MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-14 21:47:40+00:00
Don't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir.

The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.

Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
by crote | 2025-08-14 21:48:07+00:00
And how well has this worked in practice? How would you even identify violations, if you're not requiring websites to store the user's real-world identity?

Large websites do not care even the slightest bit about how accurate the verification method is. They have zero incentive to genuinely get rid of underage users. If anything, they want to keep them - they are prime advertising real estate! Websites have every incentive to implement the age check in the cheapest and most half-baked way possible. As long as they are able to prove on paper that they are doing some form of age verification, they have met their requirements. Got a 90% false positive rate? Working as intended!

The only people getting fines are the small websites who can't afford to pay a 3rd party verification service. This'll shut down your local hobbyist communities, which only drives more visitors to the large megacorp websites.
by churchill | 2025-08-14 21:48:50+00:00
The systems eroding the country & making the educated & talented leave will make any new batch raised to self-select out of the country. In fact, successive generations of talented kids won't even be raised (or, only at a significantly reduced rate) because of poor investment in education.

Or, to be blunt: a syndicate of evil clown politicians have seized control of the ship of state, looting it of anything not bolted down, and murdering anyone who challenges them.

Fixing it is an extremely high-cost endeavor, so leaving is just the only logical option if you have a portable, in-demand skill.

Perfect example would be 1940s China vs. modern China. Same people, but went from a pre-industrial hellhole to a technological superpower because the gov. deliberately invested into creating a sustainable STEM pipeline and creating a nation where their talented young people are happy to live and work. Nigeria isn't doing any of that in any significant capacity.

On the population angle, Nigeria's politicians have a thing for fudging population numbers and realistic figures are closer to 120M to 140M, vs. the 240-260m Western demographers take at face value. I explained in detail in this comment here. [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870564
by za_creature | 2025-08-14 21:48:54+00:00
Ah, I meant that for a classic heap, it's convenient to assign h[0] to the limit of your goal function (e.g. -inf for a min heap) cause that way you can skip the while i>0 check and just do while h[i>>1] > min(h[i], h[i+1]), asserting that the condition is definitely false when i < 2

I guess that it's not as important when you're explicitly willing to pay the piper and run the full log2n iterations just for the sake of branch predictability.

Thanks for the algo though, before today I never would've thought about doing a branchless downheap with i = i<<1 + h[i<<1] != h[i]
by Hizonner | 2025-08-14 21:49:03+00:00
> Almost all parental controls are horrifically buggy, full of loopholes, and these kids can just borrow each other’s technology.

... and the centrally imposed, one-size-fits-all, politics-first age verification system you want will of course be free of bugs, loopholes, opportunities to borrow devices, or whatever.

That's good, since you want to apply it to every single person on the Internet.
by staticfloat | 2025-08-14 21:49:22+00:00
While you can cause the compiler to run longer to squeeze the binary size down, the compiler has a baseline number of compiler passes that it runs over the IR of the program being compiled. These compiler passes generally take time proportional to the input IR length, so a larger program takes longer to compile. Most compiler passes aren't throwing away huge amounts of instructions (dead code elimination being a notable exception, but the analysis to figure out which pieces of dead code can be eliminated still is operating on the input IR). So it's not a perfect proxy, but in general, if the output of your compiler is 2MB of code, it probably took longer to process all the input and spit out that 2MB than if the output of your compiler was 200KB.
by wrasee | 2025-08-14 21:49:41+00:00
Supply and demand might argue that if there was real demand for something like this that people were actually willing to pay a lot of money for, then the market would be all too happy to provide.

I think the inconvenient truth here is that when anyone has got close to doing such a thing the price has been high enough that it turns out nobody actually turns up to pay for it, not at least outside a small niche.
by netsharc | 2025-08-14 21:49:53+00:00
That reminds me of some passengers I sat on a flight next to once.. they tried to watch something on their iPad, but because we were about to depart from a country foreign to theirs, it got region-blocked...

Not that I pitied them, they were obnoxiously late and boarded with 5 bags (the stiff rectangular bags boutique stores have) of shopping...
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-08-14 21:49:57+00:00
In the end, people will use what is easiest to use.

The entertainment industries are going to need to come up with a solution fast.

If they can't find a way to make it so that you can sign up once and get all the content you need, they are screwed.

I cancelled Netflix years ago when they started blocking VPNs, limiting me to their extremely limited Australian library.
by EarlKing | 2025-08-14 21:50:01+00:00
The average developer, whether of open source or otherwise, refuses to use even the bare minimum of engineering discipline in realizing their programs, thereby resulting in an explosion of bugs that the rest of us have to pay for with our time, effort, and sanity.... and they want taxpayer money for that? HOW ABOUT NO. And don't tell me things would be different if we paid them since commercial software developers are certainly incentivized to do things properly and they STILL refuse to use proper engineering practices.
Show HN: Cursor for Your Help Center
by WilsonSquared | 2025-08-14 21:50:04+00:00
I've spent the last 3 months building Ferndesk to scratch an itch I had at my previous co.

Today I'm happy to share it with you all!

Ferndesk is the fastest way to keep your help center on Intercom, Zendesk, Crisp, Helpscout etc up to date.

It does this by identifying knowledge gaps in your help center, and drafts high-quality articles using context around your entire product.

Your changelogs, your internal documentation, your codebase (soon), your product demos etc.
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-14 21:50:06+00:00
To be more clear about why I disagree the cases are parallel:

We know how a submarine moves through water, whether it's "swimming" isn't an interesting question.

We don't know to what extent a machine can reproduce the cognitive functions of a human. There are substantive and significant questions about whether or to what extent a particular machine or program can reproduce human cognitive functions.

So I might have phrased my original comment badly. It doesn't matter if we use the word "thinking" or not, but it does matter if a machine can reproduce the human cognitive functions, and if that's what we mean by the question whether a machine can think, then it does matter.
by wltr | 2025-08-14 21:50:28+00:00
Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspect, meaning how serious these copyright claims are. Do you know anyone personally, who was punished for downloading a TV show? Which country? Personally, I know many folks who do, but none who was fined.
by beefnugs | 2025-08-14 21:50:28+00:00
This appears to be a new level of "missing the plot" to me. The push to make "ai for everyone" is now just blindly intertwined with hyper specialized "for ai engineers only" releases.

Or am I so far behind that "fine tuning your own model" is something a 12 year old who is married to chatGPT does now?
by hackeraccount | 2025-08-14 21:50:30+00:00
"effectively" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In the same sense that the Democrats have not representation in the Senate, the House or the Presidency. I mean, it's true but it's not the whole truth.

Democrats in Texas are under-represented compared with their numbers. It's not fair or democratic but I wouldn't say they have no representation any more then Republicans in CA. or NY have no representation.
by sixothree | 2025-08-14 21:50:45+00:00
I see this so often it gets old especially from a certain side of the aisle. If I make an intentionally contained and concise argument someone always seems to interpret it as if it was part of some larger point I'm making. I used to believe it was a tactic to draw you in. But more and more I believe it's reading comprehension and a good bit of built-in bias.
by bvisness | 2025-08-14 21:50:52+00:00
Hello, I am the engineer in question. I am not actually super familiar with the details of the build system, but from when I saw, the main issues were:

- Lots of constant-time slowness at the beginning and end of the build

- Dubious parallelism, especially with unified builds

- Cargo being Cargo

Overall it mostly looks like a soup of `make` calls with no particular rhyme or reason. It's a far cry from the ninja example the OP showed in his post.
by sdesol | 2025-08-14 21:52:06+00:00
A lot of the messages are revisions so it is not as tedious as it may seem. As for the "3x to 4x", this is my own experience. It is possible that I am an outlier, but 80% of the generated AI code that I have are one-shot. I spend an hour or two (usually spread over days thinking about the problem) to accomplish something that would have taken a week or more for me to do.

I'm going to start producing metrics regarding how much code is AI generated along with some complexity metrics.

I am obviously bias, but this definitely feels like a paradigm shift and if people do not fully learn to adapt to it, it might be too late. I am not sure if you have ever watched Gattaca, but this sort of feels like it...the astronaut part, that is.

The profession that I have known for decades is starting to feel very different, in the same way that while watching Gattaca, my perception of astronauts changed. It was strange, but plausible and that is what I see for the software industry. Those that can articulate the problem I believe will become more valuable than the silent genius.
by can16358p | 2025-08-14 21:52:08+00:00
I rarely watch something off Netflix. And when I watch something I love watching in highest quality (4K HDR if available). If they'd let me pay-as-I-watch I'd be happy to do so, but I don't want to pay every month for a service I rarely use, and sometimes never for a few months.

Another reason is availability. Apple TV+, for some reason, isn't available in my country. I've heard great thing about Severance which is available only there. I can't legally watch it even if I were to pay it. I'd have to pirate it if I want to watch it.
by crote | 2025-08-14 21:52:27+00:00
And how is the general public supposed to verify that the IdP and checking service aren't collaborating? If it is possible for a checking service to create a log, given how Big Tech has been treating user data, how can we ever trust that they aren't logging everyone's data?

Reputation is irrelevant. Everyone is trustworthy - until they are not. The dark web is filled with data leaks from reputable parties.
by sudoshred | 2025-08-14 21:52:41+00:00
Disagree, equity of access matters a lot. Not everyone benefits from exposure to the entire hardware lifecycle, the same way that buying housing is not the best financial decision for everyone regardless of affordability. I might have unlimited budget but if I only need access to state of the art hardware intermittently or under irregular circumstances the cost of renting may be efficient for my needs. Also consider the costs of supporting hardware that is fully owned, if you own the hardware but underutilize it that is inefficiency and the owner bears that cost. The unusual way that silicon depreciates mean that the value of your “asset” is not static and rapidly depreciates as silicon manufacturing improves.
by rayiner | 2025-08-14 21:53:06+00:00
JD Vance had a comment about his Appalachian ancestors who “built this country with their bare hands.” Find a white person to say something similar in one of your liberal places. Then find a black or mexican american person to say something similar. You know what the reaction would be even if you’ve never experienced it first hand. That’s the caste system: among other things, ethnic identity is condemned for one caste, while being lauded in the other caste.

There’s dozens of other examples, of course. Admissions, hiring, and promotions are often subject to explicit or implicit racial considerations. It’s naive to believe that the same people who are required by institutional policies to think about your skin color when they hired you or admitted you or when they decided to promote you or give your a research grant aren’t thinking about it in daily interactions as well.
by jcgl | 2025-08-14 21:53:06+00:00
I wanted to quickly double-check my (albeit limited) experience against docs. The RFC[0] implies the possibility of what I described (provided a well-behaved ACME client that doesn't clobber other TXT records):

2. Query for TXT records for the validation domain name 3. Verify that the contents of one of the TXT records match the digest value

And then the certbot docs[2] show how it's a well-behaved client that wouldn't clobber TXT records from concurrent instances:

> You can have multiple TXT records in place for the same name. For instance, this might happen if you are validating a challenge for a wildcard and a non-wildcard certificate at the same time. However, you should make sure to clean up old TXT records, because if the response size gets too big Let’s Encrypt will start rejecting it. > ... > It works well even if you have multiple web servers.

That bit about "multiple webservers" is a little ambiguous, but I think the preceding line indicates clearly enough how everything is supposed to work.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8555#section-8.4

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challen...
by egypturnash | 2025-08-14 21:53:11+00:00
I have explored many looks in my time as a digital artist specializing as Illustrator but the most delightful moments were when I looked at what I was doing and felt like I'd worked out how to quickly and effortlessly get a look that had everything I loved about the airbrush art of my youth, while sitting quietly under a tree in the park with my laptop and drawing tablet.
by corsica | 2025-08-14 21:53:16+00:00
I don't get the hype around this application. The only UI Ghostty has is tabs and the context menu, is it really worth the integration pain and now this rewrite?

Maybe they're planning for more, like those GUI configuration dialogs that iterm2 has?

Kitty uses OpenGL for everything and draws its own tabs, they're fully customizable and can be made to look however you want. By not wasting time on integrating with massive frameworks for drawing tabs, Kovid was able to quickly implement really useful things that Ghostty is sorely missing, like wrapping the output of the last command in a pager (run 'ps -auxf' and press Ctrl+Shift+G — this thing so useful it's hard to go without it now. It also works for remote shells across SSH sessions.)
by lambda_foo | 2025-08-14 21:53:35+00:00
Using DAP with VSCode and OCaml's bytecode debugger (https://github.com/hackwaly/ocamlearlybird) works reasonably well already. My blog post above can be modified to work with VSCode, but I'm primarily an Emacs user. The main issue with Emacs and DAP is the DAP modes are not very polished.

The missing piece for OCaml is debugging native code, the compiler doesn't emit enough DWARF information and debuggers like LLDB or GDB, need to be modified to understand OCaml's DWARF information. Even there DAP with LLDB/GDB works, it's just the debugger doesn't have enough information to work well. You end up working with debugging assembly or C (if it's parts of the runtime). I've written up a PR documenting native debugging here https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/13747.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-14 21:54:25+00:00
Is that surprising or bad ?

Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
by bkettle | 2025-08-14 21:54:36+00:00
I was wondering recently whether someone could conceivably start a disk-in-the-mail Netflix again, now that streaming sucks so much and every publisher seems to want their own streaming service. My understanding (possibly wrong, I'm not an expert) is that it's perfectly legal to lend out physical media without any special permission from the publisher under the first-sale doctrine, so it seems like the only way to build a library that has content from many different publishers.

(of course, this could only work as long as publishers keep producing physical media)
by moron4hire | 2025-08-14 21:54:39+00:00
My problem with Twitter is that it constantly forces unwanted content into my feed. Before I finally quit about a year ago, it was pushing straight-up, no-interpretation-needed, racist and anti-semetic posts into my feed.

If there were a store that secretly sold Nazi propoganda out the back if you gave the owner a special handshake, you'd innocently have no way of knowing and you'd keep shopping at that store. I don't think anyone could hold it over your head that you were shopping at a Nazi store if it were being ran with such discretion.

But if there were a store where the owner occasionally made a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge whoopsy-doodly where he "accidentally" left such stuff out at the checkout counter, just to see if you'd be interested... I'm sorry, there's no way I'd ever go back to that store, no matter how great it's other stuff was. It could be the only place that sold my favorite beer or whatever and it wouldn't matter. Some things are inexcusable.
by duskwuff | 2025-08-14 21:54:40+00:00
Users don't care about the technical details of what model is being used for what type of output. What matters to them is that they asked ChatGPT to draw a map, and it spat out nonsense.

The same issue exists with a bunch of other types of image output from ChatGPT - graphs, schematics, organizational charts, etc. It's been getting better at generating images which look like the type of image you requested, but the accuracy of the contents hasn't kept up.
by hackeraccount | 2025-08-14 21:55:42+00:00
By definition you can Gerrymander your party to power - unless the ruling party has a death wish. The Gerrymander is a tool of a majority party that keeps the majority in power.

It's not a magic bullet - it exchanges depth for width and in so doing it can expose risk of different types. I'm not saying it's right or fair, I think it's neither and wouldn't support it but it's politics.

The best solution to my mind is to increase the number of representatives. I've heard the counter-argument to that and it has some plausibility but I reject those arguments because I'm close minded.
by franciscop | 2025-08-14 21:56:52+00:00
IMHO not really, supply here is the limiting factor since the constrain is in licensing the work. The goal of the right holders is not to maximize access to the work or those stated by OP, but to maximize profit for the company, which when at odds with those other goals still prevails.

e.g. someone calculated/believes that having a big catalog from Disney at X/month is more worth more for Disney than sublicensing to Netflix at Y/month.
by stronglikedan | 2025-08-14 21:57:16+00:00
> If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y.

To me, this is the crux of your problem. Social media is like a, well, social space like a bar. Not everyone shares the same opinions, but most of the patrons can at least agree enough to not fight each other, which is sort of an echo chamber since yelling something against the grain would get your ask kicked in a bar.

Forums are the place to have a discussion about subject X, since everyone is there to have that discussion. Of course, if you get off topic or snippy the conversation may devolve, but if you stay on topic you can have a nice conversation about subject X.
by rightbyte | 2025-08-14 21:58:14+00:00
> Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time.

40h work. 56h sleep. 72h free time.

80h work. 56h sleep. 32h free time.

Ok fair enough close enough to half I though the share would be worse. But in practice, your energy is spent and the free time will suck. Also a reasonable commute of 8h will make the share 64 to 24, a 'third'.
by kevinventullo | 2025-08-14 21:58:46+00:00
To elaborate, this is a foundation model. This basically means it can take an arbitrary image and map it to a high dimensional space H in which ~arbitrary characteristics become much easier to solve for.

For example (and this might be oversimplifying a bit, computer vision people please correct me if I’m wrong) if you’re interested in knowing whether or not the image contains a cat, then maybe there is some hyperplane P in H for which images on one side of P do not contain a cat, and images on the other side do contain a cat. And so solving for “Does this image contain a cat?”becomes a much easier problem, all you have to do is figure out what P is. Once you do that, you can pass your image into DINO, dot product with the equation for P, and check whether the answer is negative or positive. The point is that finding P is much easier than training your own computer vision model from scratch.
by skybrian | 2025-08-14 21:59:19+00:00
I bought a cheap pulse oximeter during the pandemic and what I learned is that when I’m feeling light-headed, blood oxygen is low. So I decided that my body’s built-in blood oximeter is probably good enough most of the time.

It’s sort of like having your watch tell you whether you slept well or not. Didn’t you already know? If you think you slept well and your watch disagrees, are you going to trust its opinion over your own?
by crawshaw | 2025-08-14 21:59:32+00:00
Nice example of how good programming is often about meeting systems where they are:

Whatever your feelings are about OOP and memory management, the reality is that if you choose GTK, you're forced into interfacing in some way with the GObject type system. You can't avoid it. Well you can avoid it and we did avoid it. And it leads to a mess trying to tie the lifetimes of your non-reference-counted objects to the reference counted ones. There was an entire class of bug that kept popping up in the Ghostty GTK application that could basically be summed up as: the Zig memory or the GTK memory has been freed, but not both.