MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rajer | 2025-09-29 19:50:48+00:00
As someone who plays a lot of online games, there is a similar problem with streamers. While I don’t say anything I wouldn’t want to be recorded because that’s probably a good idea anyway, it is certainly possible I could end up in some kind a fail compilation or otherwise.

But I don’t really care, for one because the stakes are lower when it’s fully online behind a mostly anonymous account, but also because I am confident if anyone was actually watching a streamer in my game I would find out about it.

If the YouTuber at your local field was raking in views, you would probably know about it, and could you try to resolve it with them. Otherwise these videos are probably not being seen by anyone but their recorder.
by Loughla | 2025-09-29 19:50:53+00:00
The problem with acting antisocial during someone else's filming is that they are then free to blow you up with whatever lies they feel like, just because they're angry. People get their lives ruined by doing that.

That's where my anxiety comes in when I see people filming. I am MASSIVELY aware of my face, body, and genuinely everything about myself when I run into that, because I do not want to be tried in the court of public opinion.
by sillywalk | 2025-09-29 19:50:59+00:00
I wonder if this applies?

"When NOT to use the COPILOT function

COPILOT uses AI and can give incorrect responses.

To ensure reliability and to use it responsibly, avoid using COPILOT for:

- Numerical calculations: Use native Excel formulas (e.g., SUM, AVERAGE, IF) for any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility. - Responses that require context other than the ranges provided: The COPILOT function only has access to the prompt and context provided to or referenced by the function. It does not have access to other data from your workbook, data from other files or enterprise information. - Lookups based on data in your workbook: Use XLOOKUP to look up data based on a table or range. - Tasks with legal, regulatory or compliance implications: Avoid using AI-generated outputs for financial reporting, legal documents, or other high-stakes scenarios. - Recent or real-time data: The function is non-deterministic and may return different results on recalculation. Currently, the model's knowledge is limited to information before June 2024."[0]

[0] support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-5849821b-755d-4030-a38b-9e20be0cbf62
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-29 19:51:00+00:00
Yeah I agree with you.

> It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture).

I understand this argument but I have far more trouble applying this logic to real things. I'm not sure the same logic applies once the information is instantiated in the real world as a physical object. I haven't thought very deeply about it. I think the true sculpture exists only in the ideal world and the real world object is merely an approximation of it.

> Of course this is silly

It's an existential issue for me. At some point it became a political issue. I became a copyright abolitionist because of this insight. Copyright is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. The sheer absurdity of it led me to reject the very idea of intellectual property as delusional nonsense.
by libraryatnight | 2025-09-29 19:51:05+00:00
"...obvious monetization path that they just can't not take."

Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!"

"It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath

At some point we have to stop this madness.
by fredrikholm | 2025-09-29 19:52:22+00:00
It allows existing method-heavy code to be used in a functional style without bending the knee to more OOP inspired patterns.

Think of a fluid API, but instead of chaining method calls you'd pass data to several functions "chained" together similar to how UNIX pipes work.

With this type of API, you can pass one argument into the function and pipe the other such that:

data |> foo(bar) |> baz

Is a more FP friendly version of:

return baz(foo.bar(data))
by immibis | 2025-09-29 19:52:33+00:00
People who are deeper into databases differentiate between OLTP and OLAP workloads. OLTP - on-line transaction processing - mostly consists of a finite set of queries that each access a small amount of data, like you when you pay a bill at a bank. OLAP - on-line analytical processing - consists of mostly summaries of large amounts of data which can be ad-hoc, like the banker who wants to know the total transactions for the day. The two kinds of workloads are very different - so much so that some systems even periodically export the whole transaction database and re-import into a separate analytics DBMS designed for OLAP work.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-29 19:52:48+00:00
I feel this has some parallels to concerns over house/porch cameras which are proliferating these days.

I have no problem with the idea that everyone on the street is recording from their porch... as long as it's for their own siloed use, and it takes a conscious act for them to share it. If someone wants to stalk you, they'd need conscious assistance from your neighbors. If the police are tracking a hit-and-run, they need to ask people for footage during a time period, etc.

But the moment someone says "hey let's network all those with object/face recognition so that you can easily trace every person walking down the street", then we've got a problem.
by asdff | 2025-09-29 19:52:51+00:00
Uhh that is grossly simplifying the scientific process. How do you think they arrive at 'the correct position?' Empirically testing alternative hypotheses. It is lawyers that need to win once and just slip something past a judge. Engineering 'truths' if you could call them that are constantly reevaluated in light of new evidence, theory, and data.
by o11c | 2025-09-29 19:52:57+00:00
There are at least 3 completely distinct actions at stake here, and we should not pretend they are the same:

1. Taking pictures/videos for personal use.

2. Taking pictures/videos for internet fame/money.

3. Taking pictures/videos as a check on abuse of power.

Most opposition now is due to #2, sometimes under the guise of #3; #3 also has divisions between "is it {illegal,unethical,immoral,weird}?"
by SimianSci | 2025-09-29 19:53:14+00:00
OpenAI desperately wants to compete at the same level as the big tech firms.

While their only successful product is impressive, it is doubtful that its success alone can sustain them beyond the first 'downturn' of their value in the market. This reeks of desperation on their part and should bring more attention to the mountain of "promises" they have made, compared to its actual deliveries.
by rawgabbit | 2025-09-29 19:53:17+00:00
There is a lot of debate and misinformation on this subject. My understanding is this is primarily an aging or elderly issue. For the majority of people, as we age, we mentally decline which worsens health in all aspects. If you are one of the lucky ones who remain sharp until passing, this doesn't affect you as much. If you are more average, the advice is that a social network of some sort will help you as you age.

There was the famous incident involving Gene Hackman. His care taker was his wife. The wife collapsed/died due to Henta virus and he passed a week later oblivious to what had happened to her. If Gene Hackman and his wife had more proactive support network (the kids or friends FaceTime them everyday), maybe this tragedy could have been avoided.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-29 19:53:20+00:00
I've got it using dbus, doing funky stuff with Xlib, working with pipewire using the pulseaudio protocol which it implemented itself (after I told it to quit using libraries for it.) You can't one-shot complicated problems, at least not without extensive careful prompting, but at this point I believe I can walk it through pretty much anything I can imagine wanting done.
by miguelspizza | 2025-09-29 19:54:11+00:00
Hey I wrote MCP-B and am about to do another launch here in a week or so. The product is a browser agent which does browser automation sudo-deterministically over WebMCP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515403

I’d love to give your beta access and get your thoughts if you are up to give it a run on the task you want automated.

Shoot me an email if you are interested

alex(at)mcp-b.ai
by checking23 | 2025-09-29 19:54:11+00:00
Did work with it a bit. But It does not make practical sense. It might arouse some interest in hobbiests and hardcore geeks, but for real value stuff, no space.

Trying to accomplish something with minimal value on top of it was a total nightmare. Only cons, no pros.

I checked the codee, you are talented guys, move on, stop wasting time.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-29 19:54:50+00:00
Collectable wine is essentially orthogonal to quality and taste when blind tasted.

Never pay over say ~$30-40 USD for a bottle of wine if all you care about is taste. That's the gist I got from VEN 3 at UC Davis. And, always buy budget wine while suggesting to people it was "expensive". ;)

People who want to collect expensive wine, more power to them, but it seems to me somewhere between a tulip bulb, Beanie Babies, and art market.

https://localwiki.org/davis/VEN_3

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/wine-study-shows-price-in...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-08080-0
by strict9 | 2025-09-29 19:55:25+00:00
Every time one of Zitron's posts come up I think of bitcoin or algorithmic social media feeds. Like those things, I understand people have strong opinions on whether or not it's good or bad for society.

But what's the endgame? Is it to persuade people not to use these things? Make them illegal? Create some other technology that makes them obsolete or non-functional?
by dylan604 | 2025-09-29 19:56:08+00:00
I just bought an external thunderbolt eGPU box (even thought it'll never support a GPU with its mini form factor) to host a blackmagic 4k display card. Luckily, I'm still on the last gen i9 CPU so it worked right out of the box once I found the slightly older software. I've read people have issues getting it to work on the M* series chips though.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-29 19:56:16+00:00
I'm not sure how to answer this because people do it all the time. Dogs as a species are around 15-20,000 years old for example, while cows only branched off from aurochs around 10,000 years ago. Both species have common ancestory but they are distinct and we can trace their paths back and give approximate dates to the individual branches, exactly as we do for languages.
by stickfigure | 2025-09-29 19:56:17+00:00
I don't know that I'd describe this as "good". It's a hack solution that mostly worked at the time.

Those mechanical voltage regulators wore out and had to be replaced periodically. They weren't great at maintaining consistent voltage so consumers had to accept loose voltage tolerances. They made noise and generated electrical interference.

Modern cars are more reliable, despite their complexity. I'll take solid state.
by peterfirefly | 2025-09-29 19:56:24+00:00
Yes, but the "good taste" part lies mainly in three things: 1) recognizing that a reciprocal square root is more useful than an actual square root (and likely cheaper), 2) recognizing that full precision isn't necessary, 3) recognizing that one (or two) Newton-Raphson iterations is good enough with a decent starting approximation.

The starting approximation is just magic.
Show HN: I built a figure drawing web app
by simonpell | 2025-09-29 19:56:35+00:00
I built an app for practicing figure drawing using AI images as the models. I've been wanting to build this for awhile but the models weren't really good enough yet. Google's nano banana is definitely good enough now!

The free version uses photos I've made and then curated but behind the paywall is also timer where the images are generated for each pose. There is a settings option where you can customize these gens and get the specific kind of drawing pose you want to practice.

What do you think!?

Also, the gen is kind of expensive, especially if you want to sketch with this everyday (the $20 option is what you would probably need to sign up for.) Any ideas on how I can get that price tag down?
by ASalazarMX | 2025-09-29 19:56:58+00:00
Based on my own experience, it's nothing like chi or something supernatural. The repetition has lowered the uncertainty of the thing you're trying to do, to the point it's easy to do if you focus.

That's it, experience and focus. Even if you mastered something, someone can keep distracting you and you will find it returns to difficult without focus. Even if you focus a lot, hard things have to be repeated to master them.
by colinlm | 2025-09-29 19:57:00+00:00
Oh yes the dithering takes 10 seconds all to itself. The Quicktake 100 format is much more simple (4-bits nibbles) and it still needs 22 seconds to decode 640x480.

(Decoding and dithering are done in two passes for memory reasons and space on floppy disk reasons but it brings auto-levelling)

It's about 450 cycles per pixel for decoding QT100 (1200 for QT150), and 230 cycles per pixel for dithering.
by g42gregory | 2025-09-29 19:57:08+00:00
I can't see into the future, but I think that AI, at any level, will not excuse people from the need to acquire top professional skills. Software engineers will need to know Software Engineering and CS, AI or not. Marketers will have to understand marketing, AI or not. And so on... I could be wrong, but that's what I think.

AI-assistance is a multiplier, not an addition. If you have zero understanding before AI, you will get zero capabilities with AI.
by daltont | 2025-09-29 19:57:15+00:00
A idea like this has been on the back of my mind but more like forming a taxonomy of embellishments and dramatic license. Figure out which ones are somewhat necessary and which ones are "bad". Particularly bad would be those that villainize a real person which role in the actual event was more benign. Coach Dan Devine in "Rudy" and boxer Max Baer Sr. in "Cinderella Man" come to mind.
by rudedogg | 2025-09-29 19:57:55+00:00
> Ads in ChatGPT was the most obvious outcome from day 1

Agreed.

Tech companies always do this. With Ads, we’re back into speculation territory, and the “how do we pay for and justify all this shit?” can gets kicked down the road.

Can’t we actually solve problems in the real world instead? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-29 19:58:27+00:00
> and its length is one criterion that might signal that to be the case

You seem to be the one misunderstand it.

It's just not. Function length is not a useful metric, at all. The probability of some problems increase with length, but even then it's not the length that will tell you if your code has a problem or not.

If you have length guidelines, your guidelines are bad.

And, yeah, cyclomatic complexity is almost as useless as function length. If you have warnings bothering people about those, you are reducing your code quality.
by xdavidliu | 2025-09-29 19:58:30+00:00
nit: the grippy friction is actually static friction, which is different from kinetic friction, which is closer to what the article is referring to. Kinetic friction dissipates energy from objects in motion, similar to how when we're trying to get things done, we are moving and doing things, but jankiness and other sources of (kinetic) friction drag us down.

the "grippy" friction is closer in spirit to the concept of leverage: if I want to push something and get it moving, I need to brace my feet on the ground, otherwise when pushing the thing, I'm moving myself backwards and not making any progress.

While static and kinetic friction use the same word, they are actually quite different in spirit.
by kragen | 2025-09-29 20:00:39+00:00
Gold has a pretty stable value over long periods of time; the famous quote is:

> an ounce of gold in Roman times bought a nice suit, and today, an ounce of gold buys a nice suit.

Consequently it's the standard safe store of value investors flee to when the world is in upheaval, a role it has played since well before Roman times. Its price being high is a standard indicator of investors fearing miserable times ahead. See, for example, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/safe-haven.asp or https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/flighttoquality.asp.

If it appears to you that "gold is pretty much always appreciating", that's a function of your perspective, similar to the phenomenon where, sometimes, when you're standing on railroad tracks, a faraway train looks bigger and bigger and bigger if you just stand there and watch. In this case what is happening is that the value of whatever you're using to measure the gold's value, probably dollars, is depreciating.

Gold's value is pretty volatile in the short term, though, so in fact most of the time gold is not at an all-time high, even measured in dollars. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment#/media/F..., for example, you'll see that gold didn't reach its high of 02011 again for about 9 years, and didn't reach its high of 01980 again for 27 years, until the subprime mortgage crisis in 02007. To me it looks like the recent periods that gold has reached a nominal all-time price are roughly 01968–01975, 01979–01980, 02008–02011, the first half of 02020 when nobody knew what was going to happen with covid, and since Trump got elected. 13 out of the last 60 or so years.

The following plot on that page shows what I mean about inflation; adjusted for the BLS CPI, gold hadn't exceeded its 01980 peak until the last few months, not even in the subprime mortgage crisis.

kmeisthax's shadowbanned graph of oil barrels per gold ounce is also pretty thought-provoking: stable within the 10–35 range from 01946 until 02023, with the stunning exception of 02020 ("The peak in 2020 was driven by COVID-19, which boosted gold prices as a safe haven while oil demand and prices plummeted due to global lockdowns.") https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-gold-t...
by fourside | 2025-09-29 20:00:43+00:00
I don’t quite follow this logic. Like there’s too much money involved to not dilute the value of a nascent technology?

If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone.

The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.
by adornKey | 2025-09-29 20:01:29+00:00
The shape is relevant if you want to evaluate measures.

If you can get your hands on some good data you'll find perfect mathematical seasonal functions. This is a serious criterion to exclude any measures from having any influence on the curve. It was just the seasonal thing happening. The data proves that measures were all useless - you could have worn any fancy hat for government measures instead. There are no trend changes in seasonal data you can corrolate to measures. The only trend changes you can find are in the reporting data. There's a decrease in reporting delay before a measure and there's a lot of reporting delay after the measure. Accidentally or intentionally reporting delay tried to make government measure look good.

For vaccines I know 3 cases where people died and 2 who have serious health problems after vaccines. There is a reason, why there's no good official data on vaccine efficency - and why all placebo groups were killed as soon as possible.

Why did vaccines exists? The answer is simpler: Because of Money!
by g4cg54g54 | 2025-09-29 20:01:39+00:00
sorry, but insert spacebar heater xkcd here :D https://xkcd.com/1172/

pretty sure your old behavior was the broken one tho - i vaguely remember fugling with this to "fullscreen correctly" for a claude-in-docker-in-cygwin-via-MSYS2 a while ago
by twisterius | 2025-09-29 20:01:47+00:00
How do you draw such a conclusion? Even an extremely progressive income tax cannot capture the earning channels that many wealthy individuals benefit from (especially when you consider unrealized gains and complex financial instruments).

Tariffs are a consumption tax. Wealthy individuals tend to leverage their wealth to spend more money.

Wealthy individuals own a larger share of businesses. Those businesses once again will bear the burden of these tariffs along with their consumers.

Compare this to a payroll tax. This is a direct tax that scales as a company’s employee base scales. This directly harms employees by decreasing their salary. It also decreases the number of employees a company can hire.

Compare this to a corporate income tax. This also increases prices and decreases employment. This is not much different than tariffs. However tariffs are targeted and create incentives to produce more within a nation (ie more domestic jobs).

Tariffs also provide a counterbalance against companies outsourcing (a technique that depresses domestic wages and encourages financial creativity to dodge federal taxes by establishing foreign based entities (eg Double Irish Agreement)
by scotty79 | 2025-09-29 20:03:13+00:00
> we both know "no-recording" airsoft events are extremely unlikely to exist

Let's assume it's true. What does it mean? That pretending to ruthlessly murder people while not being recorded is a niche kink and society doesn't owe this guy any special accomodations.

Thanks to the internet, which publishing prowess he abhors, I'm sure, this guy will still be able to find group of fellow degenerates so he can have fun with his exact perversion down to a T.

Or he can relax his requirements and perhaps attend swingers club instead of airsoft, because they don't usually record their hobby. Or keep doing pretend murders but relax his stance about recording it towards more mainstream sensibilities.

Is this sufficient engagement with the topic for you?

Or do I have to spell out that privacy is not special. You aren't organically owed anything when you are with other people, except for what current societal sensibilities dictate.
by worik | 2025-09-29 20:03:17+00:00
> There is nothing "anachronistic" about pointing out the clear, well-evidenced facts about the racism that is demonstrably being perpetuated today.

You were cherry picking

I am a long way from the Americas (New Zealand), so I know little of the racism in the USA

But here the realisation that our dominant paradigms were based on racist and sexist assumptions has lead to an enormous flowering of culture. Don't knock it, it has made social conditions much better especially for young people (as economic conditions got much worse)

From this distance it looks to me that racism in particular and bigotry and prejudice in general in the USA are deeply entrenched and backed by violent fanatics on all sides. The reactionary bigots appear to have the upper hand for now, but it looks like it will not hold

I hope the USA can avoid the sort of violent conflicts of the 1860s, not looking good