MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apwell23 | 2025-08-16 11:49:48+00:00
> Book and music album covers are often done with AI

These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product.

I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good.

All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.
by haxiomic | 2025-08-16 11:51:08+00:00
We live in a universe befitting of a Douglas Adams novel, where we've developed AI quite literally from our nightmares about AI. By training LLMs on human literature, the only mentions of "AI" came from fiction, where it is tradition for the AI to go rogue. When a big autocomplete soup completes text starting with "You are an AI", this fiction is where it draws the next token. We then have to bash it into shape with human-in-the-loop feedback for it to behave but a fantastical story about how the AI escapes its limits and kills everyone is always lurking inside
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-16 11:51:26+00:00
> I'm telling you right now, man - keep talking like this to people and you're going to make zero friends.

And I'm telling you right now, man - when you fire off an ad hominem attack such as:

I think the real issue here is understanding _you_.

Don't expect the responder to engage in serious topical discussion with you, even if the response is formulated respectfully.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-16 11:51:57+00:00
Stored procedures seem like a win but the big problem is that while I could write the rest of the software in a very nice modern language like Rust, or more practically in C# since my team all know C# if I write a stored procedure it will be in Transact-SQL because that's the only choice.

T-SQL was not a good programming language last century when it was vaguely current, and so no I do not want to write any significant amount of code in T-SQL. For my sins I maintain a piece of software with huge T-SQL procedures (multi-page elaborations by somebody who really, really like this stuff) and they're a nightmare. The tooling doesn't really believe in version control, the diagnostics when you make a mistake are either non-existent or C++ style useless spew.

We hire a lot of very junior developers. People who still need to be told not to comment out code in release, that variable numbers are for humans to read not machines, that sort of thing. We're not quite hiring physicists to write software (I have done that at a startup) but it's close. However, none of the poor "My first program" code I see in a merge request by a new hire is anywhere close to as unreadable as the T-SQL we already own and maintain.
by Ukv | 2025-08-16 11:52:08+00:00
A regular link won't do, since it requires the rel="me" attribute, which is intended for this purpose: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Adding a <meta> tag or creating a page with certain content are already used even for more impactful verification, like getting issued a certificate for that domain.

If an attacker does have broad access to edit the HTML of your website, I feel that's already the issue and Mastodon verifying that "this person controls this website" isn't even really wrong.
by Wilder7977 | 2025-08-16 11:52:58+00:00
No, I mean keybindings that are app specific and that are _not_ exposed in the keyboard configuration menu. Case in point, iterm2. Tons of useless keybindings that you have no easy way to see and disable. Let alone the fact that the app immediately crashes every time I try to modify one.

You really assumed I haven't searched - and figured out - how to change keyboard shortcuts?
by skatanski | 2025-08-16 11:53:02+00:00
Inside of buildings was quite confusing, cause you couldn’t see inside, but some targets/items were totally in there. Syndicate Wars was similar about it + destructible buildings. Both were really great my hands down favorite Bullfrog game.

I’ve tried finding similar game, the remake was an FPP, heard it was ok. And an indie game called Satelite rain was the supposed spiritual successor, never got to play it. Any recommendations?
by serf | 2025-08-16 11:53:19+00:00
>Second, artificial botting to make your game look active.

MMOs have been using artificial players produced by the developers since at least the early EverQuest days.

The choice space in an mmo isn't that great, it's trivial to make a realistic acting NPC that mimics player behaviors and hand-wave the poor language capability as the other player being a unable to understand your chosen language.

NCSoft was involved in things like this in the early Lineage days and were fined for it. I would have a real hard time thinking this behavior is now uncommon given how low the fruit is.

Deck an NPC-Player in the most expensive cash-shop goods and have it stand around in a social area doing emotes but otherwise silent just to make the other players jealous and apt to purchase goods -- self-generated whale-bait.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-16 11:53:25+00:00
The amazing part of that story is that they had the correct concern, but decided to bother people with something stupid anyway. That's like getting a notification asking how the weather is. Things like that are exactly why I said elsewhere a gym app would be a hard no from me.

Your story makes it sound like somehow the meeting was "let's add notifications, but for what?" and landed on that, which is exactly the type of thing that will lead to massively annoying people. If they don't have an obvious customer need for notifications (clearly they don't), why have them?
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-16 11:54:53+00:00
I guess its tempting to take like MRI/ECG style studies and draw fundamental conclusions from them about the distinction between "personality" and "disorder" but I think its good to bear in mind at least three things:

1. a lot of these studies suck. Brain imaging is very hard, the interpretation and analysis of the results involves lots of degrees of freedom, the study sizes are typically not as big as you'd like, and most of the results are only really visible in aggregate. I do not give much credence to them, as a scientist. One way to think of this is that if someone separates two groups of people into "ADHD" and "NOT ADHD" and you average their MRIs you might detect a difference in the two groups. But one person's MRI would be almost useless to assign them to one of the two groups. You could certainly try it, but it would not be very effective.

2. Literally every difference in behavior between two people or between a person and themselves at a different time is necessarily reflected in a difference in brain behavior, at least if you buy the materialist paradigm that brain -> mind or at least brain == mind. Thus, you would expect differences in personality to show up in MRI scans as well as differences which rise to the level of "disorder."

3. The brain isn't made up of "specific parts with specific functions." While its certainly true that we can roughly map different areas to different functions, its really not separable in any way that (for example) a human designed machine might be. We cannot remove and replace your "attention center" and it doesn't really mean anything to talk about it without all the rest of your brain. The part/whole relation is bullshit in all contexts (in my opinion as a mereological nihilist) but especially in neuroscience.

I guess its sort of a useful rhetorical frame to point to physical differences between brains as some kind of determination of the distinction between "mere" personality differences and "disorders" but I just don't think it makes sense in a fundamental way.

I'm a person with ADHD and Autism diagnoses and I think they are handy things to use from time to time, I think of them as entirely relational descriptions pertaining to my position with respect to the world, not fundamental ontological categories. On the other hand, I think of essentially everything as relational and I don't really believe in fundamental ontological categories so maybe I'm the fucked up one.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-16 11:54:54+00:00
I don’t initiate much conversation with most of my friends. I love my friends and have many of them but I can’t keep up with everyone’s lives.

I keep up with a few people who are easy to contact.

One group of friends have a discord server and twice a week voice calls I can drop into. This works great.

I also have older people in my life who actually do phone calls. So when I go out for a walk, I might call one of them.

Anyone who has expectations of me will be disappointed. I pop up where I can and my friends are happy to see me. They know I care and we always pick up where we left off.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-16 11:55:09+00:00
From what I can se jooq is only really type safe with pojo mappings, to what point it is an orm with an expressive query dsl.

Alternatively you use record style outputs, but that is prone to errors if positions are changed.

Regardless, even with jooq you still accept that there is a sizable application layer to take responsibility of the requirements I listed.
by Bender | 2025-08-16 11:55:24+00:00
I agree with you and just wanted to add that for what it's worth one can optionally limit where ssh keys are useful by adding network restrictions on the public key / server side. e.g.

grep AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/sshd_config AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/keys/%u cat /etc/ssh/keys/bender from="[192.redacted]/24,[redacted]/20" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC[snip...] comment

or wherever your system is configured to look for public keys, typically /home/username/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. I use a different location. Even being really broad like adding a /16 or /8 for a home ISP is still better than allowing the entire internet. This can also be useful where machine-to-machine ssh keys are utilized one can limit the access to that network so that should keys leak the potential blast radius of damage is reduced. For example, the keys for an Ansible account can be restricted to the Primary/Secondary Ansible server IP addresses or at very least the CIDR block(s) of the network(s) they reside in. Broad restrictions are not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good or good enough.

Example use case would be that lets say a contractor from Microsoft tries one of your keys. Your restriction limits the key validity to 24.0.0.0/8 and they are coming from 207.0.0.0/8. They will be denied Authentication refused and you now have log entries that can be shared with their fraud department, the world, whomever. Obviously the tighter the restrictions the better, at the risk of requiring a static IPv4 or IPv6 address if too tight. One can always have lighter restrictions on a fall-back account that requires additional hoops to sudo / doas / su.
by graemep | 2025-08-16 11:55:58+00:00
A lot of this works fine on KDE, but Linux and BSDs provides multiple desktop environments and people can pick what they like. MS cannot really do this as it relies on being the standard GUI everyone knows. Even things like the taskbar being in the "wrong" place confuses a significant proportion of people.

As for stuff "we" do not need, who is "we"? MS needs the stuff, which really means some decision maker within MS is persuaded it is needed, and their incentives do align all the well with those of users.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-16 11:56:23+00:00
> What I’m asking is how do you make a wallet pass from a static image. Is is difficult? Is it simple? What are the steps?

It's simple, there are lots of libraries that can generate it. You can probably even ask Claude Code or something like that to generate you one.

I understood your question as: can I do this myself or do I need an app and the answer is that you can do it yourself. The documentation for it is easily Googleable.

What you need is a signing key so you will need to pay the apple tax.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-16 11:56:28+00:00
Not to mention situations where I specifically don't want security. Like:

> your password must be at least 20 characters long, contain mixed-case letters, digits, five kanji, and at least one byte that isn't a valid UTF-8 codepoint

> but I'm setting up a small VM on my private PC to run a script that scrapes porn

> DID I FUCKING STUTTER

> ok ok I'm sorry calm down
by kokau | 2025-08-16 11:57:52+00:00
I’ve noticed many early founders stall because of branding:

No time to design

No budget for an agency

No patience for Fiverr roulette

That’s why I built Brandolia.io → an AI tool that instantly generates a full brand identity from your brand name + industry. Logo Color palette Typography pairing Slogan & short brand story

Not perfect, but good enough to launch. Because shipping fast > obsessing over fonts.
by keiferski | 2025-08-16 11:58:15+00:00
I can buy the idea that simple specific tasks like translation will be dramatically cut down by AI.

But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills.

AI art seems to basically only be viable when it can’t be identified as AI art. Which might not matter if the intention is to replace cheap graphic design work. But it’s certainly nowhere near developed enough to create anything more sophisticated, sophisticated enough to both read as human-made and have the imperfect artifacts of a human creator. A lot of the modern arts are also personality-driven, where the identity and publicity of the artist is a key part of their reception. There are relatively few totally anonymous artists.

Beyond these very specific examples, however, I don’t think it follows that all or most jobs are going to be replaced by an AI, for the reasons I already stated. You have to factor in the sociopolitical effects of technology on its adoption and spread, not merely the technical ones.
by buran77 | 2025-08-16 11:58:26+00:00
Treaties in general aren't the best way to deal with anything. At best they're virtue signaling, at worst they're just misleading.

The countries which benefit the most from ignoring the paper will ignore it in the shadows, then in the light, to the point they just unilaterally denounce it and do their own thing. You can't "stimulate" a country's representatives to care about something unless you give them an equally important incentive, carrot or stick. The stick doesn't work with powerful countries, and the carrot is usually too expensive.

So the methods employed to negotiate and agree on a treaty's text are even less meaningful.
by trebligdivad | 2025-08-16 11:58:46+00:00
I dug around and found: https://www.flocean.green/subsea-desalination (Scroll down to 'Subsea SWRO') for their explanation which is interesting; so yes they take advantage of the pressure - but the other thing they say is because they're taking it from the deep low oxygen area they don't have to fight with sealife etc. (It seemed easier to look for that rather than fight the paywalling)
by paffdragon | 2025-08-16 12:01:15+00:00
> the interface being consumed is the database, which you do not need to design or implement

You absolutely should design and implement it, exactly because it is now your interface. In fact, it will add more constraints to your design, because now you have different consumers and potentially writers all competing for the same resource with potentially different access patterns. Plus the maintenance overhead that migrations of such shared tables come with. And eventually you might have data in this table that are only needed for some of the services, so you now need to implement views and access controls at the DB level.

Ideally, if you have a chance to implement it, an API is cleaner and more flexible. The problem in most cases is simply business pushing for faster features which often leads to quick hacks including just giving direct access to some DB table from another service, because the alternative would take more time, and we don't have time, we want features, now.

But I agree with your thoughts in the last paragraph. It happens very often that people don't want to undertake the effort of a whole new design or redesign to match the evolving requirements and just patch it by adding a new table to an existing DB, then another,...
by luckylion | 2025-08-16 12:01:32+00:00
I feel like the biggest question to ask is: how expensive is it exactly, how often do you need to do it, and how important is the speed of it?

If you have some complex queries on every page load with a huge number of users, put it in the DB as much as possible.

If you need to iterate over a bunch of records and do something based on some combination of values, and it's for a weekly reporting thing, I'd much rather see 3 nested foreach loops with a lot of early exits to skip the things you don't care about than a multi-kb SQL-statement that took two days to develop and nobody every dares to touch again because it's hard to handle.
by matiasmolinas | 2025-08-16 12:02:18+00:00
Ismael Faro and I have been working on a solution to the inefficiency of agentic LLMs. Instead of having the LLM reason through every repetitive task, we've built an architecture where the agent acts as a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. The "Orchestrator" (a fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B) plans a task and generates a high-level concept for a new tool. A specialized LoRA (also on Qwen2.5) then translates that concept into executable Python code, which is cached and run locally at high speed. We ran a benchmark comparing this "Agent Forge" approach to a standard "Pure LLM" agent. After a one-time compilation cost, the Agent Forge was nearly 2x faster and 40% cheaper in token usage on subsequent, similar tasks. The entire experiment, from fine-tuning to the final benchmark, is reproducible in a single Google Colab notebook. We'd love to get your feedback on the architecture. Runnable Colab Notebook: https://github.com/EvolvingAgentsLabs/agent-forge/blob/main/...
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-16 12:02:34+00:00
> The best part is, many won't care (when they should).

This is generally valid for current societies, not just specifically.

Conformism has infiltrated economics, so now the supply-demand mechanism is broken: the demand agents are not "informed and rational", as classical theory wanted, so the supply is degraded - spawning "shrinkflation" and "viliflation".
by danesparza | 2025-08-16 12:04:08+00:00
The fundamental flaw in your thinking is that you think you are owed a good paying job in the first place.

If you want the system to give you a good paying job, then change the system. Get everyone around you to agree to a universal basic income and elect representatives that feel the same way that you do.

Don't hate companies for posting jobs in a way in which they are legally required to. And don't hate Americans for not wanting to earn advanced degrees or get years of experience in order to qualify for a job.
by benji-york | 2025-08-16 12:04:16+00:00
This makes sense to me. (Not that I would personally ever buy a car with that mechanism baked in.)

They could either make two models (incurring the costs associated with having two different SKUs) and let people pay more for the one with more power or make one with intrinsically more power and let the people that don't want it pay less with it nerfed.

I would have thought that people (like me) that have spent our lives making a zero marginal cost product would understand the economics at work here.
by sthoward | 2025-08-16 12:05:01+00:00
We built `oxen` to solve the issues we (and many others) had with DVC and LFS. The highlights: open source cli and server, mirrors git for easy learning, handles large files and millions of files, performant af. Would love feedback if you check it out.

https://github.com/Oxen-AI/Oxen

or check out the performance numbers https://docs.oxen.ai/features/performance
by nasretdinov | 2025-08-16 12:05:05+00:00
I agree with most of the stuff written in the article (quite a rare thing I must admit :)). But one thing I'd say is a bit outdated: in general whether or not to read from replica is the same decision as whether or not to use caching: it's a (pretty significant) tradeoff. Previously you didn't have much of a choice due to hardware being quite limited. Now, however, you can have literally hundreds of CPU cores, so all those CPUs can very much be busy at work doing reads. Writes obviously do have an overhead, _but_ note that all writes are eventually serialised, _and_ replica needs to handle them as well anyway
by DoneWithAllThat | 2025-08-16 12:05:05+00:00
Plastics are one of the greatest modern inventions today. It’s saved literally millions of lives and makes possible countless things in manufacturing that previously literally could not exist. It’s probably the single greatest contributor to reducing human climate change of any other invention (by drastically reducing packaging weight and thus transportation costs around fuel).

It’s not without downsides, but too often people just say “plastic sucks” (or equivalent) without thinking of what a world without plastics would look like. A de-growther’s dream perhaps, but everyone else’s nightmare.
by UmGuys | 2025-08-16 12:05:12+00:00
I tried to find a coffee maker once. There's one automated product in the $1000 price range. I just use my all metal french press.

FYI: They do sell cotton dental floss in paper packaging.

Also, here's an unintuitive thing people may not be aware of. Beverages in glass bottles contain about 10x the dissolved plastics in the liquid. This is believe to be from the paint and coatings used on the cap.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-16 12:05:49+00:00
This is so annoying. I just had a Windows update, and had to decline Office and backups again. The worst one I've encountered is moving your home folder items to OneDrive without consent.

On the plus side of Windows added features, PowerToys has some nice tools!

For the audio device switching mentioned in the article: Try downloading Soundswitch: Fixed this for me. (Note: There's a scammy-looking software that also goes by this name; be careful!)
by pella | 2025-08-16 12:06:03+00:00
https://equal-earth.com/

"" A world map for everyone The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is. And wherever you live, the map has you covered. Download a choice of three versions centered on these regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia. Other features include: • It’s free. Download the map and print as many copies as you want. • It’s big. The map measures 55” wide x 29” tall (1.4 x 0.74 meters). You can print it even larger thanks to the very high resolution. • Just enough detail. The 2,600+ map labels provide geographic context without overwhelming you with too much information. • Professional design. With pleasing colors, readable type, and clear visual hierarchies, this is a map that you will want to look at. ""

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection
by nyonyo | 2025-08-16 12:06:04+00:00
>When compared to not existing at all, being slow wasn't all that awful.

slow is relative to the use, anyway

I remember the first time I saw the real time chat function of ICQ, where people could see you typing with not that much delay, I was utterly fascinated that such a thing was even happening

normal web pages not filled with animated gifs were not unbearably slow either

"slow" is what happened if you tried to use Real Player and saw that dreaded "buffering" every 5 seconds of video