MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by projektfu | 2025-11-16 21:14:21+00:00
From the ACLU article above:

Every community in the nation that is home to Flock cameras should look at the user agreement between their police department (or other Flock customers) and the company, to see whether it contains a clause stating that the customer “hereby grants Flock” a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license” to “disclose the Agency Data… for investigative purposes.” This is the language that will govern in a community unless a department demands changes to the standard user agreement that Flock offers. That is something we absolutely urge any agencies doing business with Flock to do — and, the ACLU of Massachusetts found, is exactly what the Boston police department did.

---

What assurance does any member of the public have that your company does not and will not ever share data to which you claim a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license" to? Are you saying that the "customer" has the ability to choose a "do not share" flag or something? What happens when they flip that flag at some point in the future? What redress does a victim have if you share data you did not, at that point in time, have permission to share?
by qayxc | 2025-11-16 21:14:52+00:00
The problem is that we're reverting back to the stone age by throwing unnecessary resources at problems that have a simple and effective solution: open, standardised, and accessible APIs.

We wouldn't need to use an expensive (compute-wise) AI agent to do things like making appointments. Especially if in the end you'd end up with bots talking to bots anyway. The digital equivalent of always up-to-date yellow pages would solve many of these issues. Super simple and "dumb" but reliable programs could perform such tasks.

Scheduling multiple calendars doesn't require "AI" - it's a comparatively simple optimisation problem that can be solved using computationally cheap existing algorithms. It seems more and more to me that AI - and LLMs in particular - are the hammer and now literally everything looks like a nail...
by bgnn | 2025-11-16 21:14:53+00:00
I would have never thought to see a Franco apologist with my own eyes. Wow, thank you for this unique moment.

Anyhow, Franco was a fascist trash and allied with Hitler and Mussolini. Revolutionaries were mainly anarchists (NOT communists). In fact it's because of Stalin and the communists following him starting an infighting with the anarchists led to the fascist victory.

If the revolutionaries have won, Spain would have been an experimental socialist/anarchist republic. We don't know if ot would have been ended up like USSR. Maybe.

In 1968 though the flight was pretty much about fascism vs democracy.

Oh, last point: Torture is torture.
by vacuity | 2025-11-16 21:15:11+00:00
Not directly, but people find ways to believe in a manner analogous to religious beliefs. Faith doesn't have to be directed only at traditional theist objects. Religious or not, people can believe things by faith and by logic.

To give an example, science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly, but some people elevate it far beyond its means to answer certain inquiries. That is irrationality, or faith.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-16 21:15:59+00:00
> Claude’s version is pretty close to the blob-util version (unsurprising, since it was probably trained on it!).

AI are thieves!

> I don’t know which direction we’re going in with AI (well, ~80% of us; to the remaining holdouts, I salute you and wish you godspeed!), but I do think it’s a future where we prize instant answers over teaching and understanding.

Google ruined its search engine years ago before AI already.

The big problem I see is that we have become WAY too dependent on these mega-corporations. Which browser are people using? Typically chrome. An evil company writes the code. And soon it will fire the remaining devs and replace them with AI. Which is kind of fitting.

> Even now there’s a movement toward putting documentation in an llms.txt file, so you can just point an agent at it and save your brain cells the effort of deciphering English prose. (Is this even documentation anymore? What is documentation?)

Documentation in general sucks. But documentation is also a hard problem.

I love examples. Small snippets. FAQs. Well, many projects barely have these.

Look at ruby webassembly/wasm or ruby opal. Their documentation is about 99% useless. Or, even worse - rack in ruby. And I did not notice this in the past, in part because e. g. StackOverflow still worked, there were many blogs which helped fill up missing information too. Well all of that is largely gone now or has been slurped up by AI spam.

> the era of small, low-value libraries like blob-util is over. They were already on their way out thanks to Node.js and the browser taking on more and more of their functionality (see node:glob, structuredClone, etc.), but LLMs are the final nail in the coffin.

I still think they have value, but looking at organisations such as rubygems.org disrupt the ecosystem and bleeding it dry by kicking out small hobbyists, I think there is indeed a trend towards eliminating the silly solo devs who think their unpaid spare time is not worthy of anything at all, yet the big organisations eagerly throw down more and more restrictions onto them (my favourite example is the arbitrary 100k download limit for gems hosted at rubygems.org, but look at the new shiny corporate rules on rubygems.org - this is when corporations take over the infrastructure and control it. Ironically this also happened to pypi and they admit this indirectly: https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2023-05-25-securing-pypi-with-2f... - of course they deny that corporations control pypi now, but by claiming otherwise they admit it, because this is how hobbyists get eliminated. Just throw more and more restrictions at them without paying them. Sooner or later they decide to do something better with their time.)
by nightpool | 2025-11-16 21:16:55+00:00
GP is saying that they were already one of Coinbase's vendors (they did the networking/IT setup for Coinbase's office). Whether you'd tolerate that kind of behavior from a vendor is one thing, but for an existing vendor relationship I think adding a few billable hours for "I found this issue in your network and documented and reported it for you" to an existing contract is not particularly unreasonable.
by gnarlouse | 2025-11-16 21:17:16+00:00
Roughly $20-30B in investment by Apple to build the Apple Vision Pro over roughly the course of half a decade is disagreeing with you. That's an insane investment into a product category with "no public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset."

I didn't bring up makeup, btw. I just thought it was an absurd argument. It has nothing to do with whether the product succeeds or fails in the long run, which is precisely what I'm talking about.

Yes, the AVP store is pretty scant at the present moment. But regardless, I would absolutely explore the feasibility of replacing my TV, my desktop monitors with an AR/VR headset if it met the tech specs I listed above. I'd much rather have a 70' screen viewing experience for movies, or gaming.

Btw, why did Valve announce the Steam Frame this last week if the AR/VR market is dead? Why are companies like Virtuix, Disney developing omnidirectional treadmills for more physical VR exploration? Why are companies like Meta working to develop surface electromyography tech, electro-tactile solutions to simulate the sensation of touching physical objects in VR?

Maybe all this money being spent on a non-existent market segment is a product of a fucked economic hierarchy where the rich have so much money they can blow it all on projects that will never reach massive scale, which is an argument I'd actually listen to.
by laurencerowe | 2025-11-16 21:17:17+00:00
This slow buildout will logically limit nuclear power to a minor role in the UK. By the time we could possibly build out large amounts of nuclear it seems likely we will already have built out large amounts of cheap wind power. With some battery storage and solar this can cover us for 90-95% of the year. For the remainder we will need dispatchable backup power. That will be gas and maybe at some point green hydrogen or its derivatives.

I suspect we will always keep around a little nuclear to maintain expertise for strategic national security reasons but it is hard to see nuclear power making sense in an energy market dominated by intermittent renewables like the UK.
by Y_Y | 2025-11-16 21:17:31+00:00
Not quite a nuke (just try obtaining enough uranium ore) but there are some fairly dangerous things a determined nutcase can make without drawing suspicion.

Example determined ned nutcases include Aum Shinrikyo, who tried anthrax, botox, and nukes before succeeding with sarin gas (thank IG Farben!) among other things.

It's a fascinating (if troubling) story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack#Back...
by aspenmayer | 2025-11-16 21:17:36+00:00
Their intent in making the reference is a bit vague, but they seem to be referring to the recently released series of the same name, and maybe drawing some kind of parallel between AI technology and the mind control virus depicted in the show, which I haven’t seen yet myself, so I am only speculating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(TV_series)

> The show follows author Carol Sturka, played by Seehorn, as the rest of humanity is suddenly joined into a hive mind that seeks to amicably assimilate Carol and other immune individuals into the mind. The title of the series refers to e pluribus unum, a Latin phrase meaning 'out of many, one'.

> Set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the series follows author Carol Sturka, who is one of only thirteen people in the world immune to the effects of "the Joining", resulting from an extraterrestrial virus that had transformed the world's human population into a peaceful and content hive mind (the "Others").
by shevy-java | 2025-11-16 21:17:41+00:00
I do agree with this, but there are some caveats. At the end of the day it is time people invest into a project. And that is often unpaid time.

Now, that does not mean it has no value, but it is a trade-off. After about 14 years, for instance, I retired permanently from rubygems.org in 2024 due to the 100k download limit (and now I wouldn't use it after the shameful moves RubyCentral did, as well as the new shiny corporate rules with which I couldn't operate within anyway; it is now a private structure owned by Shopify. Good luck finding people who want to invest their own unpaid spare time into anything tainted by corporations here).
by drabbiticus | 2025-11-16 21:18:15+00:00
Just chiming in here - any time I've written something online that considers things from multiple angles or presents more detailed analysis, the liklihood that someone will ask if I just used ChatGPT go way up. I worry that people have gotten really used to short, easily digestible replies, and conflate that with "human". Because of course it would be crazy for a human to expend "that much effort" on something /s.

EDIT: having said that, many of the other articles on the blog do look like what would come from AI assistance. Stuff like pervasive emojis, overuse of bulleted lists, excessive use of very small sections with headers, art that certainly appears similar in style to AI generated assets that I've seen, etc. If anything, if AI was used in this article, it's way less intrusive than in the other articles on the blog.
by alwa | 2025-11-16 21:19:02+00:00
I know I shouldn’t pile on with respect to the AI Slop Signature Style, but in the hopes of helping people rein in the AI-trash-filter excesses and avoid reactions like these…

The sentence-level stuff was somewhat improved compared to whatever “jaunty Linked-In Voice” prompt people have been using. You know, the one that calls for clipped repetitive phrases, needless rhetorical questions, dimestore mystery framing, faux-casual tone, and some out-of-proportion “moral of the story.” All of that’s better here.

But there’s a good ways left to go still. The endless bullet lists, the “red flags,” the weirdly toothless faux drama (“The Call That Changed Everything”, “Data Catastrophe: The 2025 Cyber Fallout”), and the Frankensteined purposes (“You can still protect yourself from falling victim to the scams that follow,” “The Timeline That Doesn't Make Sense,” etc.)…

The biggest thing that stands out to me here (besides the essay being five different-but-duplicative prompt/response sessions bolted together) are the assertions/conclusions that would mean something if real people drew them, but that don’t follow from the specifics. Consider:

“The Timeline That Doesn't Make Sense

Here's where the story gets interesting—and troubling:

[they made a report, heard back that it was being investigated, didn’t get individual responses to their follow-ups in the immediate days after, the result of the larger investigation was announced 4 months later]”

Disappointing, sure. And definitely frustrating. But like… “doesn’t make sense?” How not so? Is it really surprising or unreasonable that it takes a large organization time, for a major investigation into a foreign contractor, with law enforcement and regulatory implications, as well as 9-figure customer-facing damages? Doesn’t it make sense (even if it’s disappointing), when stuff that serious and complex happens, that they wait until they’re sure before they say something to an individual customer?

I’m not saying it’s good customer service (they could at least drop a reply with “the investigation is ongoing and we can’t comment til it’s done”). There’s lots of words we could use to capture the suckage besides “doesn’t make sense.” My issue is more that the AI presents it as “interesting—and troubling; doesn’t make sense” when those things don’t really follow directly from the bullet list of facts afterward.

Each big categorical that the AI introduced this way just… doesn’t quite match what it purports to describe. I’m not sure exactly how to pin it down, but it’s as if it’s making its judgments entirely without considering the broader context… which I guess is exactly what it’s doing.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-16 21:19:18+00:00
> Again, that's all we do. We train extensively until we "get it." Monkey-see, monkey-do turns out not only to be all you need, so to speak... it's all there is.

Which is fine for us humans, but would only be fine for LLMs if they also had continual learning and whatever else was necessary for them to be able to learn on the job and be able to pick up new reasoning skills by themselves, post-deployment.

Obviously right now this isn't the case, so therefore we're stuck with the LLM companies trying to deliver models "out of the box" that have some generally useful reasoning capability that goes beyond whatever happened to be in their pre-training data, and the way they are trying to do that is with RL ...
by diego_moita | 2025-11-16 21:19:29+00:00
> “human dignity” and stuff that sounds very religious.

Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others. Should we then assume that monkeys and elephants are very religious, too?

> like a non-religious person would.

Oh, I see you took a lot of care in trying to understand what a "non-religious person" is. Are all church people this smart, too? /s
by bofadeez | 2025-11-16 21:19:48+00:00
During most of the dot-com boom, there was not a broad consensus that a bubble existed, whereas today’s AI boom is widely accompanied by media warnings about an AI bubble, making public awareness much higher than it was in the late 1990s. I don't think a single person hasn't heard the "circular financing" talking points from multiple people who think they're being insightful. Or Burry who thinks a GPU should be trashed after 2 years. Doesn't sound like irrational euphoria.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-11-16 21:20:10+00:00
This feels like an uninformed opinion. Are you saying teachers aren’t fully occupied during the day? That would be news to me. If you admit to teaching being a full time job, what would you rather see teachers not do so they can spend a few extra hours grading? Just claiming that teachers need to give paper assignments and spend time grading by hand without considering the tradeoffs sounds like a step backward.

Cell phones haven’t magically made students cheat. Students were cheating plenty with paper tests too. Ands if the students are trading answers with cell phones, they will definitely have a way to trade answers to paper tests. Nearly every smartphone has a camera. Instead we should figure out how to regulate cell phone use at school if they are the enabler for cheating.

Teaching is undoubtedly different than it was a few decades ago. There is technology integrated into most schools and classrooms. The requirements of teachers has changed, but I wouldn’t say teachers have gotten lazy.
by shuraman7 | 2025-11-16 21:21:16+00:00
It's really hard to believe this isn't AI generated, but today I was trying to use the HTTP server from std after the 0.15 changes, couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work until I've searched repos in Github. LLM's couldn't figure it out as well, they were stuck in a loop of changing/breaking things even further until they arrived at the solution of using the deprecated way. so I guess this is actually handwritten which is amazing because it looks like the best resource I've seen up until now for Zig
by tavavex | 2025-11-16 21:21:26+00:00
This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible, while denying it to the UK every step of the way. The implication of what you're saying is that the structure of the government and the precise way in which it owns a state media outlet doesn't really matter, if there's any ownership then it's a propaganda mouthpiece regardless of all other circumstances.

But as far I can see, authoritarian states tend to have a direct path from their governments' sacred opinion to the eyes and ears of the people, there are levers of direct influence within their media industries that let them directly dictate what the journalists will pretend to report on. One can debate back and forth about how the BBC may suffer from the biases of its British writers, implicit pressure from their government, individual cases of bias and even attempts at government overreach, but despite all of it, none of these infractions would rival even 1/10th of what countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia do with their media. Despite all of their countless issues, the UK still values independence far more than what the Saudis could even dream of. Moreover, the BBC is implicitly checked by having neighboring media outlets with no government ownership, while the countries I listed exercise degrees of total control over the entire industry.

The BBC may in individual instances be biased towards the current sitting government or pro-British views or whatever, but it is not a blind mouthpiece like these other countries. It's not simply a difference in preferring one ruthless government narrative over another.
by rckt | 2025-11-16 21:21:34+00:00
> The third real AI product is the coding agent. People have been talking about this for years, but it was only really in 2025 that the technology behind coding agents became feasible

No, they didn’t.

> LLMs are particularly good at tasks like “skim through ten pages of search results” or “keyword search this giant dataset for any information on a particular topic”.

No. They are not.

Amazing article without any support of the statements made. Just, “because I think so”. Cool.
by buu700 | 2025-11-16 21:21:45+00:00
> The comment I was replying to was effectively saying "no one cares about kids so you're lying if you say 'for the children'".

I don't see that in the comment you replied to. They pointed out that LLM providers have a commercial interest in avoiding bad press, which is true. No one stops buying Fords or BMWs when someone drives one off a cliff or into a crowd of people, but LLMs are new and confusing and people might react in all sorts of illogical ways to stories involving LLMs.

> Part of the reason these "for the children" arguments are so persistent is that lots of people do genuinely want these things "for the children".

I'm sure that's true. People genuinely want lots of things that are awful ideas.
by jeremy_flox | 2025-11-16 21:21:59+00:00
Just to follow up on this, Flox puts packages in one group by default so they share dependencies, plus our quantized catalog means way less version spread than raw Nix. So I do think we still improve on the Nix story, here.

We're also adding "stabilities" (downsample from daily to weekly/monthly snapshots) to reduce churn even more. Still need GC, but a lot fewer bags on trash day. .
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-16 21:22:21+00:00
All taxes are imperfect. The least distortionary one is a head tax and that's heinously regressive; it's basically a UBI with the sign inverted (which is also why a UBI is the least distortionary means of social assistance).

So the question then is, what are you going to tax and how much? The problem right now is that we're so bad at it. To begin with the government burns money like there is no consequence to it. Huge payouts to affluent retirees who don't need the money, defense contracts for things the military doesn't even want, etc. And yes, that means you need to stick your foot up the rear end of some lobbyists. Stop being the people who say it can't be done and start being the people doing it.

> You can't (shouldn't?) subsidize all industries.

If you stop wasting preposterous amounts of money then you could lower taxes across the board and remove the anti-subsidy. But taxes are also by category anyway.

So for example, don't lower the tax rate on dividends but create new credits and deductions and faster depreciation for capital investments, or make R&D fully deductible in the first year. In other words, if you make money and use it to buy a Ferrari, you're paying tax. If you use the same money to build a factory, you get to deduct it right away. Then you're effectively subsidizing all kinds of new factories or new construction, but not subsidizing purchases of imported products. Which is like a tariff in the sense that it makes domestic products relatively more attractive, except that it does it by making things less expensive rather than more expensive.
by tomrod | 2025-11-16 21:22:40+00:00
> Which raises the age-old question of how much technical expertise is really needed in executive management.

For whomever you choose to set as the core decision maker, you get out whatever their expertise is with minor impact by their guides.

Scaling a business is a skill set. It's not a skill set that captures or expands the frontier of AI, so it's clearly in the realm to label the gentleman's expensive buyout is a product development play instead of a technology play.