MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-13 14:59:08+00:00
He just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance.

Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
by grepnork | 2025-08-13 14:59:34+00:00
Currently, the police are catching up with shopping centres and entertainment chains who've been using this tech for years.

The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR.

Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator.

The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.
by agentultra | 2025-08-13 14:59:43+00:00
I’m not confident that AI can be used in place of human knowledge workers.

If you’re in software and maintaining a React application front end I can see the appeal: it takes so much code just to add a button. And it’s not like the web platform is going to get good.

It’s automated copy-pasting from stack overflow and GitHub. That can be useful.

But it’s also pretty meh. Humans stop reading code deeply enough to catch errors when they read more than a couple hundred lines of code in an hour. Someone still has to be liable for those errors when they cause harm to customer businesses and assets. Maybe AI and agent tooling will get good enough to keep that error rate low enough to be tolerable.

But maybe not.

What is concerning is that capital is getting so much support from the state. Labourers are being left in the lurch. I think part of that “redistribution of wealth,” needs to involve getting capital to support and work with labour instead of just exploiting it and squeezing everyone dry.

It’s wealth inequality and climate at the end of the day.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 14:59:44+00:00
Will they pay ten times more for a Big Mac? Probably not, but why would they need to? Hundreds of billions is Facebook's revenue. The businesses in this space are there if they can take those customers alone, never mind all the other places where advertising takes place. The market exists, is sufficiently large, and willing to spend. All these "AI" businesses need to do is show that the users are spending time on their services instead, which is exactly what they are working on right now.

The question is really only: Will users actually want to continue to use these services once the novelty wears off? The assumption is that they are useful enough to become an integral part of our lives, but time will tell...
by mvieira38 | 2025-08-13 15:00:07+00:00
We have dedicated bus lanes where I live, and they don't really work during heavy rush hour, unfortunately, due to merging and turns. For example, most of the time the bus lane needs to be on the right so it can pick people up, so cars turning right will have to cross the bus lane somewhere. The opposite happens if the bus needs to take a left turn, or if another bus is stopped for maintenance or something and overtaking is necessary.

Not to mention a lot of people figure out where the cameras are for the bus lane auto-fines and just dodge them when appropriate, but I guess that's a third world problem.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-13 15:00:13+00:00
Now that he’s got it in a computer, it might be interesting to ask questions like: what’s the geometry that has the sharpest transition, while also preserving some sort of “good view” of the two subjects from a lot of viewing angles. I think this is not even a good phrasing of the problem yet, but phrasing the problem well is part of the fun.

I guess this could be interestingly image-dependent. In particular she’s quite pale, so I wonder how many surfaces could be shared between the two images.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-13 15:00:18+00:00
The point is that "having a role" is not a core part of their model. You can also tell them to have a style, or tell them to avoid certain language, or not tell them anything specific but just speak in a way that makes them adopt a certain tone for the responses, etc.

This is similar to how you can ask me to roleplay as a wizard, and I will probably do it, but it's not a requirement for interacting with me. Conversely, an actor or an improviser on a stage would fit your original description better: they are someone who you give a role to, and they act out that role. The role is a core part of that, not an incidental option like it is for an LLM.
Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode
by andros | 2025-08-13 15:00:25+00:00
After collaborating with several communities around twtxt and gathering many improvements requested by the community, I thought that many of the technical limitations or wishes that people had could be resolved within an org file. Org social is a first draft to ask the community for feedback and see if it was something that could be useful to people. The response has been very positive and overwhelming.

It is and will remain a niche technology, its use is intentionally limited to a group of people who love the org format and want to share their thoughts, articles and reflections without having to generate HTML. In addition to being able to interact with the different Emacs communities through mentions and replies.

I am gradually responding to everyone who has written to me, sent me ideas and suggestions. If you really have something interesting to contribute, please make a pull request in the repository or send me a DM on Mastodon.
by Anthony-G | 2025-08-13 15:00:35+00:00
Fair points. Thankfully, I haven't had any of those issues.

I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN.

Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often.

For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-13 15:00:43+00:00
I for the most part havent had AI and my kid interact.

I have done voice ai chat. You can have the ai play twenty questions or "what am I thinking of"

You can have the AI create adventure stories with interaction.

"you as a dinosaur hear a rustling in the bushes, do you A, go check the bushes or B, ignore it."

Then it takes the kid on a self-constructed story adventure.

Ive generally not had success with "Two truths and a lie". Telephone game didnt work because the chat ai just blurts it out loudly.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-13 15:00:44+00:00
> What good does this bring us if it means clang can't be used to target platforms where direct memory access is a thing?

I don’t know about this specific instance, but generally disallowing aliasing enables huge performance gains. That’s something Rust does to a great amount and one of the reasons real world code bases are faster in C than C++ (the other being a much better standard library with better defaults for containers and whatnot)
by cmcaleer | 2025-08-13 15:01:20+00:00
A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head).

The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.

Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.

The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.

[0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 15:01:33+00:00
> Public transportation should always be free in cities, with car commuters paying the operation costs

Strongly disagree. There are too many perverse incentives that work against transit. If there are a lot of car commuters (which there will be - plumbers taking their tools to the job for example) they have inventive to pressure politicians to reduce that tax - any voting block will always be more powerful than the distributed masses. Your transit operators need to ensure transit doesn't become too popular: the more people taking transit the less cars there are paying that tax.

Besides almost no transit rider is worried about costs. They are all interested instead in better service, so use all the money you can get - including fares - to build better service. This is long term what everyone needs.

Yes you do need a program for the poor. However the majority of your people shouldn't be in that program.
by busterarm | 2025-08-13 15:01:53+00:00
As a longtime attendee myself, this is absolutely true.

Also, DEFCON and DT specifically have not shifted anywhere. A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general. They are also not "counterculture" as these are mainstream/televised points of view.

I had to stop dealing with certain parts/people of DEFCON and infosec in general because of this intense noise. That's not pegging myself as being on the right, it's just that my DEFCON experience has always been about expanding my worldview and fun... this very loud and influential group isn't about either of those things.
by jpalawaga | 2025-08-13 15:02:14+00:00
I come from a family of farmers, and some of my family does actively farm.

None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.

Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.

Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
by rollcat | 2025-08-13 15:02:23+00:00
It looks like it could be future-compatible with a possible Euro Rack refit? Nothing cooler than DIYing a DSP for your DIY modsynth!

Heightwise, it fits: 100mm vs ER's ~128mm; trickier with depth - 180mm vs "deep" ER modules ~100mm. One option would be a rack with no back panel. Power in ER is already being distributed via a ribbon cable so this shouldn't impact the ability to install standard modules. Electrically - 12V, perfect match.

What is the width of each module? Assuming (250mm-case)/8 ~= 30-32mm?
by andrepd | 2025-08-13 15:03:25+00:00
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.

You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
by km144 | 2025-08-13 15:03:39+00:00
As you alluded to at the end of your post—I'm not really convinced 20k LOC is very limiting. How many lines of code can you fit in your working mental model of a program? Certainly less than 20k concrete lines of text at any given time.

In your working mental model, you have broad understandings of the broader domain. You have broad understandings of the architecture. You summarize broad sections of the program into simpler ideas. module_a does x, module_b does y, insane file c does z, and so on. Then there is the part of the software you're actively working on, where you need more concrete context.

So as you move towards the central task, the context becomes more specific. But the vague outer context is still crucial to the task at hand. Now, you can certainly find ways to summarize this mental model in an input to an LLM, especially with increasing context windows. But we probably need to understand how we would better present these sorts of things to achieve performance similar to a human brain, because the mechanism is very different.
by vishvananda | 2025-08-13 15:03:49+00:00
I share the concern based on the current productivity expectations but I did stumble across something recently which makes me feel a lot better. There was a change in the tax code that coincides with the beginning of the post-pandemic layoffs[1]. This was changed back last month by the BBB which likely means a bunch of new R&D spend for big tech. I think this is why we are seeing intense M&A activity and if we can keep the AI hype under control it will probably lead to new hiring as well.

[1]: https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-micro...
by fatbird | 2025-08-13 15:04:13+00:00
The article touches on the security aspect, but doesn't highlight the real tension: if you have a proper build cycle, part of that is automated security scanning with multiple tools. Once an EOLed part of your stack is raising issues, they'll keep getting raised and dismissed with an exception to the rule of "fix all security issues". The backlog of unfixable issues grows, and in places with strict policies about addressing issues, this becomes untenable.

JS microdependency packaging makes this exponentially worse.
by aisosozjbx | 2025-08-13 15:04:25+00:00
Why not? Seems to match the trend of tech innovation creating more demand for tech.

The reality is lots of software problems can’t be solved with the level of “intelligence” LLMs have. And if they could, it wouldn’t be just software in danger - it’d be every human profession. Even the physical ones, since AI would quickly figure out how to build machinery to automate those.
by kangs | 2025-08-13 15:04:38+00:00
IMO there a flaw in this typical argument: Humans are not less fallible than current LLMs in average, unless they're experts - and even that will likely change.

what that means is that you cannot trust a human in the loop to somehow make it safe. it was also not safe with only humans.

The key difference is that LLMs are fast, relentless - humans are slow and get tired - humans have friction, and friction means slower to generate errors too.

once you embrace these differences its a lot easier yo understand where and how LLM should be used.
by bamboozled | 2025-08-13 15:04:42+00:00
Is this really because if AI or is it because of economic hardships ?

I’m just one consumer but due to inflation my spending is down massively. Also because of all the doom predictions. I’m saving way more money.

I’m sure this is slowing things down and as I said, because of the piece of eggs , I’m can’t be the only one spending less.

If you look at reality. Companies at the top of the revenue pyramid just don’t pay enough tax, and it’s borked everything.
by amai | 2025-08-13 15:04:44+00:00
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index China is on place 145 from 167 countries. About the first 100 countries are all democratic. Everything below 100 is a dictatorship.

And since mainland China was never a democracy it can be said that China is more than 2000 years behind the West in democratic development.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-13 15:05:19+00:00
> Is this person someone you know or some firm which handles things like these?

It's one of my children.

I doubt that they would pass away without me knowing about it since I talk with my children frequently, but if that happened then the plan falls apart a bit. There are actually a couple of failure points aside from that in my plan that could lead to a loss of the data. The odds of that happening are low enough that I'm willing to take that risk, though.

The actually important stuff such as legal documents are kept in a safe deposit box and with my attorney. Those are the only things that I consider to be mandatory, so those are the most recoverable.
by mikestew | 2025-08-13 15:05:21+00:00
Why would he? I’ve been hearing concerns about national debt my whole life (including the 80s when interest rates were a hell of a lot higher than now), and I’m retirement age. I’m not saying those chickens won’t eventually come home to roost, but probably not anytime soon. The U. S. has become quite skilled at giving that tin can a swift kick down the road.
by yalogin | 2025-08-13 15:05:21+00:00
I am not so optimistic. The overall need this post describes will still exist. However the whole release cycle will be condensed severely. Coding takes the most time in a software cycle and if that is essentially zero now, we expect large scale projects (by today’s standards) to be released in days.

More importantly the number of people needed could be cut drastically. A hundred person project could may be done by a handful of architects who write code by themselves.

I can see a director level org (100 people) to shrink to a regular EM role with 10 people. The rest of the company may not be impacted that much.
by pmdr | 2025-08-13 15:05:26+00:00
chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com made sense. Chatgpt.com to chat.com makes less sense IMO, for it's the "gpt" part that people know is associated with AI. They probably bought chat.com just to show off, they burn billions every month, so what's a few million (at most) for a domain?
by AstroBen | 2025-08-13 15:06:17+00:00
I shared your view a year ago. Hell half my posts here on HN are arguing against the annoying hype. Today I make heavy use of AI and my code quality has gone up, not down. It's better tested, better factored, with better error handling covering more edge cases

AI code is only buggy if no-one is guiding or reviewing it

I'm not sure how long we'll need someone in the middle to actually review the code
by mrtksn | 2025-08-13 15:06:36+00:00
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.

This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.

The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.

What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
by rastignack | 2025-08-13 15:06:37+00:00
Maybe the FS was upstreamed too soon, causing your development velocity and the high expectations you have for your end users to be at odd with the well entrenched workflows of Linux maintainers.

In any case as a Linux user, I want to thank you for your work and for your code which taught me a lot.

I hope it didn’t take too much of a toll on you.

Let’s hope that with the recent stabilization, the maintenance will be easier.
by Lio | 2025-08-13 15:06:47+00:00
It's also worth noting that if you are arrested for a serious offence your DNA and biometrics will taken and held for ever even if you are release without charge and the real perpetrator latter convicted.

In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.

The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.

West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.

No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.

You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.

Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.

See the Scott Inquiry for details.

1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.
by sofixa | 2025-08-13 15:06:48+00:00
Unfortunately, that's not how Switzerland operates, because it's a very direct democracy where the status quo and the will of the majority takes priority over common sense and long term thinking. Full franchise (women being allowed to vote) didn't happen in all cantons until the 1990s (after it being made possible in the 1970s), because the existing voters (men) just voted against it.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-13 15:06:56+00:00
> There is no plan in place at all for the outcome of most work becoming redundant. At least in the US I highly doubt we will be capable of implementing some system such as UBI for the benefit of all citizens so everyone can take advantage of most work being automated. Everyone will be left to pick up scraps and barely survive.

If 80% of US citizens lose their jobs, I assure you that there will be a political response. It might not be one you (or I) like, but it will happen and it will be a big deal.
by voxleone | 2025-08-13 15:07:05+00:00
Registrars [like Namecheap] label short, original, distinctive domains [like the one you spent weeks, months brainstorming] as "premium" right at the moment of registration, even if they were available only days or weeks prior. Once these domains are marked as premium, they are sold at exorbitant prices, often far beyond their true market value. In essence, a registrar hijacks what would otherwise be a standard domain, inflating its value simply because it's easy to do so.

There's a sharp contrast when you work with, for instance, a Brazilian registrar, Registro.br, where all domains are treated equally.
by righthand | 2025-08-13 15:07:10+00:00
> Homelessness skyrockets because people can't pay their rent, but now it's whole families on the streets

> We start to see unrest and/or riots against "the rich" because there are no jobs, and people are being evicted

> Crime goes up significantly

Arguably once a good percentage of people become unhoused, we are no longer living in a fair society. IT SHOULD break down into violence. But then so say "Crime goes up significantly". What crime? There is no society where a crime can be defined.