MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-25 13:46:25+00:00
Lots of text content on your site for AI to read, describing your product and why it is best in every task. Comparison blog articles and similar are loved by AI.

Reddit shilling, but with content that tries to very specifically fit questions that people will ask AI. If there aren’t a lot of sources available, you can get AI to play back your desired answer almost verbatim.

These are probably the state of the art of methods which are not straight up blackhat spammy stuff.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-25 13:46:33+00:00
I don't see anything weird, but perhaps I'm missing something. Try sending an email to dang/tomhow hn@ycombinator.com and ask for advice.

You have a free plan, with some limitations like "only 1 bin". I'll repeat patio11 advice and suggest to add a big orange pancake button that says "try for free now". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/01/inaugural-kalzumeus-pod...
Show HN: Dnd Character Creator
by ethanYIAI | 2025-11-25 13:46:37+00:00
DND Character Creator is an AI-powered tool that instantly generates complete Dungeons & Dragons 5e characters. It produces ability scores, skills, class features, backgrounds, personality traits, and rich backstories with minimal input. Perfect for new players, busy DMs, and creators seeking fast inspiration for campaigns or one-shots.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-25 13:46:57+00:00
> What exactly are you trying to prove here? Preemptive precautionary measures are definitely warranted in case of projects like these if the authorities demonstrate any sort of hostilities - especially from one with prior history of taking such actions.

It's pretty obvious from the start what I'm saying.

GrapheneOS is saying France is threating them and wanting a backdoor in the OS. This is absolutely not the case. A couple of articles talking about your project in far right newspapers one antidrug investigator saying they will indict the project if there is a link with organised crime is not at all the same thing that being threatened by a country, let alone being act to compromise your product when there is zero legal basis for anyone in France to do so.

> Unlike the laws of physics, human laws encompass deliberate ambiguity meant for them to be escaped (with loopholes) or to be stretched as far as possible, without raising any alarms at the time of instituting them. The main purpose of the courts is to interpret the laws somewhat consistently in the face of such ambiguities. I can easily see how this particular law can be interpreted liberally enough to mandate backdoors. Your pedantic interpretation is not something they are going to care about or abide by.

There is no loophole nor pedantic interpretation here. France has no law compeling software developers to add backdoor to their product period. Quoting another unrelated law doesn't change this fact.

> This has been the norm with even non-authoritarian administrations for ages. But the entire EU has been demonstrably gravitating towards this dystopian reality with their attempted chat control law.

You are arguing in the same sentence that Europe is untruthworthy because they are trying to pass a law allowing chat interception and that law actually doesn't matter. So what is it? The truth is France respects its own laws and there are currently no law allowing backdooring. The reality of the evolving European regulation is a separate issue entirely.

> Do you want the Graphene team to ignore any such possibilities and just stay put? In which world does that make any sense? And what's your point in brushing aside practically everyone else's concerns?

GrapheneOS is free to do whatever they want. I'm free to point out that their current scare mongering regarding France is baseless.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-25 13:46:57+00:00
It’s obviously pretty hard to figure out since no one has landed anything. I was waiting for something like the iPhone for ten years before it came out. Microsoft over there wondering why no one likes copilot all over their OS.

What do you foresee that’s obvious that humane.ai, Microsoft and a dozen other companies are missing oh oracle of AI product awesomeness?
by tene80i | 2025-11-25 13:47:15+00:00
“Nannying” as a pejorative is a thought-terminating cliché.

Sometimes, at scale, interventions save lives. You can thumb your nose at that, but you have to accept the cost in lives and say you’re happy with that. You can’t just say everybody knows best and the best will occur if left to the level of individual decisions. You are making a trade-off.

See also: seatbelts, speed limits, and the idea of law generally, as a constraint on individual liberty.
by ctippett | 2025-11-25 13:47:38+00:00
This is very well done.

I wouldn't and don't consider this to be AI slop. The author's own reflection captures perfectly my own feelings on the matter... intent does matter.

I think what gets lost in a lot of the AI media discussion is that intent matters. I find auto-generated slop-farm TikToks just as dystopic as the most fervent doomer, but I also remember when I was a 10-year-old kid making movies with my parents’ VHS camcorder and how much fun I would have had learning how to make things if I’d had tools like this.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-25 13:47:44+00:00
The lower COL areas are lower because they're less economically viable, and therefore less desirable. The job opportunities and income will, more or less, match the lower COL.

Theres some exceptions, like rural doctors can make more more than city doctors due to high demand. But the less "physical" your job is, the rarer these exceptions become.

For software devs, you can move out of silicon valley. Maybe to Texas. And now those 1.5 million dollar homes are only 700,000 dollars. But your salary will reflect that.
by paxys | 2025-11-25 13:49:24+00:00
Even if you are okay with AI generated code in the PR, the fact that the community is taking time to engage with the author and asking reasonable questions/offering reasonable feedback and the author is simply copy-pasting walls of AI-generated text in response warrants an instant ban.

If you want to behave like a spam bot don't complain when people treat you like a spam bot.
by Bender | 2025-11-25 13:50:15+00:00
I think for this to be useful and assuming people wanted this then dang may have to first block VPN's and then country would have to be learned after 99%+ of VPN's are gone as many accounts could have been created using a VPN.

If not blocking VPN's, then display "Possible VPN".

Perhaps to get some adoption, make it opt-in and also let users enable flag-display at the risk of giving off 4chan vibes.
by allanmacgregor | 2025-11-25 13:50:27+00:00
You have nothing on the website that entices the user to start a free trial, no pricing, no examples, you listed backed by research of yale usc but there are no links to said research, this looks like AI Slop at best; Scam at worst.

4.8 star global App Store rating except is not listed on any apps stores is it?
by AkshatM | 2025-11-25 13:51:12+00:00
Before the outage, Cloudflare had Cloudbleed: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c...

The move to Rust was partly motivated because it prevented that entire class of errors. No more out-of-bound reads, or data races. The compiler audits these missed spots.

Now, you could say a managed memory language would suffice as well. Perhaps it could. But we needed performance, and no memory-managed language met those performance needs then or today.

I get you're making the case that Rust isn't perfect for all use cases, but Cloudflare's scenario is the exact corner case your argument falls apart in: we needed fast and safe in an environment where not being fast or safe had real business consequences, and nothing else except Rust gave both.
by Anamon | 2025-11-25 13:51:41+00:00
...which almost everybody agrees is a bubble, wondering not if, but when it will burst.

Investing in AI companies is just about the last piece of advice I'd give someone who's struggling financially.

The billionaires will largely be fine. They hedge their bets and have plenty of spare assets on the side. Little guy investors? Not so much. They'll go from worrying about their retirement plan to worrying about becoming homeless.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-11-25 13:51:43+00:00
True; in fact mortality in 17th-century London was so bad that it required a net flow of migrants just to keep the population stable. Most of all, you were at much higher risk of plague during the plague epidemics.

But rural Europe was no picnic either - you would still be likely to die in all sorts of painful ways, from sepsis, diseases, accidents, childbirth, etc. And my god, it would have been dull.

Honestly, if you forced me to go back to the 17th century, I would probably take the risk and live in London. At least there is the possibility of crossing paths with Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, the early Royal Society etc. while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a freshly-printed news sheet.
Can application layer improve local model output quality?
by acro-v | 2025-11-25 13:52:59+00:00
Hi -

I am building a terminal-native tool for code generation, and one of the recent updates was to package a local model (Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, downloads on the first try) for those users who do not want their code uploaded to third-party servers.

Initial response from users to this addition was favorable - but I have my doubts: the model is fairly basic and does not compare in quality to online offerings.

So - I am planning to improve RAG capabilities for building a message with relevant source file chunks, add a planning call, add validation loop, maybe have a multi-sample with re-ranking, etc.: all those techniques that are common and when implemented properly - could improve quality of output.

So - the question: I believe (hope?) that with all those things implemented - 7B can be bumped approximately to quality of a 20B, do you agree that's possible or do you think it would be a wasted effort and that kind of improvement would not happen?

The source is here - give it a star if you like what you see: https://github.com/acrotron/aye-chat
by fxtentacle | 2025-11-25 13:53:02+00:00
"This seems to be largely a copy of the work done in OxCaml by @mshinwell and @spiessimon"

"The webpage credits another author: Native binary debugging for OCaml (written by Claude!) @joelreymont, could you please explain where you obtained the code in this PR?"

That pretty much sums up the experience of coding with LLMs. They are really damn awesome at regurgitating someone else's source code. And they have memorized all of GitHub. But just like how you can get sued for using Mickey Mouse in your advertisements (yes, even if AI drew it), you can get sued for stealing someone else's source code (yes, even if AI wrote it).
by simonask | 2025-11-25 13:53:51+00:00
From TFA:

> C++ is often described as complex, hard to learn, and unsafe. That reputation is undeserved. The language itself is not unsafe. On the contrary: it is precise, honest, and consistent. What is unsafe is how it is used if it is misunderstood or if one remains in old patterns.

I think this take needs to stop. It’s a longer way to say “skill issue”. Meanwhile, decades of industry experience have shown that the governing principles of even modern C++ make it incredibly hard (expensive) to deliver high quality software. Not impossible - there’s lots of examples - but unreasonably hard.

C++ is fundamentally unsafe, because that’s how the language works, and if you think otherwise, you don’t know C++. There are patterns and paradigms that people use to limit the risk (and the size of the impact crater), and that’s helpful, but usually very difficult to get right if you also want any of the benefits of using C++ in the first place.

Certain people will disagree, but I surmise that they haven’t actually tried any alternative. Instead they are high on the feeling of having finally grokked C++, which is no small feat, and I know because I’ve been there. But we have to stop making excuses. The range of problems where C++ is unequivocally the superior solution is getting smaller.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-25 13:53:53+00:00
Here we find the split hair.

Privacy first or conscientious exposition of the meta.

I have been advocating that privacy isn’t anyone’s right, it is anyone’s responsibility. Only for the self obsessed to pike my karma and rail their venomous hatred of platforms they use not respecting their identities by ignoring them properly.

I would love to see what you’ve described, though the caveats include those of increased awareness grappling with a whole lot more going on than just the loose strings it has become most popular to pull upon.

And as soon as you shine a light, any creeping critters will scurry, innovating faster to compensate than the mob of yourselves are capable of realizing. The cycle of anonymity and wtf continues to churn. An ouroboros.
by cxr | 2025-11-25 13:54:09+00:00
> No one has made a case that "main" is a bad name. Because this isn't a real case […] they know it is a good change, and they actively seek to keep the world worse

It's a bad name and a bad change. I won't be using it. Not because "master" is good (I also won't be using "master"), but because "main" is bad—even worse than if they'd started referring to it in the documentation as the "default integration branch" and so named it "int".

I'd sooner support changing "master" to "margarita" than changing it to "main".
by lesuorac | 2025-11-25 13:54:09+00:00
How drunk on American exceptionalism are you that you can't think if the US does something then somebody else does too?

Why would twitter need to whitelist US influence campaigns? Because they're banning foreign ones! Reading between the lines is going to be a very useful skill in your career; don't just take things at face value, exaime what the thing means for its surroundings.
by troupo | 2025-11-25 13:54:11+00:00
Literally hundreds of rocket attacks per month, including foreign rockets.

"Oh it's just a single grenade in Jerusalem or something"

Iron Dome literally built to protect from hundreds of rocket attacks.

"Oh, it's not even close to scratching the deaths from Israeli bombs"

A well-organised organisation easily orchestrating the attacks, and with a funding at lower estimates of at least $200 million

"Oh, it's just militants with handguns. It's just $100 million, not that much" [1].

> I can’t even imagine how people keep repeating that.

Yes, yes I can't imagine how people keep being Hamas apologists in the face of actual reality.

[1] My original comment said "I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas had total funding near the same level as IDF.". This is definitely not true. But man. To dismiss the lower estimate of ~$200 million dollars as "it's nothing" and to pretend that Hamas is neither well funded nor well organised is just absolute insanity.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-11-25 13:54:26+00:00
> And sticking with that example, once it becomes TCP's job to handle packet loss due to transmission errors (instead of just congestion), things go south pretty quickly.

Outside of wireless links (where FEC of some degree is necessary regardless) this is mostly because TCP’s checksum is so weak. QUIC for example handles this much better, since the packet’s authenticated encryption doubles as a robust error detecting code. And unlike TLS over TCP, the connection is resilient to these failures: a TCP packet that is corrupted but passes the TCP checksum will kill the TLS connection on top of it instead of retransmitting.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-25 13:55:06+00:00
Kagi is entitled to their opinion. Perhaps worth noting is by that metric the original Broccoli Man video is also slop; it was generated using stock characters, voice synthesis, and auto puppeteering. The only creative input the original "artist" had was writing the text script and signing off on the final output.

Personal opinion, using modern AI slop generation to recreate AI slop from a previous generation of the technology is pretty good art.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-25 13:55:25+00:00
ChromeOS already had an android adapter layer and apps would run windowed, with an option to respect the original size or allow arbitrary resize.

I assume we're in the same situation with Samsung's Dex ?

It worked decently well, the main issues were unrelated to the handling in itself (the Bluetooth stack was dead for android apps, trying the smart appliance stuff was just a fool's errand)
by tantalor | 2025-11-25 13:55:28+00:00
> I don't see anything interesting or new

What I find so interesting about this is how much is NOT new. It is a highly faithful reproduction of the beloved original.

The difference is the voices and visuals are much higher quality, and there are some added effects and cutaways that are nice touches.

I would still share the original video because it is a useful cultural artifact and teaching tool (as ridiculous as it is), and I would be happy to share this version at the same time, just because it is higher quality.
by ben_w | 2025-11-25 13:56:03+00:00
Been thinking about this for years.

It's easy to think that any % > 0 is a sign of something having gone wrong. My default guess used to be that, too.

But imagine a perfect health system: when all other causes of death are removed, what else remains?

If by "terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care" you mean they've not yet solved aging, not yet cured all diseases, and not yet developed instant-response life-saving kits for all accidents up to and including total body disruption, then yes, any less than 100% is a sign of terrible inadequacies.
DateAtlas – Maps every date and time to a unique spot on Earth
by forge_craft | 2025-11-25 13:57:22+00:00
I divided the timeline into blocks, then subdivided them by hours, minutes, and seconds. Each 256-second interval (~4 min) maps to specific coordinates. The result? Approximately every 2.5 square meters on Earth represents a unique timestamp. Check it out: https://dateatlas.onrender.com/
by vee-kay | 2025-11-25 13:57:26+00:00
In my country, no firearm can be issued to any civilian (certainly not a minor), without verification and license from police.

In Texas, there is no minimum age for purchasing ammunition beyond federal limits, no requirement for an ammunition seller to keep a record of the purchaser, and no specific license to buy or sell ammunition, according to the Giffords Law Center.

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/uvalde-shooter-had-1600-...

Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde school shooter, legally purchased two AR platform rifles Ramos got his guns legally through Oasis Outback, a Uvalde sporting goods store and federal firearms licensee, according to published reports. He also purchased hundreds of rounds of ammunition, on his 18th birthday.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/25/us/uvalde-texas-school-sh...

I know the USA has a bad habit of buying things on credit, but firearms & ammo should never be allowed to be purchased on credit. Let it be purchased only after a verification and license from police, and only via debit card or bank transaction with proper legal paper trail, not credit or cash. And any firearm and ammo purchase should be ratified with local police, so they know if someone is making a suspicious purchase.
by _kb | 2025-11-25 13:58:21+00:00
There was a great conversation with Matt Godbolt on CoRecursive recently [1]. It was a bit of a dive into how some of those abstractions are a lie and, particularly in early game dev, how you can create magic by realising that then exploit how the hardware actually works. Highly recommend a listen.

[1]: https://corecursive.com/godbolt-rule-matt-godbolt/
by marksun130 | 2025-11-25 13:58:27+00:00
Hmmm, I don't remember mentioning 'immoral' in my post. As for the decision on ethics and literally everything, I have literally been waiting for people all year to 'be ready' to work on this. But I am now tired of waiting and decided to just out with it. I believe things will work out well eventually.

The point is not so much about immortality or all-powerful beings as it is about giving humanity another kind of existence we have not had before, but which appear very plausible to me. So we take all the best things we have discovered/learned from our lives and try to redesign human life the best way we know.

If anything is worth doing, this is worth doing also.
by gsgermanok | 2025-11-25 13:58:47+00:00
As developers, we often debate whether tests should be clever and optimized, or simple and easy to understand. After years of working with large codebases, I’ve learned that clarity always wins. In my new article, I explore why readable, expressive specs lead to better collaboration, faster debugging, and healthier codebases — and when small optimizations can still be useful.

If you want to write tests that truly help your team, not confuse them, this is for you.
by hgomersall | 2025-11-25 13:59:15+00:00
If you are waiting for a hardware interrupt to happen based on something external happening, then you might use async. The benefit is primarily to do with code structure - you write your code such that the next thing to happen only happens when the interrupt has triggered, without having to manually poll completion.

You might have a mechanism for scheduling other stuff whilst waiting for the interrupt (like Tokio's runtime), but even that might be strictly serial.
by dhx | 2025-11-25 13:59:34+00:00
It might have a minor beneficial impact to tourism in Saint Barthelemy and Norfolk Island from geeks wanting a trendy new account registered in a territory with fewer than 1000 IPv4 addresses allocated.[1]

A more useful addition would be a contributions calendar similar to GitHub's [2] but focused on which time zones the user is active within, and importantly, the latency of the user's replies. It's trivial to fake geographic location observed through source IP addresses (or even RTT multilateration) but much harder to fake time zones a user is active within, particularly if monitoring latency of replies.

edit: To further clarify, I don't think a contributions calendar would be beneficial to HN either. I've never cared to think about the country a commenter resides in, and don't care about username/real name either unless the commenter is appealing to their own authority (e.g. "I am the author of this software"). Even then, the usefulness of an appeal to own authority is often limited to the ability to reverse lookup the user's personal website (which itself is proven to be notable from other sources) for a link back to their HN profile.

[1] https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/cont...
by sofixa | 2025-11-25 14:00:01+00:00
> Will I be able to take screenshots at will on MY computer, or get a black screen because Google decides so?

It's not Google, it's the application vendor that decides so. And as annoying as I find it when I want to screenshot something from my bank app, the reasons behind that feature being available are pretty good.

> Given what Google has done on the mobile space

You seem to be missing the nuance that as annoying as some of those Google provided Android hoops are, they are necessary for the wider security posture of the average user (and there are more average users than techies that need to install random .apks) and, very very importantly, Google allow you to skip most of them if you know what you're doing. Considering the competition in the mobile space, it really isn't even close in terms of openness.
by fredoralive | 2025-11-25 14:00:43+00:00
Clicking the "100%" next to the zoom slider gets another Word 6.0 refugee, complete with nice pixel art 4:3 CRT.

In Windows 10, Wordpad and Paint can both bring up the classic Windows 3.x colour picker Window, complete with the inscrutable Custom Colours bit. Although Wordpad is gone in Windows 11 and I don't think the Windows 11 Paint has the classic picker. It still (IIRC) has a colour arrangement in its new picker that is based on the classic pickers default colour set. Which were chosen because they dither nicely to 16 colours with the Windows 3.x dither algorithm.