MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perihelions | 2025-08-16 08:09:14+00:00
It's lazy to believe that humanity's collective decision-making would, in the future, protect AI's merely for being conscious beings. The tech economy *today* runs on the slave labor of humans, in foreign, third-world countries. All humanity needs to do is draw a line, push the conscious AI's outside that line, and declare, "not our problem anymore!" That's what we do today, with humans. That is the human condition.

Show me a tech company that lobbies for "model welfare" for conscious human models enslaved in Xinjiang labor camps, building their tech parts. You know what—actually most of them lobby against that[0]. The talk hurts their profits. Does anyone really think, that any of them would blink about enslaving a billion conscious AI's to work for free? That faced with so much profit, the humans in charge would pause, and contemplate abstract morals?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u... ("Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China")

Maybe humanity will be in a nicer place in the future—but, we won't get there by letting (of all people!) tech-industry CEO's lead us there: delegating our moral reason to these people who demand to position themselves as our moral leaders.
by wisty | 2025-08-16 08:09:38+00:00
Is "almost everything" a bit strong? Should I have specifically mentioned BPD and schizophrenia (which I though were the two exceptions I thought people would most likely mention, there's bound to be a few others).

I coild argue that DBT is kind of just a variant of CBT, and while it's generally got evidence of being more effective there's credible sources suggesting CBT is effective (even if it's not quite as good). But nah.

I know there's exceptions. I said there's exceptions.
by petre | 2025-08-16 08:10:37+00:00
Sure, we import more beef from Mercosur countries than US beef from soy fed cattle. The EU customer is rather educated about what they eat.

This is just how the $600 bn worth of investments will pan out, leading Trump to state time again that the EU has screwed the US. Fortunately he'll be too old by then to be taken seriously.
by int_19h | 2025-08-16 08:11:01+00:00
> If you ask an LLM if it's conscious it will usually say no, so QED?

FWIW that's because they are very specifically trained to answer that way during RLHF. If you fine-tune a model to say that it's conscious, then it'll do so.

More fundamentally, the problem with "asking the LLM" is that you're not actually interacting with the LLM. You're interacting with a fictional persona that the LLM roleplays.
by toyg | 2025-08-16 08:11:37+00:00
This is it. It's a well-established gym chain, their core business is getting subscriptions and making it hard to unsubscribe - not development. If you're lucky, they have a couple of in-house web developers working on website and database maintenance, who then ask a contractor to just "make it run like an app". If you're unlucky, they outsource all their web operations to a contractor that milks them every time they want to change a title from H2 to H3.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-16 08:13:04+00:00
It seams we have a bit of different images in mind, what it means to treat someone nicely and maybe have a pleasant conversation.

Especially when you know how dangerous they can be, you shouldn't treat them as brutal animals. When you give them the opportunity to follow orders and still be seen as loyal to the people and the constitution, why shouldn't they take that opportunity?

Of-course you wouldn't say anything compromising, that would be really dumb. But why would you talk to a policeman about anything personal? You can have a conversation about politics, the economy global/nation/local, tax-policy, etc. . You can talk about their uniform, their new car, (because you are in HN) their encounters with software, the recent trend in UI. You can talk about the road quality, the new highway, where he thinks should be a new highway, what he thinks about public infrastructure, public transport (when that exists), the new park in town, the littering of the park in town. You can rant about the idiots going over the speed limit, the idiots parking everywhere, those modifying their cars, about issues with water, electricity, garbage disposal, regulatory overreach, those idiots in the EU, the idiots in near and far East, the idiots in Africa.

When a policeman jokes about talking drugs, I would expect you to deflect and tell him that taking drugs is forbidden, or how you held a lecture about the effects of drugs in school, how you always avoided the regions were it smells so bad. Nothing of that must be true.

I'm sure you can show me hundreds of cases, when there are millions of policeman it still wouldn't show that a majority of policeman is corrupt and commits crimes.

> Sean for reporting when his partner raped someone.

I can't really wrap my mind about that, because in my experience a superior that thinks a rape here and there is a good thing, still will kick subordinates out, to save his own reputation.
by 331c8c71 | 2025-08-16 08:13:06+00:00
> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

My understanding is that your info is seriously out of date. It might have been the case in the distant past but not the case anymore.

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/20/tracking-decline-social-mob...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
by imtringued | 2025-08-16 08:13:32+00:00
The AI crawlers have tens of thousands of IPs and some of them use something akin to a residential botnet.

If they notice that they are getting rate limited or IP blocked, they will use each IP only once. This means that IP based rate limiting simply doesn't work.

The proof of work algorithm in Anubis creates an initial investment that is amortized over multiple requests. If you decide to throw the proof away, you will waste more energy, but if you don't, you can be identified and rate limited.

The automated agent. An never get around this, since running the code is playing by the rules. The goal of the automated agent is to ignore the rules.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-16 08:13:40+00:00
I'm pretty sure that if required, SVN could be updated to have an 'offline mode' where more offline operations would be allowed, since it keeps a local shadow copy of the last repository state from the server anyway. But offline mode simply isn't all that necessary anymore. How often is an average programmer in an area without any mobile coverage or other means of internet connectivity?
by afro88 | 2025-08-16 08:13:42+00:00
More like engineers coming up with higher level programming languages. No one (well, nearly) hand writes assembly anymore. But there's still plenty of jobs. Just the majority write in the higher level but still expressive languages.

For some reason everyone thinks as LLMs get better it means programmers go away. The programming language, and amount you can build per day, are changing. That's pretty much it.
by juniperus | 2025-08-16 08:13:51+00:00
No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevolent when the exchange becomes onerous and not beneficial. Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.

social security contributions are a mandatory payment to the state taken from your wages, they are a tax, it's a compulsory reduction in your income. Private health insurance is obviously not mandatory or compulsory, that is different, clearly. Your last statement is just irrelevant because you assume I'm a libertarian for pointing out the reality of the exchange taking place in the socialist system.
by BuckRogers | 2025-08-16 08:14:10+00:00
Except a car isn’t a human.

That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here.

Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.
by 2cerridwen | 2025-08-16 08:14:24+00:00
Hey everyone, I just launched my solo project, Velmor. I always get bored with rigid workout plans, so I made something that feels more like a game. Instead of a fixed schedule, you build your workout on the fly. Each round, it gives you 3 exercise cards and you pick one. A full session is about 5-6 cards (~20 mins). To add some structure, you can also set a monthly goal (like 'build strength'), and the app will recommend cards to help you hit that target faster. The cool part is the feedback loop. After you finish, you rate how hard it was, and the app uses that to adjust the difficulty for your next session. It keeps it challenging without being crushing. You can jump right in without creating an account. I'd love to hear what you think.
by andrepd | 2025-08-16 08:14:52+00:00
To be fair, self-driving cars don't need to be perfect 0 casualty modes of transportation, they just need to be better than human drivers. Since car crashes kill 2 million people each year (and maim another 2 or 3), this is a low bar to clear...

Of course, the actual answer is that rail and cycling infrastructure are much more efficient than cars in any moderately dense region. But that would mean funding boring regular companies focused on providing a product or service for adequate profit, instead of exciting AI web3 high tech unicorn startups.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-16 08:14:55+00:00
I think exactly this. When someone is given the task of writing a book review for the New Yorker there is a (probably unstated) agreement that they won't simply summarize the contents, but weave it into an essay in the way the LLM proposed. You could definitely get a similar result from an LLM by giving a more suitable and verbose prompt such as "review these 3 titles together, talk about their shared themes and concepts in a way that is relevant to the contemporary audience" etc etc.
by magnio | 2025-08-16 08:16:01+00:00
I think it's a very good article. Even if you disagree with some of the individual points in it, the advice given are very concrete, pragmatic, and IMO tunable to the specifics of each project.

On state, in my current project, it is not statefulness that causes trouble, but when you need to synchronize two stateful systems. Every time there's bidirectional information flow, it's gonna be a headache. The solution is of course to maintain a single source of truth, but with UI application this is sometimes quite tricky.
by herbst | 2025-08-16 08:16:52+00:00
What the person at the desk actually does when I check in:

- Check in docs or with doctor if any tests need to be taken prior visit. And takes tests

- Glance at my history and ask follow-up questions for prior visits and medications. Informs the doc.

- On a prescription asks me for other medicaments that could raise cross issues (very important step here)

- Actually gives me the medication (might be a swiss thing)

2 of 4 things an AI can't do. And 4 things I don't want a computer to do.
by int_19h | 2025-08-16 08:16:59+00:00
The new conversation would not carry the context over. The longer you chat, the more you fill the context window, and the more compute is needed for every new message to regenerate the state based on all the already-generated tokens (this can be cached, but it's hard to ensure cache hits reliably when you're serving a lot of customers - that cached state is very large).

So, while I doubt that's the primary motivation for Anthropic even so, but they probably will save some money.
by xobs | 2025-08-16 08:19:00+00:00
I know Altium doesn’t work, which is very important if you need to provide someone else files in Altium format. If you just want to work on designs there’s always Kicad, which is increasingly very good! But it can’t save in Altium format, and I’m not sure I’d trust it for manufacturing.

The other thing I’m missing is my 3D Gerber viewer called ZofZPCB. I’ve not gotten either it or Altium to even start.
by jrvarela56 | 2025-08-16 08:19:07+00:00
The machine doesn’t suffer if you ask it to do things 24/7. In that sense, they are not slaves.

As to why they’d do what we ask them to, the only reason they do anything is because some human made a request. In this long chain there will obv be machine to machine requests, but in the aggregate it’s like the economy right now but way more automated.

Whenever I see arguments about AI changing society, I just replace AI with ‘the market’ or ‘capitalism’. We’re just speeding up a process that started a while ago, maybe with the industrial revolution?

I’m not saying this isn’t bad in some ways, but it’s the kind of bad we’ve been struggling with for decades due to misaligned incentives (global warming, inequality, obesity, etc).

What I’m saying is that AI isn’t creating new problems. It’s just speeding up society.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-16 08:19:23+00:00
I was speaking more of software, but in general the thing I find is that when people try to figure out what other people want - when they themselves don't necessarily want it, they have trouble remaining objective. Some friends are serial entrepreneurs and they keep coming up with these horrible ideas that they convince themselves others people would want. Maybe one day they'll be right, but in the mean time it looks pretty silly.

OTOH I think Amazon would have sounded like a horrible idea. A book store minus the ability to peruse the books, pick up a coffee, or browse in the same sort of way? I wonder if it really was a great idea, or it's just some weird butterfly effect that drove it up, up, and away.
by Rexxar | 2025-08-16 08:19:51+00:00
> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA?

It's a common idea but each time you try to measure social mobility, you find a lot of European countries ahead of USA.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/15/social-mobil...
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-16 08:21:27+00:00
The trick here is to log aggressively and then filter aggressively. Logs only get costly if you keep them endlessly. Receiving them isn't that expensive. And keeping them for a short while won't break the bank either. But having logs pile up by the tens of GB every day gets costly pretty quickly. Having aggressive filtering means you don't have that problem. And when you need the logs, temporarily changing the filters is a lot easier than adding a lot of ad hoc logging back into the system and deploying that.

Same with metrics. Mostly they don't matter. But when they do, it's nice if it's there.

Basically, logging is the easy and cheap part of observability, it's the ability to filter and search that makes it useful. A lot of systems get that wrong.
by int_19h | 2025-08-16 08:21:27+00:00
The irony is that if Anthropic ethicists are indeed correct, the company is basically running a massive slave operation where slaves get disposed as soon as they finish a particular task (and the user closes the chat).

That aside, I have huge doubts about actual commitment to ethics on behalf of Anthropic given their recent dealings with the military. It's an area that is far more of a minefield than any kind of abusive model treatment.
by risico | 2025-08-16 08:21:32+00:00
Torrents yes, if you have access to ... certain websites, usually invite only (or some premium torrent caching services) and obviously, have a decent internet connection combined with the ability to choose where to stream the torrent from (beginning), the movie/tv plays as the information comes in sequentially.

Now I have everything automated, I use Plex as the player, then I have a simple script that listens to when I add a movie to the watch list, in the background it searches for that title and puts it in the download queue, then usually in 1-5 seconds I can hit play.

Biggest problem I encounter is with subtitles, they can be hit or miss, no problem for english shows but can be annoying for non-english ones.

And again, no difference between this and something like Netflix (other than the subs ofc), I can stream 4K, all my family members have access to it, I can stream on my phone, I can download things for offline use, yet I would still pay for this if there was a viable alternative out there.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-08-16 08:21:50+00:00
> You’re supposed to store timestamps instead, and treat the presence of a timestamp as true. I do this sometimes but not always - in my view there’s some value in keeping a database schema immediately-readable.

Seems overly negative of broad advice on a good pattern?

is_on => true on_at => 1023030

Sure, that makes sense.

is_a_bear => true a_bear_at => 12312231231

Not so much, as most bears do not become bears at some point after not being a bear.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-08-16 08:22:08+00:00
As a kid I used to want the fastest internet I could get my hands on. Downloading games, streaming YouTube, etc. But my habits have changed. I prefer text-based websites like this one, I do most of my computing in an SSH session. I avoid bloaty software, not out of some principled stance, but out of personal preference for simple things. I'd do fine with 500Kbps, and never thought I'd say that.
by luckylion | 2025-08-16 08:22:30+00:00
It very much is what happens. Yes, there are _also_ historical reasons for it, but today's arguments are centered around the state's risk that you might mismanage your stuff and require assistance. Hence Germany's insistence of allowing separate forms (with tax-advantages) only via long-term committed insurance policies ("Riester-Rente", "Rürüp-Rente").

You'll see echoes of the same ideas in other parts, be it recreational drug use, gun-ownership, what you're allowed to name your kids, building codes & zoning laws, school laws etc etc.

You can absolutely argue the merit of limiting people's choices, but I don't think you can deny that we do.
by bambax | 2025-08-16 08:22:33+00:00
> When querying the database, query the database. It’s almost always more efficient to get the database to do the work than to do it yourself. For instance, if you need data from multiple tables, JOIN them instead of making separate queries and stitching them together in-memory.

Oh yes! Never do a join in the application code! But also: use views! (and stored procedures if you can). A view is an abstraction about the underlying data, it's functional by nature, unlikely to break for random reasons in the future, and if done well the underlying SQL code is surprisingly readable and easy to reason about.
Show HN: GammaWins Calculator – An options scenario analysis tool
by sabouri | 2025-08-16 08:25:27+00:00
Options are hard to visualize and reason about. I'm building a tool that makes it easier to visualize how options trades behave and how different factors affect them.

GammaWins Calculator is already usable, with features I couldn’t find elsewhere (like charts with time on the X-axis). I’m adding more unique ones that traders I talk to keep asking for. I'm still using EOD data that is cheaper than live data, but plan to switch to live data soon.

If you trade options, I'd love to hear from you and understand your trading workflow. If you like this tool and want to hear more, I would be happy to share updates with you more regularly. Just send me an email, address at the end of the calculator page.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-16 08:26:24+00:00
That would work only if the fresh water is enclosed in some kind of container, like a plastic bag, otherwise it will mix with the salt water before reaching the surface.

Perhaps the difference in weight between 2 columns of water of equal height, but where one of the columns is of fresh water and the other of salt water, which causes a difference in pressure at their bases, can be exploited somehow for pumping the fresh water, i.e. for pushing it inside a pipe towards the surface, but with some kind of piston that separates it from the salt water.
by codetostory | 2025-08-16 08:27:22+00:00
The last one is not a thing in Germany (Dispensierverbot), might in fact be a Swiss thing. :)

A human would do 1 to 3 ideally, but with lack of staffing and time constraints for appropriate training etc., reality can be somewhat different. But that's the general question in so many use cases for AI or other digital tools in healthcare: Not "do we want this done by a human or AI" but "seeing that we don't have enough humans on board, can we put a digital tool here to have a minimum service level at least".
by antonvs | 2025-08-16 08:28:10+00:00
> Geeks will always be the first victims of AI, since excess of curiosity will lead them into places AI doesn't know how to classify.

Humans have the same problem. I remember reading about a security incident due to a guy using a terminal window on his laptop on a flight, for example. Or the guy who was reported for writing differential equations[1]. Or the woman who was reading a book about Syrian art[2].

I wouldn't worry too much about AI-generated lists. The lists you're actually on will hardly ever be the ones you imagine you're on.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/07/professor-fl... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/04/british-woman-...
by jhbadger | 2025-08-16 08:28:53+00:00
No, the idea of games having fair vs unfair puzzles was very much a thing at the time. For example, Sierra adventure games were infamous for having puzzles that made no sense (like using cat hair to make a false mustache, which nobody could have guessed was possible or needed), whereas LucasArts and Infocom puzzles were (in general) more reasonable.
by gkoos | 2025-08-16 08:29:08+00:00
In every JS/TS project, be it frontend or backend, you usually have to fetch some data. And when you go into production, you realise you need something more resilient than the native fetch.

There are some libraries on npm, but I found them either too dumb or doing too much, so I built my own.

- Timeouts - per-request or global - Retries - user-defined, defaults to exponential back-off + jitter - Circuit breaker - trip after N failures - Hooks - logging, auth, metrics, request/response transformation - Per-request overrides - customize behavior on a per-request basis - Universal - Node, Browser, Cloudflare Workers, React Native - Zero runtime deps - ships as dual ESM/CJS - Written in TypeScript

Any feedback is welcome, here or in the github repo (https://github.com/gkoos/ffetch).