MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bobbiechen | 2025-08-09 14:31:33+00:00
>The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law developed to help fiduciaries deal with digital files of the dead or incapacitated, can come into play. But Haneman points out that most people die intestate (without a will), leaving matters up to tech platforms. Facebook's response to dead users is to allow anyone to request the memorialization of an account, which keeps posts online. As for RUFADAA, it does little to address digital resurrection, says Haneman.

I think in practice, all the major services do allow removal given proper evidence like a court order. For example, Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/help/1518259735093203/?helpref=uf_sha...

I wrote about RUFADAA and some of the other implications of death in the digital world earlier this year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-happens-to-your-online-ac...

With AI replicas of people, I do think this is another case where scale makes a big difference. Anyone could put in huge time, money, and effort before to imitate a dead person. But it's entirely a different problem when the barrier to imitation is so low and so easy.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-09 14:32:08+00:00
> We’re opening up a waitlist now and would love feedback from the HN crowd:

Is this launched? How many active users do you have?

Waiting list never got traction here, and are not good for "Show HN" https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Remember to post again once people can try it. You will get a lot more of (unrequested) feedback.
by simion314 | 2025-08-09 14:32:37+00:00
>The GTA example is not a good one because the vast majority of the work in making a videogame is not coding...

What is outside coding?

- writing? an AI that can replace hard core developers that write optimized game engines should also be able to generate quests

- art? same, AI should be able to get already created models and change them here and there to make them not look stolen

- marketing? why can't AI replace those people

so?
by MBCook | 2025-08-09 14:32:56+00:00
There was recently an article about someone with a 3 year old Ford Mustang Mach E with 250k miles (400k KM).

https://www.thedrive.com/news/meet-the-man-with-the-250000-m...

Battery is still over 90%. And given that he’s having to do a full charge every day for the amount he drives, that’s pretty impressive. Still on the original brake pads too.

Sounds like all he’s really had to do is put on new tires a couple of times.
by oblio | 2025-08-09 14:33:15+00:00
Things don't work like that.

First of all iPhones have more like 6-8GB of RAM, 1-2 of which are already taken up by the system and system apps. Add some resident apps and maybe 1-2GB are already taken. Then of course during peak times, which are predictable but not guaranteed, 5-10% is maybe available. So out of your 10GB estimated per device, you actually average maybe 3GB.

Similar story for the CPU and GPU.

Then, availability: dead battery, no cell reception, airplane mode, etc, etc.

And on top of that, in the context of battery charge and long term wear and tear, you're assuming people will just let you run Bitcoin mining nodes on them.

You need a really solid incentive for people to loan you end user computing power for legitimate reasons.
by rossdavidh | 2025-08-09 14:34:27+00:00
On the one hand, that isn't necessarily a problem. It can be just a useful algorithm for tool calling or whatever.

On the other hand, if you're telling your investors that AGI is about two years away, then you can only do that for a few years. Rumor has it that such claims were made? Hopefully no big investors actually believed that.

The real question to be asking is, based on current applications of LLMs, can one pay for the hardware to sustain it? The comparison to smartphones is apt; by the time we got to the "Samsung Galaxy" phase, where only incremental improvements were coming, the industry was making a profit on each phone sold. Are any of the big LLMs actually profitable yet? And if they are, do they have any way to keep the DeepSeeks of the world from taking it away?

What happens if you built your business on a service that turns out to be hugely expensive to run and not profitable?
by xg15 | 2025-08-09 14:34:35+00:00
I can see how this will be going, if combined with the "AI copyright laundering" trick.

"Oh no your honor, we never intended for this AI to be a digital replica of the deceased Mr. Smith and we never trained it on his writings either. We exclusively trained it on synthetic, fictional content generated by this other AI which may or may not have been trained on his writings as a source of inspiration."
by ben_w | 2025-08-09 14:34:37+00:00
On the one hand: It's definitely not working anything like as well as it used to*.

But as you say: I was expecting much worse.

At a certain point, a website or an app has all the features it needs, and everything else is cruft. You don't need to hire devs to work on new features when you reach that point, just lots and lots of QA and SREs. I won't say when or where, but more than once I have been witness to a feature being added… then taken away and added again by a different team.

I guess he has enough SREs.

* when someone links me to x.com content, I manually edit the URL to xcancel.com because even on a phone keyboard this is faster than 50% of random x.com page loads*
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-09 14:34:48+00:00
What do you think about local-first messaging apps?

I think --- it is an interconnected world and not too many people can exist with only *local* communication.

For those who can't, they will need to find an alternative with broader reach. And once a broader, more general purpose solution is found, they will be inclined to use it locally too.
by breadwinner | 2025-08-09 14:35:03+00:00
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians.

Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...

The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...

The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian

https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...

The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...

Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
by diggan | 2025-08-09 14:35:32+00:00
> Also Tauri apps feel pretty clunky on Linux for me.

All of them, or this one specifically? I've developed a bunch of tiny apps for my own usage (on Linux) with Tauri (maybe largest is just 5-6K LoC) and always felt snappy to me, mostly doing all the data processing with Rust then the UI part with ClojureScript+Reagent.
by astrobe_ | 2025-08-09 14:35:36+00:00
Academia has a lot to offer with regard to:

- fundamental principles and concepts, like paradigms, SOLID, coupling, cohesion, etc. - Maybe design patterns too - and when and how to apply them - To paraphrase a famous author, how to avoid making "programming the act of putting bugs in software" - And since you can't really avoid it, debugging techniques.

All of these require good logic and judgement - skills that you are better off having when talking with an AI.
by elcritch | 2025-08-09 14:35:40+00:00
Not particularly. There's a baseline intelligence required to become a (medical) doctor but no it's much more about grit and hard work among other factors [1]. Similarly for PhDs as well IMHO.

Searching and IQs FOR doctors seem to average about 120 with 80th percentile being 105-130. So there's plenty of doctors with IQs of 105 which is not that far above average.

That also means that it's prudent to be selective in your doctors if you have any serious medical issues.

1: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-...
by giobox | 2025-08-09 14:36:43+00:00
Are there many car keys actually using time of flight in the fob? Most of the cars I’ve owned use a much simpler approach - the key sleeps (stops broadcasting) unless moved. Drives me nuts with some fobs which have to be vigorously shaken to start broadcasting again and open my car etc. if key isn’t broadcasting, it can’t be mitm’d. It’s been awhile but I seem to recall time of flight being patent encumbered vs sleeping the key.

This obviously isn’t 100 percent full proof but likely works well enough for preventing many common mitm scenarios such as stealing from a car park or drive way most of the time etc.
by LexiMax | 2025-08-09 14:37:03+00:00
There is a lot more groupthink and echo chamber behavior on HN compared to Reddit due to the way flagging works. For me, HN is unusable without using showdead and using the active front page so I can see what stories its userbase tried to flag off the normal front page.

You can also say some pretty horrendous things on this site as long as you couch it in modest proposed-esque soft language. If I want to have a non-technical conversation with other human beings, Tildes blows the doors off of HN in the empathy department.
by bluetomcat | 2025-08-09 14:37:25+00:00
The W210s did indeed rust badly and the interiors weren't on par with previous generations, but in purely mechanical terms, they were still solid cars. The diesels (particularly E250 TD and E290 TD) could cover 700k+ kilometres without any interventions to the engine or the transmission. The W211 is an improvement to the W210 in almost every aspect, and they are still plentiful on the roads in Eastern Europe.
by trilogic | 2025-08-09 14:37:47+00:00
With all respect you do seem to not understand much of how privacy works. Llama-server is working in Http. And yes the app is a bit heavy as is loading llm models using llama.cpp cli and multimodal which in itself are quite heavy, also just the dlls for cpu/gpu are huge, (just the one for the nvidial gpu is 500mb if I don't go wrong).
by bluecalm | 2025-08-09 14:37:51+00:00
They do in expectations of course. It's like saying "overall businesses make money and money accumulates over the years". You are rewarded for not spending your money right now. Taking some risks (risk premium over risk free rate) and not being an idiot (keeping your money in a bank or mattress or whatever). Market puts price on that reward. Unless you believe market is completely wrong about everything then yes - stonks will go up.

Sometimes I feel the reason for many political views presented on HN is misunderstanding of very basic of finance and economy. The whole discussion here that started with absolutely nonsense comparison (stonks go up faster than wages) is one example of that.
by Bender | 2025-08-09 14:37:54+00:00
The source code is just an html download page. The artifact is too big for virustotal to scan. What is this? What type of encryption is used for text and voice? Where is the source code? Where are the details about the fixes? What was the original Chrome webstore URL for this application?

Something seems very off about this, like I am being red-teamed.
by neom | 2025-08-09 14:38:22+00:00
For those of you who also have no clue what a Grade II* is, it appears to be a protected status of buildings in the UK - In the UK, listed buildings are graded according to their historic and architectural importance: Grade I: Buildings of exceptional interest (about 2.5% of listings) Grade II*: Particularly important buildings of more than special interest (about 5.5% of listings) Grade II: Buildings of special interest (about 92% of listings) - Thorne Island Fort is classified as "Grade II*" (Grade Two Star) so apparently it's considered particularly important and of more than just special interest.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-09 14:38:32+00:00
I've come to the conclusion that the best use for "AI" it typing faster than me. I work at a place with a very well defined architecture so basically implementation is usually very straight forward, Claude can follow it because as you said, it's following a spec of sorts.

On the other hand, there has been quite a few moments in the last week where I'm actually starting to question if it's really faster. Some of the random mistakes can be major depending on how quickly it gets something wrong. I feel like a computer game, I need to save every time I make progress (commit my work).

I'm still on the fence about it honestly.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-09 14:39:05+00:00
Really hard to say. I've avoid people IRL for extended periods of time for the past ~15 years but still retain a sense of theory of mind, boundaries, and appreciation for the differences in values, motivations, and beliefs. Productive socializing usually means navigating ambiguity, not imposing inflexible worldview bullshit.

I swear at Siri and tell Alexa to STFU, which works. AI agents aren't anywhere close to having egos, emotional memories, or agency.
by orwin | 2025-08-09 14:39:29+00:00
I can't talk about other countries, but in France it's clear that liberals (which in my books are right wing) try to emulate the US and capture more traditional movements/struggles.

Liberal 'feminists' borrowing the US word 'empowerment' to replace the word 'emancipation', and their new feminist dream is to be a CEO instead of finding a way to smoothen or remove hierarchical structures. Beauvoir is radically reinterpreted, and d'Eaubonne forgotten.

What's funny is that most movements on the right of liberals are becoming even more US coded (all beside one in the regular right, and all beside Monarchist and Bonapartists on the far right) , enough to forget even _very recent_ memories, because they want to transform my country into the US so much. Manifesting transformism shows while transformists were not a subject for almost a century (and Michou died less than a decade ago) is peak American (which isn't an issue if you're from the US to be clear). A more anecdotal example: my mother and aunts are catholic and go to every local church event, at least since their sister died. A lot of (mostly young) people converted recently and those neo-catholic act like Puritains, like they were in a TV show. Calling Yoga devil's work and other shit like that. The priests are trying to do something because apparently it became unbearable.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-09 14:39:34+00:00
My reading was that, at best, the gold might be a minor by-product of a fusion reactor which was already paying for itself by generating electricity. And maybe an extra "Look, shiny!" pitch, to sucker dim investors with.

(If the cost of the fusion-made gold was (say) 400X the cost of old-fashioned mined gold - and you also had to wait 15 or so years for its radioactivity to die down - no bright investors who want to help scale that up.)
by sleepyguy | 2025-08-09 14:39:42+00:00
We have a 2000 4Runner with approximately 325,000 miles (523036 km), and nothing has been replaced. Currently, it isn't a daily driver but a spare for anyone to use. Tires, Brakes, fan belt, and oil changes, that's all. There was an old Avalon that had over 425k miles on it, but during a storm, a tree fell on it and it was written off.
by CrazyStat | 2025-08-09 14:39:52+00:00
> The undergrad academics at T10 universities really aren't anything special.

This surprised me when I went from my decent but not great-by-ranking (generally ranked in the 50-70 range) undergrad university to a top 10 ranked university for grad school. The undergrad students weren’t noticeably smarter, nor did they work harder on average. They were more ambitious and more entitled. Cheating was rampant (pre-LLMs, I expect it’s even worse now) and professors mostly just didn’t care. The median household income at the top 10 school was more than double what it was at my undergrad school.

That was an enlightening experience.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-08-09 14:39:54+00:00
If I recall, one recator would produce something like 0.2% of the annual gold unearthed every year.

Also, can't be used immediately: there is a 16 years period before radioactivity comes down to a safe level.

So I'd say it can be introduced smoothly, and make the endeavor of of a reactor more lucrative while not destroying gold market.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-09 14:40:19+00:00
Because it's marketed as AI and it takes a while to figure out that it's really quite limited. In my opinion there's not a lot of intelligence going on, It's great at translating a requirement and giving you an approximation of what you asked for, but there isn't really any "thinking" going on.

I think when they advertise "thinking" it just does a few more iterations of giving you the closest "number in your head from the clues you've given it (requirements).

I saw someone once say that LLMs are a kind of "word calculator" and I feel that's quite a good description.
by echelon | 2025-08-09 14:40:20+00:00
You don't get both.

You want to be remembered? You'll have no control over what future technologies people have or use. Trying to impose conditions on our descendants is pointless, overbearing, and futile.

There are billions of us here. The future will be preoccupied with itself, mostly. It would be a rare treat to be remembered at all.

We're all ephemeral. Every picture, every memento -- everything will vanish within a few generations. Even our DNA gets washed out after about a dozen generations.

It's over in a geologic blink of an eye.
by craz8 | 2025-08-09 14:40:50+00:00
I grew up in that area and went to school with a member of the family that owned Thorne Island at the time.

There are times of the year that access is not possible at all due to weather which does limit the usefulness of the location.

The Angle lifeboat isn’t far away in an emergency though, so that’s helpful.

There are other Victorian fort locations in that area in private hands. A different school friend owned more than one of these for a while. Maintenance costs are outrageous!
by pron | 2025-08-09 14:40:57+00:00
> Unless you actually use the simplicity to apply formal methods I don't think simplicity make a language safer.

That depends what you mean by "safer", but it is an empirical fact that unsound methods (like tests and code reviews) are extremely effective at preventing bugs, so the claim that formal methods are the only way is just wrong (and I say this as a formal methods guy, although formal methods have come a long way since the seventies, when we thought the point was to prove programs correct).

> The exact opposite. You can see it play out in the C vs C++ arena. C++ is essentially just a more complex C. But I trust modern C++ much more in terms of memory safety.

I don't understand the logical implication. From the fact that there exists a complicating extension of a language that's safer in some practical way than the original you conclude that complexity always offers correctness benefits? This just doesn't follow logically, and you can immediately see it's false because Zig is both simpler and safer than C++ (and it's safer than C++ even if its simplicity had no correctness benefits at all).
by cratermoon | 2025-08-09 14:41:49+00:00
> give me go structs for this json "pasted json" and write 2 functions to save it and load it from "nosql db I use"

Those tools existed before LLMs and were local, fast, and most importantly free.

Why people continue to re-invent tools and workflows we already have, I don't know. Perhaps they just like to be able say "but this uses AI!"
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-09 14:43:03+00:00
You say that, but I don't think you actually want that. Utilities are very good for important, slowly changing type things. They ossify into conservative, safe services. Which is good if we're talking about power generation and transmission or water treatment or whatever. Search is still changing way too rapidly.

We do, on the other hand, need better regulation regarding how individual data can be used, collected, and shared, particularly in the US.
by simion314 | 2025-08-09 14:43:16+00:00
>None of the things you’ve said this means match my experience using LLMs to write real, usable, viable code. It might not be the most performant or perfect code, but it’s certainly usable and most software isn’t written at Google or whatever and don’t need to support hundreds of millions of customers at scale. If it took a day instead of a month, then “the business” might decide that’s a worthy tradeoff.

It depends on your project, I seen a lot of stupidity in the AI, like in a lua project where arrays were 1 indexed it would 0 index them, somehow the c like behaviour was too strong of a force to drag the model in that direction.

For example when i test an image generator I ask it to create a photo of the front of a book store and to include no brands, labels or texts (because they always include english text and most of the time there are spelling errors), but the AIs can't make a shop without the branding/text above teh door, they are just so over trained on this concept that explicti commands can't fix it,

so the same with LLMs, they are attracted to the average most popular shit they seen in the training data, so without instructions by you or maybe by the provider behind the hidden prompts it will output outdated javascript using "var" . it will output unoptimized algorithms, and even if you used a specific variable name it will be strongly be pushed to rename it to whatever is most popular in the training data.

Yes, I can make the LLMs write soem good code but ony if I baby sit it, tell it exactly what files to read as inspiration, what features to use and what to do, for sure I can't just paste the text in a ticket and let if free.

I also use it to review my code for bugs, it can find up to 5-% of the bugs and halucinate others that are not possible (like it would sugerate that if $x is null then something would crash and I should check for that, but the type system would already ensure $x can't be null so it really needs more training to do simple stuff... to be original and not just regurgitate the most popular things it was trained on it would need to be something not based on LLM architecture
by cholantesh | 2025-08-09 14:43:51+00:00
I didn't know Nissans were known for being unreliable; my first car was a hand-me-down Sentra that ran smoothly till I sold it at ~220k. I've owned three cars since, I think the worst was a used Elantra that I just put out to pasture at 198k. Persistent electronic issues and terribly uncomfortable on the passenger side. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was an asking price of 10k to repair a faulty airbag sensor. Hoping the RAV4 that replaced it will live up to its reputation.
by treetalker | 2025-08-09 14:45:00+00:00
This is almost certainly the case. Law practice probably deserves the title of the "dismal science" more than economics does — both as dismal, and as a science. Still, after practicing for a while (perhaps even just during law school) it becomes simply a perception of life that is closer to base reality than one had before — probably similar to a physician's view of the body and biological processes after encountering so much disease, decline, and death, as well as the methods by which those might be prevented, eased, and forestalled.

EDIT: I'll add that I, too, maintain a work journal. The nice thing is that mine can't be obtained through discovery in most situations because of attorney–client privilege, attorney work-product privilege, etc. The lousy thing is that I'll never be able to share complete details of my lessons with most others (save, e.g., other lawyers in my law firm) because of the duty of confidentiality, etc.
by mritterhoff | 2025-08-09 14:45:22+00:00
It's surprising to me they don't compare Teslas to other EV cars. Comparing to "average used car" which includes ICE, seems like apples to oranges.

Hank Green [1] is of the opinion that used EVs are underpriced at the moment, because of exaggerated fears concerning minor decreases in range, that don't matter enough in practice. I wonder if the stats presented are a manifestation of that, or a Tesla-specific backlash.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5KF2IhUtY