MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-13 16:15:20+00:00
> HN is pretty anti-corporate overall, if you haven't noticed.

My observation is that any given thread can go either way, and it sometimes feels like a coin toss which side of HN will be most represented in any given thread

Yes, I have seen quite a lot of anti-corporate posts, but I also see quite a few anti-employee posts. This is likely my own negative bias but I think many users here are generally pro-Capital which aligns them with corporate interests even if they are some degree of anti-corporate anyways

Probably I just fixate too much on the posts I have a negative reaction to
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-13 16:15:28+00:00
> 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.

In societies where 80% of people are not able to draw an income and there are more firearms than there are people allowed to own them, that political response is revolution.
by weinzierl | 2025-08-13 16:15:32+00:00
"There's a fair bit of talk about “Google Zero” at the moment: the day when website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero."

I am fairly convinced this day is not long.

"If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why would you ever visit the actual website?"

Because serious research consults sources. I think we will see a phase where we use LLM output with more focus on backing up everything with sources (e.g. like Perplexity). People will still come to your site, just not through Google Search anymore.
by grepnork | 2025-08-13 16:15:47+00:00
Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.

Apple made the change to advanced security in advance of the bill being finalised, now the government has gone in another direction.

All the online safety act does is implement online the law as it stands IRL. British folk have been using the same ID verification systems to validate identity for nightclub admission, passport applications, driving licence applications, benefits claims, state pension claims, disclosure and barring checks, tax filings, mortgage deeds, security clearances, job applications, and court filings since 2016.

All the reaction is just pearl clutching - 5 million checks a day are being performed, the law itself is wildly popular with 70% support amongst adults after implementation.

There are three levels of checks - IAL1 (self-asserted, low confidence), IAL2 (remote or physical proof of identity), and IAL3 (rigorous proof with biometric and physical presence requirements).

IPA 2016 affords police access to your domain history, not content history, provided police can obtain a warrant from a senior High Court Judge. The box which stores the data is at ISP level and is easily circumvented with a VPN, or simply not using your ISP's DNS servers.

IPA 2016 doesn't exempt politicians from surveillance. It includes specific provisions for heightened safeguards when intercepting their communications. The Act establishes a "triple-lock" system for warrants targeting members of a relevant legislature, requiring approval from the Secretary of State, a Judicial Commissioner, and the Prime Minister. This heightened scrutiny is in recognition of the sensitivity involved in surveilling politicians, particularly given the surveillance of Northern Irish politicians and others in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (in force 1 October 2007), and Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides powers over encryption keys/passwords etc. Section 49, RIPA can be used to force decryption, Section 51 to supply keys or passwords. These are identical to powers the police have IRL over safes, deposit boxes etcetera, and the penalty for non-compliance is identical.

You cannot use encryption or passwords to evade legal searches with a scope determined by a court on the basis of evidence of probable cause shown to the court by the entity requesting the search. A warrant from the High Court is required for each use.

Notable cases:-

- Blue chip hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally obtaining private information on behalf of blue chip companies.

- Phone hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally hacking voice mail on behalf of newspapers.

- Founder of an ISP using his position to illegally intercept communications and use them for blackmail.
by DrBazza | 2025-08-13 16:15:48+00:00
There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
by bamboozled | 2025-08-13 16:15:51+00:00
LLMs have no "memory" so it generally gives it something to go off, I forgot to add that I only do this if the change i'm making is related to whatever I did yesterday.

I do this because sometimes I just manually edit code and the LLM doesn't know everything that's happened.

I also find the. best way to work with "AI" is to make very small changes and commit frequently, I truly think it's a slot machine and if it does go wild, you can lose hours of work.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 16:16:21+00:00
> you will literally be put into jail.

Sure. That's a pretty good way to ensure that you don't see the benefits if you don't contribute. At a national scale it is probably the only way to ensure it as it is pretty hard to keep tabs on someone otherwise.

> that his taxes subsidize my SFH lifestyle, then he is correct to say that he is tired of being forced to coddle me.

He isn't forced to. He can remove himself from the community which he does not align with. Even better, he can work to reshape the community to fit his expectations. If the subsidy isn't working, he won't be alone in wanting change. No doubt the community is simply waiting for someone to stand up and resolve the matter. Things don't get fixed by way of magic. But being part of a community that sees a need for subsidies is part of the expected return on investment. The community wouldn't be what it is without those subsidies.
by ysofunny | 2025-08-13 16:16:38+00:00
because the sacred simplicity problem, yet another label I had to coin due to necessity

for example, lambda calculus, it's too simple. to the point that it's real power is immediately unbelievable.

the simplest 'solution', is to make it "sacred", to infuse an aura of mystery and ineffability around the ideas. that way people will give it the proper respect proportional to the mathematical elegance without necessarily having to really grasp the details.

I'm reflecting on how, for example, lambda calculus is really easy to learn to do by rote. but this does not help in truly grasping the significance that even LLM can be computed by (an inhuman) amount of symbol substitutions on paper. and how it is easy to trivialize what this really entails (fleshing out all the entailment is difficult; it's easier to act as if they have been fleshed out and mimic the awe)

therefore, rationalist cults are the legacy, the latest leaf in the long succession of the simplest solution to the simplicity of the truly sacred mathematical ideas with which we can "know" (and nod to each other who also "know") what numbers fucking mean
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-13 16:16:46+00:00
My whole life, I've always found myself excited about new technologies, especially growing up, and how they allowed us to solve real problems. I've always loved being on the cutting edge.

I'm not excited about what we call AI these days (LLMs). They are a useful tool, when used correctly, for certain tasks: summarizing, editing, searching, writing code. That's not bad, and even good. IDEs save a great deal of time for coders compared to a plain text editor. But IDEs don't threaten people's jobs or cause CEOs to say stupid shit like "we can just have the machines do the work, freeing the humans to explore their creative pursuits" (except no one is paying them to explore their hobbies).

Besides the above use case as a productivity-enhancement tool when used right, do they solve any real world problem? Are they making our lives better? Not really. They mostly threaten a bunch of people's jobs (who may find some other means to make a living but it's not looking very good).

It's not like AI has opened up some "new opportunity" for humans. It has opened up "new opportunity" for very large and wealthy companies to become even larger and wealthier. That's about it.

And honestly, even if it does make SWEs more productive or provide fun chatting entertainment for the masses, is it worth all the energy that it consumes (== emissions)? Did we conveniently forget about the looming global warming crisis just so we can close bug tickets faster?

The only application of AI I've been excited about is stuff like AlphaFold and similar where it seems to accelerate the pace of useful science by doing stuff that takes humans a very very long time to do.
by mystraline | 2025-08-13 16:17:02+00:00
A great case example of this corruption is the following:

AC-2 : Kerberos/LDAP/DNS/Shibboleth CAN suffice, but auditors will absolutely look for Active Directory. Most auditors don't even know how to prove Linux this way.

CM-6 : this is just a roundabout way of saying 'do you support GPOs? '. Sure, Puppet can work, as can on-login bash scripts stored on a Windows AD server. But why use Linux clients when you're already using Windows AD?

Now, nowhere in NIST actually says 'MS Windows'. Its just that the control is worded in such a way that proving it on Windows is easy, and Linux is very hard to impossible to prove.

There was a single exception to vendor agnoticism, and that was the requirement of McAfee security software. I can't find the control offhand, but now its called Trellix.
by EGreg | 2025-08-13 16:17:11+00:00
I made a provisional patent this year, about how exactly I would solve this problem. Imagine hiring a "team of developers" who can learn your library and iterate 24/7, improving things, doing support, even letting the pointy-haired boss turn his ideas into reality in a forked sandbox on the weekend.

For the last 15 years I've been writing against software patents, and producing open source software that cost me about $1M to develop, but in the case of AI, I have started to make an exception. I have also rethought how I am going to do open source vs closed source in my AI business. A few weeks ago I posted on HN asking whether it's a good idea, and no one responded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44425545

(If anyone wants to work with me on this, hit me up, email is in my profile)
by legacynl | 2025-08-13 16:17:28+00:00
There have been psychological experiments that have shown what OP experiences.

In this particular experiment subjects were asked to make a series of arbitrary choices between 2 items, while being hooked up to some brain scanning equipment. Subjects were asked to think about it for 5 seconds before making the choice.

The experiment showed that scientists were able to predict the choice before the subjects consciously reasoned about it. So the experiment indicates that the choice is made subconsciously, and the reasoning ends up on whatever choice was made.

This aligns pretty well with some other psychological theories, and it points at that a lot/most of our brain processes happen subconsciously, and our conscious experience mainly serves as a way of providing a coherent story about why we experience what we experience.

So it seems that no matter if you 'think' abstractly or visually or with a monologue, this is merely a small step in our overall cognition, and doesn't really change the fact that thing bubble up from our subconscious before we become conscious of it.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-13 16:17:53+00:00
…philosophically? Or technologically?

I’m not a philosopher; but on a technical basis, lots of OS work just fine on embedded systems that don’t provide a real-time time-of-day clock and only have time-since-booted to work on - but I don’t believe either are strictly necessary for a preemptive OS to work just fine provided the CPU itself supports millisecond-scale interrupts for the thread scheduler to work. But that made me wonder if it matters at all that a process’ time quanta have a wall-clock-based unit of quanta (e.g. people say Windows uses a 16ms quanta for foreground processes and something else (possibly variable?) for background processes. I imagine a scheduler could use a simple cpu clock cycle counter instead. Even though clock cycles themselves are also variable. And if it’s variable then it cannot be used as a clock.

…so who needs a clock? Turns out you don’t need one. I suppose that means we should just live in the present. Take each day… hour… second as it comes.

…or something. I dunno. As I said, I’m not a philosopher.
by KaiserPro | 2025-08-13 16:17:53+00:00
> But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage

Kinda, but they also don't really realise that they have much more control over the feed than they expect (in certain areas)

For the reel/tiktok/foryou-instagram feeds, it shows you subjects that you engage with. It will a/b other subjects that similar people engage with. Thats all its doing. continual a/b to see if you like what ever flavour of bullshit is popular.

Most people don't realise that you can banish posts from your feeds by doing a long press "I don't like this" equivalent. It takes a few times for the machine to work out if its an account, groups of accounts of theme that you don't like, and it'll stop showing it to you. (threads for example took a very long time to stop showing me fucking sports.)

Why don't more people know this? because it hurts short term metrics for what ever bollocks the devs are working on. so its not that well advertised. just think how unsuccessful the experiments in the facebook app would have been if you were able to block the "other posts we think you might like" experiments. How sad Zuckerberg would be that his assertion was actually bollocks?
by nogridbag | 2025-08-13 16:18:01+00:00
I'm confused a bit by this. For instance, Gemini was struggling to write proper Java code for using Firebase Admin SDK. It would write Java code using methods that only exist in the JavaScript SDK. And when I would correct it, it would give other options that also were only in the JavaScript SDK or were invalid.

So I thought this is where context7 would be useful, but I'm confused what I'm looking at in the detail page: https://context7.com/firebase/firebase-admin-java

I was expecting some sort of dump of all the admin methods, but it gives a single example of one library function and info on how to build javadoc.
Ask HN: Going to bed with *unsolved* problems in your head?
by franktankbank | 2025-08-13 16:18:11+00:00
Now I've gone to bed with a problem in my head that I had some sense was solvable, no problem there and knock it out in the morning. What happens when you go to bed regularly with unsolved problems? Either you encounter a new problem regularly that you don't know how to solve by bedtime; or you have long standing unsolved problems? In my experience this is what causes burnout at the fundamental level. Protagonists/Antagonists have at it, revere me or shred me, its the internet I don't care.
by motorest | 2025-08-13 16:18:42+00:00
> I'm not so sure sycophancy is best for entertainment, though.

I don't think "entertainment" is the right concept. Perhaps the right concept is "engagement". Would you prefer to interact with a chatbot that hallucinated or was adamant you were wrong, or would you prefer to engage with a chatbot that built upon your input and outputted constructive messages that were in line with your reasoning and train of thought?
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-13 16:19:02+00:00
I'm a bit older now, and while there has always been corporate meddling in public decision-making (which is unavoidable and also somewhat needed to help steer the boat a bit in some situations), the economic effort a company has to invest rectify wrongdoing mainly shaped the amount of spending for legal counseling and lobbying, but it didn't directly shape a ruling.

Today, environmental/privacy/safety laws are suddenly not that strict anymore, because now we naturally need to also take economic interests of the violating company into account.

So you might end up in a situation where an official body will officially rule that the harmed party may be right, but needs to be pragmatic about its needs just because of the increased inconvenience it would create for the opposing party if THEY would have to change their way.

In my experience, this was not the case 15 years ago.
by Sebb767 | 2025-08-13 16:19:02+00:00
> and successfully avoided using Llm development these last few years.

I'm not sure that's much of an achievement, to be honest. If you tried it and it turned out to be not useful for you, fine, I'm on your side. But refusing to try for the sake of it seems backwards. I mean, then why use CI, version control and those fancy IDEs anyway? Notepad is a perfectly cromulent text editor (and what is code, if not text, anyway?) and my local build.bat and deploy.bat do their job nicely and quickly.
by alnwlsn | 2025-08-13 16:19:03+00:00
I wondered how the original was made. Did they paint the whole thing at once and then pleat it? Or was it made of two paintings that were cut up?

It seems to be much simpler than that; the prisms were solid and removable. So you just put them in a rack so all of one side is flat, and paint directly on them. When that painting is done, you rotate all the prisms to the next side and do the second painting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_scalata
by BetterWhisper | 2025-08-13 16:19:11+00:00
Hey, indeed Whisper can do the transcription of Japanese and even the translation (but only to English). For the best results you need to use the largest model which depending on your hardware might be slow or fast.

Another option is to use something like VideoToTextAI which allows you to transcribe it fast and then translate it into 100+ languages which you can then export the subtitle (SRT) file for
by criddell | 2025-08-13 16:19:17+00:00
That's a good point. It's not a black and white issue.

I personally see a bot working on behalf of an end user differently than OpenAI hoovering up every bit of text they can find to build something they can sell. I'd guess the owner of localghost.dev doesn't have a problem with somebody using a screen reader because although it's a machine pulling the content, it's for a specific person and is being pulled because they requested it.

If the people making LLM's were more ethical, they would respect a Creative Commons-type license that could specify these nuances.
by hoofish | 2025-08-13 16:19:18+00:00
the real failure is in our collective intelligence — our ability to think together.

Collective intelligence requires ternary logic: a flexible, context-aware system of sensemaking that can hold multiple perspectives and still arrive at a consensus.

But in Western democracy, competition flattens this into binary choices: votes, sides, battles. Then social media adds a second competing voting algorithm, further compounding the collapse. Now we have two binary systems, both collapsing, both trying to manage a complex world that demands nuance. Binary systems cannot sustain collective intelligence unless limited through voting.

Voting is not transparent.

Voting, contrary to popular opinion––is not a transparent method for consensus building in a collective intelligence. Voting can hide reasoning or thinking behind the vote, the influence to actually cast the vote. It doesn’t matter that the vote can hide the identity (which is should!), it hides the important part, the influence.

Today, thousands of political influencers from across the spectrum are all — knowingly or not — participating in the same democracy-collapsing exercise. The content doesn’t matter. The political position doesn’t matter. The game is the same.

When enshittification hits the fan, what’s actually splattering is the failure of our collective ability to think together. Everything gets amplified under competition and conflict, with no mechanism for resolution.
by lucideer | 2025-08-13 16:19:42+00:00
You don't need a banner if you use cookies. You only need a banner if you store data about a user's activity on your server. This is usually done using cookies, but the banners are neither specific to cookies nor inherently required for all cookies.

---

Also: in general the banners are generally not required at all at an EU level (though some individual countries have implemented more narrow local rules related to banners). The EU regs only state that you need to facilitate informed consent in some form - how you do that in your UI is not specified. Most have chosen to do it via annoying banners, mostly due to misinformation about how narrow the regs are.
by subsistence234 | 2025-08-13 16:19:51+00:00
Controlling 51% of XMR costs ~$30M per day, you'd have to short a huge amount of XMR to make that worthwhile. Who would be the counter party and how would you do that anonymously?

The attack itself is unprofitable, the "profit" for Qubic is the publicity they get. (or at least that's what they're betting on)
by uncircle | 2025-08-13 16:19:52+00:00
That is a fair assessment, but on the other hand, yes men are not required to do things, despite people liking them. You can achieve great things even if your team is made of Germans.

My tongue-in-cheek comment wonders if having actors with a modicum of personality to be better than just being surrounded by over-enthusiastic bootlickers. In my experience, many projects would benefit from someone saying “no, that is silly.”
by acomjean | 2025-08-13 16:20:06+00:00
>The keyword here, though, is reproduction. A printer isn't capable of mixing pigments the same way an artist mixes paints on a palette.

This is kinda no longer true. Computer tools such as “krita” (open source) do an exceptional job emulating paints and brushes. A lot of professional illustrations now days are done digitally and printed. “Art” less so but the tablets keep getting better.

https://krita.org/en/

As someone who was kinda adept at making black and white prints from negatives, I kind of miss some of the old tech (making prints was a little magical). But digital / ink jet can get you 90% of the darkroom much easier and has some serious advantages.

I do applaud the effort and the fun factor here is real. Those pen plotters are neat and enough different to make this an interesting niche.
by MarkusQ | 2025-08-13 16:20:29+00:00
The interior and exterior are isolated; we have no idea if are universe has an exterior or not and, according to present theory, never will.

As another comment pointed out, in GR our "future" is a singularity which everything moves towards (so what we see as a time dimension).

"Expanding" and "contracting" depend on your coordinate system. If your rulers are shrinking, you can't tell this from space expanding.

The common factor here is you are wanting to use our reference frame (somewhere in this universe, not near a black hole) to describe things as they would be seen from other reference frames.
by reactordev | 2025-08-13 16:20:30+00:00
It’s not a loophole. localStorage is just that, local. Nothing is shared. No thing is “tracked” beyond your site preferences for reading on that machine.

I say it’s a perfect application of how to keep session data without keeping session data on the server, which is where GDPR fails. It assumes cookies. It assumes a server. It assumes that you give a crap about the contents of said cookie data.

In this case, no. Blast it away, the site still works fine (albeit with the default theme). This. Is. Perfect.