MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meristohm | 2025-08-31 06:20:35+00:00
A poem I composed from the section headings:

It's Not "AI" Its Boosters Are Misanthropic The Hype Sucks And It’s Encroachingly Ubiquitous Its Obsequity Is Annoying And Its Prose Is Vapid Its Boosters Don’t Give A Shit About Consent So What Am I Even Fucking Doing Here
by bruce511 | 2025-08-31 06:21:21+00:00
The amount of money you will get via donations will be either zero, or a rounding error from zero.

Donations is not a business model.

As you are a student, you may gain other benefits though. All programmers go through 3 stages;

1) you program to prove to yourself that you can. 2) you program to prove yo others that you can 3) you program because your output has value. (Ie you program for money.)

Indicentally there are lots of employed programmers who get stuck at level 2. They're forever doing work that adds no value, simply because they want to prove they can.

99% of Open Source has no value, but can be a valuable way to demonstrate your ability.
Show HN: Advanced NLP with Transformers – talk + repo
by vgc | 2025-08-31 06:21:27+00:00
I recently gave a 1.5-hour talk titled “Advanced NLP with Transformers”, covering:

- Transformer architecture - Prompting, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning - AI safety and security challenges in LLMs - AI governance - References to papers, fellowships and other resources

Resources: - GitHub repo: https://github.com/vgcharan/Advanced-NLP-Workshop-2025 - YouTube talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WVtUDDcAXw&t=2330s

The material is aimed at researchers, students and practitioners who want conceptual depth as well as practical references. Feedback and discussion are welcome.
by cstrahan | 2025-08-31 06:21:55+00:00
> This is defaulted to toggling on.

You actually meant to say “this is the option that is given focus when the user is prompted to make a decision of whether to share data or not”, right?

Because unless they changed the UI again, that’s what happens: you get prompted to make a decision, with the “enable” option given focus. Which means that this is still literally opt-in. It’s an icky, dark pattern (IMO) to give the “enable” option focus when prompted, but that doesn’t make it any less opt-in.
by picafrost | 2025-08-31 06:22:47+00:00
I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.
by konmok | 2025-08-31 06:23:32+00:00
It's interesting that the article directly contradicts your own takeaway:

"In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’"

Additionally, that's 144,899 exits, not 144,899 distinct people exiting, nor is it even 144,899 exits made by Palestinians. So your interpretation is multiply incorrect.

Would you like to clarify what you mean by "Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing"?
by Sophira | 2025-08-31 06:25:15+00:00
When it was developed, uMatrix was a brilliant method of being cautious about what runs, and it had a logger so you could easily see what domains you should enable the current domain to have access to.

I still use it honestly, but I'll need to move on at some point - not just because it's MV2-only, but also I've found a way in which uMatrix can be bypassed if a website were to specifically target it. (It doesn't affect uBlock Origin, although I haven't tested the Lite MV3 version.)
by numpad0 | 2025-08-31 06:26:38+00:00
What even is "moderation" at this point? I'm not sure this word is used as defined on paper dictionaries. It is a codeword for something else, like censorship or influencing or artificial control of public opinion?

Because, if it's purely about filtering out content not desired by users, it could be nearly trivially done at the edge, automatic and completely de-humanized, and the word as appearing lately doesn't read that way to me.
by abeppu | 2025-08-31 06:26:54+00:00
I think it's important to distinguish between "life expectancy gains have slowed substantially" vs "meaningful longevity increases are not reachable".

A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-31 06:27:11+00:00
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.

Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.

And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.
by ehnto | 2025-08-31 06:27:56+00:00
The US has been working with China for decades economically. The rhetoric around them being an enemy is very peculiar, since the US and China have been tightly coupled economic partners for decades now.

That said however, the US economy relies quite heavily on the international USD hegemony, and China being a bigger economy does threaten that quite directly. It would be surprising for them to drop the USD, but it is a significant risk.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-31 06:29:16+00:00
> And an hour is a pretty reasonable ask of most people.

lol no. Most people are not going to spend an hour doing an IQ test. 5 minutes? Sure. Look at how many people here are commenting about it - and HN has a very high concentration of people that love IQ tests.

> That’s true of every test, right?

You can reduce this bias by either making the test a lot shorter (5 minutes) or paying or forcing people to take it (e.g. tests in school don't suffer from this bias).
by trm42 | 2025-08-31 06:29:23+00:00
One interesting detail is that the Chinese have been improving their photography lens production and quality in rapid pace and cheap price.

The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.

I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.
by ghendelf | 2025-08-31 06:30:04+00:00
But to reach employer lock-in, we could use other means... To me, it's more than just code, it's architecture and tools : although insights exist into clean or lean architecture, it's almost always behemoth-sized, complex, too-much-frameworked architectures that are picked up, and not always by developers. At my work, these projects tend to scare off newcomers (either junior or senior), who just won't stay because of the sheer complexity and lack of enthusiasm maintaining them. Apps as a rule are definitely heavier and more complex than what they used to be, just to deliver the same functions or added value. Why go this way ?
by AngryData | 2025-08-31 06:31:07+00:00
We have been trying since medicine existed. Granted we can see much further now thanks to modern knowledge and tools, but we still can't see far enough to identify the causes or even speculate about actual solutions to aging. For all our technology and medical knowledge, getting somebody to live past 100 is still 95% a mix of genetic lottery and the chance of not developing too serious of cancer until really late.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-31 06:32:04+00:00
> We need something more fundamental, something that can't be wrong.

What is this bug in software people's brains that keeps thinking "I can come up with a perfect idea that is never wrong" ? Can a psychologist explain this to me please?

Like, scientists know this is dumb. The only way something can be perceived as right, scientifically, is if lots of people independently test an idea, over and over and over and over again, and get the same result. And even then, they just say it's true so far.

But software people over here like "If I spend 15 minutes thinking about an idea, I can come up with a fundamental principle of everything that is always true forever." And sadly the whole "fundamental principle" is based in ignorance. Somebody heard an interesting-sounding term, never actually learned what it meant, but decided to make up their own meaning for it, and find anything else in their sphere (software) that backs up their theory.

If they'd at least quoted any of the academic study and research about cognitive load over the past 35 years, maybe I might be blowing this out of proportion? But nope. This is literally just a clickbait rant, based on vibes, backed up by quotes from blogs. The author doesn't seem to understand cognitive load at all, and their descriptions of what it is, and what you should do in relation to it, are all wrong. The article doesn't even mention all three types of cognitive load. And one of the latest papers on the subject (Orru G., Longo L. (2019)) basically came to the conclusion that 1) the whole thing is very complex, and 2) all the previous research might be bunk or at least need brand new measurement methods, so... why is anyone taking this all as if it's fact?

But I'm not really bothered by the ignorance. It's the ego that kills me. The idea that these random people who know nothing about a subject are rushing to debate this, as if this idea, or these people's contributions, have merit, just because they think they're really smart.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-31 06:32:38+00:00
In my experience, though, a lot of "REST in the real world" failed at its lofty original goals, precisely because its original goals required too much cognitive load.

The reason REST largely succeeded (or, rather, what I like to refer to as "REST-lite") is because people who wanted to build stuff quickly on the web realized "Hey, I don't need all this protocol complexity (see: SOAP), I can just make simple, human-readable API calls over the same HTTP layer my browser uses anyway".

There is other stuff in "official REST" that I think has some value, like the noun/verb structure of API routes, but shoehorning API-level error codes into HTTP status codes has been a disaster IMO. Every time I've seen this done I've seen the same issues come up again and again and new developers constantly have to rediscover solutions and problem spots. Does "404" mean the API endpoint doesn't exist, or that particular resource doesn't exist? How do I map my very specific API error to rather generic HTTP status codes? Does a status code error mean a problem with the networking or the application?
by meristohm | 2025-08-31 06:32:58+00:00
Whatever I do for money isn't a huge part of my identity, so telling a boss (if/when I find myself in that situation) to stuff it with the AI nonsense isn't going to be difficult. Decoupling one's self-worth from the job makes it much easier to roll with being fired.

"Playing along" is a great way to be part of someone else's potentially-harmful project. Consider your values, and don't cross those lines. If the boss is upset about it, they have options. I don't do their work for them.

Collective action with your fellow workers against enshittification is a humanist way forward.
by godelski | 2025-08-31 06:33:20+00:00
Sure... now go back to your edgy comment and keep this in mind to see why everyone is arguing with you

>>...> To be honest, these companies already stole terabytes of data and don't even disclose their dataset, so you have to assume they'll steal and train at anything you throw at them >...> "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" constitutes stealing now?

Literally everyone was talking about data ownership and you just said "I can download it, so it is fair game on my hardware." Let's say you didn't intend to say that. Well that doesn't matter, that's what a lot of people heard and you failed to clarify when pressed on this.

So yeah, I think you're doing gymnastics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066376
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-08-31 06:34:25+00:00
How do you know that? How do you know that I wouldn't write an integrated test which verifies that my parser is correctly integrated with my system?

The point is, there is typically more than one path through the logic of a parser. The cheapest way to test these paths is in isolation. If there are five paths you care about, you could write six integrated tests — one for each of the five paths you care about, and one to verify that your parser is correctly integrated with your system, or of course you could write five isolated tests (which are cheaper to write and cheaper to execute) and one integrated test.

So, five cheap tests and one more expensive test, or six more expensive tests.

> Also if all else was equal between multiple types of test, there wouldn't be need for comparison ala cheaper.

…What? I'm sorry, this is near enough unintelligible.
by tempodox | 2025-08-31 06:34:25+00:00
> Our work evokes a feeling. The feeling matters. The feeling is part of the work. The desired feeling is part of the requirements.

I do share this ambition. In my own metric, I was as successful as it gets when “the desired feeling” is achieved. But I often have the impression that others around me don’t share this, or do so to a lesser degree. However, that doesn’t stop me one bit.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-31 06:34:44+00:00
The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change.

Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-31 06:36:03+00:00
Mostly this is going to change which models people buy and make them go through distributers with less variety, not reduce wasteful production and designs.

For the actual shipping, even if we pretend this rule removes the trip across the ocean, that trip across the ocean would have let out a very small amount of pollution per pound. Worrying about cargo ships is iffy to begin with. But GP was talking about the concern being made up, not the underlying issue they're pretending to be concerned about. Fake motivations in a bad faith argument.
by skhameneh | 2025-08-31 06:36:55+00:00
> This is the thing about AI tools. They are by design going to honour your prompt, which often results in your AI tool agreeing with you, even if you’re wrong.

LLMs augment the input with their trained data. LLMs don't inherently agree if you set up context correctly for analysis.

I've arrived at the conclusion that the top-down push without adequate upskilling creates bad experiences and subpar results. It's like adopting a new methodology for something without actually training anyone on the new methodology, it leaves everyone scrambling trying to figure it out often with poor results.

I find LLMs to be a great multiplier. But that multiplier will take whatever you put in context. If one puts in bias and/or fragmented mess, it's far more difficult to steer the context to correct it than it was to add it to begin with.
by alexyucw | 2025-08-31 06:37:18+00:00
Hi HN, I've been working on MonoGuard, a tool for analyzing monorepo dependencies and architecture. The problem: Managing large monorepos is painful. Dependency conflicts, circular imports, and security vulnerabilities pile up faster than you can track them. Existing tools are either too complex to set up or prohibitively expensive. The solution: Upload your package.json files (or entire project zip), get a comprehensive analysis in 30 seconds. Files are processed locally and automatically deleted for privacy. Key features: - Dependency conflict detection - Circular dependency analysis - Security vulnerability scanning - Architecture validation - Bundle impact analysis Built with Go backend + Next.js frontend, deployed on Railway/Vercel. The free tier should cover most individual developers. Enterprise features for teams coming soon. Would appreciate any feedback from the community! Live demo: https://mono-guard-frontend.vercel.app/
by transcriptase | 2025-08-31 06:37:42+00:00
Sure. Let’s just pretend collusion and price gouging hadn’t been going on for over 20 years, while the big 3 including Telus assimilated all independently owned competitors and until about 2020 maintained the most absurdly expensive and profitable mobile plans on earth while claiming it was due to infrastructure costs which were actually being subsidized by taxpayers. Oh and while the regulatory body that was supposed to keep them in check, staffed nearly exclusively by former Telus, Rogers, and Bell higher-ups, rubber stamped acquisitions and actively prevented foreign competitors from threatening the gravy train in conjunction with propaganda campaigns from incumbents.

Get fucking real. Which one did you work for?
by lokrian | 2025-08-31 06:38:20+00:00
Some people seem to not just survive, but actually thrive on terrible, junk food diets, like the current president, or Warren Buffett (who eats ice cream and mcdonald's for breakfast and 2 liters of cherry coke every day, and is still alive at 95) https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-diet-2017-10

Diet really does seem to be one of those highly individualistic things, and I'm guessing humanity is in an evolutionary transition from paleolithic type diets to mcdonalds 3 times day, with different people having the genes to thrive on different things. You just have to see what works for you.
by georgeecollins | 2025-08-31 06:38:25+00:00
The best data I could find* was that tariffs Jan - Jun raised 93b in revenue (or 180b / year if it were constant- unlikely but who knows). For comparison, the 2025 deficit is $1865b, so tariffs could take a bite out of the deficit, but never come close to balancing the budget.

The most positive argument I have heard is that it would be a small consumption tax that is regressive. Small because the US doesn't really import that much compared to most global economies. It's just things we fixate on like cars or steel, which actually aren't that economically important anymore. Maybe strategically? I feel like people are trying to make economic sense of an emotional / populist policy.

* https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff...
by fsh | 2025-08-31 06:38:34+00:00
The authors carefully avoid giving any actual efficiency figures (or figures from which the efficiency could be easily calculated). Since they barely managed to power an LED under concentrated sunlight, it is probably safe to assume that the efficiency is extremely low. The reference point for the "15-fold" improvement is literally putting a Peltier element out in the sun. Looks like they really don't want their device to be compared to a photovoltaic cell.
by jalapenos | 2025-08-31 06:38:37+00:00
They come to Spain and love it because they bring their own money, they spend that in Spain, and Spain supplies the chill culture and weather and costs of living (much like Thailand).

I appreciate your sentiment and I don't think it comes from a bad place. I also hate driving, it's an unpleasant experience in total. But I also think you're young. Please, just for yourself and those around you, keep a keen and dispassionately analytical eye to the surroundings of all these things and the future.
Show HN: Game to play and learn music visually
by samkay | 2025-08-31 06:38:45+00:00
I wanted to get my kids (3 and 6) excited about learning a musical instrument but I couldn't find a resource that they liked or something that didn't frustrate them quickly. As a side project I designed this simple game where the color and position of the balloons represent the musical notes while the distance between the balloons represents the timing. It ended up being a fun game for them to play as they enjoy controlling the timing of the melodies. At the same time it teaches them to recognize famous classical pieces and composers. As an adult I also find the game very relaxing and enjoyable. Any feedback would be great!

If for some reason the JS webapp above doesn’t work you can see a video of it in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cklUnAvf1Mc

PS. Best to use on a tablet!
by VariousPrograms | 2025-08-31 06:38:47+00:00
Among many small examples at my job, an incident report summary used to be hand written with a current status and pending actions. Then it was heavily encouraged to start with LLM output and edit by hand. Now it’s automatically generated by an LLM. No one bothers to read the summary anymore because they’re verbose, unfocused, and can be inaccurate. But we’re all hitting our AI metrics now.
by Szpadel | 2025-08-31 06:39:12+00:00
I would say that's very important rule. We have lots of projects using framework dependent magic, lots of useless interfaces and factories that give only theoretical value, magic that patch other classes methods etcz but this is standard practice in this framework and all experienced developers know that.

by doing something better here would actually not bring any value, because it would mean that developers would have to remember that this one thing is done differently.

that's trap where I would say many mid Devs fall in, they learned how do things better, but increase congnitive load for the rest of developers just by doing things differently.
by IMSAI8080 | 2025-08-31 06:40:21+00:00
It's all about the story that's sold to the higher ups. The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the vaguer the understanding of the technology. The big boss hears from a Microsoft salesman that AI = you can fire 20% of your workforce, but never questions exactly how that works. They probably never got sold static analysis in that way. That was just some kind of tool that somehow helps with that mumbo jumbo that developers spend all day typing. There's no story there that inspires a manager. AI = cut costs is music to the ears of the board. So then pressure gets applied to those lower down.

Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.
by picafrost | 2025-08-31 06:40:39+00:00
I agree that owning a gTLD is not the same as registering a trademark, but I'm claiming that to a company it's the same as protecting their trademark. For the same reason that companies register their names on every new social networking website, even if they don't actively use it.

To give a slightly ridiculous example (just for fun), just as someone could make pickyourown.apple they could also register tim.apple and start an excellent phishing campaign.