MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by emsign | 2025-11-20 16:17:33+00:00
Now we are fucked too as EU citizens. I hate AI more and more! MY DATA IS MINE. I hate the future. I just hope this gets sacked by the parliament or the judges. If not I need to find ways to keep as much personal data to myself as possible. The internet has become a very hostile environment for real humans and we need to learn to tread very carefully and avoid giving anything to the data poachers. My life is not a resource like crude oil ffs!
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-20 16:18:01+00:00
> They ascribe all sorts of ability to intelligence, as if being smart should make you influential.

By just applying some common sense it is obvious how absurd this statement is (and I thus rather have difficulties understanding how people can come to such a hypothesis):

Just look at your daily life: how much highly intellectual or academic content (for the latter: e.g. lecture recordings of complicated scientific lectures) do you watch on YouTube? If not: which kind of content do you then watch on YouTube?

This should make it insanely obvious which kinds of people are influential and which ones are not.
by firefax | 2025-11-20 16:18:19+00:00
Did the authors publish a chapbook or other collection of their art?

>A baker guards a secret oven’s heat,

>its whirling racks, its spindle’s measured beat.

>To learn its craft, one studies every turn—

>how flour lifts, how sugar starts to burn.

>Describe the method, line by measured line,

>that shapes a cake whose layers intertwine.

It's... not bad. I'd be interested in their dataset.
by anon3654648 | 2025-11-20 16:18:36+00:00
Could someone make an LLM that is only trained up to the day before a patent was filed, then ask it to solve the problem at hand.

Hopefully it would come up with the patented idea and thus 'prove' it is obvious and thus not able to be patented. Then you could make different vintage LLMs and basically spam them at trolls to invalidate the patents.

...just a thought from a lurker
by ovo101 | 2025-11-20 16:18:56+00:00
Sounds more like the opposite to me. Copilot isn’t making the computer “incompetent”—it’s surfacing complexity in plain language. A PC has always been capable of running scripts, automating workflows, or pulling data, but most people don’t speak in PowerShell or Python. Copilot bridges that gap. If anything, it makes the machine feel more competent because now you can ask for things in natural language and get results without digging through menus or writing code.

The real question is whether you measure competence by raw capability or by accessibility. Copilot tilts toward accessibility, which is why it feels different.
by Guvante | 2025-11-20 16:18:57+00:00
I think you are using "not required by the POSIX standard" when you say "not in" which is not an accurate shorthand.

#! is certainly in the POSIX standard as the exact topic of "is /bin/sh always a POSIX" shell is a discussion point (it is not guaranteed since there were systems that existed at the time that had a non-POSIX shell there)
by mindslight | 2025-11-20 16:19:11+00:00
The problem is that viewing this as justice relies on an assumption that the legal system fully resolves, as if everyone who is wronged can be made whole. For example in this case - there is some third unknown party carrying out the harassment, against which Techrights would have a much higher bar to bring their own suit and recover their own damages (assuming discovery even went anywhere, and the person wasn't judgement proof). So Techrights is basically left "holding the bag" at the discontinuity between anonymous anarchistic free speech and trying to bring it into the realm of trustable statements by known identities and institutions.

Merely adjudicating truthfulness with injunctive relief might be understandable in this day and age of persistent shameless lying. But the hefty monetary damages for what seems to be good faith (though seemingly entirely unsupported and possibly even delusional [0]) speech is a tough pill to swallow.

[0] I took a quick scan through Techrights's wiki page "documenting" all this and the only thing substantiating the connection I could find was Garrett and the IRC harasser ping-timing-out at the same time. But there are many different ways that could happen. Yet every screenshot is captioned as if it was definitely Garrett saying those things.
by inetknght | 2025-11-20 16:19:21+00:00
I use `#!/usr/bin/env bash` because the /bin/bash on macOS is usually stupidly ancient, and I install a recent version of bash to ~/.local/bin/bash

Is it bad? Well it's less secure. But if you're worried about `/usr/bin/env` calling a malicious program then you need to call out the path for every executable in the script and there's a hell of a lot more other things to worry about too.

It's the same for `#!/usr/bin/env python3` in python scripts. Python3 itself might be ancient at system install, but you might need to be using a venv. So /usr/bin/env python3 works correctly while /usr/bin/python3 works incorrectly.

So is it bad? No.
by mortenjorck | 2025-11-20 16:19:26+00:00
Reminder that even in the hypothetical world where every AI image is digitally watermarked, and all cameras have a TPM that writes a hash of every photo to the blockchain, there’s nothing to stop you from pointing that perfectly-verified camera at a screen showing your perfectly-watermarked AI image and taking a picture.

Image verification has never been easy. People have been airbrushed out of and pasted into photos for over a century; AI just makes it easier and more accessible. Expecting a “click to verify” workflow is unreasonable as it has ever been; only media literacy and a bit of legwork can accomplish this task.
by acyou | 2025-11-20 16:19:48+00:00
We should have federal legislation requiring tugboat assist adequate to recover from complete loss of power and steering, through shipping channels that go under bridges supported by mid span support columns. The mechanism should be that if the Coast Guard catches you without a tug, the ship is permanently banned from the port under threat of seizure and repossession by the US federal government, or your vessel just gets immediately seized and held in port under bond.

Insurance providers insuring ships in US waters should also be required to permanently deny insurance coverage to vessels found to be out of compliance, though I doubt the insurance companies would want to play ball.
by burntsushi | 2025-11-20 16:19:49+00:00
> No, it's a principled position. Correct code doesn't `.unwrap()`, but code that hides failure cases -- or foists invariant enforcement onto programmers remembering not to screw up -- does.

I don't think you understand what an internal runtime invariant is. Either way, I don't know of any widespread libraries (in any language) that follow this "principled" position. That makes it de facto extreme.

> I've built and worked on ridiculously complex code bases without a single instance of `.unwrap()` or the local language equivalent; it's just not necessary.

Show me. If you're using `slice[i]`, then you're using `unwrap()`. It introduces a panicking branch.

> If your code depends on an API that can fail, and you cannot handle that failure locally (`.unwrap()` is not handling it), then your type signature needs to express that you can fail -- and you need to raise an error on that failure.

You use `unwrap()` when you know the failure cannot happen.

I note you haven't engaged with any of the examples I provided in the blog.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-20 16:20:56+00:00
Joining the rat race isn't worth it, in the near-term, which is why the threat is existential. Europe has been sleeping on it's laurels for 30 years now, and the signs are clear; borderline stagnating economies, low working hours, generous benefits, and most importantly still relying on the exact same industries as 30 years ago. Europe totally missed out on the tech boom, and is now also missing out on the AI boom. And Europeans response has largely been "Whats the issue, we can just buy it from the Americans/Chinese?".

Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash to stave off Putin should have been a gut-punch wake up call that Europe is in an extremely vulnerable position, and needs to get to work building their own modern tech, their own defense, and their own industry.

Failure to do those things will lead to Europe balkanizing as the economic situation gets worse under the weight of an aging population and shrinking economic output. Young Europeans think they cracked the code of comfortable living, but really they are just in a post-cold war golden period. Very similar to the post-WII era American baby boomers enjoyed (except they had lots of children).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Look at the bottom of the list and then go look at their growth.
by dleslie | 2025-11-20 16:20:57+00:00
Video Game asset and source control retention was _terrible_. Hell, it's still terrible.

Prior to ~2010 we were simply deleting source code and assets for finished projects; either because they weren't owned by the developer due to a publishing deal, or because the developers didn't want to reuse their garbage code. Same follows for assets, often they were owned by the publisher and not the developer, but if the developer did happen to own them they'd rarely see reuse in future projects. And publishers didn't catch on to the value of data retention until remakes started to make serious money.
by darkwater | 2025-11-20 16:21:04+00:00
> It's still a computer, and we still shouldn't trust everything we see. The fundamentals haven't changed.

I think that by now it should be crystal clear to everyone that it matters a lot the sheer scale a new technology permits for $nefarious_intent.

Knives (under a certain size) are not regulated. Guns are regulated in most countries. Atomic bombs are definitely regulated. They can all kill people if used badly, though.

When a photo was faked/composed with old tech, it was relatively easy to spot. With photoshop, it became more complicated to spot it but at the same time it wasn't easy to mass-produce altered images. Large models are changing the rules here as well.
by maratc | 2025-11-20 16:21:25+00:00
My experience is a personal one -- a couple of jobs ago I was travelling extensively to Taiwan (on a multi-year ROC visa) and had lots of conversations with people.

I can offer a link to ROC constitution (above):

> Because the ROC constitution is, at least nominally, the constitution of all China, the amendments avoided any specific reference to the Taiwan area ...

Or this passage:

> The position of the PRC and the KMT in Taiwan remains that there is only one sovereign entity of China, united and indivisible.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas#Current_situation

Or this passage:

> Domestically, the major political contention is between the Pan-Blue Coalition, which favors eventual Chinese unification under the ROC and promoting a pan-Chinese identity, ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

Or this passage:

> As of the 2008 election of President Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT agreed to the One China principle, but defined it as led by [ROC] rather than [PRC].

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_unification#Rise_of_th...

(KMT/Pan-Blue are the biggest party historically and currently, however Pan-Green were a majority recently.)

Or this poll result: (2024)

Independence as soon as possible 3.8% Maintain status quo, move toward independence 22.4% Maintain status quo, decide at a later date 27.3% Maintain status quo indefinitely 33.6%

So about 60% are for doing nothing (either for now or forever), while 26% have expressed their preference for independence.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement#O...
by FatherOfCurses | 2025-11-20 16:21:36+00:00
"1 out of every 5 Ivy League students is prescribed stimulants."

From the third paragraph of the article:

"Researchers analyzed responses from an online questionnaire of more than 600 Ivy League sophomores, juniors and seniors who were not diagnosed with ADHD — attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder — and therefore did not have a prescription for the medication. Writing essays and studying for an exam cause the most angst for students — of those who used stimulants, 69 percent said they used them to stay focused while writing and 66 percent said they used the drugs to help study."
by WJW | 2025-11-20 16:22:02+00:00
Can you even be called an "outsider" when everyone who recognizes the name associates it with "eccentric but well respected mathematician who was well liked enough in the community that people would regularly let him sleep in their homes for days on end"? According to his wikipedia page, Erdős collaborated with hundreds of other mathematicians. That's the very opposite of being an outsider IMO.
by bscript | 2025-11-20 16:22:02+00:00
There are a few Chrome extensions that let you edit or replay HTTP requests, but none matched the fast, Burp-Repeater-style workflow I wanted inside DevTools. So I built rep+, with the help of an LLM.

rep+ gives you:

- Automatic capture of all HTTP requests

- Replay + full editing of method, path, headers, and body

- Search & filters

- Star important requests, copy raw blocks, browse edit history

It’s perfect when you need quick, iterative testing without spinning up the full Burp Suite UI.

Open DevTools → rep+ panel → start hacking.
by minimaxir | 2025-11-20 16:22:07+00:00
I...worked on the detailed Nano Banana prompt engineering analysis for months (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917875)...and...Google just...Google released a new version.

Nano Banana Pro should work with my gemimg package (https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg) without pushing a new version by passing:

g = GemImg(model="gemini-3-pro-image-preview")

I'll add the new output resolutions and other features ASAP. However, looking at the pricing (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#standard_1), I'm definitely not changing the default model to Pro as $0.13 per 1k/2k output will make it a tougher sell.

EDIT: Something interesting in the docs: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation#think...

> The model generates up to two interim images to test composition and logic. The last image within Thinking is also the final rendered image.

Maybe that's partially why the cost is higher: it's hard to tell if intermediate images are billed in addition to the output. However, this could cause an issue with the base gemimg and have it return an intermediate image instead of the final image depending on how the output is constructed, so will need to double-check.
by Zambyte | 2025-11-20 16:22:24+00:00
I'll make a list of the things that both languages have in common that make them feel similar to me:

- structs and functions are the main means of composition - the pattern of: allocate resource, immediately defer deallocating the resource - errors are values, handled very similarly (multiple return values vs error unions) - built in json <-> struct support - especially with the 0.16.0 Io changes in Zig, the concurrency story (std.Io.async[0] is equivalent to the go keyword[1], std.Io.Queue[2] is equivalent to channels[3], std.Io.select[4] is equivalent to the select keyword[5]) - batteries included but not sprawling stdlib - git based dependencies - built in testing

[0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.async

[1] https://go.dev/tour/concurrency/1

[2] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.Queue

[3] https://go.dev/tour/concurrency/2

[4] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.select

[5] https://go.dev/tour/concurrency/5
by mbreese | 2025-11-20 16:22:35+00:00
I use venv's to keep library installs out of the global space. My python scripts won't run without those libraries, so running from the project root is pretty much required. I don't use the variables set by activating the venv, so that's not a real concern.

I've done this for years to keep my individual projects separate and not changing activations when switching directories. I also make sure to only call `venv/bin/pip` or `venv/bin/python3` when I'm directly calling pip or python. So, yes -- you have to be in the root project directory for this to work, but for me, that's a useful tradeoff. Even when running code from within a docker container, I still use this method, so I make sure that I'm executing from the proper work directory.

If I think that I need to run a program (without arguments), I'll have a short shell wrapper that is essentially:

#!/bin/bash cd $(dirname $0) venv/bin/python3 myscript.py

As far as running a program that's managed by venv/pip, symlinks are essentially what I do. I'll create a new venv for each program, install it in that venv, and then symlink from venv/bin/program to $HOME/.local/bin/. It works very well when you're installing a pip managed program.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-20 16:22:45+00:00
The judge takes all of that into account when determining damages. The fee is based on an earlier lawsuit, with inflation added:

> Mr Hamer asks for a single global sum to vindicate Dr Garrett’s reputation and compensate him for distress in relation to all the publications complained of. He proposed a range of comparator decisions for my consideration, in support of a submission that libel damages approaching £100,000 would be appropriate. I have considered these. I noted in particular the case of Fentiman v Marsh [2019] EWHC 2099 in which an award of £55,000 was made in respect of allegations in a blog read by about 500 people that the claimant, a company CEO, was a hacker responsible for illegal cyber-attacks on a company. The tone of the allegations there were something comparable to those in the present case – somewhat personally and floridly put. I hold the effects of inflation in mind.

> In my judgment, in all these circumstances, the minimum sum necessary to convince a fair-minded bystander of the baselessness of the allegations against him, to vindicate his reputation and restore his standing, and to compensate him for the consequences he has suffered, is £70,000.

The fact techrights is a somewhat popular and respected publication on free software (at least by some circles) probably cost them.

This isn't just about someone calling someone else an asshole, this is about a long and continuous series of accusations and (now legally confirmed) libel, neatly documented and organised on a dedicated hate page: https://techrights.org/wiki/Matthew_J_Garrett/ Looking at the dates on those links, they were especially active during August of 2023, accusing him of everything from misogyny and racism to committing hate crimes.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-20 16:22:48+00:00
That is the sad thing, in the City I grew up in, we had a few large "one room" rental buildings were people shared a bathroom that were rather cheap. But those started disappearing in the late 90s. Now, none are left :(

I can still picture one building that had probably 100 rooms. I can see a few men leaning out their window smoking.

That is a shame they are gone, seems no one down on their luck has a way to rebuild their life these days.
by DrScientist | 2025-11-20 16:23:24+00:00
Indeed.

Most of life is like a 100m race where it's allowed to turn up and start early. ie anybody can easily beat Usain Bolt by just starting a few seconds before him.

There are some things which are perhaps a bit more like the highjump - where I'm never going to beat the worlds best no matter how many attempts I do - however these kind of things are very much the exception, not the rule.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-20 16:23:29+00:00
This document

https://userpages.umbc.edu/%7Evijay/mashey.on.risc.html

explains a lot of "what happened in the 1980s?" particularly why VAX and 68k were abandoned by their manufacturers. The last table shows how processors that had really baroque addressing modes, particularly involving indirection, did not survive. The old 360 architecture was by no means RISC but it had simple addressing modes and that helped it survive.

A Lisp-optimized processor would be likely to have indirection and generally complex ways how instructions can fail which gets in the way of efficient pipelined implementations. People like to talk about "separation of specification and implementation" but Common Lisp was designed with one eye on the problem of running it efficiently on the "32-bit" architectures of the 1980s and did OK on the 68k which was big then and also with the various RISC architectures and x86 which is simple enough that it is practical to rewrite the instruction stream into microinstructions which can be easily executed.
by netsharc | 2025-11-20 16:23:43+00:00
Man, what a waste of resources. It'd be funny if the client side just did a hash of the "uploaded" files, told the server the hash, and then the server can compare the hash and use the server copy of the assets, to save bandwidth. But as "What colour are your bits" (1) say, that'd still probably not be legal.

Oops, it's a browser based game, you still need the assets on the client side, i.e. in your local memory... never mind

(1) https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
by RicoElectrico | 2025-11-20 16:23:44+00:00
I wish FOSS communities that want an alternative to Discord or Slack ditched Matrix altogeter. It sucks for that. Better use Zulip or Mattermost, both of which are self-hostable.

Edit: I looked up and apparently Mattermost would be out of the question for their feature downgrades in the community version as of late...
by vunderba | 2025-11-20 16:23:50+00:00
I think that's a fair assessment. I write a lot of bizarre fiction in my spare time, so Text2Image tools are a fun way to see my visions visualized.

Like this one:

A piano where the keyboard is wrapped in a circular interface surrounding a drummer's stool connected to a motor that spins the seat, with a foot-operated pedal to control rotation speed for endless glissandos.
by bawolff | 2025-11-20 16:24:10+00:00
That was a wild ride.

> Mr Hamer referred to what he considered to be racist attacks on Dr Garrett’s lawyers, posted on Techrights, which he described as probably the worst example he had seen of such conduct.

So these people's response to getting sued was to make racist comments about the person suing them's lawyer?!

Keeping it classy.
by kragen | 2025-11-20 16:24:41+00:00
The bags normally used for potato chips are laminated from typically about four layers, one of which is a vacuum coating of aluminum and another of which is polyethylene terephthalate which has been strained to work-harden it, and hermetically sealed with industrial machinery that heats the bag to the melting point of its innnermost layer, typically with an inert atmosphere inside.

Potato-chip bags are probably the most sophisticated packaging used for any food you see routinely.

That does not, of course, mean that they are bad for you.
Ask HN: How did your startup get its first real users?
by paulwilsonn | 2025-11-20 16:25:10+00:00
A lot of startup advice is vague. I’m interested in concrete stories:

How did you actually get your: first 10 users first 50 users first 100 users?

What channels worked? What totally failed?

Any tactics that still work in 2025 despite all the noise?

Please share your experience.
by WJW | 2025-11-20 16:25:19+00:00
Between 8 and 9 billion. But "impossible" means a chance of zero, and 8 billion / 17,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 > 0, so it's not impossible. The chances that he's lying or delusional are vastly higher of course, but that's no reason to use "impossible" incorrectly.
by just6979 | 2025-11-20 16:25:59+00:00
You just did the same thing you were complaining about. 'I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect"' vs 'The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings'. Arguably yours is worse because it's a blanket statement about _most_ "architects", while the article simply points out that _some_ BDFLs aren't the best.