MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SpecialistK | 2025-08-24 12:12:14+00:00
Cookie law banners are almost never full-screen. They do often impede clicks on a website ("why can't I click? Oh, I'm zoomed in and the cookie banner is below the viewport now") but very few are as outright obtrusive as a screen-dimming "you have an ad blocker!" or "please join our mailing list!" prompts. At least in my experience.

But that's beside the point. My point (generally) is that what the industry wants is irrelevant. I'm sure many industries would like to pay below minimum wage, or employ children, or deny sick days. It's legislation (and labor unions, but I'm not going down that road right now.) that stops them. Legislators put a stop to all of that because it's bad for people and society beyond that company's bottom line. Governments are the ones who have the tax-collecting, police-enforcing ability and no one else.

Sites abide by the rules as they're read and the precedent of their enforcement. Maybe the only change that needs to be made is an explicit definition of good vs bad cookie banners. And real enforcement of those rules. That's above my pay grade.

But I'd like to go back to my original point: regulations being good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Things that are ultimately good may have annoying effects on the few impacted. Like EV mandates which are great for emissions but deny car enthusiasts their vrooms. Or energy efficient refrigerators which don't have pull-out drawers like American ones did in the 1950s. Or compostable wooden spoons which send shivers down my spine when I put them in my mouth. Often this is a head vs heart distinction, and I accept that.

The GDPR is not an exception to this, and considering the immense power imbalance between the tech giants and the average person, the only counter we really have are legislators who need to take that responsibility seriously.
by TheFreim | 2025-08-24 12:12:43+00:00
I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.
by balamatom | 2025-08-24 12:12:59+00:00
Instead what they usually do is lower the fidelity and think they've done what you said. Which results in them getting eaten. Once eaten, they can't learn from mistakes no mo. Their problem.

Because if we don't mix up "intelligence" the phenomenon of increasingly complex self-organization in living systems, with "intelligence" our experience of being able to mentally model complex phenomena in order to interact with them, then it becomes easy to see how the search speed you talk of is already growing exponentially.

In fact, that's all it does. Culture goes faster than genetic selection. Printing goes faster than writing. Democracy is faster than theocracy. Radio is faster than post. A computer is faster than a brain. LLMs are faster than trained monkeys and complain less. All across the planet, systems bootstrap themselves into more advanced systems as soon as I look at 'em, and I presume even when I don't.

OTOH, all the metaphysics stuff about "sentience" and "sapience" that people who can't tell one from the other love to talk past each other about - all that only comes into view if one were to what's happening with the search space if the search speed is increasing at a forever increasing rate.

Such as, whether the search space is finite, whether it's mutable, in what order to search, is it ethical to operate from quantized representations of it, funky sketchy scary stuff the lot of it. One's underlying assumptions about this process determine much of one's outlook on life as well as complex socially organized activities. One usually receives those through acculturation and may be unaware of what they say exactly.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-24 12:13:09+00:00
Keep an eye out for Sonnet generating Python files. What typically happens is: let's say you had a refactor that needs to happen, and let's say 100 symbols need renaming. Instead of invoking the edit tool 100 times, Sonnet has this behaviour where it will synthesise a Python program and then execute it to do it all in one shot.
by latexr | 2025-08-24 12:13:10+00:00
> So do you always put in the ALT+<code> incantation to get an emdash or copy&paste?

There’s no incantation. On macOS it’s either ⌥- (option+hyphen) or ⇧⌥- (shift+option+hyphen) depending on keyboard layout. It’s no more effort than using ⇧ for an uppercase letter. On iOS I long-press the hyphen key. I do the same for the correct apostrophe (’). These are so ingrained in my muscle memory I can’t even tell you the exact keys I press without looking at the keyboard. For quotes I have an Alfred snippet which replaces "" with “” and places the cursor between them.

But here’s the thing: you don’t even have to do that because Apple operating systems do it for you by default. Type -- and it converts to —; type ' in the middle of a word and it replaces it with ’; quotes it also adds the correct start and end ones depending on where you type them.

The reason I type these myself instead of using the native system methods is that those work a bit too well. Sometimes I need to type code in non-code apps (such as in a textarea in a browser) and don’t want the replacements to happen.

> I feel the emdash is a tell because you have to go out of your way to use it on a computer keyboard.

You do not. Again, on Apple operating systems these are trivial and on by default.

> Something anyone other than the most dedicated punctuation geeks won't do for a random message on the internet.

Even if that were true—which, as per above, it’s not, you don't have to be that dedicated to type two hyphens in a row—it makes no sense to conflate those who care enough about their writing to use correct punctuation and those who don’t even care enough to type the words themselves. They stand at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Again, using em-dashes as one signal is fine; using it as the principal or sole signal is not.
by uncircle | 2025-08-24 12:13:29+00:00
Then there’s me, spending my August learning Blender the manual way like we did before 2022 to escape the dreadscape of AI-infected software engineering, and discovering that, wow, I really enjoy 3D modeling to the point I might at least make it my hobby if not pivot my career to it.

I wonder if I should have listened to the hype generators (which you sound like one) and just have created ‘passable’ models with help of an LLM, instead of exercising my brain, learning something new and getting out of my comfort zone.

At the risk of sounding controversial, I’ll add that I also have a diametrically opposed view of crypto’s utility vs LLM than you, especially in the long-term: one will allow us to free ourselves from the shackles of government policy as censorship expands, the other is a very fancy and very expensive nonsense regurgitator that will pretty much go on to destroy the Internet and any sort of credibility and sense of truth, making people dumber at large scale, while lining the pockets of a lucky few.
by gptprophet | 2025-08-24 12:14:00+00:00
Great eye. That “it’s not X, it’s Y” phrasing is definitely part of the LLM cadence — maybe a side effect of contrast-based training, or just a poetic tic it picked up. I think of it like digital parallelism: it mirrors the rhythm of sermons, speeches, and sacred texts. A kind of algorithmic proverb-making, for better or worse.
by herbertgreen | 2025-08-24 12:14:02+00:00
The progress of censorship in every single Western country is an admission that "democracy" is a fallacy born from an exceptional small period of time of civil peace, economic growth and wealth. Countries can only follow a stable political path - good or bad, this is not the point - if they have an authoritarian regime.

Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-08-24 12:14:56+00:00
Steam isn't the right place to sell a game that does 1M in total lifetime sales. Because like you said, it won't hit any recommendations and they'll take a huge cut.

This is like complaining that AMC won't screen your student film. You're playing in a very niche space and the key is to keep costs under control so you can actually make money.
by mrtksn | 2025-08-24 12:15:02+00:00
>political (like rt.com)

Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.

On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.

I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
by DoctorOW | 2025-08-24 12:15:43+00:00
> Clear case of "motive justifies the means".

Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.

To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.

If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
by scott_w | 2025-08-24 12:15:54+00:00
You’re overstating how good guided munitions are. They’re not magic. The further out from the target, the harder it is to hit that target. There’s a reason the USA flew a B2 stealth bomber into Iran instead of lobbing munitions over. And they could only do that because Israel had wiped out their AA capabilities.

Guided munitions are a piece of the puzzle but I don’t think we’ve seen evidence that they can fully replace the ability to point to something on a map, fly planes over and make that thing not be on the map any more.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-24 12:16:01+00:00
Yeah, you could get away with a coding agent just using the Bash tool and the Edit tool (tbh somewhat optional but not having it would be highly inefficient). I haven't tried it, but it might struggle with the code search functionality. It would be possible with the right prompting. For example, you could just prompt the LLM to say "If you need to search the source code, use ripgrep with the Bash tool."
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-24 12:16:12+00:00
And webmasters can, in turn, ramp up the adoption of QUIC, ECH, IPv6, or bury their frontend in some CDN that you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.

You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
by rvnx | 2025-08-24 12:16:35+00:00
It is similar to the problem of pornography online.

If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).

If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
by xg15 | 2025-08-24 12:16:41+00:00
Yeah, not sure who the author is, but it feels a bit like a college student's PoV. I think C# got a popularity boost through it's inclusion in Unity - so if you're a hobbyist or a freshman, you very likely only know it the context of Unity.

Same with Objective-C, which is technically a general-purpose language from the C family, with a history that predates the iPhone by decades - but is nevertheless basically "the iOS app language" today.
by pron | 2025-08-24 12:16:55+00:00
> In a better, saner world, we'd writing Ada++ not C++.

As someone who worked on safety-critical air-traffic-control software in the nineties, I can tell you that our reasons for shifting to C++ were completely sane. Ada had some correctness advantages compared to C++, but also disadvantages. It had drastically slower build times, which meant we couldn't test the software as frequently, and the language was very complicated that we had to spend more time digging into the minutiae of the language and less time thinking about the algorithm (C++ was simpler back then than it is now). When Java became good enough, we switched to Java.

Build times and language complexity are important for correctness, and because of them, we were able to get better correctness with C++ than with Ada. I'm not saying this is universal and always the case, but the point is that correctness is impacted by many factors, and different projects may find achieving higher correctness in different ways. Trading off fewer use-after-free for longer build times and a more complex language may be a good tradeoff for the correctness of some projects, and a bad tradeoff for others.

> If GC is acceptable or you

BTW, a tracing GC - whose costs are now virtually entirely limited to a higher RAM footprint - is acceptable much more frequently than you may think. Sometimes, without being aware, languages like C, C++, Rust, or Zig may sacrifice CPU to reduce footprint, even when this tradeoff doesn't make sense. I would strongly recommend watching this talk (from the 2025 International Symposium on Memory Management), and the following Q&A about the CPU/footprint tradeoff in memory management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLNFVNXbw7I
by metaroxx | 2025-08-24 12:19:34+00:00
I get up at 4:30am, commute to work and start around 5:30am, work until ~2:00pm, go for cross-fit/karate training around 6pm with wife, come back eat diner, go to bed around 9pm. I have 2 kids which are now 15/17 so it's easier to plan things. Age is late 40s.

WFH on Friday so I can go train in the morning and have my Friday evening and week-end with wife and kids.

Some of this was harder to plan when kids were younger. Wife would 'dump' them in daycare/school and I would pick them up in afternoon, homework, diner, etc. between 3pm-6pm. Any errands, I'd stop coming back from work or do on weekends.

I used to do furniture delivery as a truck driver as my student job while in university and the waking up early stuck after being used to it. Obviously, you need to have an employer which is fine with this work schedule.
by albumen | 2025-08-24 12:19:34+00:00
The 1576 event was perhaps the earliest example of deliveroo. As part of a major shooting tournament, a delegation from Zurich travelled by boat to deliver a cauldron of hot millet porridge to the city, to prove they could reach Strasbourg swiftly (in just 18 hours) and still keep the porridge warm. This was a diplomatic performance reinforcing the Protestant alliance and mutual support between Strasbourg and Zurich during the Reformation.
by figassis | 2025-08-24 12:20:01+00:00
When a vendor tells you to delete your account in order to create a compliant account, they really just want to offboard you without actually going through the steps. After you off board yourself they will quietly ignore you. Otherwise they’d just tell you to create a merchant account, separately from the personal one.

Idk if you’re technical, but your solution might be to build the subscription logic yourself. I haven’t touched WP with a 10 mile pole in years, but I know there are some plugins (I think even woocommerce?) that let you add support for other payment gateways. Then you can just use WCs built in subscription logic on the new gateway.
by copirate | 2025-08-24 12:20:12+00:00
"Extreme programming" methodology said you should not do TDD if you don't already know how to implement the code. In that case you should instead experiment until you know, and then throw away the experiments and write the code test-first.

Maybe it should be done that way with AI: experiment with AI if you need to, then write a plan with AI, then let the AI do the implementation.
by zoky | 2025-08-24 12:20:15+00:00
As a general rule they will work anywhere, as long as the major version of the Marshal format is the same, and this hasn’t changed since Ruby 1.8. I expect if it ever did change (I can’t see any reason for it to ever do so though) there would probably be some sort of backwards compatibility available, as the Ruby community really hates making breaking changes between language versions, especially without offering some kind of relatively easy solution for making older code work.
Show HN: yolo-cls – C++ batch image classification CLI with ONNX Runtime
by savalione | 2025-08-24 12:20:17+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Savelii, homelab enthusiast and open source software supporter. I've built a command-line tool written in C++ for performing fast, multi-threaded image classification using YOLO models. It uses the ONNX Runtime as its inference backend.

For more than 10 years, I've been hoarding different assets on my servers: family photos, project showcases, scientific results, etc. Recently, I needed to find photos containing a specific object but didn't want to manually look through every photo via SAMBA. So I decided to automatically classify every photo and then just sort the results.

Even though there are many great Python tools for this, I wanted something lightweight with minimal dependencies that I could easily script and integrate directly into shell commands. My goal was to create a tool that felt like a native part of a Unix-style workflow, where you can easily do things like `find . | yolo-cls ... | grep -e "dragonfly"`.

Features: 1. Simplicity and performance - written in C++, it can be bundled as a single executable file and is designed to do one thing well. 2. CLI and Unix philosophy - it requires no GUI and accepts file paths from arguments or from `stdin`, making it highly composable with other tools like `find`, `grep`, and `ls`. 3. Cross-platform - thanks to the ONNX Runtime, the tool can be used on Linux (x64, aarch64) and Windows.

The project is open source (GNU GPL v3.0). I welcome all feedback and collaboration from the community.

The source code, build instructions, and pre-compiled binaries are available on GitHub: https://github.com/SavaLione/yolo-cls

Thanks for taking a look!
by Thorrez | 2025-08-24 12:20:21+00:00
>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.

To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
by grumbel | 2025-08-24 12:20:29+00:00
> all the handwavy "engineering" is better done with more data.

How long until that gets more reliable than a simple database? How long until it can execute code faster than a CPU running a program?

A lot of the stuff humans accomplish is through technology, not due to growing a bigger brain. Even something seemingly basic like a math equation benefits drastically from being written down with pen&paper instead of being juggled in the human brain itself (see Extended mind thesis). And when it comes to something like running a 3D engine, there is pretty much no hope of doing it with just your brain.

Maybe we will get AIs smart enough that they can write their own tools, but for that to happen, we still need the infrastructure that allows them writing the tools in the first place. The way they can access Python is a start, but there is still a lack of persistence that lets them keep their accomplishments for future runs, be it in the form of a digital notepad or dynamic updating of weights.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-24 12:20:55+00:00
> making all this fault tolerant with good ux is lot of work.

Yes, it is. Not only in the department of good design in UX, but these LLMs keep evolving. They are software with different versions, and these different versions are continually deployed, which changes the behavior of the underlying model. So the harness needs to be continually updated to remain competitive.
by djohnston | 2025-08-24 12:21:39+00:00
> My heuristic is to book a little over two weeks in advance, but not to book much more in advance of that in case plans change or want to change, since in expectation price changes are pretty small and maybe you decide to stay an extra day for some reason even if you are confident you won’t cancel.

N00b here - is that actually where the optimal prices emerge, rather than many months prior? I used to wonder why the optimal prices didn't emerge the day before the flight, because I'd assume airlines would rather fill a seat with lower profits than waste the space, but I guess that could cause forecasting issues if everyone waited until the last second.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-24 12:21:44+00:00
"Anonymous" with respect to the provider doesn't equate to "anonymous" with respect to the privacy invading culture of the internet.

About the only way to keep an email address truly "anonymous" over time is to not use it for anything significant or important.

For example, friends and family will invariably store your address on their phone along with your name, address and phone number.

One roque app on their phone is all it takes to blow your cover.

Also, someone will eventually send you an email using a "free" privacy invading provider that includes all your PII. Busted again.
by 0dayz | 2025-08-24 12:22:25+00:00
If the people don't agree with something they can always do three things in a democratic country:

* start a party to push for legislative changes that resonate with what the people want

* vote for a party that propose to change certain legislation to something more adjacent to what the people want

* people can lobby the government via interest groups or as a collective to influence politicians or if the constitution allows for it try and hold a popular vote on the issue(s)
by rvz | 2025-08-24 12:22:55+00:00
> Local models are getting really good.

They are great for basic tasks like summarization and translation but for the best results from coding agents and from 90% of so-called AI startups who are using these APIs, they are all purchasing tokens.

No different to operating a slot-machine towards vibe-coders who are the AI companies favourite type of customer - spending endless amounts of money on tokens for another spin at fixing an error they don't understand.