MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by constantcrying | 2025-09-28 12:40:09+00:00
The tragedy of all human freedom is that inevitably humans will use that freedom to cause harm.

The web was given away for free and made public, but that only means that people get to decide whether they use it for good or ill purposes. To be honest, I don't get why he is lamenting this.

>You should own it. You should be empowered by it.

Why? Nothing in the design of web implies this. This is just a a value judgement (I don't disagree with), not something inherent to the technology. In fact the technology makes it a difficult problem to solve.

>That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.

Which is the real point of the article. But that ship has already sailed. The US or China will never sell out it's corporations. And the EU and their member states is non-entity in the AI race.

Additionally it doesn't resolve the contradiction above. Freedom means the ability to use something for ill.
by yawpitch | 2025-09-28 12:41:16+00:00
I’ve known since highschool that a virus is a protein coat that wraps a bit of nucleotide, that “infection” means that protein coat has successfully entered your body and taken up residence, and that a vaccine’s job is to prepare your defensive systems to recognize what otherwise it would not.

I’ve no idea why your country has done such a bad job educating you, nor why you’ve allowed yourself to be so uninformed about the very basics of immunology and virology… I’m sorry they’ve failed you. But, when - not if — you face a really serious communicable pandemic (which, let’s be real, SARS-CoV-2 does not and never did represent), if you die because of your resistance to both information and “marketing” (good or bad) it will be your own fault, not mine.
by geokon | 2025-09-28 12:41:24+00:00
isn't the fundamental reason we lost control of our data because of the design of the web? Domain name registration, IPv4 and NAT makes it difficult to serve your content.

technically if you run your own server you serve your data and you own it. People can scrape and steal/copy it, but its illegal and harder to make the bigbucks (well with the AI gray area)

But I cant easily for-dummies run a software on my computer that serves my IG/Facebook-equivalent data. Furthermore all the experts told me for decades hosting is dangerous. Its bad and the hackers are going to steal my precious bodily fluids

So of course i just let Facebook/Googphabet host it and see some ads. What harm can come of that /s

i think Tor solves all of this, but i dont really know. It feels like stuff like Solid isnt necessary
by tim333 | 2025-09-28 12:41:34+00:00
I think both are kind of inevitable with bubbles like the dotcom, 2008 and the present one.

You get a positive feedback loop where the industry hypes their thing which causes the pubic to buy in which causes stocks to go up and the industry to hype more and the public to buy more. Then people point out prices are too high and capital misallocated but that doesn't stop the feedback loop so it goes on longer.

It has to stop at some point though, often because the buyers run out of money to buy with.

Then it goes into reverse - falling prices put off buyers, the industry doesn't get new cash flow to pay for its commitments to GPUs/office leases/mortgages, some of them go bust which puts off buyers even more. Then eventually, after around three years it level out.

I'm a believer in the internet, housing and AI but during the bubbles you get money misallocated on stuff like pets.com or maybe OpenAI spending zillions on data centers to provide free idle chat to the public. Money on fundamental AI research is probably good but all those data centers... dunno.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-09-28 12:41:56+00:00
>republicans. that's what they are all about. if you voted for them, you willingly voted for this.

demonrats. that's what they are all about. If you voted for them, you voted for baby molesting and baby eating. Those far-left lunatics hate America and want to destroy it!

Why do you eat babies? Why do you hate America? Why do you want to destroy it?

What's that? You don't do/feel/want those things? But, but, you voted for demonrats! You must be the most extreme version of whatever someone who disagrees says you are!

Does being painted with that brush make you want to reexamine your choices and/or political ideas? No? Why not?

And what for? It's stupid to try to have a dialogue with your fellow citizens about what's important and what we stand for as a nation, right? Because anyone that doesn't agree, in full, with everything you believe is irredeemably evil and must be stopped, right?
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-28 12:42:29+00:00
I totally agree — most C/C++ developers with 10+ years of experience have built similar thread pools or allocators in their own codebases. I’d include myself and a few of my former colleagues on that list.

That said, closed-source solutions for local use aren’t quite the same as an open-source project with wider validation. With more third-party usage, reviews, and edge cases, you often discover issues you’d never hit in-house. Some of the most valuable improvements I’ve seen have come from external bug reports or occasional PRs from people using the code in very different environments.
by user_7832 | 2025-09-28 12:42:39+00:00
Very similar here. I wouldn't use it myself but I'd definitely have liked to read such "punchy" text. The interesting thing is that I'm now much more consciously noticing how many em dashes and other similar phrases say an Agatha Christie used to use... which makes the source of such LLM data even more obvious hehe.

Interestingly, there are still many other good literary devices that are not yet used by AI - for example, sentences of varying lengths. There is still scope for a good human editor to easily outdo LLMs... but how many will notice? Especially when one of the editorial coloumns in the NYT (or Atlantic, forgot exactly) is merrily using LLMs in the heartfelt advice coloumn. It's really ironic, isn't it? ;)
by mpeg | 2025-09-28 12:43:09+00:00
This was exactly my thought when reading the article, I understand the cult to Berners-Lee as being one of "the good ones", but I don't subscribe to the idea that, if he had not given it away, the web as we know it would not exist.

I'm sure we can all think of cases where a core technology was kept private and eventually died in favor of an open version, the same would have happened here.

The article says it best "In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free"
by greatgib | 2025-09-28 12:44:34+00:00
No, because so far you "engineered" nothing. You just studied it, tried to understand it, and explain or teach it.

If you had reverse engineered it, you would have tried to "recreate something" that does not exist to do the same.

So, if you have a binary code, you recreate the source code that in theory could allow you to recreate the binary.

If you have the source code, I guess that would be when you are missing pieces of info that allows you to run this code like it is done by others...
Show HN: Create Photo Galleries from Google Drive Folders
by shouldbeshippin | 2025-09-28 12:44:50+00:00
I built a "bring-your-own-storage" gallery tool you can use with your Google Drive. Just plug in your Drive and create polished galleries with likes, downloads, password protection, expiring links, etc. without paying for hosted storage.

Here is an example gallery (images load directly from Google Drive): https://elliecooper.picspot.co/wedding-rebellion-workshop

Mostly businesses (like photographers and visual artists) use it to deliver work to clients in a "white-label" way, but I also know people who found Google Drive UI to be unintuitive when sending photos to family so they use PicSpot :)

The tech stack: – Vue.js frontend – Hono backend – Google Drive API - Cloudflare infra (pages, workers, D1 database and KV storage).

I'm rolling out watermark support and Dropbox integration soon, plus probably integrate multi drive support.

Curious to see what you think!
by gf000 | 2025-09-28 12:45:03+00:00
> bypass the thinking, which is costly and slow.

Costly, sure, but slow? Like for that to be the case you would need to compare it to something, and you can't, as there is no apples to oranges comparison. Instincts are not an alternative, it's a layered system and we have plenty of instinctual thoughts interconnecting the two. Instincts can't learn "at runtime".

Also, "moods"/flight or fight, etc are all precursors to thinking, and they seems to be very viable all across the animal kingdom. Filtering information (e.g. not interpreting "pain" signals during an emergency situation) also seems to be an excellent idea.

Does "human thinking" have negatives? Sure, so does the "design" of air and food entering the body at the same orifice, but "evolution" quite clearly seems to be fine with either.
by jsnell | 2025-09-28 12:46:16+00:00
Interesting if he really is more convincing in speech than in writing. His writing is certainly flamboyant, but the aggression and expletives seem more targeted at hyping up people who already believe the things he writes, not for making people change their minds. He found a niche in anti-tech grift, and is now exploiting the niche for all he can.

But you might want to actually fact-check a few of the things he says that convince you, because at least for his written articles basically everything is made up or misrepresented. There's plenty of links to sources, sure, but if you follow them down to the primary source what they're saying is very different from what Zitron is implying. It seems hard to believe that he's better at this in spoken form where citing a source is even harder.
by whynotminot | 2025-09-28 12:46:22+00:00
In a vacuum any added capability seems nice. And it seems so simple: "just let me go into desktop mode."

In practice, the engineering effort to enable that just doesn't seem worth it. And in a zero-sum world of engineer time, a cost better spent elsewhere. Let my laptop be a laptop, and focus on making that experience the best it can be. And let my phone be a phone, and focus on making that experience the best it can be.

I think people fundamentally don't understand Apple when they want them to engage in the same kind of "jack of all trades master of none" pursuits that led to subpar Windows experiences and the fragmented Android ecosystem.

You can kind of see Apple dabbling with this a bit with iPadOS. And it's an absolute mess. My least favorite operating system Apple makes. All available evidence right now points to Apple simply not being able to neatly converge different computing paradigms. They are right to show restraint with their most important product.

I'm ok with them experimenting with this with the iPad, because frankly, the iPad does not matter. But I do not want Apple to mess up the phone for the two people on hacker news that want to hook theirs up to a thunderbolt dock.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-28 12:46:30+00:00
Murder Turtles, however...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608

https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf

>TURTLES AND DEFENSE

>Introduction

>At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...]

>Guidance

>The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability.

>Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...]

>Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...]

>Munitions

>The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death.

>Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]
by Havoc | 2025-09-28 12:47:00+00:00
>they let people read their articles for free? This is puzzling to me.

That's the data use consent part...which the article talked about:

>We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers

>On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising.

...hence irony. Guardian is either pay or agree to data use
by jnxx | 2025-09-28 12:47:23+00:00
> The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database.

Very similar to the "EU settlement scheme" which would gave EU citizens which had work and settled in the UK pre-Brexit after a very lengthy and non-deterministic application process the right to stay without any paper document to prove that they actually got that right. Just a database entry on a government computer. Too bad if an extreme right-wing goverment came to power and something happened to that database.
by mpeg | 2025-09-28 12:47:31+00:00
It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide.

Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.

Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
by 7373737373 | 2025-09-28 12:47:48+00:00
> human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
by ajross | 2025-09-28 12:48:16+00:00
> VLIW is not binary forward- or cross-implementation-compatible.

It was on IA-64, the bundle format was deliberately chosen to allow for easy extension.

But broadly it's true: you can't have a "pure" VLIW architecture independent of the issue and pipeline architecture of the CPU. Any device with differing runtime architecture is going to have to do some cooking of the instructions to match it to its own backend. But that decode engine is much easier to write when it's starting from a wide format that presents lots of instructions and makes explicit promises about their interdependencies.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-09-28 12:48:41+00:00
Yeah car analogies suck.

Diesel is blended differently for winter and summer in many countries. See this for instance https://www.crownoil.co.uk/guides/winter-blend-vs-summer-ble...

Around the skiing season, many automotive magazines will remind diesel drivers to buy “winter diesel” or use additives if e.g. driving up to the Alps or similar cold places.

It’s not so black and white :)
by greatgib | 2025-09-28 12:48:41+00:00
Looking at the title of this post, when you do PR reviews, you are "reverse engineers"...

This question set aside, I'm not fan at all of this blog post content, might be me being too stupid, but I don't think that it is well understandable. Very few concrete info and a lot of digressions. Like the constant reference to research article or reference on related topics. Looks like low value research papers trying to show that you did your work with lot of references.
by card_zero | 2025-09-28 12:48:43+00:00
It's nice if the 90s can be mythologized as a time of optimism and reaching for a better world. That was when Jamiroquai released "Virtual Insanity", and everybody was very worried about the ozone layer and homelessness. "The world's insane, while you drink champagne, and I'm livin' in black rain," to quote I think from Body Count by Body Count. But everything's relative.
by CompoundEyes | 2025-09-28 12:48:53+00:00
I have optimism for (emphasis) open source LLMs and maybe it’s a counter to the things he’s concerned about now. Now we can have inexpensive device, running an open source model, offline, holding a compressed version of human knowledge (some hallucinated), that adapts to the user’s needs, is ad free, has a Wikipedia level of neutrality, no tracking of the user or blocked IPs and maybe most importantly no other people within it. Some serious contraband depending on where you are in the world and a relief maybe? The organizations that produce new ones with warped bias still will have to compete with existing models that it can be eval-ed against.
by lollisoft | 2025-09-28 12:48:59+00:00
A new software release for lbdmf will be out shortly. New is 64 Bit support.

I develop a multi platform framework in C++ that let you make database application prototypes very fast. The new release has been made so far ready for 64Bit Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and has been ported to the most current wxWidgets library used.

Minor bugfixes include no longer telling about a new release. Intented was only once per week. The source code at GitHib is up to date.

Please feel free to take a sneak peek on GitHub until I release it on https://sourceforge.net/projects/lbdmf/ with signed binaries where possible.

You can contact me on http://www.lollisoft.de via Discord, or post an issue at my project page.

Also read, why I have started my open source project here: https://github.com/lollisoft/WhyOpenSource
by Akronymus | 2025-09-28 12:49:02+00:00
> That's a stronger interpretation than what I was referring to.

Absolutely. I was just giving my own 2 cents. I am not that good at expressing my thoughts. And tbf, not everyone who goes "everything is political" thinks that there is no objective reality and vice versa. So my wording was definitely badly formulated. But I definitely experienced a decent overlap, and find it very hard to engage in a civil way with people who think everything is political + no objective reality existing.
by _flux | 2025-09-28 12:49:45+00:00
Where does the improved performance come from? The project does actually outline different factors, but I wonder which of them are the biggest ones, or are they all equally important?

And how big a player is the busyloop-locking. Yes, the code is telling CPU do it energy-efficiently, but it's not going to beat the OS if the loop is waiting for more job that's not coming for a while.. Is it doing this with every core?

One factor could be that when a subprocess dies, then it doesn't need to release any memory, as the OS deals with it in one* go, versus a thread teardown where you need to be neat. Though I suppose this would not be a lot of work.
by xtiansimon | 2025-09-28 12:50:33+00:00
> “…get a standing desk where the lowest position is still too tall.”

I worked at a standing desk at a corp with a strong internal Ergonomics group. Our standing desks were pairs with adjustable chairs with a range of motion much greater than regular chairs. I remember this because I would have preferred using the Herman Miller Aeron, but the taller chairs were better suited for the adjustable desks.
What tools do you use for AI code generation?
by acro-v | 2025-09-28 12:51:31+00:00
We are working primarily in Linux/terminal/SSH sessions/AWS contexts. We tried the Anthropic CLI, but the invocation rate limits made it cost‑prohibitive. Ended up building an in-house client to interoperate with inference providers with public models.

Interested to hear from developers working in different environments - all opinions are welcome. Thanks!
by latexr | 2025-09-28 12:51:47+00:00
> I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.

The date plus hundreds of issues, of which the last dozen are unaddressed variations of “is this project still alive”. And then you check the creator’s account and they’ve been active on other things. Just archive the repo. Please. It’s fine if you don’t want to work on the project anymore, that’s 100% your decision and your right, and no one should be able to criticise you for it. But please just do the tiny courtesy of letting other people know so an alternative can crop up and flourish. Archiving a repo takes less than a minute and is reversible if you ever change your mind.
by Folcon | 2025-09-28 12:51:50+00:00
Are you sure?

This statement reads to me to be heavily hindsight biased.

CERN wasn't exactly a place filled with idiots, yet the article even says that Tim Berners-Lee's boss thought the concept was a little eccentric and only gave in because Tim Berners-Lee fought for it.

Unless you're saying the concept is simple? In which case yes, most brilliant ideas that are hard to have are made by elegantly combining things to make a "simple" result.

The really annoying thing about those ideas is you sit there and kick yourself thinking, "that's so simple, why didn't I think of that"

There's a very different possible future where he instead went private and sold it, and I honestly have no idea how to work out how successful the web would have been in that world.

A good chunk of the web's impact is it was how easy it was to adopt, so I doubt we would have seen as much success as we do see now, as one of the bedrocks of our current ecosystem.

We might even have seen a similar situation to unix and linux, where a theoretical proprietary web that was released eventually was rewritten in an open-source format, but with lots of fragmentation of the ecosystem.
by ClarkMarx | 2025-09-28 12:52:00+00:00
As someone who grew up in a family of Steeplejacks (my father was third generation), I am always amazed and delighted by the amount of attention Dibnah got in his day in the UK and continues to get today via the internet. Here in the states, people would always just look at me like I had two heads when I told them what the family business was.

This is interesting and not at all how we would rig a smokestack (as we call them). I worked for the company in the early 90s but we were using rigging that was built by the company in the 60s or earlier. In relation to how we did it his solution seems to me to be overly complicated and perhaps a bit more dicey than what we were doing.

I can write something up if anyone is interested in how we did it.