MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Veserv | 2025-08-31 07:47:59+00:00
The most ridiculous part of music copyrights is that the DMCA explicitly encodes statutory damages of at least 750$ up to 30,000$, and up to 150,000$ for willful infringement per work [1].

Yet musical compositions are subject to compulsory mechanical copyright licenses at a fixed rate of 12.4 cents or 2.38 cents per minute, whichever is higher [2] for music covers [3] (i.e. same song, different singer/band or even same singer different time). Meaning you can make a cover without permission as long as you pay the copyright holder at the rates specified in the law.

So we already have cheap compulsory licensing for musical compositions which caps damages at a 1/6,000 to 1/240,000 of the DMCA rates. We should just have compulsory mechanical licensing for recordings as well.

If we really want to get crazy, we could even let copyright holders declare a compulsory licensing rate per work then multiply that by some number to get their intellectual property value and then charge them property tax on that intellectual property. So you can set a high compulsory licensing rate, but then you have to pay more property tax on your income generating property or vice versa. This allows valuable works to be protected to support the artists making them, while allowing less valuable works to be easily usable by whoever wants to.

[1] https://uwf.edu/go/legal-and-consumer-info/digital-millenium...

[2] https://copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf

[3] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ73.pdf
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-31 07:48:20+00:00
> Comparing a 10 year US period to a 20 year period? Seems awfully selective

Yes, I chose the strongest form of the other side’s argument to show that even then, it’s difficult to argue that Chinese PPP GDP/c is approaching American levels within a generation. (Though China’s numbers don’t vary much between 10 and 20 years, America’s do since we had a lot of war and then economic stimulus in the 2000s.)

> 2018 to 2023?

You want to make multi-decade projections off a pandemic baseline?

> 4x the number of people, but 0.5x the GDP growth

Per capita means per person. Purchasing power means real production. The question was about potential living standards, not aggregate might.
by londons_explore | 2025-08-31 07:49:45+00:00
I'd have the tests not show a simple line, but instead a complex checkerboard pattern you scan with a phone. The scan results would simultaneously test for 100+ diseases, and be uploaded to some department of health server which would then decide if you specifically should be paid to stay home.

That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely.

However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.
by todotask2 | 2025-08-31 07:50:12+00:00
I started with pure HTML, CSS, and JS, then moved to AlpineJS with a Go backend, before eventually migrating to Astro with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. I have not used a headless CMS, as avoiding one allows me to move faster. So far, upgrading from 2.0 to 5.x has been consistently smooth, unlike the MVC paradigm. Astro follows a folder structure similar to Vue. My sites run in SSR, mainly a vendor and business networking platform. They include quite a bit of interactivity, such as an image slider, and a good deal of logic for complex content rendering from form fields. I also simplified error handling in forms with interactive elements.

Most of my work revolves around forms and SQL (Postgres). After translating designs from Figma and Marvellous, I export with Tailwind, which makes things easier. Still, I wish my UI/UX designer had listened to my struggles and made use of pre-built UI components to save time. Instead, they often executed poorly, rushed features, and changed things on a whim as though it were a toy, which was frustrating. Even so, I managed to overcome that as a sole developer and co-founder.

I did not expect to accumulate with such a large set of custom UI components, ranging from simple to complex logic, that are reused across different parts of the frontend. Managing that in Laravel’s workflow would have been a nightmare. I prefer JSX-like syntax over Blade because it is faster to work with TypeScript for both frontend and backend.

I also do not need to waste time dealing with routing, it was the same problem with Go + Echo, although Astro allows me to add flexibility with packages like micromatch for dynamic routes within middleware. Laravel, of course, has middleware too.

From my experience, I still have not found a convincing reason to adopt traditional MVC or to need that level of abstraction in Laravel.

Astro’s colocation (.astro) is optimised for developer velocity and a component-first mental model.

Despite my aim to strive for perfection, I have been out of work for years and have been affected by permanent hazy vision due to a health-related issue. My wish is to continue building with Astro.
by makingstuffs | 2025-08-31 07:50:51+00:00
100% I often say to people that the reason for the UK’s loss of culture is not immigration but the fact that we, as British people, stopped being British in pursuit of the ‘American dream’.

Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle.

Generations of this has lead to the mess you see unraveling in the UK at the moment.
by CWIZO | 2025-08-31 07:51:07+00:00
It'd be surprising if that applies in this context. In the case of the individuals OP mentions, their parents would not have been exposed to ultra processed food (or barely, perhaps only after they've reproduced), so ehatever gens they passed on would not have been adapted. There's simply not enough generations in this case. Especially not for such significant changes.

In any case, it's moot as by and large the westeren diet is not good for the population, exceptions are simply that.
by Towaway69 | 2025-08-31 07:55:50+00:00
Really well said - it has put something I've been sensing/feeling into words.

It's also how I utilties AIs - summaries or rewrite text to make it sound better but never to create code or understand code. Nothing that requires deep understanding of the problem space.

Its the mental models in my head that don't jell with AI that prevent AI adoption for me.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-31 07:57:18+00:00
For me it's what I call the 'weekend test': Do I like tinkering with this thing enough that I'd want to play around with it on a weekend / in my own time, just for fun.

This needs to check a lot of boxes: is it easy and quick to setup, do I need some hard to obtain 'license key', does everything work out of box or at least is easy enough to fix, and most importantly: is it a joy to use (which is entirely subjective though).

If something doesn't pass this test then I also don't want to waste time with it at work. In a nutshell this is also why wheels should be reinvented over and over again, and if it's just for the sole reason that the new wheel feels better to just the person who reinvented it. Chances are other people will feel the same after trying the new wheel (on a weekend, hah) and start using it (or not and that's fine too), but in the end this is how innovation happens.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-31 07:57:33+00:00
I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.

Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
by animuchan | 2025-08-31 07:57:47+00:00
Yep, I was a Linux user for the longest time, so naturally used compose for em dashes (compose key + triple hyphen IIRC). I was later thrilled to learn that on macOS (which was called Mac OS X back then) it's even faster to type with option-shift-hyphen, and never let go of em- and en-dashes in my writing.

It's sad and not at all unsurprising that people who even half-assedly care about typography get this effort attributed to AI use.

In the post-competence workplace we're collectively building now with all the LLM coding tools, I already see people intuitively attributing non-trivial code to AI. It's a projection of own inability, more or less.

At some point any sentence with proper capitalization will be the marker of AI.
Show HN: ThisTouristDoesNotExist (virtual tourists at real landmarks)
by setrf | 2025-08-31 07:57:52+00:00
Inspired by thispersondoesnotexist.com, I built thistouristdoesnotexist.com, a lightweight weekend project that generates a new “synthetic tourist at a real landmark” on each refresh while keeping identity cues consistent across scenes, driven here by Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka Nano Banana).

It runs on a tiny DigitalOcean droplet with a simple pipeline that pairs batches of synthetic faces with a curated landmark list and tries to avoid reusing the same face–place combo.

I would love feedback on failure cases, hope you like it!
by jumploops | 2025-08-31 07:57:59+00:00
My grandfather had a little saying at each of his birthdays:

88, feeling great!

89, feeling fine

90, less mighty*

91, not yet done!

92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!

He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.

*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!
by barry-cotter | 2025-08-31 07:58:11+00:00
> I wanted to read Henry Kissinger’s 400 page undergraduate thesis (it has an incredible first page), but really didn’t feel like dealing with a scanned PDF that’s annoying to read on a phone without constantly zooming and panning.

> So I decided to convert it to a nice markdown format using OCR and LLMs. Then I thought it would be nice to fix the footnotes and get rid of the page breaks and to fix the line breaks and other things like that.

> I was already working on some other coding projects, so I had the idea of loading up the draft markdown file in Claude Code and having it work on fixing these issues using a swarm of 20 sub-agents, which worked well.

> Then I thought it would be cool to link to the full sources for all the many references on sites like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, so I had another swarm of sub-agents do a ton of searches to track the links down and insert them into the footnotes and bibliography.

> Then I figured that I might as well run it through my mind-map generator and summarization code to see what it comes up with, so I tried that. But now I had a few files to present, so needed some kind of index page.

> So I asked Codex with GPT-5 to whip up a slick looking web page to present the stuff nicely, which it did a yeoman’s job with.

> Note that I was already working with these tools in a bunch of other sessions on other projects, so my work here was occasionally giving some instructions to the coding agents and letting them crank away. I really didn’t spend much active time on this!

> Anyway, the net result is clearly the premier way in the world today to consume Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis electronically. I’ll post the link in the next tweet to avoid getting punished by the algorithm.

> As for the thesis itself, it’s wild how erudite he was as a young man, and also what a great writer he was. And even more impressive considering that English was his second language.

> The thesis is basically him trying to come to grips with, and to mentally organize in an internally consistent way, a vast swath of Western thought. From what I’ve read so far, I think he did a pretty good job.

> Incidentally, his thesis is the reason Harvard changes the rules to limit the undergrad honors thesis to a maximum of 35,000 words. Good thing they didn’t apply this silly limit to Henry!

https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1961817172516168098
by ggm | 2025-08-31 07:58:26+00:00
Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence.

If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.

The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.

Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-31 07:59:17+00:00
Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
by wiseowise | 2025-08-31 07:59:27+00:00
Requiring something and locking someone out are completely different things.

I’m fine with government requiring smoke detectors in my home, I’m not fine with completely unregulated private entity deciding how I live in my home, bought with my money.

And in case of a muffler, there’s literally no one in this entire world who can stop me from removing it. There are repercussion for doing so, but nobody stole my rights from removing it.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-31 08:00:26+00:00
There were also major gains in things like access to clean water, general safety from the perils of war (which often drives famines, etc), and so on. If one only looked at e.g. Roman aristocracy (which essentially controls for these sort of variables) then their life expectancy would likely be similar to our own. This exact study was carried out on the Ancient Greeks [1], even prior to the Romans, and found a life expectancy of 72 years. [1]

And while I know some will contest the source, while intentionally conflating the mystical with the historical, even the Bible hits on the average age of man: "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away."

Notably that is in Psalms, Old Testament, and so it was like written over the time frame of 400-1400BC. And I think it's fairly self evident that that segment was written in the context of plain historical observation with no mysticism implied or stated. Basically life expectancy once you leave childhood, let alone peak longevity, hasn't changed all that much over thousands of years.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/
by seadan83 | 2025-08-31 08:01:16+00:00
The "rules" for config are different. Code, test code, and config are different, their complexity scales in different ways of course.

By way of analogy for why the two configs are different, for example Two beaches are not the same because they both have very similar sand.

You really have two different configs.. You also have one set of configs. You didn't set up an application that also fetches some config that is already provided. It would be like having a test flag in both config and database, sane flag - two places.

Where config duplication goes bad is when repeatedly the same change is made across all N, local variations have to be reconciled each time and it is N sets of testing you need to do. Something like that in code is potentially more complex, more obviously a duplication of a module, just more likely to be a problem overall.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-31 08:02:21+00:00
Stupid, perhaps. But the idiots have brought us Pax Americana - an unprecedented peace across the world, with technological innovation never seen before, and America has been a river to humanity: through research, development, and open market access to the world.

Ideally there are no hegemons and we live in a multipolar peace, but if there must be hegemonies then you can't do much better than this.
by bisRepetita | 2025-08-31 08:02:50+00:00
If only there was no app stores... sigh... I would only download apps from the reputable company I like (myfavoritebigbank.com), trusting their brand and reputation for my security. If a client-side app can threaten their security, that's a weakness on their part.

And if a lone developer has a cool new idea, and its app is recommended by users I trust on an obscure specialized forum, then I'll decide to install their app from "coollonedeveloper.com".

If only we could invent some kind of "domain names" system that one would have control and responsibility over, instead of trusting some broken unscalable app stores...
by vixen99 | 2025-08-31 08:03:18+00:00
Not that individualistic. We have tables giving upper and lower limits for around 26 nutrients for daily intake. These tables are published by dozens of countries which mostly did their own research over decades. The tables are pretty much consistent with very little variation. Grok offers a rough estimate of between 10 and 50 million subjects used to determine these values. When you say 'you just have to see what works for you' that’s fine if the ‘what’ is a container (food) that provides content (nutrients) within the limits that extensive research has found to work. With a few very odd exceptions our biochemistry is consistent.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-31 08:03:48+00:00
But not enough to actually help them win the war, and why? Because stakes are not high enough for Canada or Australia. The same is true for countries I listed before. Poland for example is different - stakes are very high, but we are governed by morons and worms.

Obviously many countries see it beneficial to prevent Russia from reaching its goals, because that's how international politics work, especially when everything became global, but it doesn't mean they are threatened by it or they would be invaded if Ukraine falls.

The hope that punishing Russia for breaking rules would in any way prevent others from trying the same in the future is naive. For rules to be respected in a particular moment of history, there has to be a force that is able to effectively enforce those rules in that particular moment of history. Without it any punishment that happened in past will not matter.

As for Hungary - Orban is very good player. inb4 no, I wouldn't like to live in Hungary, but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating political skill.
by brnt | 2025-08-31 08:04:12+00:00
What universele are these people in? Though the app/play store is a fantastic way to obtain shitware that either steals data (seems to be nearly mandatory, if you look at the apps of these store operators), CPU time through mining of some sort, eats through your brain (by inserting horrific amounts of ads, much of which such clear scams I really don't get how this is allowed) or simply ask extra money for essential features one by one.

Everything about the so called stores is so decrepit, the safest way to get any decent software on is side loading / fdroid. How could you in sincerity argue any different?
by stared | 2025-08-31 08:04:39+00:00
I am not sure if I agree with the list. I mean, one red flag is the frequent mention of Landau & Lifshitz. It is considered a "standard textbook", but I feel it stuck there by inertia. There are quite a few choices of both less boring and more insightful.

(Back when I was reading such stuff, 20 years ago, the Feynman Lectures provided orders magnitude more insight. And fun.)
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-31 08:05:52+00:00
My last comment about V [1] still applies today: V is now well past its infancy with a fancy drama and is a working product, but still seeks to become jack of all trades, that is, too ambitious to be successful. Hopefully it will (and should) change as 1.0 approaches.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37304691
by DocTomoe | 2025-08-31 08:06:02+00:00
Ironically, the Chinese seem to disagree, as they bring online new Coal-powered power plants every other week, with 94.5 GW of new capacity having started construction in the first half of 2024 and another 66.7 GW approved. And that's 'permanently available', not (p) = peak.

"Solar is cheaper than fossil" does not look at the whole picture, it completely ignores that solar is not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands. It also is a dark laugh towards consumers, who do not see prices lowering, but exponentially rising, ironically while the so-called cheap power sources are being rolled out.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-31 08:06:22+00:00
Research article, (2024). The Abstract looks considerably more restrained than the title. And the Intro section yet more cautious. It's even noted that - in the US - liberal individuals seemed to have more children until 1990. Plus other complexities.

To the Limitations, I'd add that the study covers a very small slice of time. But my perspective on the subject is from studying history. And anticipating hot comments, from folks caught up in the current culture wars.
by tomjen3 | 2025-08-31 08:06:24+00:00
I don't think your benefit example is too much a problem in practice, we already have the access setup for that (ie its the same one for you).

For the other example, I think a nice compromise is to have the AI be able to do things only with your express permission. In your example it finds flights that it thinks are appropriate, sends you a notification with the list and you can then press a simple yes/no/more information button. It would still save you a ton of money, but it would be substantially less likely to do something dangerous/damaging.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-31 08:07:15+00:00
> I think coming to the conclusion that bosses/managers shouldn't be pushing or mandating the use of AI tools in general is incorrect. It's quite possible that any one new AI tool is wrong, but it is unlikely all of them are.

If the tool is good, then management won't need to mandate it. People will be tripping over themselves to get access to the tool that helps them to do their job better. So perhaps you're right that some of the tools will be good (though I personally haven't yet had that experience), but I think that it is incorrect for managers to push for (let alone mandate) tool usage. Measure the result, not the path an employee takes to get there. If Bob uses AI tools to great effect, but Alice is doing just as well as him without using said tools, it's a mistake to force her to change her workflow thinking that the tools will be just as good for her as for Bob.
by swiftcoder | 2025-08-31 08:07:44+00:00
Worth noting that there is some controversy about whether Jeanne Calment was actually 122, or it was a case of her daughter Yvonne assuming her identity to commit pension fraud...

This is apparently endemic in the so-called "blue zones" where folks routinely live well past 100 on paper, but its thought that many folks are exploiting poor record keeping in the past to keep drawing their pension checks