MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tolerance | 2025-10-12 21:42:07+00:00
People are dumb and emotional for a lot of different reasons these days. I think that parsing today’s brand of humor/irony—verbal and written—requires a sort of detachment that most people lack and are losing with time if they ever had it. This is at odds with the fact that traditional humor/irony requires the participants to have some kind of shared understanding about the subject matter.

You seem to be a smart enough guy that can make sense of what I’m trying to say better than I can express it.

These days the worst thing to do in the face of absurdity is to draw attention to it. There’s just too many people living right now whose entire sense of self and security comes from subscribing to some absurd ideal that’s only tangentially—or at best orthogonally—rooted in a common interpretation of a the past (i.e., a tradition.)

My approach when dealing with these kinds of people used to be “When they go low, step on their backs!” but I’m beginning to realize that doesn’t leave a good impression for my opponents who are arguing in good faith nor does it set a fine example for my colleagues, particularly the more naive ones.

My favorite counter of late is something more like a barrel roll where afterwards I can either disengage or attack from a more sophisticated vantage point. Then I can only hope that a conscious observer can pick up on my attempt at being tactful, adopt it for their own use and spare themselves the troubles of the deeply troubled.
by dcminter | 2025-10-12 21:42:09+00:00
"AI" has been doing that since the 1950s though. The problem is that each time we define something and say "only an intelligent machine can X" we find out that X is woefully inadequate as an example of real intelligence. Like hilariously so. e.g. "play chess" - seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but clearly 1980s budget chess computers are not "intelligent" in any very useful way regardless of how Sci Fi they were in the 40s.

So why's it different this time?
by sjrd | 2025-10-12 21:42:50+00:00
I am one of the maintainers is the Scala compiler, and this is one of the things that immediately jump to me when I review code that contains any casing operation. Always explicitly specify the locale. However, unlike TFA and other comments, I don't suggest `Locale.US`. That's a little too US-centric. The canonical locale is in fact `Locale.ROOT`. Granted, in practice it's equivalent, but I find it a little bit more sensible.

Also, this is the last remaining major system-dependent default in Java. They made strict floating point the default in 17; UTF-8 the default encoding some versions later (21?); only the locale remains. I hope they make ROOT the default in an upcoming version.

FWIW, in the Scala.js implementation, we've been using UTF-8 and ROOT as the defaults forever.
by koeng | 2025-10-12 21:42:53+00:00
I am working on making ultra-low cost freeze-dried enzymes for synthetic biology.

For example, 1 PCR reaction (a common reaction used to amplify DNA) costs about $1 each, and we're doing tons every day. Since it is $1, nobody really tries to do anything about it - even if you do 20 PCRs in one day, eh it's not that expensive vs everything else you're doing in lab. But that calculus changes once you start scaling up with robots, and that's where I want to be.

Approximately $30 of culture media can produce >10,000,000 reactions worth of PCR enzyme, but you need the right strain and the right equipment. So, I'm producing the strain and I have the equipment! I'm working on automating the QC (usually very expensive if done by hand) and lyophilizing for super simple logistics.

My idea is that every day you can just put a tube on your robot and it can do however many PCR reactions you need that day, and when the next day, you just throw it out! Bring the price from $1 each to $0.01 + greatly simplify logistics!

Of course, you can't really make that much money off of this... but will still be fun and impactful :)
by Einenlum | 2025-10-12 21:43:03+00:00
Maybe 10 years ago I discovered Stumble upon, a website which allowed you to randomly get a page on the internet based on your previous likes/dislikes and interests. I absolutely loved it. You could find some very niche pages. I guess this is what Kagi Small Web tries to achieve somehow, but without the personalization.

They replaced StumbleUpon with "Mix", whatever it is. Probably because they didn't know how to earn money from it. Sad.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-12 21:43:49+00:00
> If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.

That's a big part of the problem. The vetoes have evolved to resist political reformists.

Most of these regulations come from unelected administrative agencies. You can swap out the President of the United States and they're still mostly the same people. The President can issue them general orders but a single elected individual doesn't have the bandwidth to drill down into all the specifics in all the agencies, even though that's what it'd take to fix it.

The nearest you could come to it would be to actually vaporize them -- stop doing these things at the federal level at all. It was never intended to be that way, that's why the federal executive branch has only one elected official. Instead you have the states do it, which a) gives you a house cleaning because they have to start over and b) gives you 50 chances to get it right instead of just one so that one bad regulatory choice can't destroy an industry nationwide.

But that's just a major problem, not the only problem. Zoning is nearly as bad, maybe even worse, but is local. Because that one isn't caused by unaccountability, it's caused by NIMBYs. For that you can't just limit the powers of the federal government, you even need to restrict the local governments from doing that.

That one would be easy to fix, on paper -- require that in any 100 square miles of land area at least 50% of the land can't prohibit anything other than noxious industrial uses, meaning you can build mixed commercial and residential with unlimited density, and in any 10,000 square miles of land area, at least half of that 50% (i.e. 25%) has to be completely unzoned, meaning you can build literally anything. Then the people who want single family homes can have the other 50% of the land area, just not the >90% it currently is in many areas. But now actually do that.
by asacrowflies | 2025-10-12 21:43:58+00:00
In the past these sycophants ran into hard limits of reality. Now that we are almost post scarcity on many things. It's easy for people to lose connection to science backed reality . In the past this would result in death or starvation or extreme suffering (simple things like saving food for winter pre industrial refrigeration). Now these people have EVERYTHING provided for them and an entire society that will bend over backward to make sure they have water roads etc..

It's quite literally spoiled children growing into spoiled adults. Raised to blthink whatever their current thoughts are the entire world and reality. See the rise of " affirmations" in new age woo stuff.
by strcat | 2025-10-12 21:44:06+00:00
No, GrapheneOS is partnered with a major Android OEM and has security partner access through them. Our security preview releases are in full compliance with the terms set by Google. It's permitted to ship the patches early with delayed source releases for the patches on the dates the embargoes end. The current patches are from the November 2025, December 2025 and January 2026 bulletins. We've shipped the full set of currently available patches for those 3 months.

See https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... for a more detailed explanation.
Osmea – open-source Flutter Architecture for E-commerce Apps
by nurLife | 2025-10-12 21:44:29+00:00
Hey HN

We’ve built OSMEA (Open Source Mobile E-commerce Architecture) — a complete, open-source Flutter ecosystem for building scalable, production-ready e-commerce applications.

Instead of starting from scratch or stitching together random plugins, OSMEA provides a modular architecture, custom UI kit, and ready-to-use API integrations for Shopify, WooCommerce, and custom backends.

Highlights

Modular & Composable – Build only what you need.

Platform-Agnostic – Shopify, WooCommerce, or any API.

Custom UI Kit – Themeable, production-ready Flutter components.

Enterprise-Ready – CI/CD, test coverage, async-safe architecture.

Cross-Platform – iOS, Android, Web, and Desktop from one codebase.

We designed it to help teams ship e-commerce apps up to 70% faster while keeping the codebase clean, testable, and maintainable.

Repo (MIT License): https://github.com/masterfabric-mobile/osmea

We’d love to hear feedback from the community — especially around:

architecture scalability

integration improvements

real-world deployment experiences

Thanks for checking it out!
by luhsprwhkv2 | 2025-10-12 21:45:20+00:00
A spooky game for this Halloween. https://github.com/luhsprwhk/iOuija73K

Haunted house trope, but it's a chatbot. Not done yet, but it's going well. The only real blocker is that I ran into the parental controls on the commercial models right away when trying to make gory images, so I had to spin up my own generators. (Compositing by hand definitely taking forever).
by deadbabe | 2025-10-12 21:45:30+00:00
I think we will enter a neo-Luddite era at some point post-AI boom where it suddenly becomes fashionable to live one’s life with simple retro style technology, and social networks and much of the internet will just become places for bitter old people to complain amongst themselves and share stupid memes. Social media was cool when it was more genuine, but it got increasingly fake, and now with AI it could reach peak-fake. If people want genuine, what is more genuine than the real world?

It will become cool for you to become inaccessible, unreachable, no one knowing your location or what you’re doing. People might carry around little beeper type devices that bounce small pre-defined messages around on encrypted radio mesh networks to say stuff like “I’m okay” or “I love you”, and that’s it. Maybe they are used for contactless payments as well.

People won’t really bother searching the web anymore they’ll just ask AI to pull up whatever information they need.

The question is, with social media on the decline, with the internet no longer used for recreational purposes, what else are people going to do? Feels like the consumer tech sector will shrink dramatically, meaning that most tech written will be made to create “hard value” instead of soft. Think anything having to do with movement of data and matter, or money.

Much of the tech world and government plans are built on the assumption that people will just continue using tech to its maximum utility, even when it is clearly bad for them, but what if that simply weren’t the case? Then a lot of things fall apart.
by richartruddie | 2025-10-12 21:45:42+00:00
On October 8, 2025, California enacted the “Opt Me Out Act” (AB 566), the first U.S. law requiring web browsers that operate in California to ship an easy-to-find, built-in setting allowing users to send a universal opt-out preference signal (often implemented via Global Privacy Control, or “GPC”). When enabled, the browser signal instructs websites not to sell or share personal information, operationalizing California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) opt-out rights at scale. The law authorizes the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) to adopt implementing regulations and takes effect January 1, 2027. This editorial explains what the law does (and does not) cover—especially the status of mobile browsers—how it interacts with existing universal opt-out regimes in states like Colorado and Connecticut, what it means for opt-out requests and DSAR workflows, and the practical pros and cons for businesses. Finally, it outlines why this shift is advantageous for enterprise privacy programs and how leading solutions such as CaptainCompliance.com can reduce risk and cost through automation.
by ben_w | 2025-10-12 21:45:46+00:00
> but it is inevitably present in legal records, and the passport/id card is the most general excerpt from those

[…]

> Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure.

Saying "we need this information on documents like this because it's on documents like this is" is (1) circular reasoning, and (2) demonstrably false.

Other jurisdictions besides the USA expressly allow gender to be excluded from this specific document with the identifier "X" meaning "unspecified or other", and yet those legal records are now being rejected by the USA because the USA government doesn't like it.

Heck, the USA itself allowed X on passports until very recently.

It's obviously, provably, demonstrably, unnecessary to demand it be this way on documents for incoming travellers.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-10-12 21:46:20+00:00
Yeah, but usually it was another human plying you with sweet nonsense from the other side of that dance, not some bland sludge factory pointed in the right direction. What you say is sort of a non-sequitor that just bypasses how this GPT nonsense has nothing to do with love or people somehow managing to meet and create sparks in the real world.

It's like comparing "friendly" spam from a nigerian prince with emails from overseas friends wanting to come visit.

Edit: Worse, the nigerian prince emails were usually written by human Nigerians at least.
by strcat | 2025-10-12 21:46:26+00:00
The preview patches are source code patches we're applying to the source tree used for the regular GrapheneOS releases. We have the sources for the patches, but we need to wait to the embargo end date to publish the security preview patches as source code. We keep the patches in a dedicated Git repository with a script for applying them to the source tree from the regular release. Each security preview release is tagged there, so we can release the sources which were used as soon as the embargo date is reached.
by welzel | 2025-10-12 21:46:27+00:00
What did people expect to happen? Nobody seems to ask the question why military is being deployed to US cities. What would be your assumption if the same happens in Africa or South America? Seriously, how stupid can people be ...

I have many friends who already left the US or prepared to leave at a moments notice. None of them are actually political, but they are aware that 1984 is already fully implemented and at any point in time it could get very, very ugly very quickly.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-12 21:46:37+00:00
People don't have the grasp of just how insane that "800M MAU and still growing" figure is. CEOs would kill people with their own bare hands to get this kind of userbase.

OpenAI has ~4B of revenue already, and they aren't even monetizing aggressively. Facebook has an infinite money glitch, and can afford to put billions in the ground in pursuit of moonshots and Zuck's own vanity projects. Google is Google, and xAI is Elon Musk. The most vulnerable frontier lab is probably Anthropic, and Anthropic is still backed by Amazon and, counterintuitively, also Google.

At the same time: there is a glut of questionable AI startups, extreme failure rate is likely - but they aren't the bulk of the market, not by a long shot. The bulk of the "AI money" is concentrated at either the frontier labs themselves, or companies providing equipment and services to them.

The only way I see for the "bubble to pop" is for multiple frontier labs to get fucked at the same time, and I just don't see that happening as it is.
by tubignaaso | 2025-10-12 21:47:31+00:00
Having migraines on and off the past few months, I wanted a way to try and narrow down triggers. All the existing apps out there were overly complicated. So I built something simpler.

https://dotsjournal.app

It’s an iOS app to help tracking events and stats about my day as simple dots. How many cups of coffee? Did I take my supplements? How did I sleep? Did I have a migraine? Think of it like a digital bullet journal.

Then visualizing all those dots together helps me see patterns and correlations. It’s helped me cut down my occurrence of migraines significantly. I’m still just in the public beta phase but looking forward to a full release fairly soon.

Would love to hear more feedback on how to improve the app!
by ptx | 2025-10-12 21:47:38+00:00
The web version is awful, absurdly cumbersome to navigate, difficult to search, confusingly structured, slow and just generally terrible.

The native version was forced onto people's Windows machines and automatically configured to sync people's local desktop and documents to Microsoft's servers without explicit consent, so some of the hate directed towards Onedrive might be an expressions of hate of Microsoft's abusive and deceptive behavior. But even if the Onedrive app itself is amazing (I don't know if it is), installing anything from such an untrustworthy company seems like a bad idea.
by userbinator | 2025-10-12 21:47:55+00:00
That looks like HDPE, which normally requires no plasticisers. Better learn some chemistry before spouting hysterical nonsense.

Plasticised PVC, which is where phthalates are used, is not suitable for structural applications like this.

Edit: care to refute? Or do you just want to parrot ignorant talking points without thought.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-12 21:47:56+00:00
But that's how it works with every other tool you own? Nobody is complaining about the pencil manufacturer when you choose to draw an image, which you later don't like. Same with using software to modify the state of the hard disk, which you don't like later.

In Windows or Darwin you are not responsible, because you can't tell the computer what you want to do, but in a free OS, you can and do order what the computer is doing and that's why you also need to deal with the consequences.
by godelski | 2025-10-12 21:48:09+00:00
That's a pretty recent definition, one developed out of marketing since it removes the need to further refine and allows it to be naïvely measured.

So I'll refine: sentient. I'll refine more: the ability to interpret the underlying intent of ill-defined goals, the ability to self generate goals, refine, reiterate, resolve and hold conflicting goals and context together, possess a theory of mind, possess triadic awareness. And I'm certain my definition is incomplete.

What I mean by AGI is the older definition: the general intelligence possessed by humans and other intelligent creatures. In context I mean much closer to a human than a cat.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-10-12 21:48:16+00:00
Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)

I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)

As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-12 21:48:48+00:00
> If you do, can you tell me how you know it?

The other poster responded to what happens, but here is the how do we know part. We understand very well how physics works, up to some small gaps that are irrelevant here. We know that information about the contents of your mind can't be transmitted outside your body in a way that would not be picked up by some of our sensors. People have tried to actually measure if there is any emanation from the body as a person dies, and there simply isn't any, in any spectra. So, there is no possibility of a soul living the body. Plus, any concept of an afterlife has no place where it could happen. There is no place on earth, in the clouds or underground, for an afterlife to take place in.

So, unless you think all of science is dramatically mistaken, we know with very good certainty that an afterlife is not a real possibility.
by dcminter | 2025-10-12 21:48:50+00:00
The dot com crash was a thing though. The bubble burst. It's just that there was real value there so some of the companies survived and prospered.

Figuring out which was which was absolutely not possible at the time. Not many people foresaw Sun Microsystems as being a victim and nor was it obvious that Amazon would be a victor.

I wouldn't bet my life savings on OpenAI.
by troad | 2025-10-12 21:49:50+00:00
> In fact even this isn't correct, i/I represents one phoneme, not one vowel.

Not quite. In English, 'i' and 'I' are two allographs of one grapheme, corresponding to many phonemes, based on context. (Using linguistic definitions here, not compsci ones.) The 'i's in 'kit' and 'kite' stand for different phonemes, for example.

> There is no reason to assume that the English representation is in general "correct", "standard", or even "first".

Correct, but the I/i allography is not exclusive to English. Every Latin script functions that way, other than Turkish and Turkish-derived scripts.

No one is saying Turkish cannot break from that convention - they can feel free to do anything they like - but the resulting issues are fairly predictable, and their adverse effects fall mainly on Turkish speakers in practice, not on the rest of us.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2025-10-12 21:49:50+00:00
You have to verify everything from human developers too. They hallucinate APIs when they try to write code from memory. So we have:

- documentation - design reviews - type systems - code review - unit tests - continuous integration - integration testing - Q&A process - etc.

It turns out when include all these processes, teams of error-prone human developers can produce complex working software. Mostly -- sometimes there are bugs. Kind of a lot actually. But we get things done.

Is it not the same with AI? With the right processes you can get consistent results from inconsistent tools.
by andy99 | 2025-10-12 21:49:55+00:00
This raises lots of interesting questions. Off the top of my head, if this pans out:

- what would AI have to “deliver” in terms of capability to avoid collapse? And how much can be pawned off on the “people overestimate the short term value and underestimate the long term value” mantra, and for how long?

- what countries are most likely to come out ahead or less behind if the whole thing does collapse. Many European countries are investing heavily in AI but not quite going all in economically. How e.g. will France and Switzerland, who have big national investments, fare?