MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-16 16:19:16+00:00
>Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.

As long as Zuckerberg has no army forcing me, I'm fine with that. The issue would be whether he could breach contracts or get away with fraud. But if AI is sufficiently distributed, this is less likely to happen.

>At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.

I don't think of democracy as a goal to be achieved. I'm OK with democracy in so far it leads to what I value.

The big problem with democracy is that most of the time it doesn't lead to rational choices, even when voters are rational. In markets, for instance, you have an incentive to be rational, and if you aren't, the market will tend to transfer resources from you to someone more rational.

No such mechanism exists in a democracy; I have no incentive to do research and think hard about my vote. It's going to be worth the same as the vote of someone who believes the Earth is flat anyway.
by elric | 2025-08-16 16:19:23+00:00
In the case of fraud (like the article's example of a thieving storefront), banks can simply reverse the transfer. This is not an all-or-nothing deal where CCs are always safe because of theoretical chargebacks, and bank transfers are not.

Also: no-reason chargebacks are absolute BS. I worked on a PSP for a largeish adult entertainment business, and I remain convinced that most porn chargebacks are a case of "post nut clarity".
by WXLCKNO | 2025-08-16 16:19:34+00:00
"Write an extremely cursed piece of Python"

text-davinci-001

Python has been known to be a cursed language

Clearly AI peaked early on.

Jokes aside I realize they skipped models like 4o and others but the gap between the early gpt 4 and going immediately to gpt 5 feels a bit disingenuous.
by koonsolo | 2025-08-16 16:20:17+00:00
> This is abusive, wasteful, and should be illegal in my opinion.

I don't agree with this. Let's say they make 2 engines, one normal one and one powerful one. Customer pay different price points.

Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine, and limit the possibilities for the lower price point (this is already happening).

Now you come along and say "Illegal!". Now they have to sell this engine at the same price, which doesn't make sense in the market. So they are back to the inefficient way of producing 2 different engines for 2 different markets.

Calling this "wasteful" is weird in my eyes.

I'm not in the automotive industry, so I don't know all the details, and I might be wrong on the above reasoning, but this is what I got from it.

1 engine production line, serving 2 different price points.
by saltcured | 2025-08-16 16:20:24+00:00
Meanwhile, Garmin reorganized their (Iridium-based) inReach plans and took away a "suspend" option last year, and adding a lower "enabled" plan tier. They recently reintroduced the suspend option, so I guess they saw more uproar and customer loss than they anticipated.

Suspension is a total pause of service at zero recurring cost, for up to 12 months. The enabled rate is a new tier of service for about $8/mo that supports SOS and pay-as-you-go message pricing for any other use.

It is interesting to see that some competition in this area may actually start to redefine the offerings.
by password4321 | 2025-08-16 16:20:32+00:00
I am not working on:

- An entirely user-mode Docker container runtime for Windows, which based on my initial research would have to be qemu running Linux slowly. Maybe it could all be WASM'd into the browser (even more slowly)? The interesting part there would be interfacing storage/networking vs. the browser.

- Nested Windows RDP X509 [smart card] authentication through Guacamole or other browser-based RDP client into another RDP session.

- Free backup as formerly offered by CrashPlan "Home Family" sharing ended in 2017, using empty hard drive space of people you know and trust. Version 2 would support a virtual file system allowing specifying the number of redundant copies of replaceable rarely/never used operating system and software files to pull over the network when needed instead of duplicating on all computers, ideally with a slider choosing between disk space and network bandwidth. I considered licensing VirusTotal so my file system for anything that might exist on another computer is basically a SHA256 hash list + local cache, but that costs enough it would have to be a commercial business.

- My no longer supported Amazon Glow, a $250 refunded Amazon experiment that was the most awesome piece of technology connecting children with their relatives I've ever seen. I'd like to be able to deploy my own software but I'm guessing it remains as locked down as the Echo etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardwarehacking/comments/119acbh/re... https://instrumental.com/resources/teardown/amazon-glow/
by htmXlabs | 2025-08-16 16:20:39+00:00
"PET bottles on the Dutch market averaging 44% recycled PET content in 2023". Also, many other products: Fleece jackets are made out of bottles. That's up-cycling, afaik. And lots of packaging materials (bags, shampoo bottles, etc). If it is economical depends on many factors, and can be different in each country. Landfill may be cheap in the US, but extremely expensive in European countries, because there's no un-used land.

but yes, what can't be recycled is epoxy (also a plastic).
by tux1968 | 2025-08-16 16:20:46+00:00
This is an honest question, because I have no knowledge about cars at all. Could the "detuning" rather be interpreted as akin to the "binning" that CPU manufacturers do? So, if you buy a higher model car, you get qualified and tested parts for that performance rating. And if you buy a lower model, and "overclock" it, you're on your own?
by rayiner | 2025-08-16 16:20:54+00:00
That study defines “elite” as the top 10% of income earners, which is mostly skilled and knowledge workers, not owners. I can’t access the PDF but there was a reddit thread about the methodology: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/73nbuv/in.... So that is consistent with my point that knowledge workers have lots of political power.

Also, Vox did a piece discussing subsequent research that suggests that whatever effect Gilens and Page are seeing is relatively weak: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-.... I suspect you’d find a stronger correlation if you compared knowledge workers versus blue collar workers (I.e. accounted for the fact that you have fairly affluent tradespeople and medium income knowledge workers, like entry level folks who work in marketing).
by tetha | 2025-08-16 16:21:12+00:00
If you mess up your application code in a stateless container, that's boring. Roll code back, and you're back where you want to be. This is stateless and easy.

If you introduce a migration like "UPDATE billing SET prices = 0 ; WHERE something < 5", that's an entirely valid migration, but you mess up your state and then everyone is in a world of pain. This could, however, still be caught by various code review strategies, incremental rollouts and a large number of good development practices.

This is still easy, you can catch it before it hits prod so you don't have to fix prod.

And prod could still be fixed if your database layer manages backups, just with a day or two of downtime. If you don't have backups, you may have permanently lost information, which could kill the company.
by bitwizeshift | 2025-08-16 16:21:30+00:00
I hit send too early; Meant to say that it just knows words and that’s effectively it.

It’s cool technology, but the burden of proof of real intelligence shouldn’t be “can it answer questions it has great swaths of information on”, because that is the result it was designed to do.

It should be focused on whether it can truly synthesize information and know its limitations - something any programmer using Claude, copilot, Gemini, etc will tell you that it fabricates false information/apis/etc on a regular basis and has no fundamental knowledge that it even did that.

Or alternatively, ask these models leading questions that have no basis in reality — and watch what it comes up with. It’s become a fun meme in some circles to ask for definitions of nonsensical made up phrases to models, and see what crap it comes up with (again, without even knowing that it is).
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-16 16:21:59+00:00
In general, the Church is opposed to anything “magical” on the grounds that it is, first, irrational and superstitious, and second, entails evil desires for power and knowledge. These on their own suffice as justifications, but each of these are also taken to create conditions that make one vulnerable to demonic influence.

Here’s an excerpt from the Catechism [0]:

“Divination and magic

“2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.

“2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

“2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”

[0] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM
by seth17 | 2025-08-16 16:22:06+00:00
This seems like an unfair comparison for Dokku. I haven’t used the rest, but I have used Dokploy and Dokku. Dokku has had every single feature I could want or need, even accounting for weird edge cases. It just doesn’t have a UI.

With Dokploy, on the other hand, I found the UI difficult to navigate, which would be fine if the documentation was good but it was lacking.

But for many of the features their comparison claims Dokku doesn’t have, it actually does: database support, scheduled jobs, docker compose support. It has some form of monitoring. Overall Dokku has been a pretty robust solution for me and anything it might be missing, like in monitoring for instance, I can just add at the system level.

To be clear, I’m not anti-Dokploy and I think the more these tools improve the better. Just wanted to share my experience in defense of Dokku. Being able to spin up your apps on a cheap VPS is incredibly empowering over having to pay 10x more for managed services like Heroku or Render.
by anovikov | 2025-08-16 16:22:09+00:00
People only mean that AI companies themselves (which are huge by necessity because of immense scale of compute required, and limited hyper-expensive, unique talent they use, although that is secondary). They are supposed to grab all the value from all the industries much like say, Google took out all profits and value from all traditional media, advertisers, retailers, virtually everything. So it will be like, 2-5 hyper large companies controlling majority of GDP. Which may be actually not that bad. Being in the driver seat, they may provide an alternative to 2 political parties - certainly a much saner alternative. Because they will be able to decide just about everything - and government won't be able to stop them because of their transnational nature, and very soon, will be unable to stop them by force as well - they may create a more sensible government by sidelining and/or co-opting traditional political system and make everyone happier. It might look a bit like Lebanon at times, though.

When people say that we are entering new Middle Ages, they might actually be cool.
by simianwords | 2025-08-16 16:22:14+00:00
My interpretation of the progress.

3.5 to 4 was the most major leap. It went from being a party trick to legitimately useful sometimes. It did hallucinate a lot but I was still able to get some use out of it. I wouldn't count on it for most things however. It could answer simple questions and get it right mostly but never one or two levels deep.

I clearly remember 4o was also a decent leap - the accuracy increased substantially. It could answer niche questions without much hallucination. I could essentially replace it with Google for basic to slightly complex fact checking.

* 4o was the first time I actually considered paying for this tool. The $20 price was finally worth it.

o1 models were also a big leap over 4o (I realise I have been saying big leap too many times but it is true). The accuracy increased again and I got even more confident using it for niche topics. I would have to verify the results much less often. Oh and coding capabilities dramatically improved here in the thinking model. o1 essentially invented oneshotting - slightly non trivial apps could be made just by one prompt for the first time.

o3 jump was incremental and so was gpt 5.
by nprateem | 2025-08-16 16:22:18+00:00
The trouble is, I'm perfectly well aware I can go to the AI tools, ask it to do something and it'll do it. So there's no point me wasting time eg reading AI blog posts as they'll probably just tell me what I've just read. The same goes for any media.

It'll only stand on its own when significant work is required. This is possible today with writing, provided the AI is directed to incorporate original insights.

And unless it's immediately obvious to consumers a high level of work has gone into it, it'll all be tarred by the same brush.

Any workforce needs direction. Thinking an AI can creatively execute when not given a vision is flawed.

Either people will spaff out easy to generate media (which will therefore have no value due to abundance), or they'll spend time providing insight and direction to create genuinely good content... but again unless it's immediately obvious this has been done, it will again suffer the tarring through association.

The issue is really one of deciding to whom to give your attention. It's the reason an ordinary song produced by a megastar is a hit vs when it's performed by an unsigned artist. Or, as in the famous experiment, the same world class violinist gets paid about $22 for a recital while busking vs selling out a concert hall for $100 per seat that same week.

This is the issue AI, no matter how good, will have to overcome.
by Jensson | 2025-08-16 16:22:20+00:00
Prompting it to ask clarifying questions will make it ask questions it has seen before, not ask questions it needs you to clarify. So that doesn't solve the problem, it just causes other problems.

If it actually did solve the problem then they would train the models to act that way by default, so anything that you need to make smart prompts for has to be dumb.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-16 16:22:22+00:00
It has been a common tactic to work around the filibuster and reconciliation rules, and to repeal them later. They didn't expect the democrats to oppose the repeal so hard and destroy tech jobs on their watch. They know no one will ever blame them for it, like you can see on HN. Democrats platform is all about higher taxes on corps so that tracks with their actions, jobs be damned.
by gmm1990 | 2025-08-16 16:22:32+00:00
I seem to gravitate towards nosql type databases, defining tables in a ddl and then again in the code seems repetitive, and slows down changes. But the idea would be that the code is what defines the table. It'd be nice though to hear some of the drawbacks of this. Maybe for very relational things it makes sense to be able to write join queries so data is completely repeated, but my understanding would be that most data base engines would already compress that repeated info pretty well.
by shubhamjain | 2025-08-16 16:22:39+00:00
Geez! When it comes to answering questions, GPT-5 almost always starts with glazing about what a great question it is, where as GPT-4 directly addresses the answer without the fluff. In a blind test, I would probably pick GPT-4 as a superior model, so I am not surprised why people feel so let down with GPT-5.
by eth0up | 2025-08-16 16:22:57+00:00
Hydroxyapatite based paste is incredible, and has astonished a few of my incredulous friends dealing with dental problems.

It always seemed very interesting in a cynical way that Sensodyne Repair and Protect has a European version with hydroxyapatite but doesn't offer it in the US. The only reputable US brand I'm aware of is Dr Collins Biomin, which is excellent but weak on the hydroxyapatite.

I'll be abused for it here, but I'm intractably convinced the ADA and generally despicable US health industry prefer to avoid it due to its efficacy and how much revenue would be lost if it were more common. Say what you will against this, and I'll remain convinced.
by mansa10 | 2025-08-16 16:23:00+00:00
I've never understood this insurance defense of high payment card fees (percentages instead of flat fees). If it is a truly valuable insurance for the shoppers, why is it not opt-in?

My anecdotal experience from EU is that no-one even knows chargebacks exists or how it works and if this was turned into a transparent honest insurance, prompted via a question on the payment terminal/online checkout such as "Do you want to pay 1-3% to insure this purchase?" the vast majority of people would click no on the vast majority of purchases because there is already inherent trust involved between the merchant and the shopper.

Now add the chargeback pains that merchants go through for credit card frauds and you have what appears to be a sickly system where both shoppers and merchants lose, with the only winners being visa/mastercard & the acquiring and issuing banks they cooperate with.

If I buy a burger from a restaurant and its bad, i tell all my friends and i don't go back. I don't need insurance.

If I buy a service on steam, i already trust valve fully for those smaller amount sizes, I don't need insurance.

My gut feeling is that >99,9% of purchases made via payment cards are not relevant to insure meaning following the simpler risk model of cash for those would work just fine.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-16 16:23:01+00:00
Hmm yeah like gamification they put in everywhere these days. I don't really understand the attraction of that. I don't want my watch reminding me I'm halfway through my 'goal' which I only set because there was no way to activate the damn thing without setting one. Samsung also keeps switching notifications for it back on. Grrrr.

But in pursuit of these made up goals the industry ruins very real lives by widening the gap between the rich and poor :(
by seabrookmx | 2025-08-16 16:23:08+00:00
Not the person you asked, but I'm in a similar boat (15 years, polyglot but a lot of C#).

I mostly use VS Code to be honest. I use VSCode for other languages and for a long time it was the only graphical editor to have good remote development (over SSH) support.

Rider has that feature now though and is pretty nice too. I typically jump over to it when I need to profile something as it integrates with dotTrace. If you're coming from full-fat Visual Studio you'll probably prefer Rider.
by zahlman | 2025-08-16 16:24:23+00:00
> Why does software installed by a user puts stuff where it will be seen by all users?

Because the software package has its install paths predetermined. But other distribution methods absolutely are available. Flatpak works much more like what you're accustomed to; you can supply --user at the command line. Of course, this also means you get the bloat you're accustomed to; it still tries to share dependencies, but it's much harder in that world.

Also, because it is a good thing to think twice before installing any software.

> When I'm not installing "for all users" UAC isn't there, right?

Yes, and you can correspondingly put an Appimage in ~/.local/bin (or anywhere, if you don't care about having it on your PATH) without sudo, or run flatpak install --user without sudo.

> For the purposes of installing software Linux is a single-user OS masquerading as multi-user.

I am the only actual person who uses my system, but I made 7 user accounts (so far) and use at least 2 of them regularly. To say nothing of all the non-privileged users the system creates automatically, specifically so that certain background processes can run without violating privacy or corrupting anything important if they go haywire.
by wintercarver | 2025-08-16 16:24:24+00:00
First thing that came to mind when I read this was the quote attributed to Haruki Murakami "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." Turns out this is a quote from a character in one of Murakami's novels, but sentiment stands. Kind of gets to the essence of what "creativity" may be.
by appease7727 | 2025-08-16 16:25:14+00:00
The modern piracy experience is exactly what everyone hoped and was promised that streaming would be.

My husband is a non-tech person. I set up radarr and jellyfin, and now he has a website he can go to request any piece of media ever created, and then it magically pops up in the jellyfin app in like half an hour. He can watch it anywhere, at any time, for any amount and number of times. And there are no ads from the service we already pay for. Quality is better, streaming is flawless since it's on the local network. No one is monitoring his views and using it to profile him.

This is everything we all wanted streaming to be, before capitalism (inevitably) ruined it.

And honestly the fact that it's free is irrelevant. Most of us would happily pay for a service that operates this way. But such a business cannot possibly exist under capitalism so we must pirate.

But really, think about the experience of your favorite streaming platform. On radarr, you plug in a search term and you get a flat list of items matching your query and nothing else. The thing you wanted is always in the top three results. When you look at the library, you get a flat alphabetical list of everything available to you at that exact moment. No animated garbage, no endless multi-dimensional scrolling, no dickless executive trying to force you to watch whatever reality slop they're pushing that week.

Simple, respectful, and it shuts the hell up and gets out of your way. You can have anything that humanity has ever produced. There is simply no way for any business to compete. Capitalism just does not know how to make such a thing work.

Oh well, it's not like movie studios and record labels were giving that money to the artists anyway. I'd rather take $30 from Sony than give 15 cents to an artist and $29.85 to Sony.
by richardlblair | 2025-08-16 16:25:54+00:00
This is true with any any interaction with the DB, ORM or otherwise. Regardless of the layer of abstraction you choose to operate at you still need to understand the underlying complexity.

What Rails gives you is easy to use (and understand) abstractions that enable you to directly address performance issues.

Easy is highly contextual here, because none of this is trivial.