MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Intermernet | 2025-11-22 12:43:12+00:00
The problem is that "Free Market" economics (which some people still argue is a valid economic theory for some reason) states that the market will decide what things are worth. The market decided a long time ago that movies, songs, books, photographs etc were, in fact, worth nothing. That's the effect of digital media. It's completely incompatible with the free market.

Weirdly enough, the people who were most vocal about this so called "Free Market" were the people who tried to defend their ability to make money from things that can be copied infinitely with almost zero overhead.

This isn't an opinion on whether or not digital media should be free, it's a statement about digital media being completely incompatible with outdated economic theories.

The person you're replying to may actually believe that his personal information should be worth $0. The only reason it's not is because it can be used for targeted advertising and a bunch of even more horribly dystopian purposes.

So, the fact is you're both correct. Personal data should be worthless (in fact, it should be only available with the permission of the "person") if not for bad actors profiting from the purchase and sale of this data.

The broken economic theories of free market economics state that digital media should be worthless, except that current laws and regulations extend out-dated intellectual property laws to protect incumbent distributors and rights holders (this only rarely actually protects the creators of the media). The idealistic goal of the creators profiting from their creations has been corrupted beyond recognition.

Basically, the things you both are discussing are both nuanced and broken. They exist outside of the context you're putting them in.
by graemep | 2025-11-22 12:43:22+00:00
> I think that the response to COVID (ie lockdowns) did far more damage than the disease itself.

Possibly true in some places. I think it very likely did in the UK.

> I feel bad for young people growing up in this broken world

The world has always been broken. Look at the 20th Century, two world wars, multiple smaller wars, Gulag, great leap forward, cold war, genocides.....

In many ways the world is better than its ever been.

What is true is that the golden age the west had from the end of the cold war until the early 21st century has come to a close, but that was an exceptional time for people in a small proportion of the world.

Like the username. Nice reference.
by MikeNotThePope | 2025-11-22 12:43:26+00:00
Reminds me of the obscene valuations of larger tech companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and Amazon during the dotcom bubble. The companies were overvalued by any reasonable measure.

Cisco Systems

- Peak: $555-579B market cap, March 2000 ($80/share)

- Low: $8.12/share, late 2002 (down ~90%)

- Recovery: Never fully recovered; still below peak as of Nov 2025 ($308B market cap)

Microsoft

- Peak: $614B market cap, December 1999

- Low: Down ~60% to below $250B by December 2000

- Recovery: October 2016 (17 years to recover)

Amazon

- Peak: $113/share, December 1999

- Low: $5.51/share, late 2001 (down ~95%)

- Recovery: Late 2009 (10 years), though briefly recovered in 2007 before 2008 crash set it back to full recovery in 2010

It will be interesting to see which companies survive and which implode.
by Macha | 2025-11-22 12:43:55+00:00
> What’s so fascinating is you mentioned Knights of the Old Republic, and I think anyone who knows about that game thinks about it as one of the great successes in gaming, and it’s like that whole first period where it’s a total failure is just totally gone from memory.

I think the interviewer has mixed up knights of the old republic (KOTOR - the single player RPG) and Star Wars the old republic (SWTOR - the mmorpg in the same setting). SWTOR was “saved” in the sense that it went from a giant failure to a break even MMO. Which is not to diminish the work the interviewee and others put in to get there, but I’m not sure I’d call SWTOR “one of the great successes in gaming” (that would be KOTOR)
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-22 12:43:58+00:00
I can't speak to the UK but in California there are various rules around updating vehicle registration when you move. Enforcement is pretty lax unless you drive something with exceptionally high registration fees.

There's strong wording about updating voter registration when you move, but I doubt there's much in the way of actual law. If there is it's basically never enforced as far as I can tell.
by imvetri | 2025-11-22 12:44:44+00:00
"suffer in silence"

"sharing pain is misuse of energy"

"struggle creates strong memory"

"sleep works like charm"

"less screen, more cycling, lifting weights, hospital visits due to injury"

"Doctor visits to talk to smart people. friends, family and relatives, have already labelled you have no sense and they are right"

"But still you choose to walk fit, well than your previous version"

"You know things going to get crazier, and that excites you"

"You have realised you were never depressed or BPD or ADHD, its hidden potential talking to you, now it's showing in action"

"Rest is very important. More important than working"

"Not working is more productive than actually working, cause you can't afford mistakes, as it takes double or triple time to unlearn wrong and relearn or figure out alternative technique"

"There are no regrets or sad feeling, but euphoric"

"No fears, or less fears or new fears" but you want to face it.

"You invent new techniques to work"

"No burnouts, its natural now"

"Health conscious, body is the only machine you can trust"

"You start trusting nobody" - no people bs

"You start trusting nobody" - the one with no body. In word, its called god.

"You make deal with god" Me: god you have no body, but I have. Me : god I don't have spirit, but you have.

Let's make a deal.

Transfer learning between body and no body on your journey.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-11-22 12:45:16+00:00
Not much, proper PII sustainment over decades (generally) is too demanding for universities unless they have proper resources and knowhow as well.

The US banking system has some blame here as well, just knowing someone’s bank account details shouldn’t let anyone transfer money out of it. IBAN system is quite good at this, that people just share their account numbers with each other and even some merchants like restaurants accept payment through IBAN.
by dmurray | 2025-11-22 12:46:12+00:00
What would an actual market price be for this PII?

Let's say someone offers $X, and in return they post on a public website your name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and employer. Not a lifetime feed, but a single snapshot of this information taken between 4 and 36 years ago, to match the details of this university leak. Maybe some additional info like what grades you got, but not your financial or health history. This offer is made to all adult Americans.

What would X need to be? I suspect the vast majority of Americans accept this at $10,000. And a very significant number take it at $100, or in return for access to a trendy new social network or a discounted television or similar.

I'd take this offer for some five figure sum, which would not be a life changing amount to me. It's a complicating factor that SSNs are traditionally a vector for fraud, but that would go away once people take this offer.
Show HN: NB2 Hub – Free Nano Banana Pro AI Image Generator
by zane0924 | 2025-11-22 12:46:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently launched nano-banana2.app , a free, minimalistic AI image generator built around the latest Nano Banana Pro models.

The goal: make it easy to generate high-quality, photorealistic images with precise camera settings, lighting presets, and character consistency — even if you're not a prompt expert.

Key Features:

Supports Nano Banana Pro models (Pro excels in text rendering, detail retention, and photo realism)

You can try it here: https://nano-banana2.app

I built this because I was constantly switching between AI tools trying to get consistent output for creative and product imagery. I wanted a fast, clean playground that focuses solely on the Nano Banana family of models, which recently gained a lot of traction in the AI image space.

Would love your feedback on:

What tools / controls / workflows you’d want next?

Any use cases you'd want to see supported?

If you've tried Nano Banana models: what results surprised you most?

Thanks for reading — happy to answer anything! — Zane
by mrsmrtss | 2025-11-22 12:46:49+00:00
Yes, I don't know where the misconception that CQRS or Event Sourcing automatically means eventual consistency comes from. We have built, run, evolved, and operated quite a few reasonably sized event sourced systems successfully, and these systems are running to this day without any major incidents. We added eventually consistent projections where performance justified it, fully aware of the implications, but kept most of the system synchronous.
by craigdalton | 2025-11-22 12:47:30+00:00
"The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of text. It has no unified physics, no consistent ontology, no object permanence, no stable causal texture. It’s a fragmented, discontinuous series of words and tokens held together by probability and dataset curation rather than coherent laws."

I think some physicists and Buddhists would say this exactly describes the world humans inhabit. They might also agree that we live in such a world with the illusion that we have: "a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences".

The more I see LLM emergent behaviour simulate,unexpectedly, that of human cognition. I think it tells us much about human cognition as llm behaviour.
by simonw | 2025-11-22 12:48:37+00:00
I don't let AI write for me. I have a "proof reader" which I use - it's a Claude project with these custom instructions:

> You are a proof reader for posts about to be published.

> 1. Identify for spelling mistakes and typos

> 2. Identify grammar mistakes

> 3. Watch out for repeated terms like "It was interesting that X, and it was interesting that Y"

> 4. Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes

> 5. Highlight weak arguments that could be strengthened

> 6. Make sure there are no empty or placeholder links

I do occasionally use an LLM to reformat data - "turn this screenshot into a Markdown list" kind of thing.

I had it write me an HTML price comparison table for this post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/#pricing - here's how: https://chatgpt.com/share/6921b10b-0124-8006-9356-8e32f6335b... - I carefully checked the numbers before I published it!
by stared | 2025-11-22 12:50:07+00:00
Depends a lot on the context.

I mostly post tech things, but at some point I wanted to share a few thoughts about a touchy subject like dating. I had the same dilemma - the last thing I wanted was for it to backfire professionally. At that time I was a consultant and freelancer, so looking for a job wasn’t something I did every few years, but more on a continuous basis.

My girlfriend back then encouraged me to post under my name, as long as I was comfortable being asked about it and defending my words (I was, so I did).

The reception from friends was positive. To my surprise, it had a neutral to mildly positive professional impact, "this is a tech guy, but he has soft skills".

And as you can see, there are quite a few posts like that (side ideas, physical and mental health, relationships).

---

Of course, your mileage may vary. Tech is one thing, but for many jobs (especially government, public service, primary education) it might be different.

It also depends on the general norms within a country—what’s taboo, and how far you’re willing to cross it.

At the same time, when I’ve heard of someone being rejected due to their online presence, it was mostly not about the views themselves, but about how they were expressed. Raging hate might be off-putting—even to those who share a similar bias.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-22 12:50:19+00:00
Also, the pizza examples miss out the competition aspect. Pizza restaurants are competing against other pizza places, but also competing against other foods. If someone starts increasing the price and reducing quality of pizzas, then at some point people will start saying "I don't like pizza, let's go for a burger" and eventually a whole generation will grow up thinking that they don't like pizzas as they've only eaten crappy ones.

Ultimately, these kinds of things go in cycles with the population varying between choosing cheap and trashy products and choosing expensive, quality products.
by cyphar | 2025-11-22 12:50:27+00:00
> For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test.

The articles which popularised FizzBuzz as an interview question stated as a categorical fact that most computer science graduates or programmer candidates (one article even said 199/200!![2]) cannot do FizzBuzz[1,2,3] and were absolutely recommending it as an aptitude test.

I personally think this whole thing was simply untrue back in 2007 (or at the very least incredibly overstated) and we are paying the price for it with ridiculous 15-stage interviews as a paranoid response to some urban legend from ~20 years ago.

[1]: https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-de... [2]: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.... [3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
by spwa4 | 2025-11-22 12:50:52+00:00
Oh that's easy. There's a business model at play here. The point of this information is to make you spend more, and the value of that information is something like 1%-2% (goods) to 30% (of things like credit card fees you pay) of what you spend more if the shops around you know this information.

So from your perspective, the net value of the information is negative. Very negative in most cases.

The power of this model is the adversarial aspect. If there's 2 stores, especially online, and store A knows this info it can be 10% more expensive and grow faster than store B. Which means stores can't choose not to pay, it's a losing proposition and these businesses will die if advertising works even a little bit.

This aspect is why Google, and everyone, want AI to "fight" over everything: the adversarial aspect. Because for any particular purpose, OCR, or even making entire movies, there's a level of AI that's "good enough". Google or Facebook might reach that level 6 months earlier than everyone else (I would have said 10 years earlier 5 years ago, but even OpenAI's advantage has has shrunk to 2-3 months now, so I feel 6 months is generous), and I'm sure that'll be a good business ... for 6 months, if done well. But if you can create a fight where the best AI wins, then AI is worth the highest amount anyone will offer ...
by exasperaited | 2025-11-22 12:50:55+00:00
A huge contractor in the defence and automotive industries does control an open kernel and CAD tooling: OpenCascade is owned by CapGemini. And they do build focussed CAD solutions in it (e.g. SALOME and other tools.)

Several open source CAD packages use it(FreeCAD, Cadseer, Dune3D, SALOME Shaper, KiCAD, CadQuery/Build123D, DeclaraCAD etc.)

There are firms using it for bespoke naval and aerospace applications.

The reality is CAD kernels are incredibly difficult, multi-decade projects, and part of the issue is a lot of the domain expertise in them is literally dying off or retiring.
by geokon | 2025-11-22 12:51:17+00:00
maybe the issue boils down to overloading the term "multiplication". If mathematicians instead invented a new word here, people would get tripped up less (similarly for 'dot' and 'cross' "products")

i think a lot of issues arise from using analogies. Another one us complex numbers as 2D vectors. Its an ok analogy.. Except complex numbers can be multiplied where are 2D coordinates can not. Your weird new nonvectors are now spinning and people are left confused
by metalman | 2025-11-22 12:51:53+00:00
work is non optional, even nialistic,narcisists got to get up and husstle to get the attention they desperatly need for survival, and mostly everybody else just likes doing and building anyway, so by work then perhaps what is implied is "work for", but then the question becomes, will paying for stuff then stop?, or will be doing without, and "work optional" become the fancy new label for slave
by benterix | 2025-11-22 12:51:59+00:00
This is actual problem in general. As a rule, I never give my personal information online anywhere, always use fake info. However, there are a couple of cases when real info is necessary. If it's just my real name and phone number like for booking.com, that's maybe acceptable - just one weak point, little PII.

However, an institution like an university requires a bit more, like a copy my ID or a photo. And based on their attitude, I'm sure they'll get hacked sooner or later. Their IT is either outsourced or understaffed and of mediocre quality. The fact than noone broke in (?) is because nobody cared that much.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-11-22 12:52:03+00:00
I don't understand why people still blame the lockdowns. When the lockdowns started, it was unknown how dangerous Covid actually was. It could have killed 20%, or reduced lifespan by 30%, or something. Nobody knew. It takes 20/20 hindsight to blame lockdowns for what was a generational catastrophe. It's like blaming shelter in place requirements instead of the bombing of the reich.
by brazukadev | 2025-11-22 12:52:19+00:00
Do you know that millions of people live in that jungle, the Amazon rainforest? People that need to go to work, need to transport food, goods? Lula want to end the poverty there and this won't happen without bringing a bit of "development". Thousands (not even that actually) of kilometers is nothing compared to the 7 million kilometers of PRESERVED rainforest (the biggest preserved rainforest in the world, with the costs paid mostly by Brazilians).
by sandGorgon | 2025-11-22 12:53:09+00:00
the Qualcomm Adreno 750 GPU is a Snapdragon Gen 3 device. This is basically an android device.

I wonder why Valve is maintaining a separate linux and driver fork for this. Snapdragon Gen 3 android game SDK works very well...including Windows emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hsQ_-8HV6g

not saying what Valve is doing is not spectacular. But i cant help but wonder if it isnt a more productive use of their resources to mainline this in Android ? Maybe even accelerate the Desktop Android merge (which Qualcomm is pushing ! https://www.theverge.com/news/784381/qualcomm-ceo-seen-googl...)

Android that is Valve compatible will further Valve's goals of open platforms than maintaining their own fork.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-22 12:53:57+00:00
> It seems like a great way...

It was a small town, in the early 1900's. Everybody knew everybody, including the kids - who freely roamed the town when not doing chores or such.

I'd agree that it was very good for the kids' social development...but "foster a sense of community", in the present-day context, sounds like an express ticket to expecting far too much from it.
by dmurray | 2025-11-22 12:54:21+00:00
Do I spend more, or on different things? And do I get any extra value out of the extra things I buy? Most people spend approximately all of their disposable income. The information is valuable to marketers fighting to divide up that pie, not to increase the total spent.

If it does significantly boost the amount of money spent and thus the velocity of money, should governments consider publishing everyone's PII as a way to stimulate economic growth?
by theshackleford | 2025-11-22 12:54:36+00:00
Diagnosed with both (as a child, then again as an adult after ignoring said diagnosis for a long time) I’ve been continually told there is a close link between the two, in that it’s not uncommon if you have one, to be diagnosed with the other.

I’ll say I’ve found “treatments” from both schools helpful. Even though I resisted stuff on the autism side for a long time because I felt “insulted” by it and was convinced it was a diagnosis made in error.
by eviks | 2025-11-22 12:55:33+00:00
> An apology (with guarantees and plans for improvement with oversight) is better than put a low price and call it cost of doing business

How when this is a 0 price of doing business? And there is a plan: "the University has increased its vigilance in securing information that it maintains", after all "The safety and privacy of all members of the University community are a top priority" https://system.umn.edu/data-incident (this is from 23, not 21). And I'm sure there is some admin position for "oversight"! So if you're after empty words, they have those in spades! And would add the apology you requested if not for the extra legal cost, so I don't see how any of that is better.

> Also I don't understand the logic

Because you've perverted the logic from into some vague metaphorical abuse that can harm every time it happens.

> Why do we accept this in such case and not in others?

We don't because settlements such as this do not depend on whether the info is already public, so you get paid regardless. But also because in such case there is no harm (info is already public), and in other cases there is.

> why would that change anything?

for the exact same reason - because harm depends on the first publishing and you were talking about compensating for harm
by comrade1234 | 2025-11-22 12:56:03+00:00
I don't remember the timeline exactly - it was years ago. But he just disappeared for awhile as in no one knew where he was or could find him. Then a few weeks later the board was informed he was under arrest and then a few weeks after that he was still under arrest but at home arrest. Then around a year after this started he was allowed to leave china and it's like it never happened in the first place. No one acknowledged what happened and no one would ask what he had to give up in order to be freed and he still travels regularly between china and the USA.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-22 12:56:09+00:00
Denser areas are cheaper per housing unit. Building an apartment building might cost 10x as much as building a house, but it can probably house more than 20x the households.

LVT in an urban/suburban area incentivizes building more housing units per surface area. And a power law formula LVT would especially align incentives, as land that is worth more has even more incentive to be developed.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-11-22 12:57:17+00:00
That analysis only makes sense if companies value AI tools as much as equivalent human productivity. Hypothetically say you have a company with 100 junior developers. An AI service comes around that doubles the productivity of your junior developers, so you can keep only 50 of them. Would the company pay 5M dollars a year forever for that service?

In my experience, the answer is a resounding no. They’ll nickel and dime some kind of per-seat licensing on a monthly basis that costs less than 100 USD or whatever. So for every 100$ in salary you can automate away, you might get 2$ in subscription payments if you are lucky, at current rates.
by makerofthings | 2025-11-22 12:57:34+00:00
There are a surprising number of ways to generate the fizzbuzz sequence. I always liked this one:

fizzbuzz n = case (n^4 `mod` 15) of 1 -> show n 6 -> "fizz" 10 -> "buzz" 0 -> "fizzbuzz" fb :: IO () fb = print $ map fizzbuzz [1..30]
by johnisgood | 2025-11-22 12:58:16+00:00
> Outside of aviation or defense, does Ada have that? No, it does not.

> That is why no one uses it.

Both of these statements are false as well.

(I only made this response because you keep spreading misinformation about a language you know nothing about, self-admittedly, and demonstrably. Not a good look. Neither is your response to you being corrected. If you do not care, at least stop spreading bullshit so confidently about a language you do not know at all.)