MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rcxdude | 2025-11-27 10:08:44+00:00
Hi, I have interacted with a lot of artists, and spent more on commissioning art than is probably financially sensible, as well as playing around with models for writing and image generation and I have a few thoughts on this.

I think, on the whole, the distaste for AI is primarily about a threat to the value of the artist's work. Importantly, I think the idea that this was done by training on their collective work is a bit of a sting on top but it is not the primary reason for the objection. Especially importantly, I think copyright is 100% not a good way to try to mend this issue, because it will primarily enable the parasitic centralization that already plagues the art business, as well as allow for further moat-building by tho ones creating these models (Adobe having already demonstrated this). In my view, a world where the big tech companies have models that only they are legally allowed to train is the worst possible outcome from this tech. I think addressing this either needs to involve some kind of blanket compensation from the big companies (with the important proviso that even their entire valuation spread amongst all the artists in their training set is a relative pittance), or through a general push against AI generation entirely, but from the perspective of the importance of supporting the artists as opposed to leaning on copyright claims which the AI industry can happily navigate if they must.

With regards to quality, Sturgeon's law applies doubly here. The vast majority of AI generated stuff you see will be slop, because it's so easy to make. It is possible to make very good stuff with AI with more effort, but this requires at a minimum some taste and willingness to put thought into what you want to get out of it, and better also some artistic talent. To me the best is when someone engages with it as a tool to achieve a vision as opposed to a perfunctory 'I need to fill some space with something' stock-image type thing (something which humans had already been doing, but were a bit more limited on because of expense and it's hard for someone doing art to not care at least a little bit about making something good even if it's utterly soulless corporate clip-art).

I'll also say it's not universal amongst artists. I know of multiple who are OK with it, and starting to incorporate it into their work. But it's also a somewhat dicey position to take publicly in those circles at the moment, so they're not very visible on the whole. (I suspect this is often dependent on why they got into art: in general the ones who are OK with or actively like AI are the ones who got into art because they wanted to see more art of the kind that they make (insert 'oh boy, two cakes!' meme here). The ones who got into art because they enjoy the process of making the art generally don't like it, though they're not always utterly virulently against it, and the ones who got into art for the status it affords them absolutely hate it. Though of course these are somewhat oversimplified categories)
by konart | 2025-11-27 10:08:55+00:00
>What would you say about people who knowingly do actions that will lead to widespread harm and future deaths even though they're killing no one directly?

Are we talking about scientists here too or just those who give orders?

Pretty much anything can be used as a weapon and many things can be used for widespread harm.

What if you are working on something that can be used both ways? Spread good and death?
by killcoder | 2025-11-27 10:09:41+00:00
In South Australia an algal bloom started in ~mid-March of this year, it's a pretty big ecological disaster, probably the worst non-bushfire disaster in living memory. Probably 30% of SA's coastline is affected. It's a pretty big deal affecting many people's livelihoods.

The joint state and federal government relief and cleanup package is worth AUD $102.5 million dollars.

I hope the public receives that comparison at every opportunity.

The old website was frankly excellent, the only problem was it didn't have HTTPS support. I would have happily upgraded that part of the system for the cost of a cup of coffee if I'd had an opportunity to submit for the tender!

The new website is significantly more difficult to navigate (for me, a seasoned tech user). The primary thing Dad's everywhere use it for (the weather radar) now requires scrolling to the _bottom_ of the page, and zooming in from the 'map of Australia' to the region you live in. It used to be like, a click to go from home page -> state weather radar with all the info you needed.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/bureau-of-meteorology...

If you want to read our local news about it.

> [BOM] said the cost breakdown included $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build, and the site's launch and security testing cost $12.6 million.

Absolutely stupid, even those numbers are outrageous. They say it's part of some 'larger upgrade package', prompted by a cyber attack in 2015.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/china-blamed-for-cybe...

But politicians over here love to blame cyber attacks when technical blunders happen. We had a census a couple years ago and the website fell over due to 'unprecedented load' or maybe it was a 'DDOS attack'? The news at the time couldn't decide who to blame!

Welp, I hope this gets as much world-wide attention as possible so they can be embarrassed and do better.
by cedws | 2025-11-27 10:10:02+00:00
I've been following S&box for probably over 10 years at this point. It's been obvious for the last 5+ years that the vision isn't "Garry's Mod 2" anymore but maybe something else, like a Roblox-like metaverse. I'm unsure where this project is going but they seem to have smart developers and a lot of passion so hopefully it works out.

I would caution Facepunch though that what made their past games a success wasn't perfection. In the case of Gmod I would actually say imperfection was the charm.

>Obviously this isn't the Source 2 code, that's up to Valve to open source if they want.

Does this mean you need Source 2 to develop with S&box?
by throw310822 | 2025-11-27 10:10:42+00:00
Simple action for those who are unhappy with this situation (and a suggestion for this website creator/ owner): hotels appear to be linked to their booking.com listing. Take a few minutes to select some hotels from the list (possibly at random), then go to their Booking.com page, search for reviews mentioning the lack of a bathroom door, and mark them as helpful. The website could agevolate this process by providing a list of direct link to booking.com pages of the offending hotels.
by zkmon | 2025-11-27 10:10:43+00:00
What problems are left for starting a business? I see only solutions searching for problems. Maybe come up with a competing solution to an already solved problem?

As a technology startup your root goal would be an exit. So you would work on problem which is in the roadmap for a big company and your wish is, they are not agile enough to build it themselves quickly and would buy out your stuff to beat their competition. So it's kind of contract work, with contract coming after the work is done.
by kolp | 2025-11-27 10:10:47+00:00
When I lived in NL, it was explained to me that closing the curtains would imply, in some sort of weird Calvinistic belief, that the occupants were engaged in some nefarious activities; therefore the curtains are left open to show that the occupants have nothing to hide and are engaged only in wholesome activities.

The other side of the social contract obliges passers-by to not look inside.

The other strange thing that I found is that some apartments have little spy mirrors mounted on the exterior wall to allow the occupants to monitor what's going on in the street.
by egorfine | 2025-11-27 10:10:57+00:00
I have lived in a country where communication between adults and minors is not frowned upon in the slightest and so I have been a male mentor for a bunch of girls in an orphanage for many years.

(Once I perish, no one is going to remember any of my business projects, clean codebases and unit test coverage. But that little hobby of mine - oh, these deliverables are gonna last).

Anyways. Happy to be a mentor to teenagers but it seems to me that in the US that's impossible on multiple levels.
by ey3ball | 2025-11-27 10:12:35+00:00
As others have pointed out, keyboard / mouse emulation is pretty useful, but it's also quite quirky. We use MDM to automate configuration delivery as much as possible, I think it's been mentioned as well (although we're not zero touch yet).

You might want to look at Asahi Linux's Central Scrutinizer for some insights on the fancier stuff that can be done over the USB-C port.
by account42 | 2025-11-27 10:12:37+00:00
> 1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications.

This is a feature not an issue. And it's how every computer that hasn't tried to take away control from its users has worked. I WANT my programs to be empowered to act on my behalf. If you want a gimped platform to run untrusted apps go buy a phone.

> 2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy.

It works very well in fact. What you call hacks is something you probably cannot comprehend: Actual long term backwards compatibility. All programs should strive to have more of that, but especially central ones like the display server.

> The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix those two issues is Wayland.

It does limit what programs can do and breaks backwards compatibility, yes. That's the problem.
by bangaladore | 2025-11-27 10:13:32+00:00
> Does this mean you need Source 2 to develop with S&box?

Maybe I'm wrong, but S&box is essentially a game developed with Source 2, thats purpose is to expose internal APIs and wrap them for users to build their own games with. So you develop your thing in S&box that happens to be made with Source 2, but you don't care about that. Basically Roblox.
by philipallstar | 2025-11-27 10:13:35+00:00
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women

The reverse of this has been what's been dominating for a decade. Anything pro-men (or even just neutral) can be accused of being anti-woman, which creates a chilling effect as female-dominated HR departments can make life very difficult for men looking to provide for their families.
by GJim | 2025-11-27 10:13:50+00:00
Its disappointing to see your factual post being downvoted.

If somebody disagrees with the above post, then get off your arse and type a fucking rebuttal. Don't lazily click downvote.

'Drive-by' downvoting so is turning this place into another reddit.... and yes this is true, no matter how cliched a comment the admins consider it to be.
by seec | 2025-11-27 10:13:51+00:00
Better efficiency of X86 mobiles CPUs does negate much of the advantage of ARM laptops. It's just not worth the trouble of going through a major software transition.

One thing that I find suspicious is the large delta in single thread score between ARM and X86 currently. The real world performance does not suggest that big of a difference in actual use. The benchmarks suggest a 25% performance delta but in actual use the delta seems to be less than 10%. Of course Apple Silicon has the efficiency crown very much locked down

Since they have become a marketing target the benchmarks have become much less useful.
by berkes | 2025-11-27 10:14:16+00:00
I think a very common misconception makes this a terrible idea.

We, developers, are also "common computer users". Just like a sound engineer, a graphic designer, a movie editor, or any specialist, really, has fancy hard- and software, but remains also a "general user".

I have to do my taxes. Write a CV, or a speech. I have to make a presentation. I want to watch netflix. Listen to spotify. Must use trello, read my email, or use that abysmal internal time tracker. Play a game. Order new sneakers. Find a restaurant. And no, I don't do all that in emacs, terminal, bash scripts and lynx. Like every "general computer user" I use my computer for those things as well.

Despite what Hollywood makes it look like, developers, hackers, sw architects, sw engineers etc do use the stuff that everyone uses as well. Commonly and often.
by PEGHIN | 2025-11-27 10:16:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Prompt2Sheets because I kept watching non-technical founders and operators lose evenings inside Google Sheets – fighting VLOOKUPs, pivot tables, dedupe formulas, and ad/lead exports that never line up. They didn’t want another BI tool; they just wanted their existing sheets to behave.

Prompt2Sheets lets you edit a Google Sheet by describing what you want in plain English. Under the hood it generates JavaScript, runs it in a sandbox, and syncs the result back to the original sheet. Typical prompts are: – “Remove duplicate leads by email and keep the most recent row” – “Add a Margin column after cost of goods sold = (price_fyi – cost of goods sold) / price_fyi” – “Filter to only US + Canada with verified emails and add a summary row with total spend”

It’s aimed at people who live in Sheets (founders, operators, recruiters, marketers, ecommerce) but don’t want to learn complex formulas or maintain brittle scripts. The focus right now is: cleaning lead lists, transforming ad/export data, adding calculated columns, and building simple summaries directly in the sheet.

You can try it here: https://prompt2sheets.com – No credit card required – Uses Google OAuth; app is in beta but live – Works best on small/medium sheets while I harden performance and edge cases

I’m particularly interested in feedback on: – Where the natural-language interface feels useful vs. confusing – Which operations you’d trust it with (and which you would never hand to an AI) – Any cases where it silently does the “wrong” thing – those are the most valuable to fix

If you have a messy sheet you’re willing to share (leads, ads, inventory, reporting), I’m happy to personally help set up your first workflow and debug failures. Honest criticism is welcome – especially around UX, safety, and where this is obviously the wrong tool.
by sylvainFR | 2025-11-27 10:16:20+00:00
I’ve been working on a web platform called iteration3d, which allows users to generate custom 3D models based on their own dimensions using parametric templates.

The entire model generation process is powered by build123d, a Python CAD library built on top of OpenCascade. Every 3D preview and thumbnail is automatically rendered using Blender through a fully automated server-side pipeline.

Beyond simply offering a free on-demand service, iteration3d also serves as a practical showcase of what’s possible with build123d. This growing CAD library is quickly gaining attention in the Python and parametric modeling communities.

If you're curious about how everything works, I’ve written a detailed tutorial explaining the model-generation process using build123d (see link)

The project has also been referenced by OpenCascade, the geometric kernel behind build123d and widely used in software like FreeCAD.
by logicprog | 2025-11-27 10:16:32+00:00
> And I really wish I could trust an llm for that, or, indeed, any task. But I generally find answers fall into one of these useless buckets: 1. Reword the question as an answer (so common, so useless) 2. Trivial solutions that are correct - meaning one or two lines that are valid, but that I could have easily written myself quicker than getting an agent involved, and without the other detractors on this list 3. Wildly incorrect "solutions". I'm talking about code that doesn't even build because the llm can't take proper direction on which version of the library to refer to, so it keeps giving results based off old information that is no longer relevant. Try resolving a webpack 5 issue - you'll get a lot of webpack 4 answers and none of them will work, even if you specify webpack 5 4. The absolute worst: subtly incorrect solutions that seem correct and are confidently presented as correct. This has been my experience with basically every "oh wow, look what the llm can do" demo. I'm that annoying person who finds the big mid-demo.

This is just not my experience with coding agents, which is interesting. You could chalk this up to me being a bad coder, insufficiently picky, being fooled by plausible looking code, whatever, but I carefully read every diff the agent suggests, force it to keep every diff small enough for that to be easy, and I'm usually very good at spotting potential bugs, and very picky about code quality, and the ultimate test passes: the generated code works, even when I extensively test it in daily usage. I wonder if maybe it has something to do with the technologies or specific models/agents you're using? Regarding version issues, that's usually something I solve by pointing the agent at a number of docs for the version I want and having it generate documentation for itself, and then @'ing those docs in the prompt moving forward, or using llms.txt if available, and that usually works a charm for teaching it things.

> I see that proponents of the tech often gloss over this and don't realise that they're actually spending more time overall, especially when having to polish out all the bugs. Or maintain the system.

I am a very fast, productive coder by hand. I guarantee you, I am much faster with agentic coding, just in terms of measuring the number of days it takes me to finish a feature or greenfield prototype. And I doing corrections are a confounding factor because I very rarely have to correct these models. For some time I used agent that tracks how often as a percentage I accept tool calls including edits the agent suggests. One thing to know about me is that I do not ever accept subpar code. If I don't like an agent's suggestion I do not accept and then iterate; I want it to get it right from the first. My acceptance rate was 95%.
by close04 | 2025-11-27 10:16:40+00:00
> we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems

The discrimination pendulum swinged the other way. And as with a lot of discrimination, the criticism is in reality aimed at what you are, not what you do. So you will never get it right in the eyes of those critics. On the other hand the roles of men in society are changing and it's not at all clear "to what". "Be a man but don't really be one, it's complicated".
by chiffaa | 2025-11-27 10:17:08+00:00
A funny workaround I employed is running Beeper. It's a Matrix client that also provides chat mirroring for other platforms. The sync is slightly jank but it works for what I want to achieve

The mirroring stuff is FOSS and I think so is the client, the financial model being that you're limited to a fairly low amount of services proxies at once without a paid plan
by pjc50 | 2025-11-27 10:17:31+00:00
The sad thing is that you and the person you are arguing with are both right: Apple and Google are lock-in monopolists, and the legacy telcos were much worse monopolists (remember paying for ringtones?), and the car manufacturers want to foist terrible software on people with their own brand of lock-in.

Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market.

(DIN being a German standards body..)
by seec | 2025-11-27 10:19:19+00:00
As an Apple Watch user for over 7 years, I find this focus on heavy app to be completely stupid. The "smart" part of the watch is mostly useless, I've learned to use it the least possible. It is just rarely worth it to fiddle with such a restricted interface when you have the phone nearby the vast majority of the time.

The health stuff is really the killer app and they should have pivoted to low power high efficiency use case a long time ago. It doesn't make sense to charge the watch everyday for the little utility it provides.
by illwrks | 2025-11-27 10:19:45+00:00
I only know about it from my child. They were the most important thing until they weren’t. Thankfully no thought was wasted on them!

To add to everyone else… the internet has allowed you and everyone else to be put into categories, what you see is tailored to you and your demographic alone. You and your neighbors live in the same physical community but your mind and thoughts belong to a community that could be a million miles from you.
by matwood | 2025-11-27 10:19:48+00:00
Apple was clearly moving towards usbc (which they helped develop). Their laptops and iPad pros had moved along with the pro phones. To think the EU the reason usbc came to the iPhone is ignoring the clear path Apple was on. At best they put it in the rest of the phone line a generation early.

Any fight that Apple put up was performative and them not wanting any sort of precedence to be set.
by biorach | 2025-11-27 10:20:00+00:00
The wider point is that copyright headers are a very important detail and that a) the AI got it wrong b) you did not notice c) you have not taken on board the fact that it is important despite being told several times and have dismissed the issue as unimportant

Which raises the question how many other important incorrect details are buried in the 13k lines of code that you are unaware of and unable to recognise the significance of? And how much mantainer time would you waste being dismissive of the issues?

People have taken the copyright header as indicative of wider problems in the code.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-11-27 10:20:13+00:00
Yes lower income boys are hit way harder, but it's not like the issue disappears at the higher end.

> 72 percent of boys from households earning $100,000 or more reported having a male mentor for schoolwork.

> A similar trend appeared regarding relationship advice. Only 45 percent of boys in the lowest income group had a male mentor for relationships. This compares to 67 percent of boys in the highest income group.

Even 30% of rich kids don't have access to a proper male role model, those are terrible numbers!
by jakobnissen | 2025-11-27 10:20:44+00:00
That's an interesting definition, but it does have some issues.

Is an infertile animal (which can't reproduce) dead? What about a nerve cell (which have differentiated too far to become a reproductive cell)? Or a red blood cell (which has no genome)?

From the other end, is a genetic algorithm alive? What about a manuscript? Manuscripts are copied (so they reproduce), and have frequent copying errors, which propagate.
by joelreymont | 2025-11-27 10:20:48+00:00
It's not. It's absolutely justified for the OCaml maintainers to reject this PR.

I feel completely different about my Zig PR [1] but, hey, it's not my playground and the Zig folks seem to be particularly opinionated.

[1] https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-us...
by yetihehe | 2025-11-27 10:21:05+00:00
No, so we can all be schooled in "Why Every Man Should Be Strong"[0], "How to Set a Table"[1], "9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches"[2] or "Win the War on Debt: 80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money"[3]. You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves. That's not a "good" manly behavior.

[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/why-ev...

[1] https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/etiquette/how-to-se...

[2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/outdoor-survival/9-way...

[3] https://www.artofmanliness.com/career-wealth/wealth/money-sa...
by pjc50 | 2025-11-27 10:21:18+00:00
Whole bunch of factors involved in this which HN is ill-equipped to deal with. But I think paranoia about "grooming" should probably be counted as a factor as well. A lot of people are going to be suspicious about an adult man who wants to hang out with children. So everything gets tangled up and shut down in the name of safeguarding.

If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.