MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nemomarx | 2025-08-29 13:53:36+00:00
If you could either improve hft by some percentage, which slightly increases market liquidity and has downstream impacts, or you could work on making the manufacturing cost of solar panels the same percentage cheaper or making then some percentage more efficient, the latter option is more direct.

I think it would be good if our best minds went to work on directly creating better things instead of indirectly moving money around efficiently so that other people might eventually find success.
by infecto | 2025-08-29 13:54:40+00:00
Sure, but that’s kind of my point, once you open the door to moral gatekeeping of jobs, it gets very slippery very fast. You can always trace the “negative impact” argument up or down the stack. That accounting software? It helps a business capture margin. That business? Probably acting as a middleman extracting value from someone else. Even compiler contributions ultimately fuel businesses optimizing for profit.

You’re right that there are middle grounds between subsistence farming and some caricature of ultracapitalism, but deciding where to draw that line in practice is messy. Pretending it’s obvious which industries are “moral” and which aren’t usually says more about someone’s priors than it does about some universal ethical framework.

At the end of the day, efficient allocation of capital, imperfect as it is, is what makes the system work. It drives productivity gains, lowers costs, and ultimately raises living standards across the board.
by bdd8f1df777b | 2025-08-29 13:54:46+00:00
If you have the technical knowledge, you can just read the protocols, find out if they make sense, and then implement them yourself. Most of them are quite straight forward so it's not possible to hide a backdoor like Dual_EC_DRBG in the protocol.

If you are not so technical then you have to decide who to trust. For example, you may trust that open source software has been vetted enough and build one from source. Or trust that the built artefacts downloaded from github is good enough. Or trust that the software downloaded from a website not marked as fraud by Google Chrome is good enough. Etc.

In any case, the more technical knowledge you have, the more confidence you can have by doing due diligence yourself.
by closewith | 2025-08-29 13:55:09+00:00
All jokes aside, the commenter I initially replied to really should reflect on why their concept of creativity and risk tolerance is so linked with financial outcomes, because that is a very particular association and it maybe informs their worldwide more than they may realise.

> The former is a passive-aggressive way to say the latter. I aim to, and encourage others to say what they mean.

I suppose you don't see the irony?
by AndroTux | 2025-08-29 13:55:26+00:00
I don’t understand why apps need access to my photos at all. (with some very specific exceptions,) apps should only access a photo, which I first select using the system photo picker. There’s no need for apps to access the entire camera roll just so I can select one photo to use with that app.

I know that that’s partially implemented with the limited photo access now, but it’s confusing from a UI perspective and I don’t understand why this isn’t the default.

The only apps that need full access to my camera roll, are apps like Google Photos, Nextcloud or Immich. Everyone else can suck a lemon.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-08-29 13:55:28+00:00
I am not following what any of that has to do with the Web Bot Auth protocol?

it seems like complaints about Cloudflare's anti-DOS protection services and how they have a monopoly on such, I get that.

I'm not seeing the connection to a protocol for bots/crawlers voluntarily cryptographically signing their http requests, so sites (anyone implementing the protocol not just cloudflare) can use it to authenticate known actors?

I am interested in using it to exempt bots/crawlers I trust/support/have an agreement with from the anti-bot measures I, like many, am being forced to implement to keep our sites up under an enormously increased wave of what is apparently AI-training-motivated repeat crawling. Right now these measures are keeping out bots I don't want to keep out too. I would like to be able to securely identify them to let them in.
by euLh7SM5HDFY | 2025-08-29 13:56:12+00:00
Isn't that actually worse option? I mean, I don't know about BTC but there are multiple instances of attacks with fake QR codes placed over parking meters. And last time I was looking for QR code generator for some random website the first one I found one "looked to be working", but actually quietly replaced the URL with own link shortening service.
by armoredkitten | 2025-08-29 13:56:18+00:00
When I saw the title "Rupert's Property", I immediately thought of Rupert's Land which used to exist in Canada[0] (a large area around Hudson Bay, essentially). And as it turns out, it's the same guy! So apparently Canada also can be said to have Rupert's Property ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert%27s_Land
by margorczynski | 2025-08-29 13:56:25+00:00
The problem is people (not sure if it's coping) present an argument that either it can perfectly replace someone 100% or it's an useless fad.

Even increasing the average productivity by 10-20% is huge and in some areas (like copywriting as you've mentioned) the gains are much bigger than that. Of course there's also the argument of the infinite demand (i.e. demand will always overshadow any gains in supply caused by AI) but evidence is never provided.
by breadwinner | 2025-08-29 13:56:44+00:00
> In the annotated video played for the jury, the vehicle detects a vehicle about 170 feet away. A subsequent frame shows it detecting a pedestrian about 116 feet away. As McGee hurtles closer and closer, the video shows the Tesla planning a path through Angulo’s truck, right where he and his girlfriend were standing behind signs and reflectors highlighting the end of the road.

So the Tesla detected the vehicle and the pedestrian, and then plans a path through them? Wow! How bad is this software?
by 0xbadc0de5 | 2025-08-29 13:56:50+00:00
I kind of already assumed they were. I've got some pretty niche use-cases that I'd like to see the models get better at thinking their way through. I benefit from their training on my interactions. So I'll opt in. But I'll also recognize that others might not feel that way, so the services should provide a way for users to opt out.
Show HN: Find Hidden Gems on HN
by pj4533 | 2025-08-29 13:56:50+00:00
Hey HN. I created this website.

https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/

It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this.

I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I never really did anything with the idea. So I decided just to make it into a little single-page web app.

The Hacker News API is pretty cool because it doesn't require an API key, so you can just vibe code against it super easy. I just loaded up Claude Code and started talking to it. That first night when I was recording, it was just me with this repo, that I call 'thefuture' and I just put everything in there: scripts, whatever. Then i'll have Claude Code use OpenAI to talk to me and I'll just get bored and explore different APIs and see what I can come up with. That's all inside a single repo that Claude Code knows about, and just set it in YOLO mode and just go to town - it's super fun. It's kind of slow though, so that's the only downside. But if you put a script in there for Claude to talk to you, it can be pretty fun just to explore things.

This website is just one idea extracted from that one session of messing around with a Claude Code last month. I open sourced it, you can look at the repo here: https://github.com/pj4533/hn-overlooked
by buzer | 2025-08-29 13:56:53+00:00
> An in-app notification pop-up will alert you to the change. You can opt out in the pop up.

The in-app notification that I got was a pop up which contained some buttons and some images. There was no text. Just in case it was some dark mode issue I checked the DOM and I couldn't find any text there either. I just clicked outside the modal and it went away. I assumed it was some announcement about some new feature and ignored it.

I did end up seeing the news yesterday in Reddit (I'm having issues getting the research tool to actually being used, tried to see if there was some recent changes) but it's unlikely that I was the only one who experienced modal the issue & if those didn't follow the tech news they could easily miss the change.
by ryao | 2025-08-29 13:57:25+00:00
You can use similar logic to declare English to be an example of Chinese. They both have syllables. They both assemble syllables into words that convey meaning. They both use grammars to form relationships between those words. Thus, they must be the same. It is fallacious logic. Some similarities do not make things the same. Data abstraction is also its own topic that is able to stand independently from OOP. What the kernel does is data abstraction, not OOP. What you are seeing in the kernel are the abstract data types of data abstraction.
by ajross | 2025-08-29 13:57:59+00:00
Decades ago, you'd type "configure" and be told you need to install libfoobar version 9, and you would, and it would work.

Now you get npm whining at you about an unsatisfiable dependency cycle because some three-level-removed transitive dependency you've never heard of put a hard lock file in that reference a version that got pulled for a security flaw.
by tecleandor | 2025-08-29 13:58:02+00:00
I regret not pushing a bit more for deploying a custom storage solution with TrueNAS (or something similar) instead of Synology. All the TrueNAS devices I have are mine, not from my clients.

They already had one Synology device, they don't have any IT employees on site, and I'd need to take a flight to go to their offices, so I thought that using another Synology device would be better for maintenance. They (and I) were also worried about the noise: it's an small office, and they needed at least 8*3.5" drives, and most of the decent solutions I found for 8 or more drives were big and noisy. The Jonsbo N5 appeared a bit later, that looks like a good candidate today.

Now I found that all their applications are half done, they don't upgrade or fix them regularly, security-wise is a mess, and everything on the backend is super old...
by infecto | 2025-08-29 13:58:15+00:00
I get the intuition, making solar panels cheaper feels more “direct” than making markets more liquid. But that framing underestimates how much “indirect” efficiency matters.

Capital has to get from savers to builders. Liquidity, tighter spreads, and efficient pricing lower the cost of capital for all projects, including the ones building better solar panels. If financing those projects is cheaper and faster because markets function well, more of them get done.

It’s easy to glorify the visible widget (solar panels) and discount the invisible infrastructure (capital markets), but the latter is what makes scaling the former possible. The system needs both.
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-29 13:59:06+00:00
> When I had a bad experience at a chain pharmacy 10-ish years ago I spent less than an hour, googled "independent pharmacies" and found the National Community Pharmacists Association. They have a locator for locally-owned independent pharmacies and I switched to one of those.

The sole local thing I've been missing around here is a pharmacy that's not fucking CVS, which is awful (and Walgreens isn't better). I hadn't been able to find one using Maps.

Just tried this tool, very hopeful. There are six CVSs closer than the nearest independent pharmacy, literally a dozen towns closer to me than any of these independent pharmacies, and not a one with a non-megachain pharmacy in it :-/ Not driving 25ish minutes each way when we have to go two or three times a month (kids with regular prescriptions). Bummer. I really, really hate CVS.

> And before you say "there's no other option" you're wrong, unless you live in a deep rural area where the nearest store is 20 minutes away and is a Dollar General, you are wrong.

This varies greatly regionally. From what I can tell the places with the healthiest local business options are ones where not just some neighborhoods or a town or two are (relatively) rich, but the whole area is rich, and at least somewhat densely populated. Which makes sense, but is sad for all the small towns out there with people really ideologically dedicated to "local business"—there's a reason those struggle and often fail within a year or two, in those places, and it's because there's no money in the area.
by taeric | 2025-08-29 13:59:14+00:00
I think where this fails for me, is it seems to change the odds of one of the flips? (And again, to be clear, I fully expect that I am the one that has this modeled incorrectly...)

Consider. You flip a dime and a quarter, one of them is heads. What is the odds that the dime is heads? What are the odds that both are heads?

If you do as stated in this model, you would say the possible states are HT, TH, HH. Doing that, you conclude that the odds of any single one being heads is 2/3. But, that does not make any sense, as you did nothing to change the expected 1/2 odds of either coin. And if the odds of either being H is 2/3, then the odds of both would be?

So, in the original question, what would the expectation be on the question of "what are the odds that the first born is a girl, knowing that at least 1 is a girl?" My intuition would be that it should be 1/2? As the two children are independent events. Just as the two coin flips are independent of each other. Not knowing anything about either coin, the best you can do is the original odds. (Things change if talking about after you observe one, of course. If you see a heads, and I say that at least one is heads, you are then modeling if I am disclosing the one you already know or not. Basically, we have moved into liars dice.)

So, how can you model this such that you keep the 50% odds per coin, but also have it so that the "at least one of" could apply to either coin?

Conversely, why does knowing "at least 1 is heads" change the odds of either single coin being heads?
by HankStallone | 2025-08-29 13:59:37+00:00
The problem is, they don't like normal people. They don't trust them or think their opinions have value, and they've made that clear over the last several years. It took a while, but the normal people have finally started to get it.

It wasn't always that way. Democrats like Bill Clinton used to be able to go out and talk to normal people and make them feel like he liked them and sympathized with them. I remember when Clinton came to my town after the 1993 Mississippi flood, and even Republicans who met him were impressed and felt like he really cared. It may have been fake (as it certainly is with most Republicans), but he could pull it off. They can't anymore; the contempt is too strong. There's not a single prominent Democrat whom normal people look at and feel like he or she cares about them.
by phil21 | 2025-08-29 13:59:42+00:00
Banking works as a store of money and money mover until they decide what you are doing is outside the normal course for their average account holder.

After that you very rapidly get educated on the fact that money within a bank is not your money - it’s the banks money and they are not afraid to more or less tell you that outright.

There is very little recourse once you hit some internal KYC/AML or other “non-desirable” entity flags so it’s best to establish relationship banking prior to ever getting close to those (hidden and secret) thresholds. Even having multiple accounts at different banks isn’t much protection since they seemingly by law or regulation share these databases with each other. You will likely never make it off such a list if you get added to one.

For me at least that’s all private banking or even banking beyond a checking and savings account is. It’s paid insurance for continued access to the financial system.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-29 13:59:59+00:00
> I haven't personally seen the OOM killer kill unproductively

Ah, the classical linux fan adage: "never happened to me means never happens ever to anyone".

My favourite things to see with OOM:

killing mysql on the machine which hosts only mysql and is THE production;

and the best one - killing sshd. Of course I can report on that only after seeing it on the tty0 through the BMC/IPMI console or KVM console of a VM.
by thejazzman | 2025-08-29 14:00:09+00:00
my colleagues relying on it ruined the job for me and i quit. i became the debugging agent expected to constantly fix their half baked "it looks like it works" but doesn't nonsense

seriously, the idea we need this is a joke. people need it to pretend they can do their job. the rest of us enjoy having quick help from it. and we have done without it for a very long time already..
by tsunamifury | 2025-08-29 14:00:43+00:00
The data is no where near valuable enough without a new high value surface to use it, and so far chat is not it.

Merely selling data is extremely low value compared to also having the surface monopoly to monetize it in a very high engagement and decisioning space.

I feel like you don’t understand the fundamental mechanics of the ad world. Ultimately, the big 4 own such immense decisions surface area it may be a while before any AI model company can create a product the get there.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-08-29 14:01:02+00:00
In their gitHub repo’s readme, they show a benchmark on FinanceBench and found that PageIndex-based retrieval significantly outperforms vector-based methods. I’ve noticed that in domain-specific documents, where all the text has similar “semantic vibes,” non-vector methods like PageIndex can be more useful. In contrast, for use cases like recommendation systems, you might actually need a semantic-vibe search.
by bwillard | 2025-08-29 14:01:13+00:00
Officially, up to you if you believe they are following their policies, all of the companies have published statements on how long they keep their data after deletion (which customers broadly want to support recovery if something goes wrong).

- Google: active storage for "around 2 months from the time of deletion" and in backups "for up to 6 months": https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US

- Meta: 90 days: https://www.meta.com/help/quest/609965707113909/

- Apple/iCloud: 30 days: https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/delete-files-mm3b7fcd...

- Microsoft: 30-180 days: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...

So if it ends up that they are storing data longer there can be consequences (GDPR, CCPA, FTC).
Show HN: Flow Charts from Text
by trewqasdf | 2025-08-29 14:01:42+00:00
I needed to make a simple flowchart for a .pptx displaying a connections between servers. So instead of actually finishing the .pptx I vibed a browser flow chart editor. That's cool and all, but I still need to finish the presentation now that I've been vibe-crastinating...

The pitch is that you can edit the flowchart in text straight away. So you can just use any editor and paste it and press "Apply changes", if you don't like the built in one.

Probably a few bugs left.

There is no backend saving state, so remember to export the sqlite file when you're finished.

I would love feedback if this is usable to anyone?

In that case I might bother building a backend for user data and buying a domain name.
by diggan | 2025-08-29 14:01:51+00:00
> I know once you delete something on Discord its poof, and that's the end of that. I've reported things that if anyone at Discord could access a copy of they would have called police. There's a lot of awful trolls on chat platforms that post awful things.

That's not what Discord themselves say, is that coming from Discord, the police or someone else?

> Once you delete content, it will no longer be available to other users (though it may take some time to clear cached uploads). Deleted content will also be deleted from Discord’s systems, but we may retain content longer if we have a legal obligation to preserve it as described below. Public posts may also be retained for 180 days to two years for use by Discord as described in our Privacy Policy (for example, to help us train models that proactively detect content that violates our policies). - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/5431812448791-...

Seems to be something that decides if the content should be deleted faster, or kept for between 180 days - 2 years. So even for Discord, "once you delete something on Discord its poof" isn't 100% accurate.
by arman_nocapro | 2025-08-29 14:01:54+00:00
This is exactly my experience. AI tools have completely transformed my relationship with code.

On one hand, they've eliminated the boilerplate I've hated for years. No more googling obscure syntax or writing the same utility functions for the nth time. There's a real joy in focusing purely on the creative aspects again.

But there's a catch. My role has shifted from writing code to managing the AI. It's like being the manager of a brilliant intern with zero memory. My day is now this constant cycle:

1. Crafting the perfect context window to prevent hallucinations 2. Engineering the right prompt 3. Context switching while waiting for responses 4. Painstakingly reviewing the output for subtle but critical errors

So has it killed my interest in programming? Partially. The craftsman's satisfaction of writing code has diminished. But it's sparked a new obsession: building better tooling. How do we reduce this cognitive load? How do we make AI-assisted development more structured and less chaotic?

I'm wondering if others feel the same - has your passion just moved up the abstraction stack like mine has?
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-08-29 14:03:53+00:00
> there are multiple instances of attacks with fake QR codes placed over parking meters.

Sure, but if someone can change your QR code, they could change the address just as easily. With websites you can see if the URL looks like something legitimate, so URLs are slightly better, but Bitcoin addresses are just a long random string, so being able to see the address wouldn't actually help anything.
by diggan | 2025-08-29 14:04:46+00:00
> Does that make it a net positive for humanity?

That I don't know, and probably no one else, way too early to tell. I only responded to a comment stating "LLMs aren't a fundamental or core technology, they're an amusing party trick", which obviously I disagree with as for me they've been a fundamental shift in what I'm able to do.

> From the energy consumption impact on climate change alone I would say the answer is clearly no.

Ok, I guess that's fair enough. So if someone happens to use local models at home, in a home that is powered by solar power, then you'd feel LLM starting to be a net positive for humanity?

> And tons of other issues like how Big Tech is behaving.

This is such a big thing in general (that I agree with) but it has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Big Tech acts like they own the world and can do whatever they want with it, regardless if there are LLMs or not, so not sure why anyone would expect anything else.