MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-08-04 14:11:53+00:00
They're blowing up because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts, which is par for the course for big government contracting. Elections are to a certain extent a contest between different camps to swing at the Piñata of Federal funding, with the winner taking the current batch of candy.

I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.

SAP is also a good comparison, so maybe GenZ SAP.

There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.

Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
by Herz | 2025-08-04 14:11:55+00:00
I stated quite clearly that not every regulation is bad. But it seems that you want to hear that every decision made by the EU is right. I'm sorry, but I'm not a religious person. And I think self-criticism is a great privilege of democratic (not dictatorial) countries, so let's use it.

> Ensuring that AI can't be used to make life or death decisions if its decision-making can't be explained (which the AI Act boils down to)? Ensuring there is competition on, for example, railway operations?

It's such a naive question that I can't understand how you can take it seriously.

Just because you can explain how you arrived at a specific decision does not mean that failure does not exist. Every machine is fallible. Every human is fallible. Moreover, you cannot determine decision-making made by humans. So how can you trust humans? Why should you trust them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot

I would like to see the data, not the social or individual biases. It's only a matter of "when" AI will prove to be safer than humans at performing task X. I find it absurd to deprive ourselves of such an advantage, supported by data, just because our understanding isn't absolute.

Can we prove the safety or determinism of what we use or do on a daily basis? I doubt. Shouldn't we experiment with physics because our understanding is limited, and we might accidentally create a black hole? I doubt.

Also, I find it such a generic definition... Google Maps implements AI, and accidentally sends you into a ditch. What do you do? Ban AI from Google Maps? What doesn't put people's lives at risk?

I totally understand the skepticism and fear. The risks, etc. But I'll leave it to the fortune tellers to pass judgment before it's even "a thing".

> It's such a common refrain that EU is just stifling competition with "regulating everything", but quite oftne EU regulations are actually forcing competition where none was possible before.

Is killing the car market "forcing the competition"? How?
by dwringer | 2025-08-04 14:12:04+00:00
In my experience, it's still possible to learn from the AI's mistakes. I've seen others comment similarly: sometimes the AI will invent a feature, variable, exception type, etc., and while this is wrong for the specific implementation, it's often a pretty good idea for something that may have been overlooked with the initial spec. Reading the AI outputs can still be a valuable step in an interactive feedback process, even if you only ever start a new context from scratch with the AI each time. The user's context is what grows.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-04 14:12:05+00:00
We can argue semantics, but I specifically said that "their economy is much closer to a developing country." This contrasts sharply against, what I presume is, our youth - when they were at one point set to become the largest economy in the world, and everything Japanese was state of the art + crazy expensive while quite affordable for Japanese.

Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.

And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.
by fxtentacle | 2025-08-04 14:12:12+00:00
I find this problem quite difficult to solve:

1. If I as a human request a website, then I should be shown the content. Everyone agrees.

2. If I as the human request the software on my computer to modify the content before displaying it, for example by installing an ad-blocker into my user agent, then that's my choice and the website should not be notified about it. Most users agree, some websites try to nag you into modifying the software you run locally.

3. If I now go one step further and use an LLM to summarize content because the authentic presentation is so riddled with ads, JavaScript, and pop-ups, that the content becomes borderline unusable, then why would the LLM accessing the website on my behalf be in a different legal category as my Firefox web browser accessing the website on my behalf?
by baggachipz | 2025-08-04 14:12:18+00:00
State-sanctioned gambling is an absolute menace. Lots of states in the US have an ironically-named "Education Lottery", which ostensibly funds public schools. This is done because people don't want to pay the taxes necessary to fund public schools. Instead, these lotteries effectively take money from the poorest of society to fund the schools instead of taxing progressively (or even more for rich people) to fund the dwindling public school budget (assuming this is even done properly). Meanwhile, proper education would teach people that playing the lottery is a fool's errand.

I can only assume the situation is similar on military bases.
by welshwelsh | 2025-08-04 14:12:54+00:00
You're confusing the concept of free speech with the First Amendment. Any time a person is prevented from expressing themselves is a violation of their freedom of speech, even if they have no legal right to speak.

But even in the context of the First Amendment, freedom of speech does not only apply to the government. For example, net neutrality laws prevent ISPs, which are generally private companies, from restricting Internet traffic on free speech grounds.

To the extent that it is legal for a payment processor to censor speech, the only reasonable conclusion is that the law is wrong and must be amended. Large corporations are much more similar to governments than they are to private so individuals, and should be treated as such.
by shagie | 2025-08-04 14:13:00+00:00
That would be a change from preventing illegal transactions.

As it stands currently, the risk associated to the company for allowing illegal transactions is what drives their policy since they get brought into lawsuits for allowing monetization of illegal content in some jurisdiction.

Changing it (world wide) so that payment processors are not subject to money laundering laws and cannot be held liable when a merchant sells something illegal would allow them to change their model to allow all lawful transactions and not have false negatives.

Until false positives (allowing an illegal transaction) is not a risk for them, their policies are unlikely to change.
by hollywood_court | 2025-08-04 14:13:50+00:00
Bluey is by far the best children's show I've ever watched. My son and I love watching it together. It's so refreshing after having to watch Peppa Pig for a year or so before we discovered Bluey. I disliked Peppa Pig and I was relieved when my son said he no longer wish to watch it after finding Bluey.
by ghusto | 2025-08-04 14:13:54+00:00
You're examples fall into the two categories I've talked about: Those where I believe you should stick to your convictions and say it as yourself, and those where privacy options would be available (again, as in real life).

For example:

> If there's a group of young men playing loud music on a bus, do you tell them that they're idiots

Why would you tell them they're idiots? How would that help anything. If you do that online anonymously, are you trying to better the situation, or vent your own anger and thus making the world that much more negative?
by whidrubeld | 2025-08-04 14:13:55+00:00
I built a modern React Native modal library to solve issues with existing solutions that crash on Expo SDK 53 and lack proper gesture support.

Key features: • Built with Reanimated v3/v4 and Gesture Handler v2+ for optimal performance • Smooth animations (fade, slide, scale) with customizable timing and easing • Full gesture support - swipe to dismiss in any direction with bounce animations • Lightweight (~10KB) with TypeScript support • Works seamlessly with Expo and bare React Native projects • Flexible API for any modal scenario

The library addresses common pain points like janky animations, poor gesture handling, and compatibility issues with modern React Native versions. It's designed as a drop-in replacement for react-native-modal with better performance and more features.

Demo GIF: https://github.com/WhidRubeld/react-native-reanimated-modal/... Docs: https://whidrubeld.github.io/react-native-reanimated-modal NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-reanimated-modal

Would love feedback from the community!
by thoroughburro | 2025-08-04 14:14:45+00:00
> I think most people would draw a distinction between the two, and would at least agree the latter is more acceptable than the former.

No. I should be able to control which automated retrieval tools can scrape my site, regardless of who commands it.

We can play cat and mouse all day, but I control the content and I will always win: I can just take it down when annoyed badly enough. Then nobody gets the content, and we can all thank upstanding companies like Perplexity for that collapse of trust.
by zeta0134 | 2025-08-04 14:14:59+00:00
If the LLM were running this sort of thing at the user's explicit request this would be fine. The problem is training. Every AI startup on the planet right now is aggressively crawling everything that will let them crawl. The server isn't seeing occasional summaries from interested users, but thousands upon thousands of bots repeatedly requesting every link they can find as fast as they can.
by hopelite | 2025-08-04 14:15:06+00:00
Little do most people realize that they’ve already taken that; as they spend more of their life with literal strangers working for and to advance not just others, but even what may as well be gods in far off places and in sky scraper mount olympuses, living decadent lives off the work and ruin of others, who trade their time in life and the life and experiences of their children, to be raised by regime goons instead of their own parents or at least their mother who is also serving another man/person.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-04 14:15:23+00:00
> see if it works

But this is, properly expressed, "see if it works, based on my incomplete understanding of the code that I haven't worked through and corrected by trying to write it, but I have nevertheless communicated directly to an AI that may not have correctly understood it and therefore may not have even the vaguest inkling of the edge cases I haven't thought to mention yet".

Vibe-coded output could only properly be said to "work" if we were communicating our intentions in formal methods logic.

What you mean is "apparently works".
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-04 14:15:44+00:00
> Popular shows of 80-90s avoided trauma and ambiguity. Everything was simple and morally clear.

Popular western shows did; I've started watching the Gundam series, the first set started in '79 and while superficially it looks like your generic saturday morning cartoon, it starts off with trauma (many people killed) and while the villains are obviously evil - genocide, nazi ideologies ("sieg zeon"), etc - they also get more character development than what the protagonists get. The villains are the underdogs, only 1/30th the size of the "federation", and the good guys have a new set of superweapons that seems to win and kill their people on every occasion. There's two episodes where a "villain" character is introduced as a lover, ambitious military man, etc, then gets killed, his would-be wife killing herself in the next episode.

Anyway, that's just recent experience, I'm sure if you revisit some of the 80's / 90's shows you'd see more trauma / ambiguity too. I'm thinking of the X-Men series for example.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-04 14:15:48+00:00
You find growing tomatoes in a closet to cause great suffering and injustice? (that's what dystopian means)

I have gardened, but personally I'm tired of it. And a garden is often impractical; takes a bunch of land, water, nutrients, requires enough sun, etc, besides the expenses, and the time and effort. I live on an acre of land and I still don't get enough sun because of where I live, and my soil is shit. I can grow things but it's quite hard and yields are pitiful.

I'm not a botanist but my understanding is that a combination of bio-engineering and growth hacks (ex. pumping co2 into grow tents, optimizing light, nutrients, hydroponics, etc) can have substantial yield improvement. It's not that cheap or scalable, though. My theory is that, for about the same money as heirloom tomatoes, you could get good yields, better flavor, have a smaller environmental impact, and avoid all the gardening limitations I mentioned. But I think bioengineering could maximize the yield more than current methods (especially if pests weren't a concern, ex. a climate-controlled grow closet)
by lolive | 2025-08-04 14:15:49+00:00
Truth to be told: data barons rarely consume their own data, and are not at all focused of the data customers needs.

So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons. Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.

So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
by immibis | 2025-08-04 14:15:55+00:00
FWIW, "tier 1 ISP" is less prestigious than you'd think. Many tier 2's are bigger than many tier 1's. Being a tier 1 is kind of a self-exclusionary, nose-snubbing policy and in some ways it's surprising they manage to hang onto existence at all, though not in all ways.

This typically comes up when someone thinks they're getting better transit service from a tier-1 than a tier-2. They're not. A tier-2 ISP can have better routes, since a tier-1 will refuse to deliver your traffic anywhere that requires them to pay money. Some places are just unreachable from tier-1 ISPs.

Famously, for over a decade Cogent has refused to receive packets from Hurricane Electric without payment because idk profits, and Hurricane Electric has refused to pay them because it's a tier-1-ish, so you just can't talk to Cogent customers if you're an HE customer and vice versa. (I think HE eventually relented by paying a third-party to forward packets to specifically Cogent, even though they have tier-1 status to everywhere else)
by romaniv | 2025-08-04 14:16:24+00:00
Step one, companies create AI gauntlet for their applicants.

Step two, those companies lose access to the top talent who will simply go interview somewhere else or get a job in some other way.

Step three, less scrupulous candidates start to cheat these automated systems. There will also be paid services helping you cheat.

Final outcome: most of the people who get to the actual interviews in those companies will be candidates with dubious skills at the actual job, willing and able to cheat corporate policies.

Unfortunately, this will take a couple of years to play out to its logical conclusion.
by kokau | 2025-08-04 14:16:30+00:00
I built Brandolia to help founders, indie makers, and creators generate a full brand identity in under a minute using AI.

You just enter your brand name and sector, and it generates a professional logo, color palette, font combination, slogan, brand story, and marketing strategy.

It’s live with over 300 signups in the first week. Would love feedback from the HN community – especially on the UX, positioning, and if you'd find it useful for your next idea.

Thanks!
by throw0101d | 2025-08-04 14:16:35+00:00
> Everything in life involves hefty doses of luck. The alternative (i.e. without merit) seems obviously worse as it would be completely luck, no?

There is some level of luck / chance, but one can tilt the odds: more tutoring that allows for more practice to get better in the skill(s) that are 'merited', getting into schools with good alumni networks so one can 'luckily' bump into the right people with the resources you need.

Initially good luck can breed good luck in the second iteration/generation.

The meta-criticism (if you will) is that the initial batch of merited people can lock-in things for their (grand-)kids in future batches. There needs to be a way allow opportunities for future batches if their (grand-)parents from earlier batches were not 'merited' initially. Otherwise you basically get the ball rolling on an aristocracy.
by pjcodes | 2025-08-04 14:16:52+00:00
The viewpoint you shared is great because applications need to build trust through initial valuable experiences rather than hiding features behind paywall.

I’ve been really intentional about that: the core features (logging impulses, the 24-hour cooldown, and the “allocate to your dream investment” system) are fully free, with no upsell wall getting in the way.

The premium feature like personalized work-hour calculations, unlimited impulse logging, unlimited dreams and deeper goal tracking are there mostly for users who want to go deeper.

I definitely don’t want it to feel like a trap. I'm actually giving out free weekly premium access to early users so I can get feedback on what’s genuinely useful (and what’s just noise).
by lan321 | 2025-08-04 14:17:27+00:00
But it also affects your safety net. If rent is 60% of your income, it's much easier to drown in it than if it's 30%. Especially considering once you start drowning, you'll need to pull 3 months' rent out of somewhere for the deposit of a new (cheaper) place.

It also makes it make more sense to live in a car. A car costs the same, mostly everywhere, so if you're in a stupidly expensive location, it might start to sound reasonable to live in a van.

Drugs, poor financial literacy and insanity are the main reasons, but expensive housing is also there.
by the_af | 2025-08-04 14:17:48+00:00
> Especially if I'm extracting an Int out of the type to interface with other code.

Why would you do this? As soon as you go "outside" the type you lose typechecker guarantees.

The whole point of the article is showing where the compiler can tell you when you're writing code that fails to consider some cases, and how use of `newtype` loses some of these guarantees.
by joe8756438 | 2025-08-04 14:17:49+00:00
Currently, the only way to understand code is to read it. You no longer need to understand code to produce it (maybe in some pre-AI cases that was also true).

So no, you don’t _need_ to read code anymore. But not reading code is a risk.

That risk is proportional to characteristics that are very difficult, and in many cases impossible, to measure.

So currently best practice would be to continue reading code. Sigh.
by dlgeek | 2025-08-04 14:18:52+00:00
In this case? Not that I know of, but I'm not following closely.

In general? Absolutely - search 'Operation Chokepoint'.

There's a great summary in the middle of this (very long) article under that header: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
by exasperaited | 2025-08-04 14:18:52+00:00
The obvious advantage of making your own framework, or your own libraries, say, is that you can centralise all the security implementation. You either will or you won't do that security work, but you can't centralise it if you don't write some sort of library/framework to do it. And if you don't, you're more likely to leave the hole open in some situations.

Vibe coding is "don't write any libraries, just copy-paste and use these existing libraries uncritically".

The worst outcome of this will be NPM full of vibe-coded copy-paste code shoved into opaque modules that nobody has ever really read, that other vibe-coding tools will use uncritically.
by shagie | 2025-08-04 14:18:54+00:00
How would Steam know?

And yes, that's a problem that they're dealing with right now. Bellular News : Steam Faces Financial Obliteration: Others Are Already Dead https://youtu.be/AlDkL3DndtM

The law being talked about in the video is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023 / https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...

That said, not all NSFW content is allowed in all jurisdictions. Australia and Japan (for example) have laws about particular content that differs from US laws.
by 9rx | 2025-08-04 14:18:59+00:00
> Your landlord demands money every month.

As if the "AI champion" will have a landlord. Methinks you've not thought this through.

> So do your local utilities - power, gas, water, sewage, garbage collection, phone, internet, etc.

Unless he owns all that too. Even if that doesn't play out, safe to say that in said hypothetical future it will be owned by a very small group of people. And while they may still have some trade amongst themselves, there will still be no need to sell things to the average Joe.

> Is magical AI going to materialize food out of nowhere for you, with no need for any raw materials to be consumed in the process? Will it make clothes out of nothing?

The magical AI will, yes. But as it is magical, you are right that this future branch is unlikely. Much more likely is the future where people remain relevant.
by fxtentacle | 2025-08-04 14:19:02+00:00
Then what if I ask the LLM 10 questions about the same domain and ask it to research further? Any human would then click through 50 - 100 articles to make sure they know what that domain contains. If that part is automated by using an LLM, does that make any legal change? How many page URLs do you think one should be allowed to access per LLM prompt?
by sofra4 | 2025-08-04 14:19:03+00:00
GHCO - https://www.ghco.co.uk/ | Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, Trade Application Support | London | Hybrid | Full Time

GHCO is an ETF market maker, quoting across European exchanges. We're a small team of expert traders and proven software engineers, looking for experienced technologists who have an interest in advancing the state of the art in automated market making. Tech stack we're hiring for: Java, Python, SQL, AWS

* Benefits and perks: competitive salary, health insurance, generous hardware and software allowance, casual work environment, inclusive team-oriented culture, rapid career growth opportunities, high impact work.

email: anthony dot sheldon at ghco dot co dot uk, with Hacker News in the title
by yosito | 2025-08-04 14:19:19+00:00
I'm not saying that people don't think that the US should be a democracy. I'm saying that people don't think the US is a democracy. When the president of the country is a criminal and blatantly ignores the constitution and the courts, what does democracy even mean?

Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.