MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xpe | 2025-08-12 13:30:14+00:00
"Here is how you build a self-replicating unknown-impact protein structure that will survive in the wild. If this bothers you, stop reading".

Other people's blasé risk profile -- or worse, willful denial of risk -- is indeed our problem. Why?

1. Externalities, including but not limited to: security breaches, service abuse, resource depletion, and (repeat after me -- even if you only think the probability is 0.01%, such things do happen) letting a rogue AI get out of the box. *

2. Social contagion. Even if one person did think about the risks and deem them acceptable, other people all too often will just blindly copy the bottom-line result. We are only slightly evolved apes after all.

Ultimately, this is about probabilities. How many people actually take the fifteen minutes to thoughtfully build an attack tree? Or even one minute to listen to that voice in their head that says "yeah, I probably should think about this weird feeling I have ... ... maybe my subconscious mind is trying to tell me something ... maybe there is indeed a rational basis for my discomfort ... maybe there is a reason why people are warning me about this."

Remember, this isn't only about "your freedom" or "your appetite for risk" or some principle of your political philosophy that says no one should tell you what to do. What you do can affect other people, so you need to own that. Even if you don't care what other people think, that won't stop a backlash.

* https://www.aisafetybook.com/textbook/rogue-ai
by daemonologist | 2025-08-12 13:31:01+00:00
Hah, probably comparable to running a desktop for an equivalent amount of time - most ebike chargers are 100 - 200 W, and the bikes usually have a battery between 0.5 - 1 kWh (which in my area would be 5 - 10 cents). Less disruptive though, assuming they detached the battery and left the bike outside.
by shazbotter | 2025-08-12 13:31:10+00:00
This is the expected outcome in capitalism. The general flow is money -> commodities -> greater money, and while it's not zero sum eventually that flow necessarily concentrates the money into entities that have the most money.

Once you become large enough, your "commodities" become other companies that are growing, enabling you to simply purchase growth and income directly with your capital.

In game design we call this a snowball effect or a "winners win more" system. It necessarily disadvantages everyone who is not at the top.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little appetite for limiting the capacity of capital to accumulate in only a few winners.
Show HN: AI that controls your desktop natively
by AndrewEdelman | 2025-08-12 13:31:33+00:00
AI that actually controls your Windows/Mac desktop - clicks, types, automates workflows across any application. Native OS integration, not cloud APIs.

Built this because I was tired of AI that could only chat. Free tier (Gemini) + paid tier (Claude) for reliable automation.

The AI can automate complex workflows, manage files/emails, control browsers and native apps. Just launched 2 weeks ago.

What workflows would you want automated?
by ddoolin | 2025-08-12 13:31:46+00:00
My grandpa (father's father) grew up in Rochester and that was the first time I visited New York for a family reunion, way back in the early aughts. Kodak was the major employer in town then; he and practically everyone he knew either worked there, had dealings with them in some form, or knew many others who did. When we went, I had the pleasure of touring the place and hearing plenty of stories from my gramps and our family. Good times.
by Kwpolska | 2025-08-12 13:32:29+00:00
> For 64bit versions, both AMD64 and Itanium, support ended on the 30th of June in 2005.

Even Apple would not deprecate an OS two months after its release. The AMD64 version was supported until 2014, the same as the x86 version. Itanium was a dumpster fire, and anyone who had any Itanium hardware would probably want Server 2003 anyway.
by myth_drannon | 2025-08-12 13:33:45+00:00
It's interesting how the BBC and other left media are reacting to the elimination of those Hamas members. When Ukrainians eleminate and assassinate Russian journalists there is little or no reaction, sometime some small celebrations. Mind you that Russian journalists act mostly as propagandists, while the one ones that Israel eliminated are members of Hamas military wing. In case of Gazan journalist Anus that Israel tore him up yesterday, there are videos of him jumping on the head of an Israeli murdered on Oct 7th.
by aeon_ai | 2025-08-12 13:34:13+00:00
You think I delegated the opinion or the seriousness of this situation to the chatbot?

This is not just a run-of-the-mill news story. It's a fight for the rights enshrined in our constitution.

(And yes - I framed that the way a chatbot might to emphasize the point.)

You're going to have a hard time convincing me this is "overly dramatic" given the context.
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 13:34:26+00:00
“Merit” can mean different things depending on the nature of the job. Juilliard using auditions instead of SATs is still merit-based admissions. But “merit” never means someone’s race or ethnicity.

Put differently, DEI is when you have double standards based on race. Colleges do think test scores = merit, because that’s the primary criterion for selecting among within the group of whites/asians. It’s DEI when they use other factors to try and achieve desired racial balancing.
Show HN: Marchat – 6 MB terminal chat with encryption and plugin support
by Cod-e-Codes | 2025-08-12 13:34:57+00:00
We built marchat as a lightweight, terminal-native group chat app in Go with Bubble Tea for the TUI. It runs a full server in ~6MB RAM (idle ~4-5MB, low CPU), making it perfect for self-hosting on VPS, Raspberry Pi, Unraid (template in progress), or even mobile via Termux on Android (client ~30-45MB RSS, ~5% CPU, minimal battery drain).

Key features: - Real-time WebSocket messaging with optional E2E encryption (X25519/ChaCha20-Poly1305) - File sharing (up to 1MB) with commands like :sendfile/:savefile - Plugin ecosystem: TUI store for browsing/installing (WIP), SDK for custom plugins (e.g., echo — more to come), subprocess isolation for security, and Ed25519 licensing - Themes (e.g., patriot, retro, and modern), partial emoji auto-conversion - Admin tools (:kick, :ban, :cleardb) and message retention (1000 cap, SQLite backend) - Simple JSON protocol for bots or alternative clients - Offline-first design, with history loading on connect

Tested in real setups: Docker server in one city, clients via nginx proxy from others—no drops, seamless mobile-to-desktop transfers. Even hosted the server on Android Termux with PC clients connecting flawlessly.

For easy deployment, marchat is also available on Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/codecodesxyz/marchat

Roadmap includes DB abstraction (PostgreSQL/MySQL support), perf tweaks (WAL mode, indexing, caching), and plugin enhancements (auto-updates, metrics). Featured on selfh.st and mtkblogs—grateful for the early spotlight!

Would love HN feedback on the architecture, plugin system, or use cases (e.g., dev teams, edge/IoT chats). Open to contribs of all kinds including doc clarification/refactor.

GitHub: https://github.com/Cod-e-Codes/marchat

Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/codecodesxyz/marchat
by hatsuseno | 2025-08-12 13:35:10+00:00
Sort of, the "zip folder" thing was introduced with the "98 Plus!" pack, but came natively with XP. That said, "natively supported in Windows" is one thing, but the usability was... well, not great. The entire "it's a compressed folder!" analogy seems reasonable, but the implementation wasn't. It ate memory like few other components, crashed often, and because it was treated like a folder only in file explorer the analogy quickly broke down when using a file picker anywhere else. WinZIP and WinRAR were basically requirements if you often worked with zip archives until 7zip came along and did everything just a tad better.
by xnorswap | 2025-08-12 13:35:16+00:00
But traditional barriers have been able to be knocked down more easily with charity, because it's easier to raise charity money for capex than opex.

It was common to have charity drives to get computers into schools, for example, but it's much harder to see people donating money for tokens for poor people.

Previous-generation equipment can be donated, and can still spark an interest in computing and programming. Whereas you literally now can't even use ChatGPT-4.
by StopVibeCoding | 2025-08-12 13:35:38+00:00
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me." -1984
Show HN: Drawbridge – "Figma Comments" for Cursor
by tbreschi | 2025-08-12 13:35:59+00:00
As a product designer working with Cursor, I constantly have to move back and forth between the browser and my development environment to describe edits I want to make on the back end.

Initially, this meant describing the changes I wanted in plain text — until I discovered that taking screenshots with annotations (pink boxes, arrows, etc.) seemed to provide better results.

This was a boon at the time, I could bend Cursor to my will if I gave it enough visual context! But, the process felt tedious.

What if I could just click on the interface itself, leave a comment or instruction, and send that directly to Cursor or my local tools?

I built Drawbridge to test this idea, and make my workflow more efficient. Checkout the github and let me know what you think. Thanks!
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 13:36:02+00:00
> Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.

This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help.

> And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.

Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim.

[0]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-12 13:36:21+00:00
Democracy gets traded for dictatorship because someone shows up and says "I might not be perfect but I'm a hell of a lot better than these schmucks who've been ruining things". And when that person saying that stuff shows up at a point in time when the people who have been in charge of things have run the country into the ground with wars, debts and policies that give people no hope that things will get better, it's a pretty compelling message.
Show HN: HackerNewsGames [Alpha]
by labarilem | 2025-08-12 13:36:22+00:00
I'm building a manually curated catalog of games made by the HN community.

I'v found several small gems while browsing HN, and it would've been quite difficult to find those games otherwise. So I've started a personal quest to collect those games into a public catalog with open source code and open data (everything is available on GitHub: https://github.com/labarilem/hn-games).

Currently the collection has data up to the end of 2022. The plan, of course, is to gather all data up to today and then keep updating the collection.

I've published this early version of the catalog to gather some insights and feedback if possible. Especially about UI/UX, which has been mostly LLM-coded to speed things up (I'm not an expert in those domains).

You can browse the catalog at these addresses:

- https://hackernews.games/

- https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/

Please let me know what you think about the project!
by bspammer | 2025-08-12 13:37:01+00:00
As someone who knows very little about finance, is there any ETF available which acts as a middle-ground between market-cap weighted and equally-weighted funds? The very high concentration of tech and AI in the S&P 500 at the moment makes me uncomfortable, but equal-weight seems too drastic to me. A fund where the weighting is done by the square root of the market cap feels like it would make sense but I can't find anyone doing this.
by neuroelectron | 2025-08-12 13:37:38+00:00
AI is ideal for cybersecurity, if it's implemented correctly. Unknown Zero days could be prevented and detected. Now if you're plugging in an LLM with MCP, just give up. In fact, they've been around for a long time: ML classifiers for malware detection (static + behavioral), anomaly detection for network traffic and endpoint behavior, predictive models for fraud prevention in e-retail, automated correlation of SIEM events for professional review.

Then came LLMs and now you have VCs trying to plug in logs and Jira to their product... researchers say.
by jfengel | 2025-08-12 13:37:46+00:00
There is a democratic process involved. Supreme Court members are nominated by an elected president and affirmed by an elected Senate. It's democracy at an arm's length, but it's not as if they inherited the positions or got in through force of arms.

But it introduces a fairly obvious winning tactic: devote 100% of your effort to dominating that specific branch, and then you control all future decisions by the others. If you keep an eye on the bottom line, you make just enough allies to control the Court membership. Do that long enough and then 49% of the population simply don't matter any more. Their votes might as well not exist.

That's why you get two parties: each is threatening to do that to the other. Anybody who isn't part of one or the other is already completely irrelevant. Somebody has a majority and they make the rules, forever. It's a 51% attack.

All I can say in its favor is that it seemed like a sufficiently good idea at the time. The failure modes were pretty obvious, but they counted on a majority of people not being willing to completely eliminate the power of the rest. Turns out that was wrong.
by jpamata | 2025-08-12 13:38:17+00:00
Strategy is far from the bulk of their work

Most of their job is about people, leverage, and execution. It's not a sit and think job, it's mostly 1:1s and coalition-building

Theyre also utilizing LLMs to augment themselves. And are getting more data, from off-record convos to reports from trusted smart colleagues who used an LLM to refine their intel
by matwood | 2025-08-12 13:38:18+00:00
Everyone has some level of privilege. I didn't get my first PC until I was a freshman in college. I had to spend part of my college loan buying one (~$3k IIRC). Up to that point I had only played with the Apple IIc's and the few Macs they had at my high school..

Information on programming also wasn't as readily available as it is now. I used to go the book stores and use pencil and paper and copy out solutions since $50+ for a book was way more money than I could spend.

Everything today is crazy inexpensive for the value.
by brookst | 2025-08-12 13:38:30+00:00
It still uses text tokenization, so it can’t even see the word. Not sure what tokenizer GLM uses, but OpenAI’s tokenizer renders “blueberry” as a single token (116500 or thereabouts IIRC).

It’s like asking us what the average wavelength is when looking at a blueberry: the information is actually there somewhere in our processing stack, but inaccessible to reasoning. It can be worked out logically from general knowledge, but probably inaccurately, and the gotcha of “you’re looking right at it and the photons are hitting your vision” is not much of a gotcha when you understand how it works.
by billfruit | 2025-08-12 13:39:08+00:00
I think using org mode is way overkill. If someone wants to do pros tastination dressed up as emacs-gardening, it may be a good option.

The best todo app ideally should be a smartphone app, which you'd have always with you. I think Microsoft Todo is a good choice for Android. It is mostly functional, free of cost and does not have any ads.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-08-12 13:39:09+00:00
I am more and more convinced that we should set hard limits on size of companies and also individual wealth. I am ok with rewarding hard work but we have reached a point where wealthy individuals and large companies have accumulated too much power.

During the last election I was shocked how most people seem to think it’s ok for somebody like Musk to try to influence a senate election and to intimidate other candidates if they don’t fall in line. This should not be acceptable in a democracy.

Soon we will have the first trillionaire. That person will probably be more powerful than a lot of countries or US states.
by binaryturtle | 2025-08-12 13:39:10+00:00
You can't even get Rust of Go to run easily on a slightly older machine (e.g. try it on a OS X Yosemite machine) because all the compatibility issues. That's not even getting to all the "online" dependencies. This are two of the worst language ecosystems in this regard (I don't know anything that would be worse actually.)

No such problems with complex C compiler packages.

Hopefully the gcc Rust project can mitigate some of the issues for Rust (since everyone wants to rust-ify long standing projects these days and hence breaking backwards compatibility of the respective packages just to be "hip & trendy")
by bojle | 2025-08-12 13:39:32+00:00
I found todo apps to be clunky and bloated. I decided to use github issues (of a private repository) as my notes. I even made a little script around it (via gh-cli) to edit it from the command line [1]. I don't update TODO very often from my phone, but in case I want to, I use the Github mobile app. I am finally content with this solution (although I don't know for how long).

[1] https://github.com/bojle/note.py
by quesera | 2025-08-12 13:39:42+00:00
I totally agree with your first point.

Money cheapens social interactions. It reduces them to competitive advantage, exploiter or exploited. I do not want to interact with anyone that way, ever. Certainly not friends.

But I acknowledge that this is oversimplified. It is possible for mature people to find an appropriate level of heightened excitement/tension due to the elevated consequences of money. Most people have the self-control to handle/compartmentalize it, or to avoid levels where the consequences become meaningful to them (this gets harder if alcohol is involved, which it seems to always be).

This appropriate level will vary by group, but there seems to be a persistent conflict between "excitingly meaningful" and "respectfully modest" amounts of money. And of course everyone's monetary circumstances are different. And there's a social pressure to participate which may exceed your circumstances. And there's an issue where the strong (experienced) players have no choice but to prey upon the weak (new or less smart) players. These issues are the inescapable ugliness that I just can't get over.

So I will never play any game for money, and I sometimes wonder whether people who enjoy such predatory thinking patterns are deserving of a standard level of trust.

I know it's not that simple, but sometimes it is.

The other arguments, about teaching strategy vs tactics, human psychology (under stress), working with imperfect information, calculated risks, etc, are all valid and important too. And I believe that playing for money elevates these lessons. Some people (for pleasure or necessity) choose to be hard-nosed in life. My enduring privilege is that I do not need to be, and I am very grateful for that.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-12 13:41:07+00:00
>When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?

Why is grass height any of the government's business? Who voted for the people who did that? Who came up with the legal theories under which those laws exist? Why were these ever a justifiable pretense for the government to threaten people with force in the first place?

We all know the argument. It's some mumbo jumbo about mice and pests and public health, about blight and property values, and government interest in those things. But now the people (demographically, if not literally the same individuals in some cases) who were the ones peddling it are the ones threatened by it and it's made immediately clear to them how bullshit their justification was.

I feel like I'm the fucking goose chasing the guy in the down coat and I don't want to be.
by sgarland | 2025-08-12 13:42:03+00:00
12-year-old me had (or rather, my family had) a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz, both from Gateway, because that was the sole awesome perk my dad got from working there: literally free computers, with a required number of years of employment to pay them off. In 2000, the P3 was still pretty hot shit. I dual-booted them with every Linux distro under the sun. Since we had dial-up, the only way I had those distros was from 4-H [0], which at the time in Nebraska had a partnership with University of Nebraska to do tech instruction; once a quarter, we’d drive down to a campus (usually UNL) and spend a weekend learning something (LAMP stack, hardware troubleshooting, etc.), and having a LAN party at night. Also we had free access to their (at the time) screamingly fast internet, so I would download distros and packages to try out later.

My online upbringing was very much of the RTFM variety, and I am convinced that was and is a good method to learn. It’s not like the grumpy graybeards were cruel, they just didn’t want to waste their time answering the same “how do I…” questions from noobs. If you explained what you were experiencing, what you had read, and what you had tried, they were more than happy to help out. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable approach.

[0]: https://4-h.org/
by bluGill | 2025-08-12 13:42:03+00:00
The problem is you don't really think about those cases early enough to matter. 7 minutes of battery isn't even a knowable thing - that is current average (though often not calculated that well) and could be 10 minutes if nothing happens (no emails arrive, no web pages rendering in the background, don't touch anything on it....), but if you try to run that 5 minute task in reality you have 2 minutes of CPU using the P cores, or 5 minutes using the E cores - but on the E cores you need 7 minutes. The above times are all made up of course, but they give the idea.

If when the battery is full you make the right decisions your battery can last longer. However this isn't something you can do. You don't want a pop-up when your email program spawns a thread to check for new email - programs do this all the time and the system doesn't know if the thread itself will run for a few ms or for hours. In most cases the battery consumed by the popup will be more than the thread itself uses. You want the system to make the right decisions - but the right decision depends on your system and someone else with a difference CPU may need different decisions.