MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by harryf | 2025-10-19 15:26:45+00:00
It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU

Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-19 15:27:01+00:00
> Seems to me that you've demonstrated clearly through the course of the discussion that individual definitions of "badness" differ substantially enough for there to be significant disagreement.

The claim I stated that that started this thread was, that different definitions of badness are accompanied by different but respective definitions of misuse.

> Here you are making the same case yourself.

Yes? I used a word having some meaning in mind, you interpreted it with a different meaning, which obviously doesn't work. You pointed that out, so I pointed out, that that was not the meaning of the word I was using it for.

> I can see the rhetorical corner you're attempting to back the discussion into, and it's a weak position devoid of nuance or understanding.

I think you are over-interpreting me, answering to something I haven't said.

> P.S. drug use is also observed in nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use_in_anima...

That's what I was answering to, with "Killing others is natural". This is a factual true statement, but you wouldn't accept this as a moral argument in a court. Because animals (including humans) can do and do something, does not mean we want to cater to that as a society. In fact restricting things, that might not even be bad in isolation, is what separates civilization from the undomesticated.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-19 15:27:29+00:00
> I don't agree with a lot of things he is doing

You simply "don't agree" with him banning flag burning, ending birthright citizenship, going after his political opponents and their law firms, threatening broadcasting licenses over speech, his lawsuits against media for saying things he doesn't like, him running a cryptocurrency meme coin and making billions, dropping a case against Eric Adams in a quid-pro-quo, and pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists?

If you're just a single issue voter and not a die-hard MAGA person, surely you can list some of the things you "disagree with" and clearly disavow those actions?
by NaomiLehman | 2025-10-19 15:27:36+00:00
My take: I think that whiteness is not a lack of culture. It is the dominant culture, which makes it feel like an absence of culture to most within it. Like a massive white (pun intended) wall, which makes other cultures clearly visible in front of it.

I would also guess that most people saying that are centrists/moderates cosplaying a different political ideology, making it even harder to see any distinct features or a sense of community and belonging.
by andai | 2025-10-19 15:27:48+00:00
There's this principle, I forget the name, but how everyone when reading the newspaper, when they read on a subject they're familiar with, will instantly spot all the holes, all the errors. And they will ask themselves, how was this even published in the first place?

But then they flip to the next page and they read a story on a subject they're not an expert on and they just accept all of it without question.

I think people might have a similar relationship with ChatGPT.
by Retr0id | 2025-10-19 15:28:27+00:00
The "is this AI?" fatigue is very grating, but it seems inescapable even if you're not scrolling algorithmic feeds. It permeates group chats, DMs, and even personal blogs. I have no idea how we solve this!

Ironically, it seems that some of the more "anti-AI" people I know are more likely to re-share AI-generated content without realising it, because they aren't keeping up with what today's AI output looks like.
by dotancohen | 2025-10-19 15:28:35+00:00
> This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning AI but by preparing society to move forward.

Many will argue that the purpose of government is not to steer or prepare society, but rather to reflect the values of society. Traditionally, the body that has steered (prepared or failed to prepare) society for impending changes was religion.
by gausswho | 2025-10-19 15:28:45+00:00
An abrupt ending to a worthy if lomg setup. The final paragrpah hints at what I thought would be the meat of the article, but ultimately nneded more to demonstrate how limiting choice can lead to freedom.

In practice, we all restrain our choices in ways that we hope narrow our focus and abilities towards things that matter. It would be nice to read a piece that explores how this can be true collectively.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-19 15:28:59+00:00
>the land is vacant because [of some imaginary occurrences]

Texas is bigger than that.

They have always taxed more carbon and more land in ways that make them rich as hell, at the average citizen's expense.

To the envy of other states' greedy taxing entities.

That wasn't so bad when there was still enough widespread prosperity for the average citizen to be able to afford it.

The land is vacant after they tore down the buildings because the taxes were already too high, and rising too fast.

No brag, just fact.

"How far up is the river now, Ma?"

"Six feet deep, and rising . . ."
by peterfirefly | 2025-10-19 15:30:42+00:00
China was already developing economically and technologically -- especially in coastal areas and in Manchuria (there was a large migration of Chinese to the area after it came under Japanese control).

That development would have continued.

I understand the anger and the desperation that made the Communist takeover possible but doing nothing at all and keeping all the elites in charge (instead of replacing them with new ones) would have been better.
by acdha | 2025-10-19 15:31:05+00:00
> Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.

This sounds like something you were told by right-wing social media. It certainly isn’t what you’d have thought from the extensive discussion of that in the mainstream media or during the campaign when the candidates were talking about real problems affecting millions of people.

The closest you’d come to being factual were the pieces correctly noting that the U.S. economy was doing better than many other countries at recovering from the pandemic but that’s another way of saying “less bad”.
by positron26 | 2025-10-19 15:31:07+00:00
Git contributors:

LLVM: 5k GCC: 1k

This is not what sustainability looks like:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

The crossover will more likely be driven by silicon trends providing an opportunity for LLVM's velocity to translate to enough competitive advantage for casual users to want LLVM. Once that happens, you will see some Linux distributions switch over. Hard liners will fork and do what they do, but asking people to use a compiler that gives them a worse result or is harder to work with isn't going to hold the gates.

Linus prefers LLVM for development.

People need to get out of the 90s and look at some data.
by roryirvine | 2025-10-19 15:32:03+00:00
Honestly, if you're even slightly concerned about Go's memory footprint and optimization then you shouldn't bother digging any further into Ruby.

There's a reason that the DevOps world abandoned Ruby wholesale in the late 2010s (mostly replacing it with Go).

In a world where container orchestration allowed servers to be more fully utilised, it became increasingly obvious that the ancillary tooling (think log shipping or metrics collection) often had a larger memory and CPU footprint than the core service itself.

Formerly popular tools in this class like Sensu or fluentd have either been rewritten or replaced with Go equivalents, and Ruby seems to be more or less dead for new projects outside of the Rails niche.
by lukan | 2025-10-19 15:32:19+00:00
German Wikipedia conveniently left that part out and in the english Wikipedia you have to scroll quite a bit to read it mentioned.

"I said I've had many young affairs, [with those who were] 16, 17, or 18."

Still, it matters a bit to me, whether we are talking about consensual things or not. 16 year olds might be naive, but they are also not small children and usually capable of saying no. (Body language no, is also a no). So do those horror stories involve ignoring a "no" from Ginsberg towards a minor?
by garganzol | 2025-10-19 15:32:24+00:00
It seems that some tech people are prone to ludditism. No wonders here, AI is sharper and brighter than most tech workers usually are.

Instead of facing the new reality, some people start to talk about the bubbles, AI being sloppy, etc. Which is not generally true; mostly it's the users' psychological projection of their own traits and the resulting fear-induced smear campaigns.

The phenomenon is well described in psychology books. Seminal works of Carl Jung worth a ton nowadays.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-10-19 15:32:33+00:00
Having a lot of buildings under trees brings up a big problem when heavy rainstorms, wind, or hail occur. Texas has all three. Old trees are particularly troublesome since heavy limbs can snap off with very gentle stimulation.

It's nice to build a house under a tree. It's a bad idea to buy a house that was built under a tree.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-19 15:32:40+00:00
Look, you keep saying I’m telling you what you think, but that’s just a way of dodging the actual argument. In any serious conversation, we have to interpret each other’s words. That’s how reasoning works. When I restate your point, I’m not claiming psychic powers; I’m engaging with what you said. If I get something wrong, point to the sentence and explain where. But saying “you have no idea what I think” shuts down discussion instead of clarifying it.

And about the example, you keep missing what it was doing. I wasn’t saying the night sky and bestiality are the same thing. Obviously not. The example illustrates how beauty is subjective. Humans find pigs ugly, pigs find pigs beautiful. That’s not crude, it’s biology. The point is that beauty depends entirely on the observer. That’s the entire argument. You can swap out pigs for anything else and it still holds. You got hung up on the imagery instead of seeing the reasoning behind it.

You also seem to think I’m being unhinged because I’m willing to follow an argument wherever it leads, even if it’s uncomfortable. But that’s the whole purpose of rational discussion, to question assumptions rather than hide behind emotional reactions. If your position can’t survive a provocative example, that’s not my problem.

You accuse me of making assumptions, but that’s what all reasoning is. We start with assumptions and test them. If you think mine are wrong, show why. Don’t just say “stop assuming things.” That’s not logic, that’s avoidance.

And about that opening line, you keep acting like it somehow undermines everything else I said, but that’s not how rational discussion works. I took it out because it added heat, not because it invalidated the argument. You can’t take one emotional sentence and use it to dismiss paragraphs of reasoning that followed. That’s not proportional, and it’s not logical. If my logic is wrong, show me where it’s wrong. But if all you can point to is tone, that’s just a way of dodging the argument. The content stands or falls on its reasoning, not on how politely it began or how it continues.

You talk about good faith, but good faith means addressing the argument, not the emotional impression it gave you. I laid out a clear thesis: beauty is observer dependent. It’s not intrinsic, not sacred, and certainly not a unique human experience. That doesn’t make it meaningless; it makes it relative. If you disagree, then tell me why you think beauty is intrinsic or what makes human perception special. But just calling the argument crazy and walking away doesn’t make your point stronger, it just makes it look like you don’t have one.
by leobg | 2025-10-19 15:32:50+00:00
Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.

Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.

Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?

Nietzsche, ~1889
by Isamu | 2025-10-19 15:33:37+00:00
I’m trying to engage with the author here and maybe I’ll read the book that this refers to, but I think the author has this backwards.

It’s that when you little to no choice we say you aren’t free. It doesn’t follow that having more choices makes you free, but it is a prerequisite. Serfs tied to the land were not free, they had a choice to stay and struggle or leave and risk wandering and starving. Not much of a choice.

Also the author seems to be worried that people will make bad decisions with their choices, and this seems not like freedom to the author.

This piece makes me uneasy, it’s like there’s this effort to justify limiting our choices and calling that freedom. I’m wondering where this is going.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-19 15:33:42+00:00
Every time it happens it's a bit different, and it was a different generation. We will figure it out. It will be fine in the end, even if things aren't fine along the way.

I'm starting to come around to the idea that electricity was the most fundamental force that drove WW1 and WW2. We point to many other more political, social and economic reasonings, but whenever I do a kind of 5-whys on those reasons I keep coming back to electricity.

AI is kind of like electricity.

Were also at the end of a big economic/money cycle (Petro dollar, gold standard, off gold standard, maxing out leverage).

The other side will probably involve a new foundation for money. It might involve blockchain, but maybe not, I have no idea.

We don't need post-scarcity so much as we just need to rebalance everything and an upgraded system that maintains that balance for another cycle. I don't know what that system is or needs, but I suspect it will become more clear over the next 10-20 years. While many things will reach abundance (many already have) some won't, and we will need some way to deal with that. Ignoring it won't help.
by nhaehnle | 2025-10-19 15:33:55+00:00
If you'll look at the Guidelines for HN linked at the bottom of the page, you'll note that whether a submission is productive is not a criterion.

You could perhaps make an argument that among the flood of AI-related submissions, this one doesn't particularly move the needle on intellectual curiosity. Although satire is generally a good way to allow for some reflection on a serious topic, and I don't recall seeing AI-related satire here in a while.
by pierrec | 2025-10-19 15:34:35+00:00
The lack of context is kinda funny. This page from 6 months ago is a clearer demonstration and explains the idea: "HDR‑Infused Emoji" https://sharpletters.net/2025/04/16/hdr-emoji/

Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43717606

Basically a lot of recent-ish devices will display this with extra brightness. A feature intended for example in cinematic contexts, but can easily become an annoyance if abused.
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-19 15:36:12+00:00
> It named Sal Khan, the boss of Khan Academy, a free online learning site, as its “vision steward” (a very TEDster title).

This is fantastic news. Kahn Academy courses are fantastic, and how I [re]learned math. The core of the material was/is Sal teaching over a digital blackboard in videos. There are also loads of problem sets. The algebra, linear algebra, calculus etc material is all fantastic. The multivar class is taught by Grant Sanderson, another legend.

> . In 2013 The Economist mused that Mr Khan might well be awarded a Nobel peace prize for running the largest educational institution in history

Yes please! He deserves it more than any recipient.
by jacknews | 2025-10-19 15:36:23+00:00
Partly true, but let's be clear about who is being indoctrinated about culture.

Khmer culture is basically an offshoot of the original Hindu, and then Buddhist culture from India. The language is the 'latin' of the region and based off sanskrit, and all the temples in the region are modeled on Hindu temples (representations of mount Meru).

Tai people came from SW China and colonized, if not assumed, this extant culture, and also of course intermingled and whatever.

So both populations share a deep and long history and are closely related.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-10-19 15:36:33+00:00
My main concerns:

1. When such wealth is possible through autonomous means, how can the earth survive such unprecedented demands on its natural resources?

2. Should I believe that someone with more wealth (and as such, more power) than I have would not use that power to overwhelm me? Isn't my demand on resources only going to get in their way? Why would they allow me to draw on resources as well?

3. It seems like the answer to both of these concerns lies in government, but no government I'm aware of has really begun to answer these questions. Worse yet, what if governments disagree on how to implement these strategies in a global economy? Competition could become an intractable drain on the earth and humans' resources. Essentially, it opens up the possibility of war at incalculable scales.
by mr_donk | 2025-10-19 15:39:37+00:00
They don’t seem to do it anymore, but for a while the title on Disneyland.com would kinda sparkle in HDR when you loaded it on the right hardware/sodtware (safari on MacBook Pro for example). Was actually pretty subtle and animated out so it was more of a “wait, did I just see that?” sort of thing.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-19 15:40:07+00:00
If you look through my case of SD cards I have all sorts of sizes and makes/models. I also have a procedure for dumping and formatting, and someone who is handling this most likely would as well. The moment the storage on screen looks funny or I see the card I don’t recognize, I’ll notice.

I’m not saying it’s impossible or I’m somehow immune to being tricked, but you would be surprised how easy it is to leave evidence of tampering through the simple act of trying to take an SD card, whether you swap it out or not. And people like me who handle them regularly would likely notice it in a split second. Maybe we won’t even catch the perpetrator, but it would not be written off as “oh interesting I guess it didn’t record,” if for no other reason then I would go straight into CYA mode and start looking for any hint that I didn’t make a mistake.

At that point if you have a basic security SoP in place and adhere to it you can start auditing.

Anywho again nothing is airtight and a determined individual could of course get past me. But you would be surprised how many hurdles they have to get over, and it certainly wouldn’t go unnoticed and be brushed off as a read/write quirk, that’s really all I’m saying
by ludicrousdispla | 2025-10-19 15:40:43+00:00
Is the DuckDB Wasm that you are providing the same thing as the DuckDB Wasm provided by DuckDB?

I ask because I am under the impression that the 'DuckDB Wasm' client provided by DuckDB doesn't yet support all of the DuckDB functions.

So I am interested to know if this has implemented more, fewer, or the same set of functions.
by the__alchemist | 2025-10-19 15:40:56+00:00
I guess this depends on the applciation. For whole human genome? Not nanopore era. For plasmids? Absolutely.

I'm a nobody, and I can drop a tube into a box in a local university, and get the results emailed to me by next morning for $15USD. This is due to a streamlined nanopore-based workflow.
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-19 15:41:03+00:00
> Sure, but isn't that moving the goalposts? Why shouldn't we use LLMs + tools if it works?

Personally i do not see it like that at all as one is referring to LLMs specifically while the other is referring to LLMs plus a bunch of other stuff around them.

It is like person A claiming that GIF files can be used to play Doom deathmatches, person B responding that, no, a GIF file cannot start a Doom deathmatch, it is fundamentally impossible to do so and person A retorting that since the GIF format has a provision for advancing a frame on user input, a GIF viewer can interpret that input as the user wanting to launch Doom in deathmatch mode - ergo, GIF files can be used to play Doom deathmatches.
by spacechild1 | 2025-10-19 15:41:10+00:00
> when the availability of computers were kind of so and so,

I think in the early/mid 2000s most families already had a PC at home. At least all of my friends did.

> "everyone has a computer in their pocket, and learns typing by themselves"

Yeah, that seems to be the sentiment. Of course we all know this is completely wrong.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-19 15:41:33+00:00
You’re mixing representational capacity with representational intent. That’s what I meant in my initial example about encodings. The model doesn’t care whether it’s text, pixels, or sound. All of it can be mapped into the same kind of high dimensional space where patterns align by structure rather than category. “Semantic” is just our label for how those internal relationships appear when we interpret them through language.

Anything in the universe can be encoded this way. Every possible form, whether visual, auditory, physical, or abstract, can be represented as a series of numbers or symbols. With enough data, an LLM can be trained on any of it. LLMs are universal because their architecture doesn’t depend on the nature of the data, only on the consistency of patterns within it. The so called semantic encoding is simply the internal coordinate system the model builds to organize and decode meaning from those encodings. It is not limited to language; it is a general representation of structure and relationship.

And the genome in a bottle example actually supports this. The DNA string does encode a living organism; it just needs the right decoding environment. LLMs serve that role for their training domains. With the right bridge, like a diffusion model or a VAE, a text latent can unfold into an image distribution that’s statistically consistent with real light data.

So the meaning isn’t in the words. It’s in the shape of the data.
by ticulatedspline | 2025-10-19 15:42:44+00:00
> What finally will break people's brains (and I extrapolate that from my brain) is the decision fatigue that is growing, that we now have to figure out if a funny cat video is real...

Nah. seems people forget social media has been fake for way longer than AI. sometimes Photoshop, or editing. Sometimes just deliberately miss-attributing a real photo for clicks. heck there's a whole "fake Asian videos" subreddit, funny videos that in another light are brilliant sketch comedy but always portray themselves as real. not to mention humans consume boatloads of knowingly-fake things -- movies, tv shows, cartoons, artwork etc.

oddly enough the rise of AI may flip one of the most annoying things in social media, all the fake stuff that people think is real. a small subset of people (like myself) are less annoyed by the fake content and more annoyed by the people falling for it. Like those "Fake Asian Videos" I've seen a few that were well written, well acted and even well filmed. If it were a comedy show on Netflix it would be hilarious, the distaste I have for them is that they portend to be real and people often believe them to be real.

In the short term this is going to be way worse as even discriminating people can't tell if something is fake, but the light at the end of the tunnel is when it hits such saturation that anything real is in the minority and everyone assumes that everything is fake and keeps on consuming.