MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whyenot | 2025-09-15 03:07:16+00:00
Even if you use exactly the same ingredients, there is the temperature of the butter and how good a job you do of creaming it. Then there are factors like how do you mix the ingredients, and for how long. These all affect the final product. Then there is the oven, and if the temperature is accurate, if it does a good job holding temperature, etc. That's a lot of variables for something as simple as a tollhouse cookie!
by CursedSilicon | 2025-09-15 03:08:35+00:00
That's quite a strawman definition of "copyright infringement" especially given the ongoing Anthropic lawsuit

It's not a question of if feeding all the worlds books into a blender and eating the resulting slurry paste is copyright infringement. It's that they stole the books in the first place by getting them from piracy websites

If they'd purchased every book ever written, scanned them in and fed that into the model? That would be perfectly legal
by cogman10 | 2025-09-15 03:08:49+00:00
The exotic ingredients are often there either because a normal ingredient would spoil or can't be powdered. Fats, for example, are a major part of some baking and those cannot be dried out and will go rancid in a box.

It can seem intimidating until you realize that an egg, a pat of butter, or milk are just mishmashes of compounds not always easily added in mass production. (Yes, you can powder milk and eggs, in some baking it's just fine in other it messes with the flavor).
by EvanAnderson | 2025-09-15 03:09:00+00:00
Re: not using Google Play

I'm not using GrapheneOS (I am unwilling to give Google money directly), but I did recently move to my second Android phone after having been a decade-plus iPhone user.

When I got my first Android phone I decided to "sideload" all non-stock software on the phone. I never have setup a Google Play account. I kept all the APKs for the software I loaded over the three years I used the old phone.

When I got the new phone I loaded all the software I use day-to-day and imported my SMS, contacts, and call logs using a nice FOSS app[0]. It felt remarkably like moving to a new PC does. It was nice.

You definitely don't need Google Play to get a lot of functionality. I have run into a number of apps that I can't get to "sideload" (basically any xapk-packaged apps) but I don't need any of the badly enough to care.

I am really sad Google is ending this moving forward. Jackasses.

[0] https://github.com/tmo1/sms-ie
by lifeformed | 2025-09-15 03:09:13+00:00
If someone is eating cakes at the scale at which the artificial ingredients are causing issues, the nutritional content of the cake itself would overtake most of the problems.

A lot of scary sounding processed ingredients are perfectly safe and as natural as like orange juice or cheese.

I know it's more ideal to eat a perfect from-scratch cake, but I wouldn't let a few processed ingredients get in the way of appreciating the cultural and social aspects of someone making a cake for me.
by taosx | 2025-09-15 03:09:20+00:00
I’d actually love to see something that goes in the opposite direction, highly optimized and compiled, where the result is as small, fast, and efficient as possible. I get that a lot of people dislike compilation, but once I have the CI set upI never found build steps to be a problem for me.

Some time ago while I was experimenting with writing Debian benchmarks[0], I found that by completely avoiding strings, using Uint8Arrays, and manually managing bounds/memory, I could squeeze out performance that almost made you forget you were writing JavaScript. I never ended up submitting a PR, but it was pretty eye-opening.

At one point I went into a rabbit hole and tried to build something similar on my own, but it got complicated very quickly given my limited compiler knowledge. That’s why I always thought Prepack[1] was such a cool idea.

[0] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... [1] https://github.com/facebookarchive/prepack
by ammo1662 | 2025-09-15 03:09:41+00:00
China's already selling waste incineration power plant tech to other countries. They can build their own plants to handle their waste.

In China, these power plants are part of the urban waste management system, they are built to process trash, not to generate profit. As a waste disposal measure, their capacity must exceed the city’s waste production rate; otherwise, garbage would pile up.
by kragen | 2025-09-15 03:09:43+00:00
I'm not a domain expert in Krusteaz, and I certainly have a lot to learn about thrift, but I've been living on an income of under US$8000 per year for over a decade, so I do know a lot of things about thrift that not many people do. I think I probably also qualify as a domain expert in self-destructive choices!
by simianwords | 2025-09-15 03:11:42+00:00
> In Monday's order, Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup supported Anthropic's argument, stating the company's use of books by the plaintiffs to train their AI model was acceptable.

"The training use was a fair use," he wrote. "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative."

I agree it is debatable but it is not so cut and clear that it is _not_ transformative when a judge has ruled that it is.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-09-15 03:12:37+00:00
>I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?

FOSS still has to exist within the rules of the system the planet operates under. You can't just say "I downloaded that movie, but I'm a Linux user so I don't believe in copyright" and get away with it

>the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products.

[citation needed]

>Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software.

Disingenuous strawman. Tech CEO's and the like have been exuberant at the idea that "AI" will replace human labor. The entire end-goal of companies like OpenAI is to create a "super-intelligence" that will then generate a return. By definition the AI would be performing labor (services) for capital, outcompeting humans to do so. Unless OpenAI wants it to just hack every bank account on Earth and transfer it all to them instead? Or something equally farcical

>So did email.

"We should improve society somewhat"

"Ah, but you participate in society! Curious!"
by jjmarr | 2025-09-15 03:13:56+00:00
I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy.

The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR.

That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes.

I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review to show I care about quality.

LLMs increase review burden a ton but I would say it can be a fair tradeoff, because I'm learning quicker and can contribute at a level I otherwise couldn't. I feel like I will become a net-positive to the project much earlier than I otherwise would have.

edit: the PR in question. Unfortunately I've been on vacation and haven't touched it recently.

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970

It's a community's decision whether to accept this tradeoff & I won't submit AI generated code if your project refuses it. I also believe that we can mitigate this tradeoff with strong social norms that a developer is responsible for understanding and explaining their AI-generated code.
by litoE | 2025-09-15 03:13:58+00:00
In our condominium building (42 floors) the rule is that every apartment owner is responsible for any damages to their apartment, even if they are caused by an apartment in an upper floor. This is because otherwise the owners of the upper floors would have to have million-dollar insurance premiums to cover the possibility of a leak in their apartment causing damages to multiple floors below. We had an event where a burst pipe in the 28th floor caused damages all the way down to the 8th floor.
by wenbin | 2025-09-15 03:14:37+00:00
Maybe some of them already embed some simple, secret marker to identify their own generated content. But people outside the organization wouldn’t know. And this still can’t prevent other companies from training models on synthetic data.

Once synthetic data becomes pervasive, it’s inevitable that some of it will end up in the training process. Then it’ll be interesting to see how the information world evolves: AI-generated content built on synthetic data produced by other AIs. Over time, people may trust AI-generated content less and less.
by bruce511 | 2025-09-15 03:14:45+00:00
Mate, you are so wrong here, but I completely accept that your belief here is not unique.

Firstly, there's a lot wrong with using processed foods, but I'll skip over that.

If processed food is now "traditional" then that's a bit sad. Really.

Secondly, made from scratch tastes way better than box mix. Because, you know, flavors. Now I get that tastes, especially nostalgic tastes, are very subjective so YMMV. But processed foods are always made to fit a broad market, so are typically bland. Cake mixes typically use sugar as "flavor", so "tastes good" to someone raised on an American diet will tend to lean on high-fat, high-sugar.

Outside the US the emphasis is more on flavor than sugar. A coffee cake has a strong coffee taste. A chocolate cake uses real chocolate and so on. Using better ingredients makes for a better result.

Getting consistenty in baking is really not hard. Yes, it takes a bit of practice. But it's a skill a child can learn. My son was baking by himself at 6 years old. It really isn't hard. And it really does turn out better. And ultimately it has better food value as well.

Yes, I agree, that US culture is different. The days of grandma teaching kids to bake, of parents teaching kids to bake or cook is dwindling. It's sad to see this learned helplessness in the kitchen, which then leads to dependence on "big food" to decide what you eat. Fortunately they prioritize your health, not their profit.

Personally I'm grateful that my elders taught me to cook, and something I taught to my kids. If you are able to, I recommend it as a skill with passing on.

Calling it "snobby" suggests that it is a skill you have not yet acquired. And indeed a skill you feel you cannot acquire. You are incorrect. It is easy to do, you really can learn how, and the results are far superior.
by davebranton | 2025-09-15 03:16:39+00:00
I very strongly suspect that this preference is learned. I've never made anything from a mix, but I've baked brownies, cookies, sponge, tarts, biscuits and bread. They have all turned out perfectly delicious, without any need for the addition of whatever emulsifiers and what-not you'll find in the premixed packets.

This isn't to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with those ingredients. I'm sure that they're perfectly safe to eat, but they are simply not required. This seems to be a peculiarly American thing, permitting a large corporation to insert itself in the supply chain without there being any need whatsoever for them to be there.

In the rest of the world, where most of us live, there seems to be almost no examples of cake "recipes" containing anything other than basic ingredients. I've literally never even seen a recipe for anything that says "Add one box of brownie mix". I can hardly even imagine such a recipe existing. It boggles my mind.
by shoo | 2025-09-15 03:16:47+00:00
problem is, politically it is feasible for government to support policy that superficially appears to help home buyers, but also props up housing prices. like all these "give the first home buyers more money / access to loans / reduced stamp duty" policies

a government with an actual serious policy to increase housing supply, which should cause housing prices to fall, might have a lot of trouble getting elected or staying elected (only 1/3 of australian households rent, but that'll increase over time due to wealth inequality)
by ksenzee | 2025-09-15 03:17:14+00:00
Then you’re certainly a domain expert in making that kind of calculation, so I do retract my comment. I do not, however, retract my assertion that nobody in a modern society should have to make that kind of calculation to such an extreme. $8k/year is hardcore, and if you’re doing that successfully, I both tip my hat to you and am a little horrified. I hope you’re doing it because you want to and not because you’re forced to.
by tstrimple | 2025-09-15 03:17:37+00:00
It’s actually the opposite. Immediately after Kamala got the nod there was an enormous amount of energy surrounding her nomination that she managed to entirely squander. If Kamala had less time as the main candidate she would have done better. She ran a shit campaign and bled support the entire time. I can’t imagine why anyone wasn’t impressed with her promises to maintain the status quo and her ability to campaign with war criminals from the Bush era.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-15 03:17:49+00:00
I think you're being extremely judgmental and making a lot of assumptions.

I didn't see any "helpless" in the article. I see someone who doesn't want to spend twice the money for no good reason, and then have leftover ingredients they don't have any other use for.

It's sad that you seem unable to sympathize with someone else's inconvenience and chose to diminish them instead.

When standard ingredient sizes change, that have remained unchanged for decades, and lots of recipes are scaled to match them precisely, you... choose to call people helpless, rather than call it out as corporate greed?

It's actually constructive, not "helpless", to stop buying the product, because if enough people do that, the company gets the message and brings back the old size.
by MBCook | 2025-09-15 03:18:38+00:00
I’ve seen the stronger x86 memory model argued as one of the things that affects its performance before.

It’s neat to see real numbers on it. Didn’t seem to be very big in many circumstances which I guess would have been my guess.

Of course Apple just implemented that on the M1 and AMD/Intel had been doing it for a long time. I wonder if later M chips reduced the effect. And will they drop the feature once they drop Rosetta 2?
by lacoolj | 2025-09-15 03:19:05+00:00
I first noticed this with Triscuits - they both changed the size of the box/content, but also shrunk the actual "chip" (sorry not sure what to call a triscuit)

Super dishonest shit here. Glad more people are noticing finally but 100% don't expect Nestle or the other big 3 to make any changes back.

Inflation never seems to reverse, especially with food products.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-15 03:20:12+00:00
You're missing a very important reason

4 - There is a very active anti-LLM activist movement and they care more about participating in it than they care about free software.

For example, see their rationale, which are just canned anti-LLM activist talking points. You see the same ones repeated and memed ad nauseam if you lurk on anti-AI spaces.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-15 03:21:11+00:00
If you look up the purpose of the various ingredients you quickly find that they are simply filling roles that other more commonly used household ingredients can take with minimal to no impact on flavor.

Dextrins, for example, are simply thickening agents. Corn starch/potato starch. glycerides are literally just fats and added because most fats can't be powdered. Butter works just as well and is in fact preferable. Surfactants are soap, often simply used for emulsification. There's a bunch of cooking techniques to achieve that but, frankly, it's often not needed. "specific leavening ratios" is just silly. Yes, baking power and/or soda are needed in a lot of baking and you need to add enough and not too much. It isn't, however, and unforgiving ratio. A few grams more or less won't make a difference that anyone would care about.

Yes, the boxed recipe has been specifically tweaked to be as foolproof and forgiving as possible. Further, there's definitely times where ingredients are added simply because it gives just a slight benefit to the outcome. But it's not as if you can't get close if not better with a from scratch recipe depending on what you are making. Angel food cake, for example, is far better when done from scratch. So are a few cakes like texas sheet cake and arguably brownies (that one is a holy war).
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-15 03:21:25+00:00
Why are you using chocolate chips? Real bakers get the cacao pods from the grocery store, ferment the nibs inside for a month, then carefully formulate their own chocolate to pour into boutique chips of their own making.

As other comments point out, there is no added value in the pre-made ones, make your own chips! Oh, and the mixing bowl, why not take up glass-blowing? It's relatively easy to make your own bowls.
by positron26 | 2025-09-15 03:22:09+00:00
Can't imagine this survives napkin scrutiny. A ten mile drive isn't using nearly as much hydrocarbon mass as 10k plastic bags. While most of the plastic hopefully winds up in a landfill, most of the gasoline is water and carbon dioxide by the end. It's tires versus bags. While tires shed, the mass lost in 10min is definitely quite a bit lower than 10k bags or the fraction that escapes the waste pipeline.
by mythz | 2025-09-15 03:23:09+00:00
Using the full vue.js doesn't have a build step either.

I started out developing UIs using petite-vue, unfortunately ended up rewriting it to use full Vue.js after running into too many of its limitations and issues, which given that it's abandon-ware wont ever be resolved. As such I'd strongly recommend against starting projects with PetiteVue and just use the ESM build of Vue.js which also doesn't require a build step, has the full feature-set, is actively used and maintained, etc.

Either way developing Web Apps (using Vue) without a build step using JS Modules is now my preference which I've written about in my Simple, Modern JavaScript post [1]

[1] https://servicestack.net/posts/javascript
by blahedo | 2025-09-15 03:23:35+00:00
Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.

So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.
by The_SamminAter | 2025-09-15 03:24:00+00:00
Well, if you’d ever be interested in lightening your collection by one for a fellow enthusiast, I’ve always wanted to get my hands on an SGI to restore/rebuild. I’m currently working on an IBM 5150+5153, but the workshop always has space for more.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something just so mystical about SGI’s computers. I don’t know animation, and never got to work with IRIX, but at some point I want to get my hands on a Silicon Graphics computer (as well as a Sharp X86000).
by kop316 | 2025-09-15 03:24:06+00:00
Assuming you read the article, they address that: "She now calls them 'unusable.' She could buy an additional box to make up the difference, she acknowledges, 'but out of principle, I just can’t.'"

As someone who likes to cook, I understand this appeal too. I rarely make brownies (one or twice a year), but when I do, I just go to the boxed stuff. It reminds me of my childhood when I made them with my parents and siblings. I could reverse engineer the recipe to mimic what it does (and probably improve it), but given how little I make them, so it isn't high on my list of things to do. Now if they changed the recipe, sure, that may make me motivated enough to reverse engineer the recipe, but I would still be disappointed.

I think that's what they are going through. Sure, they could figure out what "1 box" used to be, they could go through the effort of reconstructing it with only from scratch ingredients, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's disappointing to have to go through. Maybe this recipe is one they always made for their kids and now grand-kids.
by ehnto | 2025-09-15 03:24:33+00:00
How would you know, generally speaking? Factuality online is always subjective, based on a thing someone said, or that you observed, and you are putting trust in the source. Whether you googled it, or AI googled it and generated an explanation, you are trusting the source.

You can influence it so easily with your inputs as well. You could easily, accidentally point it's search toward the searches someone is more likely to be aligned with, but may not actually be fact.

Especially as AI providers implement long term memory or reflections on historic chats, your bias will very strongly influence outcomes of fact checking.
by blahedo | 2025-09-15 03:24:51+00:00
This is a link to the last time I talked about this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745

and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540539

EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:

3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme) 2 eggs ¼c. water ⅓c. vegetable oil and the included packet of Hershey's syrup

The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)

As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
by bruce511 | 2025-09-15 03:25:03+00:00
The problem is indeed not processed ingredients in cake. Unfortunately, in the US, those ingredients are not limited to cake.

And yes, most industrial, chemical, ingredients are harmless. That said, around the world, there's a emphasis on non-processed food. Unprocessed foods tend towards healthier. Less added sugar, less saturated fat etc.

I guess, taken as an overall picture, American health is perceived as poor. Poor food choices. Poor food-related outcomes and so on. That's predicated on a food culture that prioritizes cost, profit, quantity, ubiquity etc over health and quality.

Taken in that light, arguing in favor of processed foods seems like a outcome most countries would like to avoid.
by crivlaldo | 2025-09-15 03:25:07+00:00
I made a course project on Irrlicht back in 2008. It was a shooter with a Quake map, medkits, and ammo. I don’t even remember who you were supposed to shoot at.

The point of the project was to show what a graphics engine is, and why I could get in just a few evenings what used to take man-months or even years only a few years earlier.

I got the highest grade.
by EPWN3D | 2025-09-15 03:25:07+00:00
Good. OCSP sucks. It's a fail-open design, and the fact that it exists means that a lot of security people have developed an auto-response for certificate lifetime problems, even in domains where OCSP is totally infeasible, like secure boot.

I can patiently explain why a ROM cannot query a fucking remote service for a certificate's validity, but it's a lot easier to just say "Look OCSP sucks, and Let's Encrypt stopped supporting it", especially to the types of people I argue with about these things.