MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by transcriptase | 2025-08-15 18:08:33+00:00
The “do nothing and win” strategy has served Valve well. The fact is every publisher wants their own launcher on start-up running all the time collecting data, updating all the time, throwing popups at the user.

The user on the other hand doesn’t want 8 different bloated game launchers slowing startup, siphoning bandwidth, constantly updating, using a bunch of memory, and each using 1-2% of CPU at idle doing who knows what.
by lazyeye | 2025-08-15 18:08:35+00:00
The point I was making is that:-

Using lawfare to try to take out a political opponent (ridiculous NY charge with no precedent, no victim, and from a DA who was famous for reducing felonies to misdemeanours but for Trump did the opposite)

Applying govt pressure to social media companies to censor content (twitter files etc)

Using the intelligence apparatus to try to take out a political opponent (russian collusion hoax, fake dossier)

Relying on the media lies to maintain power (border is secure, Biden is mentally competent etc)

Well these are all features of Stalin, Putin, the CCP and now the modern Democrat party.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-15 18:09:10+00:00
The issue is the insane amount of traffic from crawlers that DDOS websites.

For example: https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

> [...] Now it’s LLMs. If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.

The linux kernel has also been dealing with it AFAIK. Apparently it's not so easy to deal with, because these ai scrapers pull a lot of tricks to anonymize themselves.
by majormajor | 2025-08-15 18:09:14+00:00
That isn't just a pattern LLM's use—it's one people use too.

But there's a whole lotta metaphor and flowery synonyms in that article too, and it all certainly feels robotic and repetitive in today's day and age.

> The thread, titled "How do parents cultivate young, famous entrepreneurial kids?" revealed insights that might make you rethink everything you thought you knew about teenage success stories.

Though I'm very curious about this sentence: that `?` at the end of the title is taking the place of a comma ending the aside about the title... but feels funky. I can't say it's wrong, but I feel like there's gotta be a better way to style it. Any English experts here?

(Also em-dashes with surrounding spaces bug me, personally.)
by superkuh | 2025-08-15 18:09:29+00:00
> If we want a secure web, HTTP/1.1 must die.

Yes, the corporations and insitutions and their economic transactions must be the highest and only priority. I hear that a lot from commercial people with commercial blinders on.

They simply cannot see beyond their context and realize the web, http/1.1 is used by human people that don't have the same use cases or incredibly stringent identity verification needs. Human use cases don't matter to them because they are not profitable.

Also, this "attack" only works on commercial style complex CDN setups. It wouldn't effect human hosted webservers at all. So yeah, commercial companies, abandon HTTP, go to your HTTP/3 with all it's UDP only and CA TLS only and no self signing and no clear text. And leave the actual web on HTTP/1.1 HTTP+HTTPS alone.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-08-15 18:09:33+00:00
Flying before every country dropped covid restrictions was really just a degree of bliss that I'll never again attain in my life. Tickets at rock bottom prices, booking just one seat but having a full row to stretch out and sleep on, nobody in front of or behind me, meals being oddly good for some reason (maybe desperate to appeal to customers or not needing to make as many meals with little ingredients?). 2020-2023 was peak travel.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-15 18:09:36+00:00
> So obviously Seattleites who oppose residential development should just promote more crime.

I knew the fent addicts on the D line in Ballard were good for something! But seriously, you know, there are two sure fire ways to lower housing prices: make the place a crappier place to live, or just get rid of jobs/economic activity. My dad was in Seattle working for Boeing after Vietnam, and got hit by the "will the last person to leave Seattle turn out the lights" Boeing bust. It is kind of like falling oil prices: you know, drilling more doesn't really affect the price of oil as much as reduced demand due to an economic recession.

> That's a collective action/free-rider problem, where the positive externalities of good public policies of one community are captured in part by other, cheating groups.

Isn't that the main problem? This is the main problem with progressivism at a local level: even if you are making the world a better place, you could be failing to improve your place (seeing no benefit for your money) or actually making it worse (seeing negative benefit for your money). How many of us are saints who are willing to sacrifice our own lives for the greater good?
by nis0s | 2025-08-15 18:10:02+00:00
One problem that’s unaddressed is that there isn’t a house building, pricing and mortgage model for people making 50K or less.

One piece of data I’ve found is that 65% of Americans are homeowners (meaning American families, not rentals or investments), which is also about the percentage of Americans who make $50K or more per year (~68%).

For people with a middle class networth (not income, I mean networth, which is about ~1M-9M when compared with the top of US society), homeownership currently works as a wealth-building mechanism because of scarcity. There’s also the desire to live close to certain areas, but why not make more neighborhoods or areas worth living in?

Regardless, if the goal is to maintain scarcity for wealth building, then I think the scarcity mechanism will remain intact if homeownership is increased to a high rate while balancing the cost of materials and labor, and building houses specially for certain income levels, as mentioned already in other posts.

But no one seems to be doing materials innovation, or construction innovation. I don’t think 3D printing is there quite yet, and might be more expensive. Where’s the push on automating construction? Why not build with a genetically engineered bamboo that’s cheaper and more sustainable than wood? Seems materials innovation will help with both housing and sustainability goals.
by sandworm101 | 2025-08-15 18:10:24+00:00
>> our economy is not built on poetry and painting

Really? Hollywood operates on the efforts of screenwriters and digital rendering masters, both areas very informed by poetry and painting. Graphic design and quick language are the basis of online ads, which in turn are what supports the likes of Facebook and Google. If not for the wordsmiths and visual artists, the modern internet would be a very different place.
by hungmung | 2025-08-15 18:10:25+00:00
I believe the Royal Society in particular had strong connections to the so-called Rosicrucians, or at least were very interested in the texts. It's likely no such group ever really existed, but the learned men of the day seem to have taken inspiration from the texts, which read very much like academics frustrated by the constraints of the Reformations. So they had a loose network which flew under the radar to avoid trouble. Eventually part of this becomes the Royal Society. There was even a short-lived monarchy in Bohemia which was essentially coopted Rosicrucian ideas to create what resembles a liberal monarchy which tried to insulate itself from the chaos of the reformations.

https://ia903209.us.archive.org/30/items/the-rosicrucian-enl...
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-15 18:10:51+00:00
Just remember the "rules of making things findable on the internet": no special characters (ascii letters only), and unique enough to be one of the top results when googled unqualified. Otherwise half of the people will start calling it "csharp" instead of C# or "golang" instead of go.

I'm partial to looking at non-english words because they frequently have these properties and there's basically an unlimited number to choose from.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-15 18:11:58+00:00
One thing about my own challenges with AI are;

Almost every other tool I adopt, once I learn how to use it, I always know the use case. Whether it's slack, docker an IDE, zoom, most programming libraries. So yeah, it took me a while to switch from VIM to an IDE, but there was never _really_ a question of "Maybe the IDE won't work here". VIM might have been better for certain things, but the IDE didn't just outright fail, there was always an option.

AI, there's always the overhead of wondering, maybe it just won't work? So when I think it will work it's great, but it's very hard to get addicted to a solution that has that overhead.
by colpabar | 2025-08-15 18:12:51+00:00
Look man, dems have tried the whole "democracy is on the ballot" thing and lost two elections to trump. They have lost to him twice! Maybe instead of campaigning on how bad the other guy is (disclaimer: i fully agree that he is bad), they could actually do things that make people want to vote for them? I say this as someone who would really like to republicans lose forever after this, but who fears that the dems won't ever win again because they won't change.
by wolrah | 2025-08-15 18:13:23+00:00
I wasn't a hater of Steam, but I did hate it being forced on the CS community as well as the news that it would be required for HL2.

At the time I had dialup. Patching on Valve's schedule simply did not work for me. Patching most games at that point was a multi-stage process involving resume-capable download managers and setting my PC to automatically get online and start downloading at night.

I will say that even those who had broadband did have legitimate grievances. Any kind of background process mattered a lot more back then, and Steam was not particularly light weight thanks in part to its use of a custom UI framework. I also don't recall it being particularly stable early on, nor the servers being able to hold up too well under load as demonstrated almost immediately by the HL2 launch. Neither insurmountable and both in fact surmounted within a few years, but again it was being forced on an existing community.

Had it been optional for CS it still would have had a rough start with HL2 and a lot of gripes from that community but I think it wouldn't have been hated as hard as what resulted from forcing it on CS players.
by bitpush | 2025-08-15 18:13:44+00:00
All of us are "living in the glass house" [1]. If you're taking a strong position, I expect people to be a) self-aware b) state their biases/hypocricy upfront.

It is the holier than thou ("Look how bad things are. tsk tsk") that I cant stand.

The message would have been much better if was like "We live in this economy, and wouldnt it be nice if we could .. oh and by the way, I am part of the problem and here's what I'm doing about it."

The article is no different than a drug dealer saying "the drug problem in this country is out of control.

[1]: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
by keerthiko | 2025-08-15 18:13:44+00:00
People can have writing tics, i know i do — that said, this article does read very much like a scrape-n-translate + some "summarized insights" of Chinese forum threads. While that's fully within the scope of a human blogger, it is very much in the wheelhouse of a modern LLM.

More telling rather than any specific lines or phrases, to me, is that the tone gives off a strong "i don't have a single strong feeling about this topic, i'm just transcribing others' opinions and vaguely coming up with a C2A" vibe — no human who'd bother to write a personal-opinions blog would realistically channel that energy into an 850-word essay without LLMs doing all the drudgery.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-15 18:14:08+00:00
Most of the books are the outcomes of the Renaissance. The relationship between “science” and spirituality was much closer then than now.

Further, most books published in Europe between 1300-1700 were written in Neo-Latin. Most of these books, therefore, have not been digitized and translated.

Now, to me, it seems like a real shame if this humanist core of European thought is deemed too dangerous for consumption. But it wouldn’t be the first time. The library behind these works, the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica, specializes in books banned by various church authorities.

I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training. The renaissance, esoteric though it may be, deserves to be part of the diversity of thought used to train LLMs.

We can easily imagine an AI apocalypse - maybe these books might even help us imagine an AI renaissance…
by spenczar5 | 2025-08-15 18:14:28+00:00
I dont know, arguing that http/2 is safer overall is a... bold claim. It is sufficiently complex that there is no standard implementation in the Python standard library, and even third party library support is all over the place. requests doesn't support it; httpx has experimental, partial, pre-1.0 support. Python http/2 servers are virtually unavailable at all. And it's not just Python - I remember battling memory leaks, catastrophic deadlocks, and more in the grpc-go implementation of http/2, in its early days.

HTTP 1.1 connection reuse is indeed more subtle than it first appears. But http/2 is so hard to get right.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-15 18:14:39+00:00
Option 4 was redesigning a camera unit to be narrow along the whole width of the screen instead of dropping in an oem component that demands the notch.

When you look at the remaining bezel along with the camera unit, the lens is the same size. They really could have built a bezelless mac more or less if they only stretched out the components in that camera unit.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-15 18:15:13+00:00
That depends on whether or not you choose to accept VC funding or external investment, or take the alternative route of being a sustainable and debt-free concern owned entirely by its founders - with the downside that you won't be able to afford that Superbowl ad spot that your competitors use to win-over the market leaving you with a small, but loyal, customer-base.
by galleywest200 | 2025-08-15 18:15:13+00:00
When I was in school we were educated in STEM alongside the humanities, they called this being "interdisciplinary".

One of my undergraduate chemistry professors went to Cal Tech and he told us that his professors encouraged him to ask people outside of his discipline about problems if he got stuck.

I do not understand why people are unwilling to do more interdisciplinary studies. When I took courses on crop botany and plant genetics we also read books and had seminar to discuss the topics of the books - that is a humanities skill, to discuss in a group what meaning you can derive from texts.

As for the people saying you should get a degree that pays well...look at all the folks who got Comp. Sci. degrees who are now being thrown in the wood chipper. Was that worth it? Time will tell.
by recursive | 2025-08-15 18:15:13+00:00
It almost sounds like student loans should be harder to get. Giving a student a loan seems like a bad bet. All the parties that know how to do a proper risk analysis aren't willing to take that on. So this hot potato gets passed around. Eventually it ends up back on the prospective student, who is least equipped to make a rational financial decision.

Kind of makes the whole thing sound like a scam from that perspective.
by reactordev | 2025-08-15 18:15:21+00:00
A fly can not escape the spiders web.

The only answer I can give you is never put yourself in a position to be taken advantage of by another. Whether that be your location. Your position. Your job. Or your ability to get food.

I sympathize. War is shit. I wish it wasn't but it is. Humans inflicting harm on humans makes no one happy. Keep your eyes open and your belly full.
by nashashmi | 2025-08-15 18:15:35+00:00
Some people here are reacting like the occult is fake.

Magic is fake. It is an illusion and it is fun and games. And we have lots of stories about it, both fantasy and horror.

Occult is real. There is no such thing as white magic. There is only black magic. And such magic involves making trades with spirits and demons and establishing relationships with them. These demons do not have a code. They slowly guide you towards a state where you humiliate yourself and put yourself in a compromised state. Addicted. Disconnected. Repulsed.

Please be careful around these things. It’s fun until someone dies. As this professional witch will tell you. https://www.facebook.com/shadow.control.en/videos/zhanna-kus...
by einszwei | 2025-08-15 18:15:50+00:00
Its disingenuous to discard the contribution of humanities. To name a few of the top of my mind:

Chomsky hierarchy is an important concept in programming languages and could be considered as originating from linguistics

Philosophy (which is counted in humanities) has had massive contributions to Logic and formal methods in computer science.

There's even more examples of humanities contribution in HCI and AI safety.
by buzer | 2025-08-15 18:16:01+00:00
> Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?

Pretty famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_glass#Island_of_Muran...

> Glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without permission from the government. Leaving without permission, or revealing trade secrets, was punishable by death

Though importantly this was enforced by state.
by dathinab | 2025-08-15 18:17:12+00:00
the problem in many cases is that even if such a law is made it likely

- is hard to enforce

- misses bite, i.e. it makes you more money to break it then any penalties

but in general yes, a site which indicates they don't want to be crawled by AI bots but still gets crawled should be handled similar to someone with house ban on a shop forcing them self into the shop

given how severely messed up some millennia cyber security laws are I wonder if crawlers bypassing Anubis could be interpreted as "circumventing digital access controls/protections" or similar, especially given that its done to make copies of copyrighted material ;=)
by Forgeties79 | 2025-08-15 18:17:24+00:00
But that’s exactly what it is. They are worried about the blowback from the very easy PR advantage groups like this have, all based on weaponizing how it is basically a PR slam dunk to paint these companies as “supporting disgusting pornography” and “exposing harmful content to minors.” As long as you can couch your points in that kind of rhetoric, you are virtually unbeatable in the US when it comes to messaging. No major company is going to stand in defense of pornography outside of Pornhub.

There’s a reason this hasn’t been taken to the courts and regardless of what you attribute the motivation to the outcome is the same. This is top to bottom an ethics discussion, and the banks are a part of it. By capitulating they have made a choice. They decided the public debate would be bad for business.
by tines | 2025-08-15 18:17:33+00:00
Your comment is, strictly speaking, correct, but not very useful, because nobody is saying either of those things. The reality is that 90% of people are totally oblivious to the danger of any technology, and they scorn the 9% who say "Let's examine this carefully and see if we can separate the bad from the good." There is the 1% of people who will oppose any change, but they're not dominating the conversation like the people are who say that this technology is unmitigated good (or at least that the bad is so minor that it isn't worth thinking about or changing for).

(Also strictly speaking, "I'm critical therefore I'm right" isn't always valid, but "I'm uncritical therefore I'm right" is always invalid.)
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-15 18:17:39+00:00
Thanks for scheduling a demo! Looking forward to chatting soon.

You can definitely monitor this remotely by looking at the logs of the runs which includes screenshots, but we don't currently support live streaming of the desktop screen. Our customers usually do that via RDP which is usually straightforward.

Because our agent directly controls the keyboard, mouse, and display, it needs exclusive access (no concurrent users). Our customer typically run it on either a dedicated spare desktop at the client site or a dedicated cloud VM (managed by them or provisioned by us)
by roland35 | 2025-08-15 18:18:19+00:00
I suppose out of context it seems out of nowhere, but if you follow some of these influencers they act like it is literally impossible for anything bad to happen with guns around.

I enjoy shooting myself (don't really do it frequently but I have a number of times at ranges) but I feel like there are a lot of people who do not take gun ownership seriously.

I also think there are a lot of people who dont take driving a car seriously enough so it isn't exclusive to guns...
by true_religion | 2025-08-15 18:18:23+00:00
Security is a spectrum. If you totally control the input going into a program, it can be safe even if you didn't test it for memory leaks. The only errors that occur will be truly erroneous, not malicious and for many solutions that's fine.

At the very least, it's fine for personal projects which is something I'm getting into more and more: remembering that computers were meant to create convenience, so writing small programs to make life easier.
by pash | 2025-08-15 18:18:25+00:00
For some definition of “sufficiently introductory”, I’d recommend starting with the first chapter of John Nolan’s book Stable Distributions [0] (20 pages), which presents the class of distributions to which sums of iid random variables converge and builds up to a version of the generalized CLT.

Note that this generalization of the classical CLT relaxes the requirement of finite mean and variance but still requires that the summed random variables are iid. There are further generalizations to sums of dependent random variables. John D. Cook has a good blog post that gives a quick overview of these generalizations [1].

0. https://edspace.american.edu/jpnolan/wp-content/uploads/site... [PDF]

1. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/central_limit_theorems/
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-08-15 18:18:26+00:00
I've never understood the induced demand argument. Yes, when goods get cheaper demand increases. Or, to put it another way, when we make our cities more affordable more people want to live there. What's the problem? Sure, induced demand means that the marginal increase of affordability is less than it may have been if demand remained constant, but a. affordability still increases, and b. the solution is just to keep adding more housing until things flatten off. I truly don't understand why this is controversial; do you not want people to have desirable things? The rational response to induced demand is "great, people actually want this. Build more".
by nunez | 2025-08-15 18:18:44+00:00
Good thread. I wish he touched on COVID's impact to the athleisure and its role in popularizing technical fabrics. Athleisure is all the way in these days mostly thanks to WFH.

As for heat/cold: wool is unbeatable for hot formal wear. A super 120 wool suit with a wool blend shirt will feel effortless and will actually help cool you down a little bit.