MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-10-08 18:54:57+00:00
Legal contracts built for sellers of AI agents.

The contract establishes that your agent functions as a sophisticated tool, not an autonomous employee. When a customer's agent books 500 meetings with the wrong prospect list, the answer to "who approved that?" cannot be "the AI decided."

It has to be "the customer deployed the agent with these parameters and maintained oversight responsibility."

The MSA includes explicit language in Section 1.2 that protects you from liability for autonomous decisions while clarifying customer responsibility.

The alternative is that the service has financial responsibility for its mistakes. This is the norm in the gambling industry. Back when GTech was publicly held, their financial statements listed how much they paid out for their errors. It was about 3%-5% of revenue.

Since this kind of product is sold via large scale B2B deals, buyers can negotiate. Perhaps service responsibility for errors backed up by reinsurance above some limit.
by mrandish | 2025-10-08 18:55:24+00:00
Even after 28 years, there continue to be a lot of interesting things happening across MAME - and it goes well beyond the arcade machines MAME is known for to lesser known home consoles, vintage computers and other hardware.

One example I'm excited about is the recent progress emulating professional music synthesizers like the legendary Yamaha MU-series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_MU-series). These are significant not just to musicians but also gamers because in the late 80s PC games started supporting MIDI music soundtracks. Throughout the 90s, most PC gamers only heard these soundtracks through fairly primitive PC sound cards which had limited audio sample memory, bit rates and simultaneous voice counts. So we usually heard chintzy, partial renditions of the lush full soundtracks the game's composer originally created (many composers used external MIDI hardware).

If you were a hardcore gamer with serious money you got an external MIDI sound module like the Roland Sound Canvas which could elevate your favorite game's sound from chintzy to breathtakingly beautiful. However, the absolute best MIDI game hardware was the $699 64-voice Yamaha MU80. I heard one back in the day and it blew my mind what I'd been missing (MU80 Demo Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwWxEN2NGHA). Now thanks to MAME I can have a full software emulation of this powerful, pricey professional hardware I could only lust for back then.
by em-bee | 2025-10-08 18:55:54+00:00
my android (/e/OS) allows to create multiple accounts that you can switch. i create a second account that only has the apps my kids are allowed to use. they can't switch users as that would require them to log in.

i don't think multiple account is an /e/OS feature, but must be coming from lineage/ASOP so other ROMs should have it too (unless it was intentionally removed)
by Lammy | 2025-10-08 18:55:59+00:00
Same setup here with a Supermicro Denverton board except in an iStarUSA chassis that I got brand new: https://istarusa.com/product/product-detail/?brand=istarusa&...

Though it looks like their SFF-8087 miniSAS chassis are EOL and soon replaced with SFF-8643 HD-miniSAS equivalents: https://istarusa.com/product/product-list/?brand=istarusa&se...
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-10-08 18:56:02+00:00
Can’t say anything about UGREEN, but UNAS with Unifi identity endpoint is magic on a Mac. You install it, sign in with your UI credentials, and it automatically mounts all shares you have access to whenever you’re on a network where the NAS is reachable.

It works on my LAN, but also over my site to site VPN from my summerhouse, as well as my road warrior wireguard VPN.
by pona-a | 2025-10-08 18:56:02+00:00
If I said the Web Integrity API is incompatible with Free Software, would you read that as: a) Chromium would cease to be Free Software if it implemented it; or b) Web Integrity itself makes effective Free Software structurally impossible and exists to punish its users?

The latter is what I mean. Web Integrity or SafetyNet are a closer counterpart to this situation than your curl example. A user agent is just a hint; attestation is an effective enforcement mechanism.

No Free Software license on my client can obligate your server to cooperate. But if attestation becomes the norm across many different services, the entire framework of user choice Free Software stands on collapses.

How would Ungoogled Chromium survive if every second website rejected non-Google Chrome? We've already seen this play out with Android: more people daily-drive GrapheneOS than Lineage because it passes Google's lower-level integrity checks.

And when a "strongly advised" government app requires the strictest attestation level, will you have to move countries just to exercise that freedom of choice you supposedly have?
by cycomanic | 2025-10-08 18:56:04+00:00
Funny, in my experience Airbnb never captured the vacation home market to anywhere near the degree of the apartment in a popular city market. Where I am you still have a much better bet of finding a vacation home via the websites that existed previously than Airbnb.

Also there is a reason why places places with lots of vacation homes are considered expensive an dnot the most pleasant to live at permanently. That's why cities etc regulated, they dis not want them to turn into holiday parks.
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-08 18:56:07+00:00
I don't think it's careless because I think that for someone who does not really care about the ideology here other than "I want people to be able to use my code," I think that the MIT license or similar is actually the closest license to their intent.

I also don't think it's careless because "Go with community norms" is a considered way to choose something.

Finally, this isn't really about "careless" exactly, but if I were the authors of this project, I would deliberately choose MIT/Apache2.0 over the GPL, and so like, I dunno, suggesting that they're not being responsible because they didn't pick the GPL isn't a framing I'd agree with.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-10-08 18:56:11+00:00
By way of example, if there's a backdoor key, it can be stolen or misused. Witness the many examples of companies that collect too much data and have that data stolen, and many examples of police departments abusing police databases for personal stalking and similar misuses.

Any other backdoor mechanism can similarly be breached or misused. There is no such thing as a backdoor that can only be used for what it is "supposed" to be used for.
by NaOH | 2025-10-08 18:56:31+00:00
Previous and related:

The Alternate Universe of Soviet Arcade Games (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478046 - Sept 2021 (46 comments)

Soviet Arcade Games from the 70s and 80s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20192006 - June 2019 (36 comments)

Museum of Soviet arcade machines - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11739329 - May 2016 (40 comments)

The Alternate Universe of Soviet Arcade Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171304 - Sept 2015 (31 comments)

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085 - Sept 2010 (12 comments)
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-10-08 18:56:45+00:00
Is this really about nationality or ideology? Open source projects that support weapons of war will eventually end up killing some of their contributors. Open source projects that don't... won't.

Name calling aside, its reasonable to to break from indifference and neutrality if you notice your project changing from the latter to the former.

Granted, there's not much to be done... Open source is open. But I think it's pretty understandable to expect harsh language from open source communities when somebody who is building killer robots enters the chat.
by mlsu | 2025-10-08 18:56:50+00:00
If you're writing your own tests, sure, AI is fast at writing code that passes the tests.

But if you write a comprehensive test suite for a problem, you've effectively done the hard development work to solve the problem in the first place. How did the AI help?

Oh have the AI write unit tests you say? Claude cheats constantly at the tests ime. It frequently tests the mock instead of the UUT and reports a pass. That's worse than useless! I'm sure a huge swath of slop unit tests that all pass is acceptable quality for a lot of businesses out there.
by asdff | 2025-10-08 18:57:51+00:00
You can set this up today with newsboat, if you are fine with writing a small helper script that will parse browsing links for "youtube" string and open them directly in mpv. There are a bunch of examples of these sorts of scripts on peoples githubs where they already went through the trouble of writing regex for video and image file links (beyond just youtube) for you. You then add a line in the newsboat config file to set the default browser to your helper script.

I extended one to include opening rss subscribed reddit links in rtv in my terminal window, for example.
by nilirl | 2025-10-08 18:58:04+00:00
I was referring to this:

> who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds

You invoked usage that connotes vapid meaning.

I see your argument: How can someone do something if they don't know what to do?

Explicit instruction is useful to a novice; say a toddler or someone new to a domain. But most adults don't spend the day explicitly telling each other how to behave socially.

A case can be made for individuals who display some difficulty learning this vicariously, but considering that should affect <1% of the world population, I think it's reasonable to be suspect of misbehavior.

i.e "you didn't tell me how to be nice, so how could I be nice?" is not a reasonable excuse for most adults.
by mtlynch | 2025-10-08 18:58:26+00:00
>Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes.

This actually did happen to me. When I was in Hyderabad, I took an Uber from my company's office to the airport, and the driver said his phone died right after picking me up, so I had to pay cash.
by hylaride | 2025-10-08 18:59:42+00:00
> This doesn't make any sense. Going going to a random shop to buy a rain jacket is inevitably going to be worse than doing careful research and ordering from the cheapest retailer. Moreover after you bought your first rain jacket, then what? Buy another next time it rains? If not, why not just buy it ahead of your trip and pack it?

That means constantly planning for every eventuality, which means always carrying an over-sized/over-stuffed piece of luggage. If you travel enough, you want to minimize that. Weight adds up, especially jeans and pants.

No, I don't always go and buy a rain jacket. Most of the time the forecasts are decent enough for most trips that I'll buy a cheap umbrella, wait it out, or something if things go sideways. But it did cause me to browse through some stores I'd never have bothered go into. For me, unexpected things can sometimes result in delights like that.

I saw a jacket that felt very nicely made, had nice materials, had a lot of high-quality seams (my wife's friend was a seamstress and taught us what to look for in quality clothing), and was a perfect fit and colour.

I'm far more willing to buy sweaters or other things that keep you warm, though.
by johnnienaked | 2025-10-08 19:00:01+00:00
If the market is efficient then there is no risk adjusted alpha, which renders the search for it a waste of time and effort, which means no actor would rationally continue it, which means there is no mechanism for price discovery, which would render the market totally inefficient.

This is the paradox.

EMH is unfalsifiable at best and tautological at worst.
by mindcrime | 2025-10-08 19:00:06+00:00
Why do you need a "vendor" at all? Do the paperwork yourself and pay the $100 fee (or whatever it is in your chosen state), and Bob's yer uncle. At worst add in a one-time cost of $40 or so to buy a book like Nolo's LLC Handbook[1].

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Nolos-LLC-Handbook-Agreements-Instruc...
by sebastos | 2025-10-08 19:01:09+00:00
The analysis isn't done yet though: - How much do you trust the statistics about which ladder deaths were preventable? - Do you have the numbers on the counter-factual: once ladder training is introduced, these sub-populations see X reduction in ladder deaths, offsetting for reduction in ladder use due to people not having their ladder license? - What is the productivity cost of assigning every single ladder user a training class, in perpetuity? This analysis should include the cost of creating a cottage ladder training industry that provides the trainings, the hourly productivity loss of sending people to trainings, the administrative cost of ensuring the trainings have been conformed to, etc.

In your heart of hearts, when you are assigned mandatory trainings, how much do you learn? I'm not asking how much _could_ you learn, I'm asking how much DO you learn? My experience, and the obvious unspoken consensus of all my colleagues, is that you click through mandatory virtual trainings as fast as possible, with the sound down, on fast-forward. If it's a live training with an actual practical skill (like ladder training), then I'd definitely concede it's much more engaging and you probably learn something. But MANY trainings are clearly, obviously, a net friction on society.

"I see a problem - how about we make a law that everybody must learn about that thing?" is the crappiest, laziest way to address the problem that you could possibly think of. If 'mandate a training' was analogized to a pull request on a codebase, it would be like responding to a bug report by adding a pop-up dialog that always pops up whenever you open the program and warns you about the bug. In other words, the shittiest possible non-solution that lets somebody close the issue as resolved. A real solution takes more work and more thinking.
by munk-a | 2025-10-08 19:01:52+00:00
I think that's a fair point and sort of speaks to one of the indicators that say this possible bubble may be different than the dotcom bubble. I think that end-user revenue for AI is a pipe-dream - but the companies interested in compute have a whole lot of resources and so long as they are willing to divert those resources to prop up AI it can keep going for quite a while (at a smaller scale though).

There is a commonly held belief that there is a level of compute (vaguely referred to as AGI) that would be extremely valuable and those companies may continue to rationally fund AI research as R&D though if the VC and loan funding dries up there will probably be serious fights with the accounting departments. It is good to point out that companies with huge war chests do seem poised to continue investing in this even if VC/etc dries up due to the lack of end-user profitability - it'll be an interesting shift but probably not as disastrous as the dot-com bubble burst was.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-08 19:02:09+00:00
> According to Ortega, science is mostly the work of geniuses, and geniuses mostly build on each other's work, but in some fields there is a real need for systematic laboratory work that could be done by almost anyone.

That seems correct to me. Imagine having a hypothesis named after you that a) you disagree with, and b) seems fairly doubtful at best!
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-08 19:02:27+00:00
> proven to be dangerous to others if they access the internet

What does this even mean? What kind of crimes can people commit using the internet that justifies bypassing due process for public safety?

There are rules on the books in Canada that allows bypassing due process to confiscate firearms from a potentially violent or mentally unstable person, but I think that is a bit — just a little bit — more justifiable as the crimes that can be committed with a gun are much more serious than the crimes you can commit with the internet. Also, the internet is almost a necessity to be a part of functioning society whereas guns are not.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-10-08 19:02:46+00:00
> Good for Germany and the EU, but how (or why) is the rule of law supposed to make it a taboo? Is it thrown in just to sound nicer, or did they skip a few steps in the reasoning?

Don't thank Germany too early. The only reason they changed their tune is because a massive number of people reached out to the government representatives in the last few days/weeks.

Without that, it would have gone through.

Case and point, you can look at the timeline of each country's position on https://fightchatcontrol.eu and you will see that Germany went from opposing to undecided to opposing again.

This is the sad state of affairs today. Privacy and rule of law have nothing to do with it.

I personally reached out to many German MEPs and the only ones who bothered to respond and were against CC were from the AFD. Make of that what you will.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-08 19:03:13+00:00
Vectrex was an old game console with an integral CRT, famous for the "vector scan" CRT it used.

Basically the only new principle involved is that instead of cathode ray beams always scanning on a fixed rectangular pattern, the X and Y deflection amounts were provided by the game to move around the singular dot to desired locations.

It's crisp as waving around a laser pointer. Some people like that aesthetics.
by drusepth | 2025-10-08 19:03:17+00:00
Presumably the reverse would be more valuable: design something in Figma, then have Gemini CLI read from Figma and use that as a reference while writing the code.

I don't know if this is how the Figma integration works, but right now I'm just manually screenshotting my designs and passing them into Claude CLI as references for what I want, so this seems potentially more streamlined.
by wavemode | 2025-10-08 19:03:20+00:00
Does a denser wall produce a higher-energy barrier?

And, if so, is there then actually a practical difference between the classical and quantum interpretations? (i.e. could it simply be said that, the denser wall just has more chances to collide with the particle and stop it from passing through, thus explaining why the probability of finding it on the other side is lower?)
by dgunay | 2025-10-08 19:03:40+00:00
It's a different kind of fun for me.

I've been enjoying seeing my agents produce code while I am otherwise too busy to program, or seeing refined prompts & context engineering get better results. The boring kinds of programming tasks that I would normally put off are now lower friction, and now there's an element of workflow tinkering with all these different AI tools that lets me have some fun with it.

I also recently programmed for a few hours on a plane, with no LLM assistance whatsoever, and it was a refreshing way to reconnect with the joy of just internalizing a problem and fitting the pieces together in realtime. I am a bit sad that this kind of fun may no longer be lucrative in the near future, but I am thankful I got to experience it.
by mattkrause | 2025-10-08 19:05:33+00:00
I'm sure status is part of it but I think it's almost certainly driven by "availability."

Big names give more talks in more places and people follow their outputs specifically (e.g., author-based alerts on PubMed or Google Scholar), so people are more aware of their work. There are often a lot of papers one could cite to make the same point, and people tend to go with the ones that they've already got in mind....
by tredre3 | 2025-10-08 19:05:33+00:00
Both Espressif and Raspberry pi (pico) target OEMs who will buy millions of their chips. They've both embraced the hobbyist market as well, but it's not how they've recouped their investment.

Arduino targets the hobyist market where customers will buy one (or at best a handful) of their boards. Arduino simply has no other way of recouping their investment than selling expensive hardware.

So I don't think it's fair to say that Arduino is being greedy. Also FWIW, Espressif's official dev boards are also pretty expensive. Not Arduino expensive, but several times the price of identical "clones" based on the same reference design and using the same official esp32 module.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-10-08 19:05:45+00:00
I'm talking about two different cases here.

First, in a case closer to the current world, I'm just suggesting that disabling the cell modem should power it off so it can't do any kind of location or tracking.

Second, in a more ideal world, the concept of "data connection" would be entirely separate from any identity attached to a phone or text message, and you could handle the latter via whatever connection you have, whether a cell data connection or wifi or something else.
by TMWNN | 2025-10-08 19:05:46+00:00
DES is an example of where people were sure that NSA persuaded IBM to weaken it but, to quote Bruce Schneier, "It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA 'tweaks' actually improved the security of DES". <https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/saluting-the-data-encrypti...>
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-08 19:06:20+00:00
> I think the obvious answer is whatever tool you're attempting to replicate/supplant, you should use the same (or a compatible) license.

But there isn’t a standard license for coreutils, as I’ve demonstrated.

And worse to your point is that literally only one implementation of coreutils is GPLv3. So by your logic “rewrite in rust” projects shouldnt be GPL-licensed.

> The issue is there's a massive leap between GPLv3 and MIT, even something like GPLv2 or anything else is better than MIT or public domain-tier licenses.

Actually MIT is closer to what the term “public domain” means than GPLv3 is.

But either way, you’re arguing preference as fact. And your preference here is basically just a license flame war. I thought the community had evolved passed this pettiness.
by satisfice | 2025-10-08 19:06:47+00:00
No there isn't "a polite and impolite way to recline a seat."

All ways are polite. You are just making shit up.

Why do so many smart people think that correct behavior is whatever makes intuitive sense to themselves and everything else must be wrong? NOBODY HAS EVER CONVENED A SUMMIT ON RULES FOR RECLINING AIRLINE SEATS, DUDE. There is no council of elders. There's just us.

Either you're a pluralist, who understands that the world has lots of different kinds of people in it, that we don't all agree, and somehow we must get along without resorting to violence... or you're part of the why we aren't getting along.

As I said in my original comment. There are no rules. But there is empathy. Empathy is a gift. It's a choice. Thank you for choosing it. But it's not my right to demand it from you. My comfort is NOT your problem.

And it's so strange to be downvoted when I say that, because if my comfort is your problem, then you all should be upvoting me so that I will feel good about myself! Every downvote proves I'm right. (sort of)
by cycomanic | 2025-10-08 19:06:48+00:00
> I would say that regulatory capture is merely a consequence of political capture. The politicians write the regulations, supervise the regulators, and in most cases, appoint the judges. > > How did Microsoft avoid breakup in 2001? Simple: George W. Bush was elected President, and the Bush administration decided to settle the court case with a slap on the wrist. Don't blame the regulators but rather the politicians. >

But he addresses that in the post, by saying that these monopoly/olipolyies actors can amass massive war chests that make them become bigger than the regulator. So by the time MS was a monopoly it was already too late.
by kubectl_h | 2025-10-08 19:06:57+00:00
I remember the weird, pretty bad MIDI songs that shipped with my Packard Bell Pentium 166 (with MMX technology) and I didn't realize there were devices at that time that would have elevated them. A quick search on youtube shows this video comparing a Sound Blaster output with the MU80. Pretty cool!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C33-YCX7Too