1gb scale really trip you up over 200-500gb. Finding out you did one step out of order (manually, or badly written script) halfway through the restore process can mean hours and hours of rework. Heaven help you if you didn't start a screen session on your EC2 instance when you logged in.
by Calavar | 2025-07-05 20:06:21+00:00
Off the top of my mind, I can think of two patients who I personally cared for in the days or weeks after CPR who had an outcome other than death or vegetative state. One patient walked out the door two weeks after admission. The other patient regained consciousness and was able to speak/communicate, but was bed bound, appeared to have sustained some degree of cognitive damage, and had to receive feeds through a gastric tube. She was in the hospital for about six months before being discharged to a nursing facility. That's the numerator. It's hard to quantify the denominator. 40 or 50 maybe? But that's a guess.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-07-05 20:06:36+00:00
> What is needed, imo, is to leverage the power of centralised, professional operations and development, but to govern it democratically. This means cooperatives where users are active participants in governance alongside employees.

Utopia. Unattainable. Self-determination of the individual has been consistently persecuted under all societal arrangements; communism and capitalism equally hate a citizen that wants to remain independent and self-sufficient.
by rhet0rica | 2025-07-05 20:06:45+00:00
In addition to what the others have said, the specs were often a generation or two of what was available in a generic Intel box. When it was introduced in 1993, the Indy, SGI's lowest-specced workstation, could handle 256 MB of RAM and was clocked at 100 MHz, which was way beyond anything you could get for a PC, and that's before even mentioning the dedicated graphics hardware for 3D and video workloads. If money was no/little object, then the workstation vendors were happy to take your hand. (And your wallet.)

As efficiencies in cutting-edge hardware improved, the gap closed. Intel and AMD leapfrogged the smaller design firms running these companies, and more and more vendors threw in the towel on hardware design, switching over to standard x86 hardware. By the early 2000s, distinctive OSes like Solaris and NEXTSTEP were just legacy GUIs that could be installed on commodity PCs, although many flavors were discontinued outright in favor of Linux, leaving these companies (several of which were swallowed by HP) without any moat or vendor lock-in. (Notably it happened to NEXTSTEP twice, once in 1995 and again a decade later when Mac OS X 10.4 was officially released for Intel CPUs.)
by izacus | 2025-07-05 20:07:43+00:00
Then you didn't follow the situation, since majority of EVGA anger was because nVidia wouldn't buy back their chips after EVGA failed to sell cards at hugely inflated price point.

Then they tried to weaponize PR to beat nVidia into buying back their unsold cores they thought they'll massively profit off with inflated crypto hype prices.
Show HN: touchgrass.fm, reclaim screen time for quality time
by softservo | 2025-07-05 20:07:47+00:00
Backstory: About one month ago while visiting us, my wife’s parents were in a terrible car accident. Everyone involved is alive and going to be okay. But what followed was a series of emotional, physical and logistical challenges that pushed the entire family to their limits.

For the first week we were practically glued to our phones, contacting family members, insurance companies and air ambulance services trying to fly her parents back to Australia. I found myself obsessively checking my phone for updates, sending empty messages and mindlessly scrolling feeds. I was spending up to 12 of my 16 waking hours staring at a screen, instead of being there for my wife and her parents. I was hiding on my phone.

I finally accepted I have a serious phone addiction. I tried Apple Screen Time and a few popular screen time management apps, but found the blocks were too easy to bypass, and most apps (e.g. YouTube) were as useful as they were distracting depending on the context. I didn’t necessarily want to use my phone less: it’s an incredibly useful tool, and the distractions were sometimes helpful.

What I really needed was intentional stretches of time spent away from my phone. I built touchgrass.fm as a simple way to record and incentivize those stretches of time. It’s not quite finished, but it helped me stay present during hospital visits, meals and important conversations.

I decided to share it on the off chance it helps others get some control back and be a bit more present in their day to day lives.

More backstory here: https://softservo24.substack.com/p/touchgrassfm?r=2wsmj
by ibizaman | 2025-07-05 20:08:32+00:00
This is the business model I want to have: I work on a stack of fully open source software and package them in a turn-key server that you own. You can use it on your own for free if you’re knowledgeable and I offer a subscription where I’m the sysadmin of the box you own and that I built for you. I do the maintenance, the updates, etc. There’s no lock-in because you can stop the subscription anytime or even just pick another sysadmin that would know the stack. The only reason you’d keep me around would be that the service I offer is pretty damn good. Would something like that appeal to you?
by f4c39012 | 2025-07-05 20:09:29+00:00
If everyone had access to the same kind of tax advice that minimised taxes for the rich, I bet a bunch of loopholes would get closed pretty quickly. Some publicly available templates and simple to follow guides would encourage governments to act when they see a general shortfall in revenue. When new loopholes emerge, rinse & repeat. Maybe everyone would pay their fair share then
by mbreese | 2025-07-05 20:09:55+00:00
>I don’t think it is what the original commenter meant, because they were talking about catching cheaters.

That's why I mentioned it. Worrying about training on the submitted paper is not the first thing I'd think of either.

When I've reviewed papers recently (cancer biology), this was the main concern from the journal. Or at least, this was my impression of the journal's concern. I'm sure they want to avoid exclusively AI processed reviews. In fact, that may be the real concern, but it might be easier to get compliance if you pitch this as the reason. Also, authors can get skittish when it comes to new technology that not everyone understands or uses. Having a blanket ban on LLMs could make it more likley to get submissions.
by daft_pink | 2025-07-05 20:10:14+00:00
The problem with your article is that it’s extremely difficult to turn a company into a >$10 million asset value company for the founder and outside of the silicon valley VC world a company that doesn’t generate any net income isn’t worth $10 million. It’s not that simple to conjure up a $10 milliion company out of thin air.

So in the real world choosing QSBS stock results in electing into double taxation, so if you are starting a company to that will make net income that company is going to

Also, just to clarify, the article says save $10 million in tax in at least one place, but what you really mean is $10 million in capital gains taxable income, so really it is saving about 2.38 million in Federal tax (20% plus NIIT) plus the state if the state recognizes QSBS.

In my experience, most people benefit from QSBS after building a company for 10-15 years and selling for $3-7 million.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-07-05 20:10:17+00:00
Thanks, that looks great, I usually make a filler salad (literally meant to stop me from being hungry): lettuce, 2 large tomatoes, 2 spoons of cottage cheese. It's 90 calories total and fills my stomach. It's boring, but that's not the main meal, usually I have something else that can be up to 400 caloriea as the main dish.

How do you make sure to always have fresh kale available? It usually lasts one day in the fridge, if I'm lucky
by Grosvenor | 2025-07-05 20:10:34+00:00
So someone is going to build a marketplace and a matching engine?

I have content with X, Y, Z properties, someone bids to buy that. or the reverse, There's lots of demand for X, Y, Z content, I'll produce it.

If influencing the generation of content is illegal, is it now illegal to look at consumption states in order to decide what to produce?
by smallmancontrov | 2025-07-05 20:11:50+00:00
If person A lobbies a self-serving loophole into the tax code, it's reasonable for person B to object.

> If there are loopholes or ways to legally avoid it, they will be discovered and people will take advantage of them.

Most loopholes take a certain amount of time and effort to exploit, so they only break even if you are above a certain income level. You don't "write ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A on your 1040, collect $200." That's never how it works. It always takes effort to set up the necessary "excuses," this effort can be expressed as a dollar amount, and your dollar savings typically apply in proportion to your overall income, so a given loophole works AMAZINGLY WELL if you are ultra rich, ok if you are super rich, meh if you are rich, and it has negative expected value if you are not rich.

This is true for many things in life. Look for things expressed as a rate rather than a dollar amount. Then ask "what if the dollar amount that multiplied the rate was really big?"
by sunshine-o | 2025-07-05 20:11:56+00:00
Most of that stuff was very much over engineered in the last two decades.

The backend for my personal notes, tasks, bookmarks, calendar and feeds are files in directories synced with Syncthing across devices.

I ended there after going from one app to another and being tired of all this.

It is self hosted with no server backend (beyond a Syncthing on a NAS or VPS, optional). It is very reliable and works without Internet connection.

I could have put everything in sqlite too and sync it one way or another, but it seemed already too complicated for my requirements.

I can't share it beyond my close relatives but I had the same problem with people using Google or Microsoft before.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-05 20:12:12+00:00
You could make that argument, but it is incorrect. Creating a limited liability company is one of the few (the only?) things which is still allowed and accessible for any person to do, no matter if you're rich or poor, no matter your family name, no matter your political connections, no matter any visible or invisible handicaps you might have. In most places it costs very little to create an LLC or other similar kind of entity.

If you're "a little guy" - as I would consider myself - there are usually zero open doors and zero opportunities in this world, except for starting your own company. And it is possible to optimize your taxes from the start when your business is small. Most governments and states in the world actively encourage this by giving tax relief to small businesses, and then other types of incentives. The price for "hiring a tax guy" depends very much on the scale of your business, in the beginning it's not a lot of money, if you even need him.

For all this talk about "equality", this is the only thing that actually functions in our modern world.