MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-08-28 13:37:53+00:00
When Back to the Future was made, Libya was ruled by Gaddafi, who was the archetype of a crazy middle eastern dictator. So the movie’s portrayal wasn’t exactly a stretch.

Putting that aside, one of the luxuries of having your own movie industry is not having to care how other people depict you in their movies. I’ve been watching low budget Indian action/horror movies in Netflix lately, and the depictions of foreign countries are similarly one-dimensional. Because why should Indians care? They’re just trying to tell a story and they need props to fit into archetypes in the narrative.
by calf | 2025-08-28 13:37:56+00:00
Your unpopular opinion is fallacious, markets can fail and as a result grey/black markets arise. This sci-hub issue is plausible evidence of that. Moreover there are systems where markets could be entirely inappropriate. But there's no law of nature or god that tells us how to decide as a society. Indeed it is your very mention of consumerism that belies this presupposition.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-28 13:38:00+00:00
> The models as is are still hugely useful, even if no further training was done.

Exactly. The parent comment has an incorrect understanding of what unit economics means.

The cost of training is not a factor in the marginal cost of each inference or each new customer.

It’s unfortunate this comment thread is the highest upvoted right now when it’s based on a basic misunderstanding of unit economics.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-28 13:38:25+00:00
It’s not purely social. A lot of web apps are legitimately poor, probably because the web has become the go-to platform for those looking to cut costs, who aren’t willing to pay for quality talent. This why there’s such a gulf between VS Code (not technically a web app, but built with web tech) and MS Teams for example: the former has had no expenses spared to woo devs and give MS legitimacy in software dev while the latter only needs to technically function since its audience is captive, so quality can be an afterthought.

So really, people need to start rejecting poor quality or poorly performing web apps. The collective bar for “good enough” is far too low, and so cheapskates will continue to churn out garbage.
by monegator | 2025-08-28 13:38:26+00:00
what about EU? ChatControl has a website, but I am having trouble finding out who the hell to contact for the requirement for google play integrity in our goverment apps (which was recently changed from requiring hardware integrity, as graphene can only do the latter.), both national and comunitary, and whoever is in charge of the repositories is not responding to the tens of issues opened for it.

Now there's also this new requirement, and it's shocking the EU hasn't responded yet. Weren't we supposed to make ourselves more independent from US technology? But i wouldn't be surprised someone would be lobbying on google's behalf to convince the politicians that "trust me bro, google play is more secure"
by ojosilva | 2025-08-28 13:38:27+00:00
> We need these things to be legislated

Maybe we can start by enacting legislation that implements Asimov's 3 laws in its very simple form.

1. First Law:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. Second Law:

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. Third Law:

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A Russian sci-fi writer in the 1940s predicted we were bound to have serious issues with AI safety. Fast-forward to today and we have hundreds of millions of people using AI every week and very little legislation to protect us, or just to guide courts in the process of detecting harm.
by cormorant | 2025-08-28 13:38:32+00:00
Honest question: how do you all sense when a page is AI-written? To me, the many headings, lists, and frequent use of bold stand out stylistically. Additionally: the multilevel numbered table of contents; the parenthetical acronyms (to the point of silliness, as in "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)" stand out.

Non-stylistically, the non-answers to questions or misinterpreted questions (read the bolded final sentence under "What is the octane rating of synthetic gasoline?") are a tell.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-28 13:38:34+00:00
C only got to its performance state, when optimizing compilers taking advantage of UB started being common thing, during the 8 and 16 bit home computer days they were hardly any better than writing Assembly by hand, hence why books like Zen of Assembly Language left such a mark.

So if we are speaking of optimizing compilers there is MLton, while ensuring that the application doesn't blow up in strange ways.

The problem is not people getting to learn these features from Rust, glad that they do, the issue is that they think Rust invented them.
by Thorrez | 2025-08-28 13:38:41+00:00
The article has a long list of reasons for certificates. Here's another reason:

>4. It also opens up new opportunities such as payment processing, "as current PCI DSS requirements do not allow non-standard TLS"2 and may only work with certificates having some sort of validation3. Payments card networks require HTTPS for a payment to be taken. So if someone wants to do that over an onion site they would need a TLS certificate.
by utyop22 | 2025-08-28 13:39:00+00:00
I think we need to first straighten out the terms.

What really is a bubble? In my view, if we want to get strict with this, a bubble is really an enlargement in asset prices that is not backed by fundamentals.

Now as it stands, Nvidia's recent growth has been to date backed by fundamentals due to increases in free cash flows. However, its market capitalization is based upon the fact that demand for what they produce continues to rise notwithstanding competition.

The problem is, Nvidia's customers who are responsible for their revenue growth are not seeing meaningful ROI and how steep will the barriers to entry remain? Its questionable if Nvidia can maintain existing barriers to entry (let alone making those barriers any steeper) to sustain the market power it enjoys over a long time horizon to justify its present value. Therein lies the problem with Nvidia's valuation.

There is also no evidence that shows Nvidia's projects have real options embedded within them. Now of course, lets get real - who is really doing this level of analysis? Very few, and we are seeing this play out with jumps in the stock price with no tangible justification.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-08-28 13:39:05+00:00
"Almost completely boiled frog petitions against raising the water temperature another degree"

It's great to see that some more people who were previously complacent are outraged about this move. But let's look back a bit:

In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds started writing an OS kernel for 386-class PCs. He didn't need the approval of some corporation to allow him to run code on his own machine, or distribute it for others to run on theirs. The code didn't have to run as an "app" in some restricted sandbox under Microsoft's OS (not that back then, DOS or Windows were even in any way locked down the way modern operating systems are). Documentation for all the "standard" hardware like video, keyboard, hard disks, etc. was openly available, so it didn't have to rely on proprietary drivers.

This is how it was at one time, and what should have remained the standard today, but instead it's turned into some utopian dream that those who grew up with "smart" devices can't even conceive as possible anymore.

Google has taken what became of this code, and turned it into an "open" system that is pretty much designed to track every aspect of people's lives in order to more effectively target them with psychological manipulation, which is what advertisements really are. And you're not really getting "free stuff" in return for this invasion either, since pretty much everything you buy includes a hidden "tax" that goes to support this massive industry.

"A supercomputer in everyone's pocket"? Yes, but it's not yours, nor can you even know what it does. Even the source code that is available is millions of lines that you couldn't inspect in all your lifetime. Online 24/7, with GPS tracking your every move and a microphone that listens to what you say. Every URL you visit is logged. Your photos uploaded to "the cloud" and used to train AI.

The only solution is to no longer accept any of this, even if almost everyone else does. Even if it means giving up some convenience.

Google has to be destroyed.
by mrangle | 2025-08-28 13:39:09+00:00
>"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."

What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.

Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.

I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
by ramses0 | 2025-08-28 13:39:13+00:00
I have that shirt! ;-)

The other day (we're being encouraged to "use AI" at work), I had a bunch of 20250101, 20250201, ... fields in a g-sheet at work. I decide to ask google's AI to "help out", hey... can you convert these integers to ISO date strings?

"Sure can do, old buddy, old, pal, here you go, it's '2025-01-01', '2025-02-01', etc..."

OK, great, can you put those rows into the spreadsheet now? "Whoah whoa... I used python code to do that for you" => "Can you do it with a spreadsheet formula or something? Can you replace those rows? What's the formula to convert this into a string / iso date? ...etc..."

Finally I'm just like "fuck it!", grabbed it in vim, `Ctrl-V, G, I-, ll.` and pasted it all back in. Like 10 keystrokes instead of arguing with our new robot overlords. :-D
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-28 13:39:21+00:00
Good catch. Yes, side-loading directly from the developer website isn’t going to trigger marketplace obligations. Those obligations still exist but are the responsibility of the developer directly.

Under the CRA, smartphones are considered to be much more critical from a security standpoint and, by the end of 2027, will have to follow an enhanced set of “best practices” to be able to enjoy a presumption of conformity. The best practices are due to be published by December of this year. I think Google already knows that developer attestations will be on that list and want to appear proactive instead of reactive.

The point still stands - the DMA does not exist in a vacuum. Other EU laws affect how you interpret it, and you should assume that the EU will pass more laws in the future that also affect how you interpret it.
by kibwen | 2025-08-28 13:39:32+00:00
> In any language, when we hand a function a reference to an object, that function can't destroy the object, nor change its type

This isn't quite true. While Rust doesn't currently support this, people have proposed the concept of `&own` references that take ownership of the object and free it when the reference goes out of scope (consider that Rust's standard destructor signature, `fn drop(&mut)`, should probably take one of these hypothetical owning references). I addition, I believe that languages with typestate can cause types to change as a result of function calls, although I don't quite understand the details.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-28 13:39:39+00:00
> Yes it's a damning indictment of programming culture than people did not adopt pre-Rust ML-family languages, but it could be worse, they could be not adopting Rust either.

I'll say for a long time I've been quite pleased on the general direction of the industry in terms of language design and industry trends around things like memory safety. For a good many years we've seen functional features being integrated into popular imperative languages, probably since map/reduce became a thing thanks to Google. So I'll us all credit for coming around eventually.

I'm more dismayed by the recent AI trend of asking an AI to write Python code and then just going with whatever it outputs. I can't say that seems like a step forward.
by neutronicus | 2025-08-28 13:39:56+00:00
Some of the user interaction borders on "disaster" IMO. One puts up with it because it's not a show-stopper for the core value proposition of the software (an LLM agent completing tasks for you), and the core value proposition of the software is really valuable.

The noticeable issues are (1) unpredictable scrolling of the terminal window and (2) a super-buggy text box for inputting the prompt.

In particular if I mash the arrow key too fast while moving around and editing the prompt CC and my terminal's idea of where the cursor is get out of sync somehow and it's tricky to get them re-aligned, and I can't actually input text until I do. The vim mode lets me bypass this but it has its own bugs and is missing a ton of features that I expect. Visual selection in particular seems to be missing? Not entirely certain what things I'm used to are stock vim features vs Spacemacs features but I'm pretty sure visual mode is the former. Regardless, only the very basics seem to actually work. "w", "b", "e", "cw/b/e", "dw/b/e", "esc/i".

So for the most part I actually just edit CC prompts in emacs and paste them.

I resort to this workaround because I am very motivated to use Claude Code. For a less-useful piece of software I would probably just give up.
Ask HN: Anyone working on bringing software back from US clouds?
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-08-28 13:40:01+00:00
I am a freelancer from EU and I want to specialize in migrating software back on-prem or to traditional EU hosting providers.

However, with all the talk about Digital Sovereignty and Strategic Autonomy, I found few real projects that require engineering expertise.

I feel like everyone is just trying to squeeze money from EU funds on this hot topic, but none actually believes such migrations can be done, so all money is consumed on policy issues, not the actual work.

We are collectively sitting on our hands, waiting until Trump administration is over and relations between EU and US are back to normal.

Are there people out there really doing such migrations? Technology associations that provide support? Businesses that grow in that niche?
by raffael_de | 2025-08-28 13:40:06+00:00
I sometimes don't even bother checking if a movie is on Netflix and instead just go "elsewhere" I know I'll find it for sure. Precisely up until not too long ago Netflix wouldn't even grant me as a Linux user FullHD resolution (despite paying for it). We're at a point where for many artists it isn't about having your work stolen or bought, but rather fading into obscurity versus someone enjoying what you created.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-28 13:40:26+00:00
With the heat turning up on AI companies to explain how they will land on a viable business model some of this is starting to look like WeWork’s “Community Adjusted EBITA” arguments of “hey if you ignore where we’re losing money, we’re not losing money!” that they made right before imploding.

I think most folks understand that pure inference in a vacuum is likely cash flow positive, but that’s not why folks are asking increasingly tough questions on the financial health of these enterprises.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-28 13:40:28+00:00
I think, in comparing the energy input and output of the fuel, you might be omitting its storage density and role in off-grid energy availability. For example, consider aviation: you can't hook up a plane to a solar farm or nuke plant, but you have to take energy with you onboard. In order to fly and lift passengers or cargo, you need to minimize the mass of energy supply, which means maximizing energy density. It's really hard to beat hydrocarbons for that, and they're available at a convenient range of temperatures and pressures. So, the idea behind synthetic fuels is to make artificial hydrocarbon fuel as a means of storing green energy. The energy input-output inefficiency is just the price of storing that energy for off-grid use.
by mrangle | 2025-08-28 13:40:35+00:00
Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late.

Moving on.

Perhaps they didn't riot.

Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
by nperez | 2025-08-28 13:40:36+00:00
Whether web or native is better is hardly relevant to the core of this issue IMO, which is about fundamental rights to admin our own devices. Having to make a network request to fetch an external resource every time you want to run code on your own device is sort of a non-solution to this problem.

For a while, I had stopped flashing custom ROMs because the default Android experience was good enough for me, but it looks like this is now necessary again.
by TFortunato | 2025-08-28 13:40:42+00:00
This is probably not going to be a very helpful answer, but I sort of think of it this way: you probably have favorite authors or artist (or maybe some really dislike!), where you could probably take a look at a piece of their work, even if its new to you, and immediately recognize their voice & style.

A lot of LLM chat models have a very particular voice and style they use by default, especially in these longer form "Sure, I can help you write a blog article about X!" type responses. Some pieces of writing just scream "ChatGPT wrote this", even if they don't include em-dashes, hah!
by u5wbxrc3 | 2025-08-28 13:41:08+00:00
It's just bizarre to me. I have always been fully aware that when I give input to a LLM I am conversing with a statistical model. Never has it crossed my mind to actually talk to a LLM. But I guess it seems possible when you haven't grown up with technology or don't know how it works. This fate for that poor boy is awful and OpenAI should be responsible.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-28 13:41:11+00:00
Not everyone appreciates having his speech characterized as "academic" - in certain circles, it's viewed rather poorly - so I'm not convinced of the glazing hypothesis.

ChatGPT certainly makes distinctions. If I give it a blog post written by a philosophy professor, I get "formal, academic, and analytical". If I feed it an article from The Register, I get "informal and conversational". The justifications it gives are accurate.

"Academic" may simply mean that your writing is best characterized as an example of clearly written prose with an expository flavor, and devoid of regional and working class slang as well as any colloquialisms. Which, again, points to my RP comparison.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-28 13:41:11+00:00
Also, there’s usually more than one side of the story.

I work for an organization that is supportive of employees. I managed someone with this diagnosis, who was a fabulous colleague for several years. Then stuff happened. We ended up in a situation where there were significant personal safety concerns. That’s not the situation here, but without the framework of support for both the employee and the people around them, these situations become untenable.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-28 13:41:42+00:00
> the issue is that they think Rust invented them

Sorry, my post wasn't to imply Rust invented those things. My point was Rust's success as a language is due to those features.

Of course there's more to it, but what Rust really does right is blend functional and imperative styles. The "match" statement is a great way to bring functional concepts to imperative programmers, because it "feels" like a familiar switch statement, but with super powers. So it's a good "gateway drug" if you will, because the benefit is quickly realized ("Oh, it caught that edge case for me before it became a problem at runtime, that would have been a headache...").

From there, you can learn how to use match as an expression, and then you start to wonder why "if" isn't an expression in every language. After that you're hooked.
by giuliomagnifico | 2025-08-28 13:42:21+00:00
But it’s an issue only Android:

> While iOS's remote tab in-app browser (SFSafariViewController) prevents the app injecting JavaScript, it is locked to Safari (or more specifically the WkWebView) and thus overrides the user's choice of default browser.

They are complaining that the in-app browser does not allow user customization if I understood correctly.

That seems like a present, but minor issue. The important thing is security/privacy to me, which is less strong on Android if I understand correctly.
by randomtoast | 2025-08-28 13:42:37+00:00
> If "YouTubers" are journalists, then everyone is a journalist.

In a way, yes. That is what freedom of the press means, and it is a core principle of the Western world. Anyone can start a blog, write articles, take photos, make videos, and share them publicly. That is, and should remain, legal. No authority can decide who qualifies as a journalist.

There are no official press credentials in law either. The passes that some news agencies issue are simply pieces of paper with no legal weight, because press freedom is a fundamental right for every citizen.

The idea that someone cannot be a journalist simply because they are not part of a large agency is mistaken. It is just as mistaken to assume that independent journalists will automatically act irresponsibly.

> Am I the public? Cause, I am super happy people can't just film and publish me walking in public.

There is no expectation of privacy in public. Of course no one can come to you and hold their camera in your face. That's not allowed. But if you happen to be walking around and there's some news agency or journalist that has a camera on to something else (again in public) like a tourist attraction, then of course you will be on their film and they do not have to ask you before putting it on YouTube.
by taylodl | 2025-08-28 13:43:10+00:00
For processing and analysis, you're centralizing the compute of complex analysis and storing the result so downstream decision support systems can use the result as a criterion in their analysis - and not have to distribute, and maintain, that logic throughout the set of applications. A contrived example: is_valued_customer. This is a simple boolean, but its computation can be involved and you wouldn't want to have to replicate and maintain this logic throughout all the applications. But at the time, it likely has no business being in the OLTP store.
by cgadski | 2025-08-28 13:43:23+00:00
It's not really about the language. If someone doesn't speak English well and wants to use a model to translate it, that's cool. What I'm picking up on is the dishonesty and vapidness. The article _doesn't_ explore linear algebra, it _doesn't_ have visualizations, it's _not_ a comprehensive resource, and reading this won't teach you anything beyond keywords and formulas.

What makes me angry about LLM slop is imagining how this looks to a student learning this stuff. Putting a post like this on your personal blog is implicitly saying: as long as you know some some "equations" and remember the keywords, a language model can do the rest of the thinking for you! It's encouraging people to forgo learning.