MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mvdtnz | 2025-08-12 18:25:48+00:00
Modern slavery legislation passed in 2022 has abslutely no bearing on public opinion on crime and punishment for violent offenders in 1999. People in NZ have been fed up with soft on crime policies and short setences for violent repeat offenders for a long, long, long time (and continue to be today). Despite what the noisy left wing in this country might tell you.

It baffles me that you people think we didn't know what we voted for in a referendum question expressed in a single sentence which included the words,

> Should there be a reform of our justice system [...] imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-12 18:26:34+00:00
Agreed. This one is especially annoying to me and dear to my heart, because I enjoy discussing the philosophy behind this, but it devolves into weird discussions and conclusions fairly quickly without much effort at all. I particularly enjoy the tenets of certain sects of buddhism and how they view these things, but you'll get a lot of people that are doing a really pseudo-intellectual version of the Matrix where they are the main character.
by it_citizen | 2025-08-12 18:26:50+00:00
> The global pandemic will tank the stock market

> War in Ukraine will tank the stock market

> High interest rates will tank the stock market

> Tariffs will tank the stock market

> IA will tank the stock market <- We are here

All those statements made sense to me at the time. And I have no doubt that one of these days, someone will make a correct prediction. But who the hell know what and when.

Diversify, be reasonable and be prepared for it to happen someday. But freaking out with any new prediction of doom is not the winning strategy.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-12 18:27:01+00:00
Qubic stopped reporting their hashrate as queried and reported by https://miningpoolstats.stream/monero .

Previously, the "Unknown" pool as reported by MiningPoolStats used to be at ~3%, but now it's at ~23%, so as per silly napkin math, this tells me that Qubic could currently be in control up to 20% of the Monero network.

If the reports of depth 6 block reorgs by Qubic are true, users could consider requiring at least 5x the number of block confirmations for their incoming transactions for safety, meaning at least 30 confirmations, before they consider their incoming tokens to truly be their own.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-12 18:27:31+00:00
If you are employed you should petition your employer for tools you want. Maybe you can use it to take the day off earlier or spend more time socializing. Or to get a promotion or performance bonus. Hopefully not just to meet rising productivity expectations without being handed the tools needed to achieve that. Having full-time access to these tools can also improve your own skills in using them, to profit from in a later career move or from contributing toward your own ends.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-08-12 18:27:32+00:00
This is my experience too. Also, their propensity to jump into code without necessarily understanding the requirement is annoying to say the least. As the project complexity grows, you find yourself writing longer and longer instructions just to guardrail.

Another rather interesting thing is that they tend to gravitate towards sweep the errors under the rug kind of coding which is disastrous. e.g. "return X if we don't find the value so downstream doesn't crash". These are the kind of errors no human, even a beginner on their first day learning to code, wouldn't make and are extremely annoying to debug.

Tl;dr: LLMs' tendency to treat every single thing you give it as a demo homework project
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-08-12 18:27:48+00:00
I think the problem that many people, including me, have with your justification is very similar to trumps own televised justification: its vague and selective.

Fact is there are other "worthy" candidate cities to deploy NG to, to counter crime. Additionally, trump is unreliable and generally unfit as a POTUS. Given these two, the concern about trumps tendency to abuse of power, which he demonstrated already, is a very valid response to him mobilizing NG in the most sensitive political region.

You cant calm these concerns with comparably similar crime rates.

Ontop, isnt it an assumption, that NG can actually help with rampand crime? I imagine they project hard force on the streets but do not react to 911 calls.

Also, your budget justification was vague too. The total spending per capita does not allow any clues on relative spending on law enforcement. There must be a reason why its significantly higher and maybe thats why LE falls short too.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-12 18:28:07+00:00
The Apple 1 registry site says that it was likely a marketing stunt by the e-waste facility (https://www.apple1registry.com/en/theapple1.html):

> The story of an almost-destroyed Apple-1 found in a recycling center is a bit strange. There’s no proof it's true. No picture of the Apple-1 has been published, yet the company was in the news for a long time. After gaining so much attention, many people sent old computers to them. Numerous requests for a photo or info went unanswered. No Apple-1 expert or collector was ever contacted by the recycling company.

As far as I can tell, there's no public record of the sale, the buyer never came forward, and all the photos of the computer from news articles and stuff are stock images of other Apple 1s.
MakeMyDay – Start your morning with only positive, uplifting news
by KamalNanda | 2025-08-12 18:28:30+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’ve been building MakeMyDay as a product because I was tired of waking up to a flood of negative news. Instead of starting the day anxious or stressed, I wanted a way to begin with something uplifting, inspiring, and real.

What it does:

• Curates only verified, positive news stories from around the world

• Presents them in a minimal, distraction-free daily feed

• Available as a mobile app (APK download + waitlist for full release)

Why I built it:

News consumption today is largely optimized for engagement — which often means fear, outrage, or sadness. While these stories are important, they aren’t the only stories happening. There are incredible things happening every day that never get amplified. MakeMyDay exists to give those stories their space.

Who it’s for:

• People who want to start their mornings in a better mental state

• Anyone reducing doomscrolling but still wanting to stay informed

• Mental wellness enthusiasts, productivity hackers, and optimists Where to get it:

Website & waitlist: https://makemydaynow.netlify.app

APK download: https://tinyurl.com/MakeMyDayApp

I’d love feedback from this community — from UX to content curation ideas. Also curious if you’d see this as a daily-use app for yourself.

Thanks for reading!

– Kamal Nanda
by numpad0 | 2025-08-12 18:28:39+00:00
lists.gnu.org. 1800 IN A 209.51.188.17 17.0-24.188.51.209.in-addr.arpa. 1800 IN PTR lists.gnu.org. 64 bytes from 209.51.188.17: icmp_seq=1 ttl=42 time=219 ms curl: (7) Failed to connect to 209.51.188.17 port 443 after 208 ms: Couldn't connect to server curl: (7) Failed to connect to 209.51.188.17 port 80 after 212 ms: Couldn't connect to server ssh hey__your_http_is_down@209.51.188.17 The authenticity of host '209.51.188.17 (209.51.188.17)' can't be established. ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:fKT2Sr7vshZxNytNKcnQgXhqtDYptpayjVTa1upy46w.
by robbomacrae | 2025-08-12 18:29:12+00:00
Like others (smithclay, sst/opencode) have said about aiming for a similar feature, I had plans to make a mobile app for Talkito[0][1] which primarily adds voice TTS/ASR and WhatsApp/slack interactions to Claude Code.

This looks like exactly what I was envisioning so congrats on getting out there first! LMK if you want to add voice controls to this.

[0]: https://github.com/robdmac/talkito

[1]: https://talkito.com
by 3acctforcom | 2025-08-12 18:29:13+00:00
In parliamentary systems we see fractures and reformation all the time, including in the current political climate in the UK.

Duverger's Law is only really parroted by Americans, who's ballot access and districting is determined by a coalition of two political parties instead of an constitutionally defined apolitical government institution. Don't forget to vote Green or Libertarian! Oh wait, you can't because the dems and repubs struck them from the ballot :(
by moregrist | 2025-08-12 18:29:37+00:00
> Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days.

There were gobs of terrible road metaphors that spun out of calling the Internet the “Information Superhighway.”

Gobs and gobs of them. All self-parody to anyone who knew anything.

I hesitate to relate this to anything in the current AI era, but maybe the closest (and in a gallows humor/doomer kind of way) is the amount of exec speak on how many jobs will be replaced.
by byryan | 2025-08-12 18:30:40+00:00
That makes sense, especially if your building web applications that are primarily "just" CRUD operations. If a lot of the API calls follow the same pattern and the application is just a series of API calls + React UI then that seems like something an LLM would excel at. LLM's are also more proficient in TypeScript/JS/Python compared to other languages, so that helps as well.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-12 18:30:47+00:00
I never thought I could make a custom CPU until I came across

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

But when I saw that I thought, yeah, I could implement something like that on an FPGA. It's not so much a language-specific CPU as an application-specific CPU. If you were building something that might be FPGA + CPU or FPGA with a soft core it might be your soft core, particularly if you had the right kind of tooling. (Wouldn't it be great to have a superoptimizing 'compiler' that can codesign the CPU together with the program?)

It has its disadvantages, particularly the whole thing will lock up if a fetch is late. For workloads where memory access is predictable I'd imagine you could have a custom memory controller but my picture of how that works is fuzzy. For unpredictable memory access though you can't beat the mainstream CPU -- me and my biz dev guy had a lot of talks with a silicon designer who had some patents for a new kind of 'vector' processor who schooled us on how many ASIC and FPGA ideas that sound great on paper can't really fly because of the memory wall.
by photon_lines | 2025-08-12 18:30:49+00:00
So - in the pre-training step you are right -- they are simple 'statistical' predictors but there are more steps involved in their training which turn them from simple predictors to being able to capture patterns and reason -- I tried to come up with an intuitive overview of how they do this in the write-up and I'm not sure I can give you a simple explanation here, but I would recommend you play around with Deep-Seek and other more advanced 'reasoning' or 'chain-of-reason' models and ask them to perform tasks for you: they are not simply statistically combining information together. Many times they are able to reason through and come up with extremely advanced working solutions. To me this indicates that they are not 'accidently' stumbling upon solutions based on statistics -- they actually are able to 'understand' what you are asking them to do and to produce valid results.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-12 18:31:04+00:00
> How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now.

The current freshest study focusing on experienced developers showed a net negative in the productivity when using an LLM solution in their flow:

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

My conclusion on this, as an ex VP of Engineering, is that good senior developers find little utility with LLMs and even them to be a nuisance/detriment, while for juniors, they can be godsend, as they help them with syntax and coax the solution out of them.

It's like training wheels to a bike. A toddler might find 3x utility, while a person who actually can ride a bike well will find themselves restricted by training wheels.
by MajimasEyepatch | 2025-08-12 18:31:05+00:00
I feel this way about some of the more extreme effective altruists. There is no room for uncertainty or recognition of the way that errors compound.

- "We should focus our charitable endeavors on the problems that are most impactful, like eradicating preventable diseases in poor countries." Cool, I'm on board.

- "I should do the job that makes the absolute most amount of money possible, like starting a crypto exchange, so that I can use my vast wealth in the most effective way." Maybe? If you like crypto, go for it, I guess, but I don't think that's the only way to live, and I'm not frankly willing to trust the infallibility and incorruptibility of these so-called geniuses.

- "There are many billions more people who will be born in the future than those people who are alive today. Therefore, we should focus on long-term problems over short-term ones because the long-term ones will affect far more people." Long-term problems are obviously important, but the further we get into the future, the less certain we can be about our projections. We're not even good at seeing five years into the future. We should have very little faith in some billionaire tech bro insisting that their projections about the 22nd century are correct (especially when those projections just so happen to show that the best thing you can do in the present is buy the products that said tech bro is selling).
by ASalazarMX | 2025-08-12 18:31:08+00:00
I think BlueSky still needs to prove itself. It is what Twitter/X was a decade ago, before the enshittification, and I enjoy the content a lot, with my reservations.

The weakness of Mastodon (and the Fediverse IMO), is that you can join one of many instances, and it becomes easier to form an echo chamber. Your feed will the the Fediverse hose (lots of irrelevant content), your local instance (an echo chamber), or your subscriptions (curating them takes effort). Nevertheless, that might be as well a strength I'm not truly appreciating.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-08-12 18:31:39+00:00
>The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy. >We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?

The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.

And this seems to be the incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_murders

Would you like to read that carefully?
by bitwize | 2025-08-12 18:31:52+00:00
In Mass Effect, there is a distinction made between AI (which is smart enough to be considered a person) and VI (virtual intelligence, basically a dumb conversational UI over some information service).

What we have built in terms of LLMs barely qualifies as a VI, and not a particularly reliable one. I think we should begin treating and designing them as such, emphasizing responding to queries and carrying out commands accurately over friendliness. (The "friendly" in "user-friendly" has done too much anthropomorphization work. User-friendly non-AI software makes user choices, and the results of such choices, clear and responds unambiguously to commands.)
by mh- | 2025-08-12 18:32:11+00:00
> Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days.

Older person here: they absolutely did, all over the place in the early 90s. I remember people decrying projects that moved them to computers everywhere I went. Doctors offices, auto mechanics, etc.

Then later, people did the same thing about the Internet (was written with a single word capital I by 2000, having been previously written as two separate words.)

https://i.imgur.com/vApWP6l.png
by derektank | 2025-08-12 18:32:42+00:00
Setting aside the reductio ad absurdum of genocide, this is an unfortunately common viewpoint. People really need to take into account the chances their child might wind up working on science or technology which reduces global CO2 emissions or even captures CO2. This reasoning can be applied to all sorts of naive "more people bad" arguments. I can't imagine where the world would be if Norman Borlaug's parents had decided to never have kids out of concern for global food insecurity.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-12 18:33:25+00:00
As James Mickens says in The Night Watch[1],

“Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

But I feel there's a middle ground between LISP and raw assembly and mangling pointers. For instance, modern C++ and Rust (and all the C++ 'successors', like Carbon, Circle, Safe C++, etc) have a very novel and clear set of ownership, view, and span semantics that make more declarative, functional, side-effect-free programming easy to write and read, while still maintaining high-performance—most notably without unnecessarily throwing copies around.

A few days ago a friend was asking me for a HPC problem: he'd written a bog-standard nested for loop with indices, was observing poor performance, and asked me if using C++23 std::ranges::views would help. It did, but I also fundamentally reworked his data flow. I saw something like a 5x performance improvement, even though I was writing at a higher level of abstraction than he was.

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
by photon_lines | 2025-08-12 18:33:56+00:00
'I don't know if LLMs have a built in scepticism like humans do' - humans don't have an 'in built skepticism' -- we learn in through experience and through being taught how to 'reason' within school (and it takes a very long time to do this). You believe that this is in-grained but you may have forgotten having to slog through most of how the world works and being tested when you went to school and when your parents taught you these things. On the context component: yes, context is vitally important (just as it is with humans) -- you can't produce a great solution unless you understand the 'why' behind it and how the current solution works so I 100% agree with that.
by scubbo | 2025-08-12 18:33:58+00:00
I think you're making good points, that aren't exactly counter-examples to the concerns being raised.

You are making the - correct! - point that _other companies_ who have paid contracts with an AI provider would impose significant costs on that provider if those contracts were found to be breached. Either the company would leave and stop paying their huge subscription, and/or the reputational fallout would be a cost.

But companies aren't people, and are treated differently from people. Companies have lawyers. Companies have the deep pockets to fight legal cases. Companies have publicity reach. If a company is mistreated, it has the resources and capabilities to fight back. A person does not. If J. Random Hacker somehow discovers that their data is being used for training (if they even could), what are they gonna do about it - stop paying $20/month, and post on HN? That's negligible.

So - yes, you're right that there are cold-hearted profit-motivated self-interested incentives for an AI provider to not breach contract to train on _a company's_ data. But there is no such incentive protecting people.

EDIT: /u/johnnyanmac said it better than me:

>> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.

> I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.
by Tainnor | 2025-08-12 18:34:00+00:00
I hate criminals and social disorder too.

You're part of the problem that I'm talking about. Instead of engaging with the issue at hand, you jump to wild assumptions about my positions, as if there were no alternatives between absolute anarchy and full-on authoritarianism.

That's what I mean by "poisoning the well", you have 124268 karma and yet you can't help yourself but discuss in bad faith.
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-12 18:34:02+00:00
Well, arguably that's exactly where we are, but machines can evolve faster.

And that's an entire new angle that the cultists are ignoring... because superintelligence may just not be very valuable.

And we don't need superintelligence for smart machines to be a problem anyway. We don't need even AGI. IMO, there's no reason to focus on that.
by balamatom | 2025-08-12 18:34:09+00:00
Is a lay ontology that's basically a folk offshoot of the proverbial 5th edition practitioner's manual and people use to keep the question of ethics in our closes relationships at arm's length (because they've also, like you and I, found this self-consistent set of just-so stories weirdly smeared atop all useful ethics and psychology discourse on the Internet) proto-AI spam or the reins of as many future mass psychoses as the doctor ordered? And are we cool yet?
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 18:35:37+00:00
>Your city doesn't sound very safe as you claim in another comment.

All that stuff was 30-50 years ago. As I mentioned (and linked[0] to statistics), I'm old and things have changed a lot.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879420

Edit: Actually it was 35-50 years ago, but who's counting?
by kazinator | 2025-08-12 18:35:51+00:00
To completely eliminate the possibility of ransomware attack, you need an incredibly locked down platform, and users who are impervious to social engineering.

Vulnerabilities to ransomware (and other forms of malware) can be perpetrated without a single bad pointer being dereferenced.

For instance, a memory-safe e-mail program can automatically open an attachment, and the memory-safe application which handles the attachment can blindly run code embedded in the document in a leaky sandbox.

There is an incredible amount of infrastructure out there that depends on C. Embedded devices, mobile devices, desktops, servers. Network stacks, telephony stacks, storage, you name it. Encryption, codecs, ...

Sky is falling would mean all of it would be falling down so badly that, for instance, you would have about a 50% chance of connecting a server that is more than four hops away.
by uncircle | 2025-08-12 18:35:58+00:00
Calling other people’s work “garbage” is not conclusive proof of arrogance, if that work is actual garbage. Linus has calmed down a lot over the years, yet at this point if he still has issues with somebody’s work, it’s probably best to listen rather than calling that arrogance.

Personally, I do believe the quality of Linux kernel has a lot to do with having a steward able to be firm and opinionated, rather than adopting a passive anglo management style where confrontation is avoided at all costs.
by kube-system | 2025-08-12 18:36:44+00:00
Most vehicular tunnels aren't too terribly long, if you're stuck in one in traffic, yeah dead reckoning drifts quite a bit. But if you're driving through one for a minute or two, it's sufficient.

On a side note I've personally had bad experience with beacons in train tunnels telling me I'm miles away from where I'm actually at.