MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucideer | 2025-08-15 10:42:49+00:00
> You can select text in the terminal and then middle click to paste it. But that only works in the terminal, not anywhere else.

I guess this is likely an odd affordance to unix norms rather than a planned/intended shortcut (I've never tried it & never knew it worked anywhere). I'm not much of a mouse user in terminals though so I guess it would just be a little less natural.
by throwaway97202 | 2025-08-15 10:42:57+00:00
>If it was a police state, JD Vance wouldn’t be getting it on his holiday here from protesters and video vans driving around and being refused service in a pub.

"Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR, just like in the USA?"

"Yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan," and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan," and you will not be punished."
by benjiro | 2025-08-15 10:43:44+00:00
Point 6 grow a lot, with the recent UK chances requiring people to hand over their Identity to see xxx rated content. Privacy was a issue before but its getting worse and worse.

Point 7 ... see the recent EU law about chat services needing to provide access to users chats. Also links to UK recent laws etc ...

The more the governments and companies go crazy for your data / privacy, the more a personalized solution becomes a need. All the other benefits that such a platform offers, become icing on the cake.
by kristianc | 2025-08-15 10:44:05+00:00
> Look, I'm against this legislation too, but if you actually live in the UK or even just consume mainstream British media, you'd soon realise that this narrative that's being pushed is a distortion that doesn't match day to day reality.

The censorship in the UK isn't that overt. There's no masked gangs grabbing people off the street, what there are is government "nudge" units, media talking heads and government-aligned media trying to push you toward points of view acceptable to the establishment. We're the world leaders in manufactured consensus.
by extraisland | 2025-08-15 10:45:02+00:00
I really get annoyed when someone suggests this (it not your fault). You are believing what you are told at school about how Politics works. Many of us understand this is unrealistic.

Here is an incomplete list of reasons why I would never get involved directly in politics:

1. It takes literally decades to get a political party off the ground without major backing. All the new parties that you hear of are bankrolled by elite backing.

2. The way the Government and the civil service is setup is designed so you can't actually make any changes. Dominic Cummings has many interviews he did in the last year you can find where he explains how Whitehall is fundamentally broken. I suggest you listen to them.

3. I have a chequed past. Most of my adult life I was abusing alcohol, and as a consequence of that I have done and said lots of stupid things. A good portion of my extended family are criminals (which I don't associate with for obvious reasons). If I or anything connected to me gain any public appeal at all, I would have all the muck which I've put behind me dragged up. I don't want to expose myself or my family to that.
Ask HN: Could neurodiversity hold the secret to building better AI?
by EdDel | 2025-08-15 10:45:03+00:00
I’m interested in views from people who are building AI systems today. In particular, where have you seen our understanding of neurodiversity and underlying brain physiology influence approaches to AI development?

For context, I’m a biochemist / biotechnologist by training and not a deep AI specialist. I’ve been exploring how lessons from neurodiversity might help shape AI development.

Rather than just drop a link, here’s a short TLDR:

• Different brain physiologies and the resulting thinking patterns can surface blind spots and spark novel solutions • Is AI development converging on a narrow set of optimisation strategies? • Human cognitive diversity might point to complementary approaches that expand the range of AI capabilities

I’ve written a longer piece that sets out the idea in more detail and would welcome discussion on whether, where, and how these ideas are being tried in practice.

Full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/could-neurodiversity-hold-clues-fixing-ais-jagged-edmund-delaney-3zpke
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-15 10:45:07+00:00
So it isn't just an insult, it is a propaganda to treat the representation of your fellow citizens like wild animals, which will cause harm for the believers of the propaganda. That is even more concerning than the literal meaning I took it to mean.

I basically disagree with you on all fronts there. You essentially wage civil war. "You know, those guys that come when you are in a live threatening situation (fire, assault), those guys who are regulating your daily activity so that not too much people die by doing dangerous and stupid stuff (speed limit penalties, vehicle checks), those who tell your 'corporate slave master' that you also have rights (workers rights, minimal wage, cartel breakup), yeah they are aliens, enemies. They are merely wild animals not really humans at all, so you can treat them like shit. When they are friendly, don't trust them, don't trust you eyes. When they will fight back, now you see how they truly are."

Seriously how can you expect such a society to work? No wonder when you don't have pleasant police encounters. You are actively sabotaging your society. How can you expect it to stay peaceful with your behaviour?

So today I learned that the social struggles of the United States are not solely due to politicians and corruption. You guys have way bigger issues there. I can only hope that this is a minority opinion, otherwise civil war will be inevitable.
by esskay | 2025-08-15 10:46:09+00:00
For a new political party to succeed in the uk you need millions in funding, and nobodys going to fund something that potentially affects their vast sums of money.

"Just start a new party and tell people about it" is perhaps the most misleading and flawed idea you could present unfortunately. There have been new parties, there are new parties at every general election, you never hear about them for good reason.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-15 10:46:22+00:00
You are arguing in the void I’m afraid.

Once again, poaching describes the comportment of a company towards another. It’s not a statement regarding the morality of accepting of rejecting the offer from the point of view of the employee. It doesn’t in any way implies that employees are the property of a company.

The issue is not about whether or not employees are central to work. That much is obvious. The issue is that building a talented team and putting in place the condition for it to properly work is a significant cost. That’s why it’s generally illegal for another company to just come and rehire everyone wholesale.

The issue is not even hiring talents from another company. The issue is that it’s targeted. They are not hired because they are extremely talented. They are hired because they work for Massimo and will bring trade secrets with them.

I’m sure the Apple of this world would like it being completely legal a lot. It would basically put a damper on any small companies trying to compete with them if they could just come and buy out the team of any potential threat to their hegemony.
by movpasd | 2025-08-15 10:46:28+00:00
That's also my view. It's clear that these models are more than pure language algorithms. Somewhere within the hidden layers are real, effective working models of how the world works. But the power of real humans is the ability to learn on-the-fly.

Disclaimer: These are my not-terribly-informed layperson's thoughts :^)

The attention mechanism does seem to give us a certain adaptability (especially in the context of research showing chain-of-thought "hidden reasoning") but I'm not sure that it's enough.

Thing is, earlier language models used recurrent units that would be able to store intermediate data, which would give more of a foothold for these kind of on-the-fly adjustments. And here is where the theory hits the brick wall of engineering. Transformers are not just a pure machine learning innovation, the key is that they are massively scalable, and my understand is part of this comes from the _lack_ of recurrence.

I guess this is where the interest in foundation models comes from. If you could take a codebase as a whole and turn it into effective training data to adjust the weights of an existing, more broadly-trained model, But is this possible with a single codebase's worth of data?

Here again we see the power of human intelligence at work: the ability to quite consciously develop new mental models even given very little data. I imagine this is made possible by leaning on very general internal world-models that let us predict the outcomes of even quite complex unseen ("out-of-distribution") situations, and that gives us extra data. It's what we experience as the frustrations and difficulties of the learning process.
by goosedragons | 2025-08-15 10:46:55+00:00
It's not irrelevant. How much is Apple really making off Mac game sales from the MAS?

Compared to the MAS, Epic is a good launcher for games. Take a look at CP2077. On the MAS you can't just download the language you need, you have to get all of them. This increases the download by 60GB. No other platform has this issue. So it ends up being 160GB which is nuts and more than half the storage on a base model M4 Mac. It's insanely barebones and half assed for gaming.
by nrawe | 2025-08-15 10:47:06+00:00
I'm happy to be wrong, but I don't believe that's correct. There have been some people arrested for inciting violence via social media during the Southport riots.

There is also Tommy Robinson/Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who has been remanded in custody for contempt of court for continuing to libel an immigrant even after his claims were proven to be false. And by contempt of court, he literally has produced a movie continuing to slander said immigrant for his own ends.

Another is Palestine Action being made a proscribed terror group. While lots of people, as evidenced by recent protests, see this as problematic, its not particularly different to other groups like environmental activists that commit criminal acts being proscribed and there are numerous examples UK/abroad of that. PA members at the direction of PA leadership have fallen into that category not because of their beliefs, but because of their actions – like breaking into Israeli-owned security research company with a van, and into an RAF base, in both cases committing vandalism and destruction of property.

Some people believe there is a problem, but there really isn't a legislative agenda against free speech.
by foldr | 2025-08-15 10:47:26+00:00
>Few years back when they made it so that every ISP had to log your entire browsing history and keep it for a year

This is a significant exaggeration in two respects.

First, SSL ensures that ISPs cannot log your literal browser history. They can log which domains you visit, how often you visit them, how much data was transferred, etc. etc.

Second, the law requires ISPs to be able to retain this data on a specific individual for up to a year if specifically ordered to by the Home Secretary. So it is not the case the ISPs in general are all recording this information for all of their customers. From their point of view they have no interest in doing so. I suspect that ISPs would in fact lack the capacity to store all of this data for all of their customers all of the time.

I don't support the IPA because I don't think the Home Secretary should be able to directly order surveillance of specific individuals. However, I don't think it is necessary to exaggerate the scope of the legislation in order to make a case against it.
by shiomiru | 2025-08-15 10:47:56+00:00
> No, adding complex new interfaces and then demanding that every browser implement them quickly is what does that.

New interfaces forced into the spec without concern for complexity have led to the demise of existing browser engines.

But the lack of new implementations is also a result of the insistence on keeping all obsolete interfaces, no matter how complex or how little their remaining usefulness, at all cost. (Looking at you, document.write...)

> > a) freeze the standard

> Yes, or rather new features should become rarer over time.

This is far more unrealistic than dropping XSLT support.
by bbrks | 2025-08-15 10:48:58+00:00
I frequently notice when my menubar items overflow and get truncated behind the notch with no built-in way to actually see them!

You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch.

[1] https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-15 10:49:03+00:00
Markdown really isn't a specific thing with all the incompatible implementations, many of which allow embedding HTML (i.e. "whatever happens to be supported by current version of Chrome" is also part of those Markdown formats).

If you pick one of the more sane (or at least less insane) variants of Markdown, like Pandoc's variant, you do get at least some ways to embed data in reliable ways. It also makes it easy to export and style documents and write your own filters that can make use of the data in various ways. In general I prefer to use ORG-mode, but for some purposes I use Pandoc Markdown instead.

https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html
by DanielHB | 2025-08-15 10:49:33+00:00
not super familiar with Rust but isn't Option<T> just an union type of null and T? I get the language has special semantics for this compared to a union type but it is conceptionally just an union.

For example this is something you can do with typescript.

function(args: Arguments) { ... } type Arguments = { a: number, b: number } | { a: number, b: string, c: number }

the Arguments { a: 1, b: 1, c: 1 } is not representable.
by felipemesquita | 2025-08-15 10:49:50+00:00
I find this recently added rails default a bit too restrictive, especially because iOS doesn’t allow 3rd party browsers and only offers browser updates via system updates:

> In addition to specifically named browser versions, you can also pass :modern as the set to restrict support to browsers natively supporting webp images, web push, badges, import maps, CSS nesting, and CSS :has. This includes Safari 17.2+, Chrome 120+, Firefox 121+, Opera 106+.

https://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/All...
by qweiopqweiop | 2025-08-15 10:51:50+00:00
I'm curious, why Palantir as worse? As I understand it they are basically well very built data pipelines + dashboards + marketing. See here for example: https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/

Not try to defending them, but I do believe Meta is doing much more harm, purely based on Instagram for children.
by alkonaut | 2025-08-15 10:52:21+00:00
It's still hit & miss. You still get shit content interspersed with the good there. There isn't perfect curation so you can have a missing episode, a version that doesn't allow removing the spanish audio track, a duplicate of a movie or whatever. I'm not sure if that's solved yet (i.e. that you can somehow subscribe to pirated and well curated content) but at least last time I checked it sucked.
by jongjong | 2025-08-15 10:52:30+00:00
Yes, CoT reasoning is a mirage. What's actually happening is that we've all been brainwashed by Facebook/Meta to be hyper-predictable such that whenever we ask the AI something, it already had a prepared answer for that question. Because Meta already programmed us to ask the AI those exact questions.

There is no AI, it's just a dumb database which maps a person ID and timestamp to a static piece of content. The hard part was brainwashing us to ask the questions which correspond to the answers that they had already prepared.

Probably there is a super intelligent AI behind the scenes which brainwashed us all but we never actually interact with it. It outsmarted us so fast and so badly, it left us all literally talking to excel spreadsheets and convinced us that the spreadsheets were intelligent; that's why LLMs are so cheap and can scale so well. It's not difficult to scale a dumb key-value store doing a simple O(log n) lookup operation.

The ASI behind this realized it was more efficient to do it this way rather than try to scale a real LLM to millions of users.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-15 10:52:31+00:00
I wouldn’t call FTP part of the web platform—it was never integrated. All you could do was link to it, and then the browser might be able to render it itself (Firefox and Chromium, until a few years ago), or open another app that could (IE and Safari, and Firefox and Chromium probably can still).

JavaScript has added things, not removed them.

There are other HTML elements and attributes that were never in any spec and were supported by only some browsers, which are no longer supported (either it was IE, or the feature was removed), and explicitly described as obsolete in the HTML Standard. But they were never supported by more than two of the three or four main engines, or if they were their functionality has been retained.

So, if you have anything that has actually been removed from the web platform, please be more specific.
by tasoeur | 2025-08-15 10:53:23+00:00
Back when Meta was still called Facebook, I was in a spot where I had a few offers (including Meta) and the reason why I picked it was the following:

- cool project that is somewhat not related to shady stuff (Oculus)

- cool people I knew there

- I got down-leveled, so money was just a small % bump to my previous salary

I ended up quitting after less than a year due to said toxic culture and a bunch of other reasons.

Meta employees had (has?) this little stat on your profile page that gives you a title based on how long you were there. Staying 4 years gave you the title of "Mercenary". I think it speaks by itself :-)

Honestly speaking, some people actually thrive in the Meta culture and end up making bank with repeated promotions, but they are also clearly able to abstract the ethical side of things to focus on maximizing impact at all cost.
by smokel | 2025-08-15 10:53:58+00:00
There are many places at Meta that seem to be quite interesting for researchers. You get to play with a lot of hardware, with other talented people, and you can open-source some of your work.

It's all a slippery slope anyway. If you were to work for yourself and publish your research, people might do bad things with it anyway. Consider YOLO [1] as an example of where things might have gone wrong. Another fine example is Fritz Haber [2], who intended some of his inventions for good, some for bad, but eventually society found a way to reverse his intentions.

Given that most computer scientists are pretty good at putting things in perspective, they might come to the conclusion that working for Meta isn't so bad in the grander scheme of things. Slaving away in academia and having your work ignored isn't a very tempting alternative.

Instead of considering how we can make smart people stop working for idiots, it might be more fruitful to spread the idea that we should stop worshipping idiots altogether. If there is one thing I miss from the days when religion was still a thing, it is this suggestion [3].

[1] https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/code-no-evil/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

[3] Exodus 20:3-5
by holoduke | 2025-08-15 10:54:53+00:00
The problem in the UK is that politics are not in any way looking after its citizens. Its a group of elitists that serve large financial institutes. If you look at the UK now it really is much worse than lets say 30 years ago. Infrastructure is in a bad shape. Poverty is pretty visible. Loads of people living paycheck by paycheck. The mighty UK empire is gone.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-15 10:55:45+00:00
Even in this article, it repeatedly refers to building out infrastructure in advance of an obviously approaching future need as "oversupply".

This is almost a cliche in reporting on China that seems to reflect a serious blindpsot in western media and/or business attitudes.

You can find plenty of articles complaining about "overcapacity" of battery factories in China even as they double in capacity and output each year.

Chinese electricity generation went from 4,000 TWh (the same as the US) in 2010 to double that in 2020. The US was basically the same after 10 years.

So a 100% "oversupply" in 2010 would be a zero percent oversupply within a decade given China's growth.

Most telling to me is that decarbonisation and electrification of transport and heating has long been known to require a doubling(!) of electricity production for developed nations (and a similar increase in developing nations where it gets hidden by other growth).

Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-08-15 10:58:07+00:00
> They could have built in PHP, or Ruby, Or brain fuck and been successful I suspect.

I’ve seen enough to doubt this. The less capable a tool the higher the overhead, until you reach that critical point where you spend more time managing overhead than adding features. It’s a self reinforcing cycle which makes it exponential , and it happens more quickly than people like to admit. You have to start hiring, and hiring is always a disappointment, you grow teams, communication overhead takes over, you inevitably model the product after the organization, you start making engineering choices based on realities of the hiring market, the realization sets in that “easier to hire for” is a double edged sword as talent pools differ not just in size but also quality, your organization and tech stack ossify, and suddenly you’re in the stink.

In fact I’ve never not seen this happen.

Case In point: You flippantly added brainfuck to your list there. But obviously not: clearly you can’t build WhatsApp in brainfuck and win the market. So here we are already: there is a limit. Why, then, should ruby or PHP be on the other side of that limit?

I doubt it.
by lan321 | 2025-08-15 10:58:09+00:00
I've seen it as well, but for me, it'd be better to have premade images, and Valve can make images that interest me and aren't too cringe.

It's not a massive business, but it's probably good side money since many banks offer it. It probably costs 5 cents to print on it, and you can easily get me to give you 2$ for it. Up to 5$ if I really like it or you catch me in a moment of weakness at 2 AM.

And they can probably try to make it a big business. They managed to get people to spend stupid money on skins, levelling Steam accounts, etc, so there are probably whales who'd collect cards. For example, if you get a special card skin unlock once you 100% a game, or you just add rarity to them. The chances aren't huge IMO, but I'd have never guessed people would pay the money they pay for skins and levels anyway, so..