MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cons0le | 2025-11-20 16:26:09+00:00
>The "hacker spirit" is dying

This is the number one issue in computing today. Everybodys running around trying to get rich building shitty extensions and frameworks without looking at the bigger picture. We need collective action. Imagine a movement where everybody becomes millitant about adblockers. Like install them on every computer and deflate the advertising industry. Smarter people than me can probably think of better ideas

Right now its death by 1000 cuts. There needs to be a big change or we could lose everything in just 20-30 years in my opinion
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-20 16:26:42+00:00
I dunno. The iPhone has some kind of "visual voicemail" and must use some kind of API to get access to my mailbox to download and transcribe messages... and my iPhone has gone 6 months without the voicemail getting reset whereas it would happen between 6 days and 6 weeks with every Android I had. Could well be the carrier treats me differently or the phone does something that stops periodic or intermittent resets initiated by the carrier.
by lordnacho | 2025-11-20 16:26:52+00:00
> This seems like a very flat view of intelligence.

Yes, because the article leads with that. But I think we're actually in agreement.

I make a distinction between intelligence and wisdom, something I thought about from D&D.

Intelligence is having accurate models. Quick thinking, and correct predictions.

Wisdom is about making good decisions. Risk control, understanding rewards.

Both are a mental qualities we appreciate in people, but often we are more dazzled by intelligence, and we often mistake wisdom for intelligence.
by soiltype | 2025-11-20 16:26:57+00:00
Honestly not sure if this is a bit, it's so on-the-nose... Taking it at face value, you are literally claiming to know precisely what intelligence is? You would be the first to know if so. You should probably publish quickly before someone steals your definition!

In your post is demonstrated one of the deep mysteries of intelligence: How can a smart person make such a dumb assertion? (I'll give a hint: consider that "intelligence" is not a single axis)
by jkaplowitz | 2025-11-20 16:27:30+00:00
The statements motivating this lawsuit included a lot more than just calling him an asshole. They called him a habitual cocaine user and accused him of orchestrating a harassment campaign. Those are claims of fact, and false accusations of that kind widely read in the victim’s professional and academic communities could certainly cause more than £70k plus court fees in eventual damages through reduced lifetime earnings.

Disclaimer: Being a (currently quite inactive) member of the Debian project myself, I’ve met Matthew Garrett in the past on a relatively small number of occasions, but I have no inside information on the allegations mentioned in this court judgment and have not discussed them with him or with anyone else involved. I do, however, believe his side of the story based on what context I have about him.
by ghaff | 2025-11-20 16:27:32+00:00
Calculators went from something that was really expensive to something that was relatively affordable over a very short period of time. In about 1974, a 5-function TI was about $100 (in 1975 currency). By the next year a full scientific TI calculator wasn't much more and no one, at least in engineering school, was still using a slide rule though I brought one to exams as a a backup. By a couple years later, I was able to buy a discontinued HP calculator for about the same.
by acyou | 2025-11-20 16:27:33+00:00
But if we own real estate, we see the limitation and destruction of housing stock as value creation benefiting own personal assets. From that perspective, reducing this sort of low cost housing makes perfect sense.

Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
by vunderba | 2025-11-20 16:27:51+00:00
That IS the use-case for Nano Banana (as opposed to pure generative like Imagen4).

In my benchmarks, Nano-Banana scores a 7 out of 12. Seedream4 managed to outpace it, but Seedream can also introduce slight tone mapping variations. NB is the gold standard for highly localized edits.

Comparisons of Seedream4, NanoBanana, gpt-image-1, etc.

https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
by axxto | 2025-11-20 16:27:58+00:00
Reducing comedy to 'subverting predictions' and empathy to 'compression algorithms' is like explaining music as 'organized sound waves', technically defensible yet completely missing the point. Missing the forest for the trees is an objective sign of limited metacognition, by the way.

The fact that you claim to be 'above average' at empathy and social cues while writing this robotic dismissal that completely misses the point (I asked for measurement methods, you provided questionable definitions) is the ultimate proof of my argument. You haven't defined intelligence, you've just compressed the meaning of it until it's small enough to fit inside your ego.
by viridian | 2025-11-20 16:28:11+00:00
It's possible in the same way its possible that you will spontaneously phase through the floor due to a particular outcome of atomic resonance. Possible, but so unlikely it almost certainly has not, nor ever will happen.

Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-20 16:28:20+00:00
History has never been purely about studying literary records. Thucydides' History includes gratuitous use of oral speeches and discussion of events that predate writing. I can't think of a single modern historian who doesn't make use of archaeological data either.

Equating history with writing is a very anachronistic definition that was popular among Renaissance and early modern historians as a way of legitimizing their preference for classical scholarship over the "dark" middle ages. It's not a good rule of thumb for what is or isn't historical.
by lotyrin | 2025-11-20 16:28:33+00:00
This is only socially and "practically" true, not literally or inevitably or technically (or in my opinion, actual-practically) so.

One of the things we need to accept as social animals is that there are a lot of different flavors of "true" and "correct".

A lot of times I'll get someone to concede with my opinion of stuff in a way where they say something like "well, sure, but good luck convincing anyone of this" and that's them just giving into the social-consensus truth rather than the empirical (what the evidence shows, what follows from that and our choices of axiomatic principles) or practical (produces the best outcomes in the situation) truth.

If we want to be a species worthy of surviving our impending climate extinction we need to have a population of leaders and actors who are willing to act on and create institutions according to the practical truth as informed by the empirical truth, and become villains in the eye of the social-consensus truth.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-11-20 16:28:42+00:00
When my father came to this country he lived in an SRO while working in restaurants in New York City. That gave him the start he needed to eventually grow a family of 6 that had the opportunity to experience the American dream. The decline of SROs (and IMO mixed use residential like where the owner of a deli lives on top of it) has really pulled the out the bottom rungs of the ladder making it harder to get a footing.
by gambiting | 2025-11-20 16:28:45+00:00
>> I don't know why people expect the US to be some beacon of global morality or democracy

I think I can answer that - because growing up(not in the US) United States of America were that paragon of well, everything. Everyone wanted to move there eventually, everything about US was the best, best books, films, technology, women(yes, I know), jobs, sights, cities etc etc. For better or worse America has managed to inspire millions of kids around the globe to see it as the best country in the world. Like, US were the good guys in every situation. If you heard about US going to war with someone, it was because they were right and the other side was wrong. And then we grew up and realized that most of it was just a lie.

>>we don't car as much about our "image".

Respectfully, if there is one thing that America does well it's caring about its image - the soft projection of power by export of its culture is one thing that no other country has been able to replicate anywhere near as well, maybe except for Japan.

>>but Russia doesn't have much you can't get elsewhere, other than maybe oil

You can get everything anywhere, but the point is that Russia has certain resources that it produces in huge quantities and cheaply. They are a leading producer of nickel, which obviously is incredibly important in various industries. They are the main producer of palladium, platinum, and one of the biggest producers of gold and diamonds. Plus they produce and export huge quantities of wood and coal. Obviously all of those things can be obtained elsewhere, but there is a reason why countries have been buying those things from Russia - they have a lot of it and they sell it cheap.
by abixb | 2025-11-20 16:29:26+00:00
Switching a Japanese dumbphone (Kyocera) was the best thing I ever did. Eliminating your smartphone (as inconvenient and life altering as it may be -- you'll need to figure out a path) is probably the single most effective thing you can do to get into the top 1-10%... of people with properly functioning cognition.
by int_19h | 2025-11-20 16:29:30+00:00
> iMessage relies on Apple managing your encryption keys so there are no confidentiality guarantees. Apple can, at any moment, give themselves a key to decrypt your messages.

It relies on Apple device managing your encryption keys, no? Which, yes, Apple can still access if it really wanted to simply by virtue of being able to push an iOS update that does that. But the same exact vulnerability applies to any app running on your iPhone.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-20 16:29:43+00:00
I don't know what it is with Gemini (and even other models) but I swear they must be doing some kind of active load-dependant quanitization or a/b/c/d testing behind the scenes, because sometimes the model is stellar and hitting everything, and other times it's tripping all over itself.

The most effective fix I have found is that when the model is acting dumb, just turn it off and come back in the few hours to a new chat and try again.
by kragen | 2025-11-20 16:29:46+00:00
That is not "metabolic syndrome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_syndrome:

> Metabolic syndrome is a clustering of at least three of the following five medical conditions: abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high serum triglycerides, and low serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL).

The pandemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome started about 50 years ago, and is not limited to "the West" or "the developed world". Mass consumption of meats processed with nitrites (producing nitrates as a byproduct) goes back at least several centuries, maybe a millennium.

"Farmed meat", if by that you mean factory-farmed meat, is facially plausible as a cause, in that it fits the timeframe. However, people with metabolic syndrome who switch to an all-meat diet, even if the meat is factory-farmed, tend to improve rather than worsening.
by salawat | 2025-11-20 16:30:15+00:00
>If this is in Texas, absolutely. Doing 75 in an 80 is suspicious AF.

Oh, please. Half the damn signage in Texas hasn't been updated from 75, and if you weren't a Texas resident to read when the State updated the daytime speed limit to 80 in the newspapers, you wouldn't know that signs notwithstanding, 80 is the speed you should be going in the day. If you're just passing through the state, speed limit signs on parts of the interstate that haven't been updated still tell you 75. If anything it was a masterful move by Texas LE to engineer probable cause to do a traffic stop on anyone who wasn't a local, which would tend to select for non-resident traffickers.

I say this as someone who was a resident in the state when that change happened and is disgusted every time I go through and see unupdated signs. It is disingenuous, yet effective, profiling of the worst sort that seems to be ignored by most in favor of thinking like quoted poster's.

I seem to be of a minority that believe that a State has an obligation to clearly and consistently communicate the actual state of their traffic management regime to drivers from in and out of state via signage. Not play games to manufacture justification to surveil subpopulations that aren't likely to be represented/incapable of voting.
by 83 | 2025-11-20 16:30:27+00:00
Each material has its own issues. Kevlar is very difficult to work with (need special scissors to cut and you can't sand the finished product), Dyneema is sensitive to UV degradation. Carbon is $$$. Basalt sounds like the sweet spot for some of my applications but afaict it can't be purchased by the yard like most materials so is essentially unobtainium to a hobbyist who can't afford a $1k or so roll of material.
by scottlamb | 2025-11-20 16:30:31+00:00
Ooh, I just got offered the new version on https://gemini.google.com/. Plugged in that exact prompt, got this:

https://imgur.com/a/ENNk68B

Much better than previous attempts. Still has an extra lane with the cars on the right cutting off the cars in the middle. Still has the numbers in the wrong order.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-20 16:30:36+00:00
I have done native cross-platform projects in https://wxwidgets.org/ and https://quasar.dev/ . Fine for basic interfaces, but static linking on Win64 gets dicey with lgpl libraries etc. YMMV For iOS targets, one must use a MacOS environment with a non-free Apple developer account.

Personally, I like Apache 2.0, and standard quality of life *nix build tools. Everything Windows runs off a frozen VM backing image KVM COW file now, as even Microsoft can no longer resist the urge to break things. =3
by DrScientist | 2025-11-20 16:30:39+00:00
> Ending oil subsidies

What makes it left or right is how you otherwise spend the money saved from stopping subsidies - not the ending of subsidies itself.

If you reduce tax then it's right wing, if you use the money to help the poorer in society deal with the short term price shocks that would result from spiking energy costs - then it's left-wing.
by scottlamb | 2025-11-20 16:31:03+00:00
Imagen4 did no better. edit: example https://imgur.com/Dl8PWgm with a so-so result: four lanes, cars at least facing the same way, lane block looks good, weird extra division in the center, some numbers repeated, one arrow going straight into construction, one arrow going backwards

edit: or Imagen4 Ultra. https://imgur.com/a/xr2ElXj cars facing opposite directions within a lane, 2-way (4 lanes total), double-ended arrows, confused disaster. pretty though.
by Groxx | 2025-11-20 16:31:06+00:00
I've had constant problems with the verification ever since it was introduced. As far as I can tell it hasn't improved at all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it repeatedly kicks me out moments after succeeding, and it's still prompting me to verify some old devices that I removed Element from years ago and I can't find any way to make the constant pop-ups go away (when they feel like appearing again - sometimes they go away for a couple months).

All this will do is make me lose EVERY profile.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-20 16:31:06+00:00
I agree with the latter 100% (the biggest problem is incentives), however I don't agree catching cheaters is easy. It's an arms race, and reminds me of catching cheaters in video games.

Using every means available (multiple technologies and in-person proctored exams) cuts down cheating to probably ~2%... But online programs have serious integrity challenges.
by FatherOfCurses | 2025-11-20 16:31:17+00:00
In your personal experience, therapy did nothing for your ADHD. That doesn't mean it is universally unhelpful.

While it is true that therapy is not a replacement for how stimulants reinforce executive function, therapy can help folks with ADHD understand their behavior patterns and better manage some of the challenges that go along with the disorder.

In my experience, therapy helped me get over my lifetime guilt around my lack of achievements, better understanding my triggers, and prioritizing self care. I couldn't have gotten through COVID lockdown with my wife and two kids in our tiny house without it.
by ajross | 2025-11-20 16:31:32+00:00
> A slow-moving train wreck is still a train wreck.

It's. Not. A. Train. Wreck.

There is a high signal NOW, due (very obviously) to a well-understood and well-characterized effect visible up and down social metrics in all societies where they have been measured.

What I'm saying is that pretending to ignore this very obvious hypothesis in order to push a personal theory about "grade inflation" or whatever and demanding the rest of us freak out about the implied "train wreck" is just bad logic.

Usually that kind of argument is the result of ideological bent, not considered thought.
by tmuhlestein | 2025-11-20 16:31:42+00:00
GoDaddy just published the Agent Name Service (ANS) API) and an accompanying standards site for defining identity and lifecycle management for autonomous agents.

ANS pairs a human-readable name with cryptographically verifiable identity, using PKI/X.509 and DNS-style discovery. It’s designed to work alongside frameworks like A2A, MCP, and other emerging agent protocols.

What’s new:

Public ANS API is now live (registration, discovery, certificates, revocation, etc.) ANS Standards site with the current spec + architecture Open adapter layer for interoperability without framework lock-in

GitHub repo available for builders

Links:

Standards → hhttps://www.agentnameregistry.org/ Repo → https://github.com/godaddy/ans-registry API keys → https://developer.godaddy.com/keys

Given the rise of autonomous agents, this aims to solve identity, trust, and lifecycle governance at internet scale.

Curious what HN thinks: Do we need shared, neutral identity infrastructure for agents — or should each framework solve this independently?
by Yizahi | 2025-11-20 16:31:59+00:00
Content often already exists and depending on the course not much effort is needed to adapt it to next year. Feedback and teaching is what hard and time consuming. Thus we will see the hard part being replaced first. Grading and exams are hard? Let's automate it. Lecturing is hard? Let's narrate text by a program. Etc.

Meanwhile laying off "unneeded" teachers an getting hooked on the enterprise LLM subs. After these borderline bankrupt LLM corpos will raise prices several times universities will be paying even more while struggling with limited staff. This will translate into admin pressure on the teachers to automate more and more and more.
by Enk1du | 2025-11-20 16:32:04+00:00
> Python is backed by Google

For me, this is why python took off. People wanted that lucrative job or receive the reflected glory of a winner, so y'gotta learn python. The rest is just post-hoc justification for why you made that choice passed on as "this language is better because of blah..."

A lot of the justifications don't stack up against serious scrutiny, but are accepted as gospel.
by knowitnone3 | 2025-11-20 16:32:46+00:00
I agree. I can't imagine anybody would call a function that returns the same result in a loop like that. There are plenty more optimizations they could come up with. In fact, there are a couple of books https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-python... for instance. Didn't want to link the one on Amazon
by pjmlp | 2025-11-20 16:33:07+00:00
Which is why sadly Web 3D never took off beyond ecommerce and visualisation tooling, with game studios rather focusing on streaming.

While on native games the engine can workaround the driver issues, Web 3D APIs are at the mercy of the browser sandbox, where studios don't have access to possible workarounds due to lack of feedback on API performance.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-20 16:33:11+00:00
where do we land on motherf!cker?

Taken literally it's accusing someone of a specific depraved act, but it's also clearly a term of abuse. My guess (not a lawyer!) is that once a term becomes more associated with abuse the more you're protected.

Hustler basically called Jerry Falwell a motherf!cker but attributed to him a specific act, which they highlighted was satire and not to be taken seriously. Hustler lost in a jury trial and also on an appeal to the 4th circuit. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Hustler's favor [0]. This is dramatized in the movie The People vs Larry Flint.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell

[1] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-people-vs-larry-flynt/
by losvedir | 2025-11-20 16:34:05+00:00
I'm sure Apple will roll something out in the coming years. Now that just anyone can easily AI themselves into a picture in front of the Eiffel tower, they'll want a feature that will let their users prove that they _really_ took that photo in front of the Eiffel tower (since to a lot of people sharing that you're on a Paris vacation is the point, more than the particular photo).

I bet it will be called "Real Photos" or something like that, and the pictures will be signed by the camera hardware. Then iMessage will put a special border around it or something, so that when people share the photos with other Apple users they can prove that it was a real photo taken with their phone's camera.
by cestith | 2025-11-20 16:34:10+00:00
Life is alright I suppose. There’s been a lot of cancer in our families, which is rough. There’s been some wonderful responses to treatment though. My job since late 2022 I mostly really like. My fiancee and I moved from Texas back to Illinois in June. We got engaged in late August.

I’m sorry to hear how life’s treating you. I wish you well.

If you want to connect on some social media platform, I’m on FB, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Or I do check Perlmonks still once in a while, and Slashdot.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-20 16:35:15+00:00
> The orange gas plasma display from a Toshiba T3200SX (1989)

For some reason I love the computers of the 1980s era, plus minus some more years, even up to about 1995 or so.

Today's computers are of course much more powerful and cheaper per calculating unit, but also more boring. Those things in the 1980s were so wild. Also before that, 1970s. 1950s and 1960s look outright alien - also very cool.

Of course having all that in a small smartphone is epic too, but the hardware today just doesn't interest me anymore. It seems like a "problem solved" whereas in the past, people were trying harder, including micro-optimising all available resources. That required a different kind of creativity.

Perhaps this will come back one day in the future but I doubt it. Quantum computers would mean people don't care much about maximizing everything to the bare metal if things are already mega-fast for most tasks to solve.