MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freedomben | 2025-09-29 21:49:34+00:00
I think protection for whistleblowers both in AI and in general is a good thing, but ... do we really need a special carveout for AI whistleblowers? Do we not already have protections for them, or is it insufficient? And if we don't have them already, why not pass general protections instead of something so hyper-specific?

(not directing these questions at you specifically, though if you know I'd certainly love to hear your thoughts)
by ryandrake | 2025-09-29 21:49:55+00:00
Marketers are obsessed with this idea that people want some kind of "relationship" with them. As if I wake up in the morning, hoping to interact with brands and have experiences around them. I'm not going to follow McDonalds. I'm not going to subscribe to the McDonalds E-mail newsletter. I'm not going to read posts on Twitter from the official McDonalds social media editor. I'm not looking for relevant McDonalds products. I'm not even fucking thinking about you, McDonalds. That goes for all brands, not just them. I wish companies could just back off, offer products, take my money when I buy them, and butt out of my life otherwise.
by cgonzar3 | 2025-09-29 21:49:57+00:00
Kanban boards and Jira tickets are manual. The point of TimeFly is automating that part, you don’t have to log tasks or go back through commits to reconstruct your week. It gives you a clean, visual timeline of what you actually worked on, without extra input.

We’re also working on features to track progress toward goals and to generate reports if you ever need to justify your time objectively (instead of estimating it by hand) which is something I’d definitely value myself as a client.

It might not be your exact use case, but it still provides value by taking away the overhead of manual tracking while giving you structured insight.
by Animats | 2025-09-29 21:50:00+00:00
The query optimizer knows how many items are in each index, but has no advance idea how many items will be in the result of a JOIN. An "a OR b" query on a table with millions of rows might have three hits on A, or millions of hits. The optimal query strategy for the two cases is very different.

Has anyone put machine learning in an SQL query optimizer yet?
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-29 21:50:19+00:00
OpenAI has a subscription revenue stream that's more than sufficient to keep current basic operations going. It is losing money because most of that money is spent on research, more and more GPUs, very expensive people and other capital expenditure.

Of course, they can't just retreat to selling their basic services since some other company would train and produce a marginally better model.

So it's a paradoxical situation. They're moving in contradictory directions - both to become a thing so valuable they'd only need to sell subscriptions and towards a mote if they don't reach that "AGI" thing. No reason being flexible would displease their shareholders but there are many other questions to answer here (who gets AGI raptures, who gets the Skynet/Terminator treatment, who decides, etc).
by Theodores | 2025-09-29 21:50:30+00:00
This website is amazing for inspiration, and this page from it is awesome.

Originally 'the camera never lied' but nowadays 'the camera always lies'. This is my new starting point for everything I see.

Part of the art of storytelling for me is all about truth. The most fascinating stories are the true ones. Getting that truth told without confabulation or exaggeration is the goal as far as I see it, unless I am reading a bedtime story to an eight-year-old.

There is no Oscar or Golden Globe for movies that are the most grounded in fact. Yet so often, the true story, or even the printed book version (versus the movie) is the better story.

Clearly there are limitations on what can be done in budget and in time, and nothing from the past can be recreated verbatim, particularly if you want to trim down many story lines spanning many days/months/years into 90-120 minutes. However, this page confirms my hunch that, in the last century, the camera 'never lied' but, in this century, the camera never tells the truth.
by ajross | 2025-09-29 21:50:44+00:00
Citing the completely-unused ancient law in support of a claim that the fed is somehow "fixing prices" or "making outrageous course corrections overnight" or that they can "make another law any time they want" is the conspiracy. They aren't doing that. And they never have. And you know it. Which is why you're making noise about ancient unused laws.

We're done, this will be my last comment.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-29 21:50:54+00:00
Here in Maine we have Ranked Choice and despite the complaints of voting theory diehards, it I think is a good first step.

However, the problem is that Republicans immediately latched on that this would erode their power base, when the fairly disparate opinions of Maine conservatives and non-liberals are actually able to choose what they want.

So now changes to voting are part of the culture war. Republicans were vocally against ranked choice voting, and stonewalled it in the courts after it was passed. Their primary call to action was "One person, one vote", and no, they do not care that that doesn't make any fucking sense as an actual complaint against RCV.
by jeena | 2025-09-29 21:51:12+00:00
A script which will find random pictures of anyone in the family from the Immich database, resize them and add metadata on them like where they were taken and when and put them on the TV to show as kind of a screen saver when we're at home.

I like this Facebook feature which shows you "Today 10 years ago", Immich, does have it in it's UI too and perhaps I will mix in those pictures also to show on TV.
by stevepotter | 2025-09-29 21:51:27+00:00
I'm working on a system that helps surgeons make precise bone cuts during knee replacement surgery. Believe it or not, manual cuts are still the standard in that type of procedure. Robotic systems exist but they are very costly, big, and actually add time to the surgery (bad news when you are under anesthesia and your leg is in a tourniquet).

It uses 4k stereoscopic capture and bunch of ML models to match bone position with sub-millimeter precision. The surgeon screws a metal base piece into the bone, and we detect where that is in space. Then, a Stewart Platform adjusts another part that is placed onto the base. The robotic adjustment allows the base to be placed in a ballpark area, with the robotically-adjusted piece oriented in the exact spot where the surgeon needs to cut.

The net result is a robotic system that is many times cheaper than the least expensive incumbent, decreases surgery time significantly, reduces error, and basically "just works" as opposed to requiring a ton of training. We are debuting at a tradeshow in October.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-29 21:51:50+00:00
One of the interesting features prominent on this map is the TAPline, the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, constructed in 1950 and operated, with some interruptions, until 1976.

My understanding is that the TAPLine was amongst the reasons for Lebanon's significance in the 1950s and 1960s, as this was the transshippment point for Arabian oil headed to Europe (shipped by amongst others Aristotle Onasis's oil tankers). The 1967 Six Days War say a portion of the pipeline running through the Golan Heights fall into Israeli control, though Israel permitted the line to continue operating. The pipeline was damaged by Palestinian activists in 1969, and eventually ceased operating in 1976 with advances in supertankers, political conflicts between states over which the line passed, transit fee disagreements, and breakdowns.

Along with control over the Suez Canal, the TAPline is an instructive lesson in the values and risks of fixed-route transports (physical, data, logical) especially under volatile political and military climates.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Arabian_Pipeline>
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-29 21:51:52+00:00
Sorry if that wasn't clear, it would be returns matching a 3% annual inflation. So you are never growing except to cancel out inflation.

Which again circles back to the same question "Why should you voluntarily restrict growth to inflation (to appease others who want more for less) if other investments returned more (on top of inflation) with less work?"

I'd prefer you use actual examples than magic wells. We wouldn't have any problems in society if we had magic wells that printed a 50% ROI annually. We don't. Riskier assets usually land in the 10-20% ROI, but the risk dictates bad years too, so it's not really steady. Steady ROIs of 5-8% are obtainable. 50% ROI is penny stock/meme stock territory.
by Glyptodon | 2025-09-29 21:52:26+00:00
If optimization is really as simple as applying De Morgan's laws, surely it could be done within the query planner if that really is the main optimization switch? Or am I misreading this somehow?

Edit: I guess the main difference is that it's just calculating separate sets and then merging them, which isn't really DeMorgan's, but a calculation approach.
by mort96 | 2025-09-29 21:52:38+00:00
Wait, by "allocating anonymous pages" we just mean memory allocation from the kernel that's used for implementing e.g malloc, right? Did memory mapped files come before memory allocation so that it "made sense" to implement memory allocation as "mapping in /dev/zero"?

Or was some amount heap memory always just mapped into the process in early UNIX so that the need to map more pages only appeared as programs started to demand more heap memory than whatever the standard amount was?
by Joeboy | 2025-09-29 21:53:01+00:00
Years ago, a British TV show called The Comic Strip Presents... made two films called The Strike[0] and GLC: The Carnage Continues[1]. Both comedies about what would happen if Hollywood were to make films about '80s British political events like the miners' strike or the abolition of the Greater London Council. While they're both broad comedies I think watching them at an impressionable age was probably quite a good education.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-oufaMHUHw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBFSo4TY_r8
by nitwit005 | 2025-09-29 21:53:22+00:00
I've seen multiple prior conversations about the idea on this site. It's easy to find similar reddit discussions with a search: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ljv78j/sam_altman_...

It's a fairly obvious way for them to make money, as people are using it as a replacement for search engines, and that's how search engines have made money.
by andy99 | 2025-09-29 21:53:45+00:00
> I’d rather pay real human authors and artists for their creativity than openAI.

So would I. You've just demonstrated one of the many reasons that any kind of LLM tax that redistributes money to supposedly aggrieved "creators" is a bad idea.

While by no means the only argument or even one of the top ones, if an author has a clearly differentiated product from LLM generated content (which all good authors do) why should they also get compensated because of the existence of LLMs? The whole thing is just "someone is making money in a way I didn't think about, not fair!"
by jamesponddotco | 2025-09-29 21:53:52+00:00
I’m working on an ISBN database that fetches information from several other services, such as Hardcover.app, Google Books, and ISBNDB, merges that information, and return something more complete than using them alone. It also saves that information in the database for future lookups.

Mostly because I’m working on a personal library management service called Shelvica to solve my own problems[1], and none of those services provided all the information on a book. One might provide the series, the other might provide genres, and yet another might provide a cover with good dimensions, but none provided everything, so I decided to work on something of my own (called Librario).

While Shelvica is the focus, Librario could become its own thing in time, so I don’t mind the sidetracking.

I also plan on having a “ISBN Search” kind of website that feeds from that database as a way to let users search for information about books, which then feeds the service’s database, making it stronger for Shelvica.

I open source everything I make, but I’m still wondering if these will be open sourced or not. I’ll probably go with the EUPL 1.2 license if I do decide on open sourcing them.

[1]: My wife and I have a personal library with around 1800 books, but most applications for management are either focused on ebooks or choke with this many books. Libib is the exception, but I wanted a little more.
by epolanski | 2025-09-29 21:54:33+00:00
I'll share something as a former solar researcher.

Scientific progress is heavily influenced by how many bodies you can throw at a problem.

The more experiments you can run, with more variety and angles the more data you can get, the higher the likelihood of a breakthrough.

Several huge scientist are famous not because they are geniuses, but because they are great fundraisers and can have 20/30/50 bodies to throw at problems every year.

This is true in virtually any experimental field.

If LLMs can be de facto another body then scientific progress is going to sky rocket.

Robots also tend to be more precise than humans and could possibly lead to better replication.

But given that LLMs cannot interact with the real world I don't see that happening anytime soon.
by smeeger | 2025-09-29 21:55:18+00:00
i was asking myself what is the point of succeeding if its so late in life. then i wondered what is the point of succeeding young? having a ten year period of not working when you otherwise would be? but business owners and other rich people work harder than most… so the only way to succeed is to not only succeed but make enough to stop working? i just dont understand what im chasing anymore. the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can
by babblingfish | 2025-09-29 21:55:32+00:00
The juxtaposition in the headline implies that A.I. coding tools are the cause of unemployment for new grads. I find this sort of headline to be intentionally misleading. But sadly, A.I. gets clicks. There's no evidence that A.I. coding tools are causative of unemployment. The simpler and more likely explanation is that big tech companies overhired during the pandemic and now are doing layoffs to adjust course. Correlation being presented as causation is lazy reporting.

> As the industry embraces A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.
by pcardoso | 2025-09-29 21:55:45+00:00
Two side projects, as if 3 kids are not enough!

- a booking platform for surfing schools - a tool for pelvic physiotherapy practitioners handle appointments and exercise prescriptions

Doing backend and frontend for both, but there is a small team helping with #2. Both come from actual needs of actual businesses.

Tech is pretty standard typescript, react and node.

Would love to be working on these full time.
by jvanderbot | 2025-09-29 21:56:14+00:00
What's the difference? The message is "keep trying and don't give up just because you're 40". It's fairly dubious to say "You can feel free to start a new hobby/business at 40 and expect to succeed quickly", but it's in line with this thread to say "If you haven't felt the success you want by 40, it's ok, greatness comes as often as not after".
by NedF | 2025-09-29 21:56:27+00:00
> I get it, but the alternative is what?

Airsoft sites ban/allow videos in certain matches.

Not rocket science. We manage in public spaces like toilets ok.

They also point to purple lanyards in conferences and suggest an equivalent in Airsoft.

Why is this comment going back to zero? Does Hacker News not have the ability to move forward? Is this a central tenant to the nihilism worship that is Hacker News?
by csb6 | 2025-09-29 21:56:52+00:00
Automatic memory management isn’t necessary for closures, but if you don’t have it then it is easy to have dangling pointers (e.g. you capture a local variable by reference, return the closure object, and then call the closure and use the referenced variable). This is a problem in C++ but isn’t in Ada due to Ada’s stricter scoping rules. Capturing variables by value is safe (assuming the captured values contain no dangling references themselves). It might require allocation if there were type-erased function objects (like std::function in C++), but this could be done using explicit allocator and deallocator functions with some help from the compiler to determine the closure object’s size.
by Retric | 2025-09-29 21:57:15+00:00
Radio stations get to use anyone’s music but they still need to pay to play that music. Requiring payment to use your product isn’t rent seeking anymore than requiring a hobo to leave your house is.

AI companies trying to leverage their power and lobby governments to stiff paying people and thus increase profits is rent seeking behavior. They aren’t creating wealth by non payment, just trying to enrich themselves.
by EliRivers | 2025-09-29 21:57:29+00:00
Picture a machine endowed with human intellect. In its most simplistic form, that is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Artificial human intelligence. Not what I'd call general, but I guess so long as we make it clear that by "general" we don't actually mean general, fine. I'd really expect actual general intelligence to do a lot better than human, in ways we can't understand any more than ants can comprehend us.
by jongjong | 2025-09-29 21:57:32+00:00
I feel like there is powerful social conditioning in our society which prevents people who didn't succeed early from succeeding later. It's not about their work. At the end of the day, nobody can succeed in society without the stamp of approval from a bunch of elites. Like a big publisher, or a big social media influencer or a big media platform editor. Nowadays, it seems more than ever, that the elites all have to agree.

It creates situations where some young person may not be "allowed to succeed" due to their unconventional approach and this continues until they turn a certain age by which point those in power think "This person cannot be good because they're 45 and I never heard of them." The suppression becomes self-fulfilling because they were unconventional even though their approach later proved optimal and everyone may be doing it now. Not everyone on the frontline gets recognition.

Also, because a lot of successful people achieved success by a certain age, they tend to look for and help people who are like them. Someone who is 45 and not successful has a very different worldview than someone who became successful in their first venture at 18 years old.
by 6510 | 2025-09-29 21:57:52+00:00
When we had this tiny memory and the slow cpu to work with everyone was into optimization. It quite regularly happened that someone would find a new way to do something way beyond what everyone else thought possible. You would quite literally sit in front the screen stuck in a loop saying "What?" then "How?" with 5 second pauses in between. I'm not bragging about my amazing skills here, more the opposite. I've just adjusted my estimated accordingly. If enough people spend enough time the solution will turn out much weirder than the quake inverse square root.

> I’ll be using the revised version as I think it’s a well-established example of doing a real-world block transfer. Sure there may be faster ways, but this is a realistic way, which is what we’re going for.

NEXT LDX #NUMBER LDA BASE,X STA DEST,X DEX BNE NEXT

Something unrolled like:

$1000 LDA $2000 $1003 STA $3000 $1006 LDA $2001 $1009 STA $3001 etc...

Isn't even the fastest solution but 3 out of 5 instructions are gone and I think the two remaining are faster. The transfer in the book is of course really practical while this one is already almost unworkable. You can do worse tho:

$1000 LDA #$12 $1002 STA $30 $1004 LDA #$34 $1006 STA $31 etc...

For the truly insane solution you would have to consider if you even have to read the data. Maybe you can present the image as-is and modify it... or worse... turn it into code...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-29 21:58:10+00:00
I was one of them for a long time but for me I truly only picked pace after getting a computer, now experimenting with a lot of different things.

On the other hand one of my friends used to code on the phone, and he was using kivy to do some raytracing cool thing in 9th grade. Definitely something that I wouldn't be able to do right now even too, and i was the only person excited about it as much. I celebrated the nerd culture on ms teams in our school (back when there was covid)

Now he has a laptop too and I introduced him to hyprland though he picked fedora and he riced it being inspired by me.

Its like, I don't think that he's that much into coding anymore, like the exam for which we are both learning idk, I am still really really interested about coding yet he seems to focus on defense and wants to be someone in defense technologies for the nation.

We literally used to joke how our youtube feeds are of the same people and yet I think that we are very two different people right now of sorts and now recently I was coding something on my phone with micro in alpine in userland application and wanted to share him the python code and I wanted to have something like a for i,n in range in a langauge like golang and yes I could do a while loop but I was just wondering if it was possible or not and I asked him and he asked if I knew coding or not :sob:, ofc I didn't know there was something like enumerate() function, noone in programming just spawns out of that information and I thought he would be more kinder to me given we've been friends for so long and he definitely made me a bit insecure and just said that I am blowing things up when I said that dude I just wanted to show ya something I was working on for fun, not get roasted.

We were really close before hand but that instance just made me feel like :/ I want to be appreciated too and sometimes I don't like the dark jokes or whatever, I like if someone can be as kind as I was to them, I just its not even karma but human decency to know sometimes. I usually try to help others and just expected it from someone I deeply trusted that had done some massive communication blunders and he just said that he won't change for me and I need to grow up... Yes its silly but he just said in the most condescending way but still I forgive him because maybe he was having a bad day and we are still friends but that's when i also realized that I need better friends too of sorts yknow.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-09-29 21:58:11+00:00
Not sure that I see this as some concerted effort of the man vs normal people looking at the landscape of jobs. Relative to education requirements, tech has been an amazing opportunity for many. Pretty common to see posts on tech forums of humble bragging about high salaries, low effort, or ease of job hopping (for even higher compensation).

Even using $300k as an example of a programmer getting ripped off relative to their worth -few industries afford opportunities to make anywhere near that much money. The median US pay is ~$40k.
by paulhebert | 2025-09-29 21:58:31+00:00
I’m building a daily word puzzle game with a twist!

In Tiled Words you rearrange tiles to solve clues and rebuild a broken crossword.

You can play a demo at https://tiledwords.com - it’s free and web based so it works on whatever device you’ve got.

I’ll be officially launching on October 19th at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. You can sign up to be notified on launch. Starting then there will be a new puzzle every day!

So far I’ve gotten really positive feedback and have around 100 people signed up to get notified. It’s been a lot of fun to build!