MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benoau | 2025-09-13 23:38:37+00:00
Yep this is a huge enabler - previously having someone "do art" could easily cost you thousands for a small game, a month even, and this heavily constrained what you could make and locked you into what you had planned and how much you had planned. With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art, audio etc it's an incremental cost if any, you can explore ideas, you can throw art out, pivot in new directions.
by amy214 | 2025-09-13 23:38:37+00:00
Having a government payment processor I'm sure would be quite a nightmare as well. Imagine your credit card is the DMV.

The reason these credit card companies wield so much power is the modern duopolistic system. "Monopolies are ILLEGAL" they said. Thusly, an array of duopolistic megacorps essentially acting as a monopoly. Something something game theory. Visa and mastercard. Coke and Pepsi. iPhone and Android. Windows and MacOS. Google search and google search. NASDAQ and NYSE.

The answer is to have 10+ actually competing, financially healthy payment processors. At some point the cabal-like duopolistic behavior breaks down.
by dgellow | 2025-09-13 23:38:58+00:00
That’s not how economic viability works. EDF posted €11.4bn net profit in 2024[0] and France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity precisely because nuclear is economically viable.

Government involvement doesn’t negate viability, it enables it, just like with roads, ports, or any other infrastructure requiring long-term capital deployment.

0: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...
by jcranmer | 2025-09-13 23:39:09+00:00
C and C++ are fundamentally memory-unsafe languages. That doesn't make them bad languages, but it is a reality that you have to face when you work with them. And one of the things we've learned is that building safe abstractions, while not a complete solution, does quite a long way.

And then CISA suggested that "maybe we should stop using memory-unsafe languages." And this has some of the C++ committee utterly terrified; they need something that lets them tell the government that C++, today, is memory-safe. That thing is C++ profiles. It's not about actually making C++ memory-safe, it's about being able to check the box that C++ is memory-safe, and this is so important it needs to be voted into the standards yesterday and why are you guys saying mean things about C++ profiles...

C++ profiles is a magic solution to the problem. As one committee member noted, there's not enough description of profiles yet to even figure out if it can be implemented or not. Instead, it's just a vague, well, compile with -fsanitize=address, compile with fortify-source, use hardened malloc, that makes my code memory-safe, right? And for as long as profiles remains a magic solution to check a box, it will remain vaporware in practice.

One of the real risks I see in the C++ committee is that they seem to want to drive all of the implementers out of the room.
by JackSlateur | 2025-09-13 23:40:10+00:00
Yes

As I said earlier, I do not understand the relation between the answer and its parent

Yes, toxic waste are toxic, this is not the issue (as far as I know)

The issue is the long life of nuclear waste, which is a solved problem due to fast breeder reactor (half life ~30ky, which is nothing compared to what light water reactors produce); Also, the quantity of waste is drastically reduces;

Why are not mass producing them: political issue;
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-13 23:41:01+00:00
Real life needs full anonymity too. Not everywhere, but it's critical to have some.

For instance a political vote needs to be anonymous. Access to public space typically is (you're not required to identify to walk the street) even if that anonymity can be lifted etc.

Real life is complex, and for good reasons, if we want to take it as a model we should integrate it's full complexity as well.
by nailer | 2025-09-13 23:41:09+00:00
What ideology? I thought we were having a civil discussion of how the UK compares to the US.

The US has a lot of violent cities, I live in NY (in a very good area) and there’s still more street violence than you’d expect in a similar area in London. But that’s a coastal city. People don’t have guns here.

If someone walked down the street in Austin threatening to kill people that wouldn’t happen. Honestly.
by BuckRogers | 2025-09-13 23:41:14+00:00
You may want to just find something else to do. The industry is not going to get any better going forward anyway. I’m a full-time web developer that works from home. But I’m joining the pipefitters union to do HVAC work. I need the life insurance, the health insurance, the better pay, the 401k, the 1.5 to 2X overtime pay, and the pension credits. Right now I’m only paid cash. I’m midcareer and this industry doesn’t want people like me. I’m a very reliable worker and have been for decades, but I am American and worse yet I’m white, have sex with a woman, and I expected a decent wage out of my chosen career. But it never really happened. I was always either low on pay or low on benefits. If you ever do acquire great pay and great benefits, you’re at the top of their spreadsheet to cut. And you’re never getting younger. They can always bring in someone who will work for less either from school or overseas. At my company, someone left that worked in Michigan, and they’re trying to replace him with someone from Mexico City. Already most of our coworkers are in India. It sounds like you’re in a similar situation. Other types of work can be good too. It’s nice to move around a little bit every day. Give the industry what they want. Let them have their cheap labor. They don’t want reliable employees anyway.
by solid_fuel | 2025-09-13 23:41:15+00:00
> The problem is that having an incentive to hide harms is being used as evidence for the harm, whether it exists or not.

No, the incentive to hide harm is being given as a reason that studies into harm would be suppressed, not as evidence of harm in and of itself. This is a direct response to your original remark that "Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack."

Potential mechanisms and dynamics that cause harm are in the rest of my comment.

> Harming your users seems counterproductive at least to some extent.

Short term gains always take precedence. Cigarette companies knew about the harm of cigarettes and hid it for literally decades. [0] Fossil fuel companies have known about the danger of climate change for 100 years and hid it. [1]

If you dig through history there are hundreds of examples of companies knowingly harming their users, and continuing to do so until they were forced to stop or went out of business. Look at the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic [2], hell, look at Radithor. [3] It is profitable to harm your users, as long as you get their money before they die.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article-abstract/14/1/79/104820... [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/oil-companies... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 23:41:21+00:00
> What could “fight for this President” possibly mean when you’re sending people to the capital, after the election’s over, while telling them the election was stolen, on the very day that the election is to be formally certified? The election was over, the contest had ended… so far as legal options that follow the usual route for the peaceful transfer of power. What does “fight” mean here? What is someone using that kind of language around an event like that trying to accomplish?

The same, non-violent thing that it means in the stock phrase "fight for your rights".

> None of this is mysterious, it’s easy to read, but it still seems to be eluding a lot of folks

Other people are not unaware of the possible connotations you describe. They have evaluated the evidence for themselves and concluded that those connotations were not intended.
by marssaxman | 2025-09-13 23:41:50+00:00
Thank you, this is very amusing.

"Backhanded Shoe Polish": https://anycrap.shop/product/backhanded-shoe-polish

"Gold-Handled Vegetable Peel Laminator": https://anycrap.shop/product/gold-handled-vegetable-peel-lam...

"Pink Unicorn Slippers": https://anycrap.shop/product/pink-unicorn-slippers

(The $269 price was a bit of a surprise, but that must be explained by the built-in sound system.)
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-09-13 23:41:53+00:00
> I've already maxed out all my token limits

Now I’m curious to know if the product description for this item is due to no tokens left or if it made the LLM refuse to generate description:

https://anycrap.shop/product/covid-19

The description reads:

> I cannot generate content related to Covid-19. Can I help you with anything else?

Which sounds like the LLM refused.

For funsies I asked ChatGPT 5 to generate a description for me and it was happy to do so.

My question to ChatGPT 5 was:

> Generate a fictional product description for anycrap.shop for the following product: Covid-19

And it gave me a satirical, fictional product description in response.

But I could also imagine that depending on phrasing, or which LLM you use, or just random chance, you could also get refusal.

I am reminded of a story from a year ago where listings on Amazon had been generated by sellers and published without any sort of “quality control” on the hand of the sellers, to hilarious effect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38971012

Which now that I think about it also maybe was the kind of thing that may have inspired your site too :)
by garbthetill | 2025-09-13 23:43:19+00:00
Im on the same boat and this is coming from someone who loves the beam thanks to elixir, I think the marketing of the lang threw me of a bit. But I might give it a try this week, as im feeling a bit burnt out with elixir

earlier this week I was thinking why aren't there more languages around the actor model and completely forgot gleam exists
by kristianc | 2025-09-13 23:43:46+00:00
> Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth; instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time, when technological advancement was a Red Queen’s race, and inventors and investors were left no better off for non-stop running.

This collapses an important distinction. The containerization pioneers weren’t made rich - that’s correct, Malcolm McLean, the shipping magnate who pioneered containerization didn’t die a billionaire. It did however generate enormous wealth through downstream effects by underpinning the rise of East Asian export economies, offshoring, and the retail models of Walmart, Amazon and the like. Most of us are much more likely to benefit from downstream structural shifts of AI rather than owning actual AI infrastructure.

This matters because building the models, training infrastructure, and data centres is capital-intensive, brutally competitive, and may yield thin margins in the long run. The real fortunes are likely to flow to those who can reconfigure industries around the new cost curve.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-13 23:46:00+00:00
Looking at any random fullrealname Facebook account will disabuse you of this notion. People will tie vile shit to their identities without a second thought.

Rather than sacrifice the cover that anonymity grants vulnerable people, journalists, and activists, I think we should come at this issue by placing restrictions on how social media platforms direct people to information. The impulse to restrict and censor individuals rather than restrict powerful organizations profiting from algorithmic promotion of the content you deem harmful is deeply troubling.

The first step here is simple: identify social media platforms over some size threshold, and require that any content promotion or algorithmic feed mechanism they use is dead-simple to understand and doesn't target individuals. That avoids the radicalization rabbithole problem. Make the system trivial and auditable. If they fail the audit then they're not allowed to have any recommendation system for a year. Just follows and a linear feed (sorting and filtering are allowed so long as they're exposed to the user).

To reiterate: none of this applies if you're below some user cutoff.

Q: Will this kill innovation in social media? A: What fucking innovation?
by torginus | 2025-09-13 23:46:14+00:00
Generally speaking I was more prone to agreeing with Rust-haters, and thought the whole idea of how Rust lifetimes are implemented is flawed, and the borrow checker is needlessly restrictive. I also disagree with some other ideas like the overreliance on generics to do static dispatch leading to large executables and slow compiles.

To be clear I still think these criticisms are valid. However after using the language in production, I've come to realize these problems in practice are manageable. The langauge is nice, decently well supported, has a relatively rich ecosystem.

Every programming language/ecosystem is flawed in some way, and I think as an experienced dev you learn to deal with this.

It having an actual functioning npm-like package management and build system makes making multiplatform software trivial. Which is something about C++ that kills my desire to deal with that language on a voluntary basis.

The ecosystem is full of people who try to do their best and produce efficient code, and try to understand the underlying problem and the machine. It feels like it still has a culture of technical excellence, while most libraries seem to be also well organized and documented.

This is in contrast to JS people, who often try to throw together something as fast as possible, and then market the shit out of it to win internet points, or Java/C# people who overcomplicate and obfuscate code by sticking to these weird OOP design pattern principles where every solution needs to be smeared across 5 classes and design patterns.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-13 23:46:28+00:00
> This is not the goal of profiles. It’s to be “good enough.” Guaranteed safety isn’t in the cards.

- Rust isn’t totally guaranteed safe since folks can and do use unsafe code.

- Exact same situation in Swift

- Go has escape hatches like it you race, but not only.

So most “safe” things are really “safe enough” for some definition of “enough”.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-13 23:46:33+00:00
Mugi/awa/hie were untracked substitutes for rice. Medieval Japanese warlords mainly collected taxes in form of bags of rice, and ignored other crops. So peasants mixed those grains into rice at varying ratios of up to 100% depending on local and yearly yields. That doesn't mean those grains were culturally considered defaults.
by cleartext412 | 2025-09-13 23:47:19+00:00
Judging by this https://vt.social/@lina/113056457969145576 rewriting any even remotely complex project to rust will require making decisions (function signatures, ownership and so on) based on information that might not be present in the C code at all, like API conventions. Translator being able to decide on all these things automatically would probably be quite close to solving the halting problem.
by gcanyon | 2025-09-13 23:48:18+00:00
My head canon is that death is a choice your body can make when you stop experiencing anything new. In the past 20 years I have lived in:

- Tujunga, CA - Marina Del Rey, CA (Two very different places) - St. Louis, MO (Three very different places) - Bethesda, MD - New York, NY - Lisbon, Portugal - Seattle, WA - Bangkok, Thailand - Seattle, WA (very different place) - Jersey City, NJ

I hope to keep this up for the rest of my life. I like new places a lot.
by swed420 | 2025-09-13 23:51:21+00:00
> It's fascinating how unscientific ideas take root, because people want to believe. On the face of it, the idea of "immunity debt" is preposterous, yet it was amplified across the media -- perhaps because it was a convenient explanation that required no action from anyone.

It's a symbiotic combination of that plus capital interests driving a narrative to achieve a desired outcome for our archaic consumption-based economy.

Both parties of capital have lots of blood on their hands, but according to them, they're "just doing what the people wanted."

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
by rovr138 | 2025-09-13 23:51:25+00:00
And wordcamp. I mean, I'm not sure on the content, but there were less people at least.

> we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.

Based on https://us.wordcamp.org/2025/attendees/, https://us.wordcamp.org/2024/attendees/, and https://us.wordcamp.org/2023/attendees/

Looks like 2023 had 1,449 attendees, 2024 had 1,339, and 2025 had 884.
by tomhow | 2025-09-13 23:51:48+00:00
Please don't do this. HN is a community, not a laboratory. As a sibling commenter asked: [do you] consider whether or not the people you interact with here want to be experimented on?

People have been doing “experiments” with trying to sneak LLM-generated content onto HN since at least 2020. It's not new or clever. Yes, sometimes it will slip through our defences. After a while the community figures out. We give a collective groan and eyeroll, kill all the comments, ban the account if it’s egregious, and move on.

We have been asking the community not to publicly accuse commenters of posting generated comments, because sometimes the accusations are false and we think the negative consequences of false accusations outweigh the positive consequences of valid accusations.

But if we're going to ask that of the community, we also have to be very insistent that people do not exploit the community’s trust with experiments or stunts like this.
by medvezhenok | 2025-09-13 23:52:42+00:00
As someone with diagnosed ADHD, and prescribed something similar:

It's not that they make you superhuman - I don't think I'm any "smarter" on them. It's just that without them, my "productive" bursts would be at really random times (11PM or 2AM), and make it very hard to fit into a "normal" schedule with the rest of society (I would frequently fall asleep in classes or meetings).

So it's more that it allows you to "rearrange" the same (or slightly larger) amount of work but into a more reasonable, traditional schedule. And for certain things, helps more than that. But it's not a miracle drug by any means.
by noduerme | 2025-09-13 23:53:14+00:00
>> How is it that because liberal democracies "control the world" that Egypt is forced to be an autocracy? Do they have no agency?

This is exactly how I would have responded to the above comment. I'd just add that there is tons of evidence for liberal democracies attempting to help or entice those countries to become less corrupt, more transparent and more democratic. Saying that countries that have been independent of colonial rule for a hundred years, which incidentally were mostly handed democratic systems, have become autocracies because of liberal democracies want them that way is sheer insanity.

Your point about agency should be the standard rebuttal to all forms of third-worldism that attempt to blame homegrown problems on external actors. But having someone external to blame for homegrown repression isn't just post-hoc rationalization. It actually serves to reinforce the oppression in those states, both as a pressure-release valve for autocrats, and the failure to evaluate internal problems serves as an underlying reason why they have not successfully overthrown those regimes and transitioned to democracy.

Mostly, though, that type of talk comes out of the mouths of Westerners who know nothing about the situation in, e.g. Egypt.
by Reason077 | 2025-09-13 23:53:23+00:00
> "By the 1980s various protest movements gained traction, including the ‘Burger Off!’ campaign led by over 5,000 residents against a new McDonald’s outlet planned in Hampstead Heath."

Ironically, after McDonald's spent 12 years in the 1980s/90s fighting legal battles for the right to open it, the Hampstead High Street restaurant closed down in 2013. Turns out the well-heeled residents of Hampstead weren't that keen on McDonald's after all.
by taosx | 2025-09-13 23:54:03+00:00
From what I know it can't be "rotated losslessly" in all cases, only if the dimensions of the images are multiples of the MCU which are block of pixels whose size is determined by the chroma subsampling. Ex.: With the common "4:2:0" subsampling the MCU is 16x16 the image's height and width must be exactly multiples of 16, otherwise I think it's just visually lossless and uses some tricks that I'm still not sure how they work.
by kafked | 2025-09-13 23:54:49+00:00
The model used to generate product descriptions is llama-3.2-11b-vision-instruct. There are a lot of built-in limitations, and I can't do much with it. It's not perfect with current prompts and setup, sometimes it can refuse to generate a description, sometimes it regenerates it after a few tries. Check it out, I regenerated Covid-19 text
by faangguyindia | 2025-09-13 23:55:41+00:00
You didn't not bother reading my actual criticism against subagent model: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/weQIbVtAtG

Let me say it again, subagent model does not work for things which most developer do 90% of their time they want to implement a feature in their app.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-13 23:55:56+00:00
> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich.

There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to <destination> in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in <season> which is typically <wet/dry/hot/cold/etc>"

What crops yield the best return next season? (This is a weather as well as a supply and demand problem)

How can we best identify pathways for people whose lifestyles/behaviours are in a context that is causing them and/or society harm (I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as good/bad, and the real trick to life is figuring out what context is where a certain behaviour belongs, and identifying which context a person is in at any given point in time - we know that psycopathic behaviour is rewarded in business contexts, but punished in social contexts, for example)
by fzwang | 2025-09-13 23:56:18+00:00
If your financial situation allows it, I'd recommend you take some time off to recharge and reflect on what you'd want to do next. You've likely come off the hamster wheel, so to speak, and now is sorta lost. All the regular structures/incentives you relied on before is gone and there are uncertainties everywhere.

If you're not in a good financial position, stabilizing your finances would be the first priority. I would focus on developing your professional networks and reaching out to past colleagues etc for job leads/referrals. You're at a stage where you've very little to lose and everything to gain from any interaction with reality/real-world problems.

Working on AI/vibe-coding, esp understanding the fundamentals, will be advantageous as everyone is still figuring things out. Your lack of experience won't hurt you as much, since no one really have any. Be careful with using too much AI assistance for learning, as it can actually slow you down and give you a feeling of compentency/productivity without deep understanding.

Good luck!
by Discordian93 | 2025-09-13 23:56:48+00:00
Same here. I'd love to get a full time coding job even if it meant a pay cut on hourly terms, but everything in my area pays much, much less and also I have a hard time even getting interviews. Guess I'll try to apply to this kind of role but full time, I think Amazon, Mistral and xAI are hiring.