MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kcartlidge | 2025-11-10 19:33:51+00:00
> So, a UK-only advice, and it strangely assumes that any other service in UK wouldn’t be bound by the same laws.

I suspect it's because whilst other services would be affected we only know about Apple currently and, thanks to iOS and Mac, a large percentage of the population will be using Apple by default for the services impacted. Only Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows) really overlap in that regard.
by themadturk | 2025-11-10 19:33:52+00:00
I was in my late 20s when one of the trust managers at the bank I worked for brought in his Osborne. I was so very, very jealous. I'd just purchased the CP/M cartridge for my Commodore 64 and tried to convince him let me borrow the WordStar disk, but he wouldn't do it (and I really never went anywhere with CP/M on the C=64).
by saghm | 2025-11-10 19:33:53+00:00
Yeah, and I think it's fully intended to embrace how silly it sounds, given the tongue-and-cheek opening paragraph:

> It’s widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding.

It reminds me of that episode of Community where Subway enrolled a person who they hired to legally represent their corporate entity so that they could open a shop on campus without violating the school's rule that only student-run businesses were allowed.
by yannyu | 2025-11-10 19:33:55+00:00
It's remarkably easy to get ChatGPT to hallucinate. A go-to for me is to ask it about factual things as compared to other factual things. The description of the Bluey episode is wrong in nearly every possible way. Additionally, the response continues on analyzing in multiple ways, and again continues to get the fundamental facts and therefore the analysis wrong.

Prompt: Compare the Space episode of Bluey to Interstellar

Response: That’s a really fun and surprisingly fitting comparison! Let’s break down how Bluey’s “Space” episode parallels Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar — both emotionally and thematically — even though one is a 7-minute preschool cartoon and the other a 3-hour sci-fi epic.

1. Core Theme: Love Across Distance

Interstellar: The film centers on a father (Cooper) who leaves his daughter (Murph) to save humanity, exploring how love transcends time and space — literally. The emotional heart of Interstellar is the bond between parent and child that endures despite impossible separation.

Bluey: “Space” In this episode, Bluey, Bingo, and their dad (Bandit) play an imaginative game where they’re astronauts who have to separate to save their mission. The moment Bluey and Bandit must say goodbye echoes that same emotional tension — the pain of letting go but also the love that motivates sacrifice.

Parallel: Both stories use the setting of outer space as a metaphor for emotional distance — how people we love can feel far away, and how connection can bridge that gap.
by crooked-v | 2025-11-10 19:33:56+00:00
I don't meant to be insulting about it, but I'm a little surprised you would pay for new cover art, but not for a more professional design for the cover in general. The current design seems very obviously 'amateur' to me in a way that I automatically associate with vanity press or other low-quality works, and I think it would have been more beneficial to pay more attention to the layout and typography even if that meant just using stock art.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-10 19:34:11+00:00
It's not that subtle, the thing that we knew doesn't work still doesn't work.

Some of our problems are novelties because before Grace Hopper basically nobody is writing software so there aren't centuries of lessons in how to do it properly - but this problem isn't like that, all the safety critical industries could tell you that "professionalism" won't prevent the mistakes and what you need is mechanism so that the mistakes cannot happen.

Let me give you an example I like from the railways, which are about twice as old. One night, signaller comes on duty and during the day a team of engineers have been doing work on "his" signal box. Still, things seem to check out and he gets to work, a train approaches, he tries to give them their whole route but their next signal seems stuck and won't "pull off" from danger - he blames the engineers of course. In accordance with regulations the train's driver phones the signaller, signaller explains that he can't release the signal but gives the driver authoriation, per standard instructions, to pass only one signal and proceed at caution (ie slowly enough to stop short of any obstruction) to the next signal. The next signal though is the same, the signaller is annoyed, blames the engineers again, same order to proceed at caution. The next signal is the same again. But, just after the driver receives their authority and passes that signal the signaller gets another call. Funny, surely they haven't reached the next signal yet? No. They're face-to-face with another train. Some junction points ("switch" if you're American) have failed, the train has been sent into another, both stopped short and nobody is injured.

The points failure had been detected. If the signaller had carefully checked his instruments they'd have told him that this failure had occurred and that is why it wasn't clear to set those danger signals off which is why, try as hard as he could, they could not be pulled off. It is mechanically impossible, not because of professionalism, or capability or any other brave words but physically impossible to kill everybody by clearing the conflicting signals in this state.

Mechanism.
by NaOH | 2025-11-10 19:34:40+00:00
The issue is not tolerance, or intolerance; it's the site goal of pursuing "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" and doing so while we all, among other things,

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

None of that precludes us here from criticizing someone or something. It's a matter of how we hold such discussions.
by subscribed | 2025-11-10 19:34:58+00:00
Excessive surveillance.

Selling my location, list of the installed apps, cookies, whatever they can extract.

That's for starters.

But most importantly why the hell should I be forced to use phone app if having a printed pass was good enough?

I need to reverse your surprising question into: should I be expected to install, update, maintain and use apps of ALL the service providers I use?

Separate app for train provider A, another for train provider B, another for bus provider C.

No paper tickets.

An app to purchase groceries, another app to pay for the parking, another app to buy a coffee, another app to buy a newspaper in the kiosk. And app to check in the hotel, an app to order food in the restaurant, an app to call the tax return website (not the phone, an app).

Can you see now how absurd is to normalise it?
by cerulin | 2025-11-10 19:35:23+00:00
Our team has spent the past few months exploring ideas with AI, but realized that time is our biggest bottleneck. What if your prompts could keep running while you’re at work, or on your daily commute?

Our goal was to make vibecoding easier and more accessible. Now, with our app, you can start using Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex right from your phone, no computer necessary.
by saltcured | 2025-11-10 19:35:33+00:00
I don't have any great answer. But when I think about this for myself, I realize there is are different kinds of abstraction that qualitatively change the nature of the work.

I don't want my software developer's experience to turn into a real estate developer's experience. I don't want to go from being a technical knowledge worker to a financier or contract negotiator. I've realized I was never in it for the outcome. I was in it for the exploration and puzzles.

Similarly, I don't want to become a "Hollywood producer" cliche. This caricature was a common joke earlier in my tech career in Southern California. We detested the idea of becoming a "tech" person acting like a Steve Martin parody of a Hollywood wheeler-dealer. Someone sitting in a cafe, pitching ideas that was nothing more than a reference to an existing work with an added gimmick or casting change.

To me, that caricature combines two negative aspects. One is the heavily derivative and cynical nature. The other is the stratospheric abstraction level, where folks at this level see themselves as visionaries rather than just patrons of someone else doing all the creative work.

I don't want to be a patron of an LLM or other black box.
by iso1631 | 2025-11-10 19:35:49+00:00
But that popularity (about 2:1 saying brexit was a mistake) isn't translating to political support, probably because both Labour and Tories supported Brexit.

And while the majority agree we should never have left the EU, and the majority agree we should rejoin, that isn't translating to political support.

Indeed the plurarity of votes is to Mr Brexit himself, who thanks to FPTP is likely to get a majority government in 2029 off 30% of the vote.

Hell 1 in 8 people that voted Farage last year think the UK never should have left Europe. Not that it wasn't the right type of brexit, but that it shouldn't. Yet they voted for Farage, decided that was a mistake, and are continuing to vote for Farage.

I get it. Some people just want the world to burn.

But a similar number think we should rejoin the EU, yet voted Farage last year.

It's no wonder support for democracy is at an all time low.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-11-10 19:35:50+00:00
I mean it "depends on the query". I used LLMs for vacation planning and with the right queries you get some really non-mid suggestions.

"Find the most interesting, quirky, or just plain unusual attractions that locals are pleasantly surprised by, searching using {local language}"

The models have complex behavior surfaces and when they interact with external data, the dynamics pliable. You can get very much non-basic stuff for whatever you want.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-10 19:36:21+00:00
There's no sense in quibbling over a vague and imprecise summary of the concept. Legally, fraud requires an injured party. In our scenario here, nobody was injured, so no fraud. Whether temporarily possessing a document to hand it to its intended recipient counts as "obtaining" is not really the pertinent question.

I suspect it may fall afoul of a law about making false statements to the government, but that's distinct from fraud.
by cipehr | 2025-11-10 19:37:51+00:00
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.

> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.

So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?

:(
by NobodyNada | 2025-11-10 19:37:51+00:00
> As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick

A bit of a nitpick here: the trick is for creating a new vector of a different type, that reuses the allocation of an existing vector, using only safe code. "Resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory" is just vec.clear() if you're not changing the type. And it's trivial to change the type of a vector with unsafe (the docs even have examples of this); the only advantage of the "trick" is to ensure you'll get a panic if you screw up the alignment of the types.

And after that blog post, the Rust team accepted a proposal to introduce a vec.recycle() function to change the type of a vector without needing that trick (and with compile-time checks for alignment compatibility): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148416

But that example aside, I agree with your overall premise -- Zig and Rust share different design goals here, and Zig's lower level of abstraction makes it more approachable to learn than a language like Rust.
by lamontcg | 2025-11-10 19:38:16+00:00
I'm pretty well "on the spectrum" and people glazing me in real life produce suspicion and discomfort rather than any good feelings.

I don't have a problem just ignoring all the LLM glazing, although I'd really like the ability to turn it off.

The fact that they've all been trained to do it, because so many of the "normies" fall for it, is kind of an indictment in my eyes. Bit of a mirror held up to society.

You should probably be worried about how fake flattery works so well in society, and how this enables sociopaths and narcissists to flourish and control everything.

This LLM problem is just a symptom.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-11-10 19:38:35+00:00
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.

How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?

Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
by seneca | 2025-11-10 19:38:43+00:00
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?

No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-11-10 19:38:49+00:00
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants

There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.

When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.

People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
by pugworthy | 2025-11-10 19:39:19+00:00
It would be interesting if the "no cure, no pay" principle from right of salvage could be applied to medical treatment.

Something like this...

> The "no cure, no pay" principle is a fundamental concept in medical law where a doctor (the party assisting a human in health danger) is only entitled to a reward if the healing operation is successful in saving the person or part of person (life, limb, sight, hearing, etc.). If the operation fails, the doctor receives no payment, regardless of the effort or expense incurred.
by jumploops | 2025-11-10 19:39:19+00:00
I recall trying to use GPT-4 to plan a trip through the PNW in ~Spring of 2023.

It presented a reasonable agenda, however 80% of the rockhounding spots were completely made up!

Over time, and as LLMs have gotten less sycophantic, I’ve found myself trusting them a bit more (a dangerous and slippery slope).

With that said, GPT-4o in particular, seemed to rank user satisfaction above truth.

I’ve found that GPT-5 Pro is currently the best at pushing back against silly ideas, and does a decent job of informing me that my questions could be better (:
by legitster | 2025-11-10 19:39:27+00:00
To put another way, contrarianism is a survival adaptation for humans.

There are some options that are clearly 99% superior than other options. But that 1% happens enough to create an extinction event for humanity if everyone relies on it.

People are going to oppose good ideas from their very core for no discernable rhyme or reason. But at the same time, it's not necessarily irrational - our genetics are hardcoded to hedge collectively in weird ways.
by svieira | 2025-11-10 19:39:30+00:00
Depends on what you consider a language. There are a lot of DSLs out there and once you add a couple of configuration files for Jenkins / Git{Hub, Lab} / Bazel / Buck and Vagrant / Docker / Bash and so on you're already at 5 languages and you haven't even added the lethal trifecta of HTML+CSS+JS for your web front-end or Swift+Kotlin if you only want to roll on mobile.
by screemers | 2025-11-10 19:39:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this simple tool to solve a personal problem: my Downloads folder was always a complete mess.

Smart File Organizer is a free, open-source Windows app that runs in the background, monitors a folder you choose, and automatically moves files into subdirectories (Images, Documents, Archives, etc.) based on their extension.

I wrote it using Python and the standard Tkinter library for the UI. It's a very simple implementation, but it gets the job done.

I've just released the first version and I'm here to get your honest feedback. What do you think of the concept? Are there any obvious features I'm missing? Any suggestions on how to improve the code are also very welcome.

Thanks for taking a look!
by pron | 2025-11-10 19:39:48+00:00
>> Much of Zig seems to me like "wishful thinking"; if every programmer was 150% smarter and more capable, perhaps it would work.

... and the same could be said about Rust, only with Rust we can already see that it suffers from relatively low adoption at a relatively advanced age.

The funny thing about that claim is that it leads to an obvious question: if working harder to satisfy the compiler is something that requires less competence than other forms of thinking about a program, then why Rust? Why not ATS? After all, Rust does let you eliminate certain bugs at compile time, but ATS lets you eliminate so many more.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-10 19:40:00+00:00
In addition to that (which is already bad), you will need a compatible smart phone (I do not have and do not intend to have; other people mentioned the same thing), and if you do have then it might use more battery power and more disk space, and sometimes the battery power will run out (or it can fail due to many other reasons), so it is even worse than what you mention.
by kcartlidge | 2025-11-10 19:40:18+00:00
I like how their number one benefit is Order to Seat. In one fell swoop it shows that:

* Their priority is revenue above all else (fair enough; honest too)

* They are either deceptive or stupid

Re the deception/stupidity - if everyone is moving to using the same app, how does everyone "get served first" as per their bullet point?
by saulpw | 2025-11-10 19:40:58+00:00
Companies do waste time on interviews when they don't really want to hire, for numerous reasons. 1) To test the labor wage pricing of the market, 2) for legal or tax or optics reasons (in order to get cheaper H1B labor you have to have been trying to hire domestically for the role), 3) to placate someone internal (cheaper to perpetually pretend to be hiring than to actually hire).

I'd bet there are others. It's easy to imagine that "companies don't waste time" but companies waste time and money all the time. The bigger the company, the more waste.
by seltzered_ | 2025-11-10 19:41:15+00:00
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."

This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
by bokohut | 2025-11-10 19:41:26+00:00
I wanted to take this opportunity to share this recent law that passed within the State of Maryland USA that will likely irritate many a technology business owner in this ever evolving world of more and more tech. IANAL so gauge your own impacts if you do work within the State of Maryland offering technology services. My opinions are my own but those here within that have vast technological experience, years beyond the comprehension of those making these laws, I await to read your feedback. Page 10, 11, and 12 have the definition of services now taxed.

Good, bad, or indifferent it is now a law and in reading this several times as an impacted business owner I can certainly read in between the lines where the "grey areas" reside as subjective interpretation. Lawyers are likely going to be busy with this one as well.
by rockostrich | 2025-11-10 19:41:27+00:00
At the moment, I find them to be the perfect tool to get started with learning about something. I don't expect it to tell me everything I need to know or to even be right, but if I ask ChatGPT or another LLM a question about a subject I'm not familiar with then it will at least use a bunch of terminology that I didn't have in my vocabulary before starting.

For example, I just bought a 1990 Miata and I want to install a couple of rocker switches in the dash to individually control the pop-up headlights. I have enough circuits knowledge to safely change outlets and light switches, but I didn't know about relays. I asked ChatGPT how to add these switches and it immediately mentioned buying DPDT switches and tying in the OEM relay into a SPDT relay. It may have gotten the actual circuit diagram completely wrong, but now I know exactly what to read up on.
by arrosenberg | 2025-11-10 19:41:29+00:00
If they know about malfeasance and don't stop it, they are complicit; if they don't know about it, they are grossly negligent. In either case, they should be held accountable for the crimes. Maybe in an ideal world it would not be that way, but since we are seeing corruption run amok in corporate board rooms, it's clear they need a greater incentive to police their organizations.
by djoldman | 2025-11-10 19:41:50+00:00
Newspapers are really nailing these GenAI ragebait pieces.

> We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills.

Before GenAI, there was Google, AWS, Facebook, not to mention Netflix and friends. A single streaming episode probably uses more resources all told than reasonable ChatGPT use over a month.

> It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now.

Anything/everything possible is sold as a placebo for human connection because loneliness is a powerful human motivator (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. etc.) Before that: TV.

> The megarich tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Most profitable corps think about profit, yes. The idea is that they can't profit unless people get something good out of it. If they can profit without people getting something good, it's a failure in the system, so the correct target is market breakdown: bad regulation, unbroken monopolies, fraud, etc.

> OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?

...
by raincole | 2025-11-10 19:41:51+00:00
I know this site is full of ads, but isn't this a little bit too much? It's just a link to buy a book on Amazon. At least pretend to have hacker spirit, wrap it as "how I use {insert open source book layout software} to make a book" and sell DRM-free epub or something. Where is the usual HN hatred towards DRM, Amazon and copyright...