MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by myrmidon | 2025-11-05 13:51:12+00:00
Wealth inequality is a problem because it deprives median citizens of limited ressources; consider urban housing as an example. There are two factors at play:

- Average people have to compete on price with the wealthy (which becomes harder as inequality rises)

- Wealthy people are incentivized to use their wealth to acquire things and extract rent, which drives up total costs and makes inequality worse

A lot of the resulting problems stay negligible or hidden or as long as there is enough overall growth, but as soon as that growth slows down these kinds of problems become very apparent.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-11-05 13:51:48+00:00
The “Brenda” example is a lumped sum fallacy where there is an “average” person or phenomenon that we can benchmark against. Such a person doesn't exist, leading to these dissonant, contradictory dichotomies.

The fact of the matter is that there are some people who can hold lots of information in their head at once. Others are good at finding information. Others still are proficient at getting people to help them. Etc. Any of these people could be tasked with solving the same problem and they would leverage their actual, particular strengths rather than some nebulous “is good or bad at the task” metric.

As it happens, nearly all the discourse uses this lumped sum fallacy, leading to people simultaneously talking past one another while not fundamentally moving the discussion forward.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-05 13:52:29+00:00
I think the larger reason being an "AWS expert" is a job description is lock in. If you've hired people who have spent years grokking the AWS names, terminology, and options then your likelihood of switching to anything else is much lower.

Not that AWS doesn't also enable scaling or something, it just (conveniently) doesn't give an option to deploy anything but scalable services you'll train your staff on. A lot of the time AWS interfaces/offerings are copied not because they were ideal, but because it's an easier way to break past that barrier with your offering.
by rurban | 2025-11-05 13:52:34+00:00
For the history nerds. The Eisbach wave was the world's first river wave. And is the fastest still. The second was the one in Montreal, Habitat 67. 1998. Bigger, wider, but a real big river. And also too many people. Third was ours, 1999. Radetzky Graz, Austria. Bigger, higher, but was not running that often. But was officially recognized, and allowed. No police harassment as in Munich. Now destroyed by the local energy company.

We had to repair our wave every few years. Munich does it similarly. Many good waves are now destroyed, because the repair became troublesome. In Munich they already destroyed their 2nd wave, Flosslände, and the third, the best but deadly one directly in the river is forbidden. In Graz we had 5. Montreal also has more. Boisy is good. Swiss and French also have some.
by martin-t | 2025-11-05 13:52:49+00:00
Because it's much cheaper.

So now you don't have to pay people to do their actual work, you assign the work to ML ("AI") and then pay the people to check what it generated. That's a very different task, menial and boring, but if it produces more value for the same amount of input money, then it's economical to do so.

And since checking the output is often a lower skilled job, you can even pay the people less, pocketing more as an owner.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-11-05 13:53:21+00:00
"Monopoly" is a distraction. The issue is abuse of market power. Having market power is fine. You can't punish people for being successful.

Steam doesn't abuse being successful to lock out competitors. You can sell products sold through Steam via other platforms too. You can sell outside of Steam and give your customers Steam keys for the game. You can install Steam on different platforms alongside other stores and programs.

Nothing Steam does makes it harder for consumers to buy games from Valve's competitors. That's what matters, not whether Steam is very successful.
by TulioKBR | 2025-11-05 13:53:26+00:00
Hahaha, é só você não testar.. nunca peguei em chatgpt. Tenta e verá.. vindo de um brasileiro que provavelmente é só mais um.. não faz a mínima diferença para mim. Agora se quer comentar sobre um projeto, faça o commit dê seu prompt e veja receber um sistema com mais de 30 componentes em segundos e sem erros.. agora como é brasileiro.. já é de esperar mesmo. Criticar a escrita em inglês ok, Criticar um projeto que você provavelmente não é capaz de projetar e podendo claramente testar isso me mostra claramente que você é só mais um como qualquer outro brasileiro. Você que é foda. Continue aí...
Tell HN: YAAS Yet Another AI Shit – Monkeys with Machine Guns
by hypery11 | 2025-11-05 13:54:46+00:00
Every week there’s a new “AI startup.” Same formula: a prompt, a wrapper, a landing page. So yeah — YAAS: Yet Another AI Shit.

⸻

1. The monkey and the gun

AI made building easy — maybe too easy. Now everyone’s a “founder.” No clue what a transformer is, but hey, it runs. The internet’s a zoo: monkeys with machine guns. Loud. Flashy. Dangerous.

⸻

2. The new breed of monkeys

Half of them can’t tell LLM ≠ AI. They say “trained our model,” but it’s just an API call. Wrappers as “innovation,” demos as “intelligence.” Not evil — just clueless. Magic tricks without learning the trick.

⸻

3. The illusion of creation

Using ≠ creating. Real builders care about constraints. YAAS thrives on infinite compute, zero thought. When cost hits zero, taste dies. Creativity wasn’t democratized — noise was.

⸻

4. The trust, fear & security crash •Auto-generated junk leaking keys.

And the cherry on top? Knowledge panic. People buy courses to feel safe. Gurus sell fear disguised as wisdom.

⸻

5. What’s scarce again

Understanding. Taste. Maybe the only innovation left is knowing when to shut up and stop typing “/generate.”

⸻

Guess what — this post might be YAAS too.

s/o to Skynet — same team, just cleaning the trash.
by cpburns2009 | 2025-11-05 13:55:10+00:00
Amazon may be dominant in a couple markets but it is far from a monopoly in them. For online retail you have Walmart, Target, eBay, Newegg, and 100s of other well known retailers with third-party sellers trying to compete. On the data center side you have large players such as Microsoft Azure and Google GCP, and small ones like Digital Ocean, Hertzner, OVH, Vultr, and many others.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-11-05 13:55:28+00:00
The promise of AI is that it lets you "skip the drudgery of thinking about the details" but sometimes that is exactly what you don't want. You want one or more humans with experience in the business domain to demonstrate they have thought about the details very carefully. The spreadsheet computes a result but its higher purpose is a kind of "proof" this thinking was done.

If the actual thinking doesn't matter and you just need some plausible numbers that look the part (also a common situation), gen ai will do that pretty well.
by TheDong | 2025-11-05 13:55:55+00:00
The even more anti-competitive thing Apple does vs Spotify and all competitors is avoiding app store fees, while forcing all competitors to pay them.

To have the same profit, Spotify has to charge $13/mo when apple music charges $10/mo with all else being the same.

That's very obviously the App Store monopoly being used to give Apple Music a massive unfair advantage that is practically impossible to break through.

Steam does not have anything like that, if someone else decides to make "Epic Game Launcher" tomorrow for PC, that new company doesn't need to distribute it on the "Steam App Store" and pay valve 30% of all sales.
by martin-t | 2025-11-05 13:56:19+00:00
Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue.

If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company.

To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-05 13:56:31+00:00
I have been using Debian for literally decades and I didn't even know "apt-get upgrade $PACKAGE" existed. It is weird, it doesn't appear in the documentation, it doesn't work with the "apt" command, it means it is probably a relic of the past left there for compatibility reasons and you probably shouldn't use it.

My guess is that someone or some LLM hallucinated this command, "apt-get upgrade" is for upgrading your system, not for upgrading a single package, and it takes no extra argument.

For upgrading a single package, just do "apt install $PACKAGE". It is the same command as for installing. The semantics is rather clear to me, upgrading is like installing the new version on top of the old version. It also makes no sense to install a package you already have or to upgrade a package you don't have, but if you want to be sure, for example because you don't know if you already have the package installed or not, there are the --no-upgrade and --only-upgrade options.
by heavyset_go | 2025-11-05 13:56:37+00:00
> Is Apple really going to keep playing this game of gatekeeping until legislation forces them not to?

Is Apple going to kill the golden goose unless it is literally forced to? Of course not.

Apple, together with Google, get a cut of 15% to 30% of all mobile app revenue. They have the entire market captured. They will only give that up when they're forced to.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-05 13:56:52+00:00
About 15, 20 years ago I was still in uni and we had a computer vision lab, the main guy there had been working on that subject for years and dealt with businesses where his stuff was used for quality control.

Without fail, step one of computer vision was to bring the image down to grayscale and / or filter for specific colours so you ended up with a 1 bit representation.

My "algorithm" for a robot that was to follow a line drawn on the floor boiled down to "filter out the colour green, then look at the bottom rows of the image and find the black pixels. If they're to the left, adjust to the left, if to the right adjust to the right". Roughly. I'm sure it could be done a lot more cleverly but I was pretty proud of it AND the whole tool suite was custom made, from editing environment to programming language. Expensive cameras and robot, too.
by masklinn | 2025-11-05 13:57:02+00:00
> With Epic the first million you make is free.

That's Epic using its money from other markets for loss leader schemes in order to grab market share. It's a very classic move (same as free games), and it's always detrimental to the market and customers in the long run.

It's not a good thing, epic games is a garbage company. That they're actively losing money to prop up their store should tell you how bad of a thing it is if it ever succeeds.
by personomas | 2025-11-05 13:57:33+00:00
All western economies are socialist nowadays. There doesn't exist any hyper-capitalistic economies. What hyper-capitalistic economies are you talking about?

Even America has become a socialist country. The current Republicans are doing their best (thankfully) to slowly roll this back, but it's a long, slow process.

As evidence that America has become a socialist country, you just need to look at the massive expansion of medicare/medicaid and social security.

Here is a great place to start (Scroll down to the table called "Historical Social Security Tax Rates" and see how the numbers have just exploded): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States...
Show HN: Smart notes – never loose any bookmark, link or (voice) note again
by marclelamy | 2025-11-05 13:57:41+00:00
On IOS/MacOS all apps have this share button that open the same sheet where we can share with more apps. I always wanted something that can take any shared item from anywhere and organized it nicely.

Idk how to do mobile development but I have a small AI app so I made an iOS shortcut, and added the Smart Notes as small feature on the app.

How it works: - Share anything from any app and click the iOS shortcut - The iOS shortcut sends the content to my backend (with a voice/written note if you want to add a detail about it) - Depending on the content it gets downloaded/transcribed - An LLM summarizes and categorizes it - All the "Smart Notes" get added to a feed UI like on social media

In the feed UI you can see all the Smart Notes that you created, archive them, mark them as favorite, etc...

One thing I use it a lot for is on the lock screen where I can record myself talking and send the recording which will be converted into a written note (you can start it like any iOS shortcut, not always need to share something). I use it for ideas, reminder, todo, etc... It's very practical as I don't have to unlock my phone all the time and can talk for a long time without it breaking. I wish siri would have been able to do this at this point...

It's part of my chatbot and as I give 500 credits for free per month to everyone with an account, you're unlikely to ever pay for it.

I'm planning to add more to it: - Function tool to my chatbot so you can ask "what was this article about X I saved Y months ago" and have it retrieved super easily - Browsers extension to save links from there with one button - For users with no more credits, use a cheaper LLM for unlimited and real free usage

You can try it as https://www.tryblend.ai/smart-notes, I would love some feedback! Here's a demo: https://oh28wvg0kw.ufs.sh/f/Uq9yFdNAkVnxz3OC9tbWPiYA3Mnrjz7d...
by dsr_ | 2025-11-05 13:58:04+00:00
There are two kinds of reliability:

Machine reliability does the same thing the same way every time. If there's an error on some input, it will always make that error on that input, and somebody can investigate it and fix it, and then it will never make that error again.

Human reliability does the job even when there are weird variances or things nobody bothered to check for. If the printer runs out of paper, the human goes to the supply cabinet and gets out paper and if there is no paper the human decides whether to run out right now and buy more paper or postpone the print job until tomorrow; possibly they decide that the printing doesn't need to be done at all, or they go downstairs and use a different printer... Humans make errors but they fix them.

LLMs are not machine reliable and not human reliable.
by subb | 2025-11-05 13:58:09+00:00
The problem is that we mix up physical and perception, including in our language. If you look at the physical stuff, there's nothing in this specific range of EM radiation that is different from UV or IR light (or further). The physical stuff is not unique, our reading is. Therefore, color is not a physical thing.

And so when I say "color" I only mean it to be the construction that we make out of the physical thing.

We project back these construction outside of us (e.g. the apple is red), but we must no fool ourselves that the projection is the thing, especially when we try to be more precise about what is happening.

This is why I'm saying a 3D model of color (brain thing) is very far from modelling color (brain thing) at all. But! It's not purely physical either, otherwise it would just be a spectral band or something. So this is pseudo-perceptual. It's the physical stuff, tailored for the very first bits of anatomy that we have to read this physical stuff. It's stimuli encoding.

If you build a color model, it's therefore always perceptual, and needs to be evaluated against what you are trying to model - perception. You create a model to predict things. RGB and all the other models based on three values in a vaccum will always fail at predicting color (brain!) when the stimuli's surround is more complex.
by jwsteigerwalt | 2025-11-05 13:58:15+00:00
Many fears of “AI mucking it up” could be mitigated with an ability to connect a workbook to a git repository. Not for data, but for VBA, cell formulas, and cell metadata. When you can encapsulate the changes a contributor (in this case co-pilot) makes into a commit, you can more easily understand what changes it/they made.
by ItsBob | 2025-11-05 13:58:18+00:00
It's not as black-and-white as "Brenda good, AI bad". It's much more nuanced than this.

When it comes to (traditional) coding, for the most part, when I program a function to do X, every single time I run that function from now until the heat death of the sun, it will always produce Y. Forever! When it does, we understand why, and when it doesn't, we also can understand why it didn't!

When I use AI to perform X, every single time I run that AI from now until the heat death of the sun it will maybe produce Y. Forever! When it does, we don't understand why, and when it doesn't, we also don't understand why!

We know that Brenda might screw up sometimes but she doesn't run at the speed of light, isn't able to produce a thousand lines of Excel Macro in 3 seconds, doesn't hallucinate (well, let's hope she doesn't), can follow instructions etc. If she does make a mistake, we can find it, fix it, ask her what happened etc. before the damage is too great.

In short: when AI does anything at all, we only have, at best, a rough approximation of why it did it. With Brenda, it only takes a couple of questions to figure it out!

Before anyone says I'm against AI, I love it and am neck-deep in it all day when programming (not vibe-coding!) so I have a full understanding of what I'm getting myself into but I also know its limitations!
by _heimdall | 2025-11-05 13:58:28+00:00
It doesn't seem that clear in my opinion. There is a lot of smoke there, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fire, but I didn't see the article specifically claiming the government directed YouTube to take down the videos.

I saw multiple references there to the government sanctioning groups and that YouTube took down videos based on the sanctions. That very well could be a loophole and a court might deem that a first amendment violation, but it isn't as simple as finding communications where the government directly requested those videos to be taken down.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-11-05 13:59:04+00:00
It isn't overcharging on Mobile either IMO but the difference is pretty obvious: there is only one way to get your app onto an iPhone or an Android and that's through those stores.

PCs are an open platform. It is very different.

>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.

And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
by _heimdall | 2025-11-05 14:00:02+00:00
I could see a court finding that to be a first amendment violation, but that isn't the same as the government directly requesting YouTube to take down videos.

Sanctions were put in place and YouTube followed policy to not allow content from sanctioned groups. That sounds like a loophole, and could be found by a court to be a violation, but it isn't nearly as cut and dry as people here seem to be making it out to be.
by gruez | 2025-11-05 14:00:06+00:00
>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes

Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
by aeblyve | 2025-11-05 14:00:17+00:00
The reason is oftentimes fairly simple, certain people have their material wealth and income threatened by such automation, and therefore it's bad (an intellectualized reason is created post-hoc)

I predict there will actually be a lot of work to be done on the "software engineering" side w.r.t. improving reliability and safety as you allude to, for handing off to less than sentient bots. Improved snapshot, commit, undo, quorum, functionalities, this sort of thing.

The idea that the AI should step into our programs without changing the programs whatsoever around the AI is a horseless carriage.
by gmac | 2025-11-05 14:00:46+00:00
Nudge theory isn't useless, it's just not anything like as powerful as money or regulation.

It was taken up by the UK government at that time because the government was, unusually, a coalition of two quite different parties, and thus found it hard to agree to actually use the normal levers of power.

This NY Times opinion piece by Loewenstein and Ubel makes some good arguments along these lines: https://web.archive.org/web/20250906130827/https://www.nytim...
by jmye | 2025-11-05 14:00:57+00:00
> ACA is a failure and the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time.

This is absolute, unequivocal bullshit. I get that you aren't under 26, that you don't need subsidies, never were denied coverage for having had the audacity to get sick years before, and that you've never had to pay for expensive care, so you probably don't know what you're talking about in the first place, but suggesting it was a "failure" is absurd. The idea that actual coverage was less affordable after the ACA passed is such spectacular nonsense I don't even know where to start.

Sometimes it's ok to NOT have big, strident opinions on things you know you don't even slightly understand, and to ask questions or approach things with curiosity, instead.
by hansvm | 2025-11-05 14:01:01+00:00
Jumping away from the article slightly, where would you go if you needed a ton of vanilla disk space, the ability to do compute near to that disk, and for it to be accessible with a reasonable pipe to the public internet?

As far as I can tell, you'd almost have to do something with a colo if you didn't want to pay 10x or more for the storage. Are there other options?
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-05 14:01:13+00:00
Europe has a borderline shrinking economy, and completely missed out on the tech wave of the last 25 years.

So you have all of Europe using American software, running on American or Chinese hardware, all imported rather than home built.

This "foreign dependent" theme repeats again and again as you go through why Europeans need to get off their asses and drop their perceptions towards industry.

And this doesn't even mention the population age crisis.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-05 14:01:19+00:00
I've found a number of hidden items in PDFs masked in the same way. The one that comes to mind immediately are Dell product code names hiding in official spec PDFs. (The PowerConnect 6200-series switches are "Kinnick", for example.) I always assumed it was a lazy redaction method and people weren't necessarily aware the text wasn't actually redacted.
by Telemakhos | 2025-11-05 14:02:09+00:00
There are a lot of underlying assumptions: Brenda, the woman, is accurate and trustworthy and has mastered an accurate and trustworthy technology; the upper manager, the male, will introduce error by not understanding that the technology he brings to bear on the situation is hallucinatory. The woman is lower in status and pay than the male. The woman is necessary to the functioning of "the economy" and "capitalism," while the man threatens those. There are a lot of unsubtle political undertones on TikTok.
by ratsimihah | 2025-11-05 14:02:12+00:00
I'm not sold because:

1. "It’s difficult to say these things without coming across as arrogant, but I’ve been managing servers since 2006."

You have experience manager servers, so for you it's not a big deal. But maybe software developers who aren't devops don't want to worry about it and just want to write code and ship a project?

2. If you're launching a new product as a solo developer, isn't it faster to just build an MVP on the cloud, validate the idea, get some traction, and eventually migrate to cheaper hosting if you do become the x% that gets product/market fit and do need to scale?

3. "Look, first of all, you’re as unique as the other 1000 peanut gallery enjoyers that have made the same astute observation before you. Congratulations. But you’re absolutely missing the point."

What's with the tone? Is it supposed to be funny? Does it help getting the point across?