MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-20 04:19:51+00:00
Do you have a document explaining all of the rules? (I think it is unfortunate that too many games do not make the rules clear by writing long documents about their working. How should you know how to do it if you do not know its working?)

(I had made a puzzle game engine that does not require a web browser nor an internet connection, and has no spyware or analytics or telemetry or anything else like that. Some puzzles can be made by it including stuff similar to sokoban.)
by lumost | 2025-11-20 04:19:57+00:00
no - this is a lesson an engineer learns early on. The time spent making the tool may still dwarf the time savings you gain from the tool. I may make tools for problems that only ever occurred or will occur once. That single incident may have occurred before I made the tool.

This also makes it harder to prioritize work in an organization. If work is perceived as "cheap" then it's easy to demand teams prioritize features that will simply never be used. Or to polish single user experiences far beyond what is necessary.
by zrobotics | 2025-11-20 04:20:40+00:00
I would argue that your 2 first examples are exceedingly apt. Sure, sculptors can turn clay into works of art and masons can build cathedrals. However, a potter can throw a basic jug to hold wine that doesn't have any care out into it besides being functional, and a mason can build a retaining wall.

These second examples aren't any less valuable, they solve real problems and improve people's lives. However, they aren't really art. Writing code is the same thing. I'm not creating art when I hack together yet another CRUD app that is basically plumbing together existing modules with a tiny bit of logic sprinkled on top, but it improves how our business functions and makes the employees who use the software more productive. That isn't art, but it's useful.

There is code out there that is art. But most programmers aren't writing it. We're writing the boring everyday stuff. Very few masons built cathedrals, but building a retaining wall is useful too.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-11-20 04:21:04+00:00
AI is not overhyped. It's like saying going to the moon is overhyped.

First of all this AI stuff is next level. It's as great, if not greater than going to space or going to the moon.

Second the rate at which is improving makes it such that the hype is relevant and realistic.

I think what's throwing people off are two things. First people are just over exposed to AI. So the overexposure is causing people to feel AI is boring and useless slop. Investments are heavy into AI but the people who throw that money around are a minority, overall the general public is actually UNDER hyping AI. Look at everyone on this thread. Everyone and I mean Everyone isn't overly optimistic about AI. instead the irony is... Everyone and I mean everyone again strangely thinks the world is overhyped about AI and they are wrong. This thread and practically every thread on HN is a microcosm of the world and the sentiment is decidedly against AI. Think about it like this, if Elon Musk invented a car that cost 1$ and this car could travel at FTL speeds to anywhere in the universe, than interstellar travel will be routine and boring within a year. People will call it overhyped.

Second the investment and money spent on AI is definitely overhyped. Right? Think about it. If we quantify the utility and achievement of what AI can currently do and what it's projected to achieve the math works out. If you quantify the profitability of AI the math suddenly doesn't work out.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-11-20 04:21:33+00:00
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.

I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-20 04:21:48+00:00
Even if it was 4s, you can always parallelize the frames to do it “realtime”, just the latency for the output will be 4s (provided you can get a cluster with 120 or 240 GPUs to do 4s of frames going in parallel (if it’s 30ms per image then you only need 2 GPUs to do 60fps on a video stream).
by foresto | 2025-11-20 04:22:13+00:00
I think current Element versions accept either a recovery key or recovery passphrase in the same input field, so there's no getting it wrong. Since you seem focused on UI, it's worth noting that Element X (their beta mobile app) has a greatly simplified interface; their team clearly has been working to make it easier.

Also, other clients exist.

For whatever it's worth, I've been using Matrix for about five years, including some of its roughest times. I seldom see errors these days, but I can understand how folks who were frustrated with earlier iterations would still be soured to it. Such is the nature of an ambitious work in progress, I suppose.

I use it because there is nothing else with the combination of features that are most important to me, and because (despite my gripes) I can see slow and steady improvement. I think it's moving in the right direction overall. I could picture introducing family members to it once Matrix 2.0 is released and the implementations shake out any early problems.
by CMay | 2025-11-20 04:23:36+00:00
The technology is amazing, but Microsoft has no imagination in the way they try to make use of it. It's sad. It also legitimately hurts society that they are further blurring the line between what is an offline and online experience in Windows, which I fully and openly reject in the strongest of terms.

Also, Co-pilot objectively sucks and is a lying disinformation machine that has rarely helped me with anything.

Trust is Microsoft's greatest asset and they don't seem to have any champions inside the company that can tell these people they are destroying the company's trust.

Bing has been broken for a year now and nobody has fixed it. ATROCIOUSLY broken. That hurts trust.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-11-20 04:24:21+00:00
Dear mr microsoft AI CEO, why dont you pass my message to the higher ups will ya? Make a decent operating system that runs on modern hardware with me the end user in full control of what gets installed and what doesnt. make a single scrollable screen that is 100 pages long for all i care where i get to choose what programs are installed, what permissions are required by each program, what telemetry options are enabled by default for each program and give me the ability to turn everything off if I must. I must be able to uninstall notepad and the Edge browser or even prevent them from being installed in the first place. After you get this much done, why dont we talk about your little AI features then?
by mikeocool | 2025-11-20 04:24:31+00:00
That’s a great quote —- when you hire a “creative” to do a job (ie photographer, designer, etc) in area where you aren’t an expert, the conversation of what you want usually starts with similar existing work that you like.

A good creative will take that as a starting point, apply their skills and vision to it, and give you something that solves your specific problem in a unique way, often far better than whatever you had imagined.

In my experience, if you do a similar expertise with AI, it just gives you a facsimile of the inspiration you initially provided and not much more.
by datenyan | 2025-11-20 04:24:39+00:00
> Sticking with just the Gmail interface (or whatever) is so limiting

Perhaps it's the fact that I grew up with Gmail throughout my education (and now my career), but most local clients lack one key feature - quick move!

My entire workflow around emails is based around opening & reading them, and then using the "Quick Move" button in Gmail to move it into a specific folder by typing the first few letters of the folder and hitting enter.

I know there are extensions for Thunderbird like Quick Folder Move [0], but I find these can be buggy, slow, etc. I presume these are just the realities of dealing with email providers who'd prefer you use their webmail clients rather than Thunderbird et al.

[0] https://services.addons.thunderbird.net/eN-US/thunderbird/ad...
by dasil003 | 2025-11-20 04:25:13+00:00
Automating away software engineering entirely is nothing new. It goes all the way back to BASIC and COBOL, and later visual programming tools, Microsoft Access, etc. There have been innumerable attempts to do somehow get by without need those pedantic and difficult programmers and all their annoying questions and nit picking.

But here's the thing: the hard part of programming was never really syntax, it was about having the clarity of thought and conceptual precision to build a system that normal humans find useful despite the fact they will never have the patience to understand let alone debug failures. Modern AI tools are just the next step to abstracting away syntax as a gatekeeper function, but the need for precise systemic thinking is as glaringly necessary as ever.

I won't say AI will never get there—it already surpasses human programmers in many of the mechanical and rote knowledge of programing language arcana—but it it still is orders of magnitude away from being able to produce a useful system when specified by someone who does not think like a programmer. Perhaps it will get there. But I think the barrier at that point will be the age old human need to have a throat to choke when things go sideways. Those in power know how to control and manipulate humans through well-understood incentives, and this applies all the way to the highest levels of leadership. No matter how smart or competent AI is, you can't just drop it into those scenarios. Business leaders can't replace human accountability with an SLA from OpenAI, it just doesn't work. Never say never I suppose, but I'd be willing to bet the wheels come off modern civilization long before the skillset of senior software engineers becomes obsolete.
Ask HN: Git Mirrors. Who's running one? What repos are you mirroring?
by gooob | 2025-11-20 04:25:37+00:00
I started an effort a few months ago to mirror some essential git repos from github in case github ever goes down or microsoft decides to do some shenanigans.

What repos would you like to mirrored?

And do you know of any existing good mirrors out there that host good repos?
by jmyeet | 2025-11-20 04:27:18+00:00
The irony here is that the QAnon people were right, just not in the way they thought they were. There's no child trafficking pizzeria where Democrats were using "cp" to mean, well, something that isn't "cheese pizza". That's all crazy.

I also don't believe Epstein was murdered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's no such evidence of the murder claims. More to the point, the onus is on people making such claims to provide the evidence, not everyone else to disprove it.

But Robert Maxwell's history is well-documented and verifiable. And there's so much evidence that Epstein was mysteriously well-connected. The jobs he got. A match teacher at a prestigious school without a college degree. Power of attorney over Leslie Wexner's assets. The access he had to the wealthy, world leaders and academics. The fact that nobody really knows how he made his money. He's been dubbed a financier but this just isn't documented. There are thousands of bank accounts that haven't been scrutinized for where money was going and why.

And of course Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking people to... absolutely no one. Nobody has been named let alone charged. Her conditions on jail aren't appropriate for someone with her charges. She has a bunch of privileges in a Club Fed prison she shouldn't be in. The president fired the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York so only his former personal lawyers met with Maxwell for a proffer session.

And of course the connections to intelligence agencies and certain governments is both entirely believable and it fits a ton of evidence. There are credible claims why this is why he got the most lenient sweetheart plea agreement in 2006 despite Palm Beach police having the testimony of dozens of underage victims.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-11-20 04:27:37+00:00
I have been one of the small inventors who wrote patents and ultimately sold them to a company that makes most of its money suing over patents.

Patents are a form of business insurance you can get on expensive R&D work. When you go into the market to sell your products, your marketing material and the function of your product naturally leaks how it works. Motivated competitors can then reverse-engineer what you did or otherwise figure out how to enter the market that you revealed was valuable. If they do it by actually out-innovating you, your patents don't really protect you, but if they just take what you're doing, the patent is there so you can claim the fruits of your labor regardless. In general, you cash in on this insurance contract by either contracting with lawyers to sue the infringers (usually on contingency or with litigation financing to remove the cash cost) or by selling your patent portfolio to someone who will sue the infringers.

In return for this insurance contract, you have to publicly disclose the details of your inventions in a way that a motivated party can read and understand (it's patentese, not English, but you can decipher it if you know the language). It also frees you up to publish internal details through other fora like scientific journals because this disclosure becomes pure upside (raising your company's reputation) rather than making you balance that upside against the downside of revealing information. Google is a good example of a firm that does a lot of balancing there: they publish a lot of their old, antiquated work while keeping the new stuff secret because it's mostly software and software is mostly unpatentable. In electrical engineering, small companies are much more likely to publish a lot more details on their newest devices because their devices are usually patented.

On HN, people mostly think about software patents. Many of these are stupid patents, and almost all of them have been invalidated through a decision called Alice Corp. vs CLS Bank. The digital shopping cart is one of these patents that Alice invalidated. By value, most patent litigation is about drugs, and after that you have things like computer hardware. The patent system really isn't for the HN crowd, and it really doesn't make sense for these software patents to be a thing - there's usually no expensive R&D to insure, and you have to write your patent before finding out if you have PMF.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-11-20 04:27:41+00:00
Very good point.

Everyone I knew while growing up was in the white pages (parents) with home address, not just phone number.

The early “FreeNet” and ISPs like Compuserve used anonymous usernames. Personalized email addresses came later…

Oddly, because we can’t even pay for privacy today, it appears as if nobody cares. Sure, still desirable but not even an option at any cost.

How we got from there to here is troubling.
by latchkey | 2025-11-20 04:27:52+00:00
A bit of background. This is directed towards Spectral Compute (Michael) and https://scale-lang.com/. I know both of these guys personally and consider them both good friends, so you have to understand a bit of the background in order to really dive into this.

My take on it is fairly well summed up at the bottom of Elio's post. In essence, Elio is taking the view of "we would never use scale-lang for llms because we have a product that is native AMD" and Michael is taking the view of "there is a ton of CUDA code out there that isn't just AI and we can help move those people over to AMD... oh and by the way, we actually do know what we are doing, and we think we have a good chance at making this perform."

At the end of the day, both companies (my friends) are trying to make AMD a viable solution in a world dominated by an ever growing monopoly. Stepping back a bit and looking at the larger picture, I feel this is fantastic and want to support both of them in their efforts.
by andrewflnr | 2025-11-20 04:28:52+00:00
Obviously this is the standard line any disaster prevention, and makes sense 99% of the time. But what's the standard line about where this whole protocols-to-catch-mistakes thing bottoms out? Obviously people executing the protocol can make mistakes, or fall victim to normalization of deviance. The same is true for the next level of safety protocol you layer on top of that. At some level, the only answer really is just "don't make mistakes", right? And you're mostly trying to make sure you can do that at a level where it's easier to not make mistakes, like simpler decisions not under time pressure.

Am I missing something? I feel like one of us is crazy when people are talking about improving process instead of assigning blame without addressing the base case.
by int_19h | 2025-11-20 04:29:39+00:00
That is indeed the sticky question, but, again, anarchists aren't opposed to organizing either, even at scale - only that such organizing should be fundamentally egalitarian, not forced.

You can argue that hierarchical organization is fundamentally more efficient, but by the same logic authoritarian governments ought to always outcompete democracies militarily, yet it's clearly not as simple as that.

One could also argue that in a world where anarchist modes of organization are the norm, an attempt by some group to organize for the purpose of conquering neighbors would be treated as a fundamental threat by basically all other groups and treated as an imminent threat that warrants legitimate community self-defense. Of course, then the question is how you get to that state of affairs from the world of nation-states.

I don't have answers to these questions, but it should also be noted that it's not a binary. Look at Rojava for an example of a society that, while not anarchist, is much closer to that, yet has shown itself quite capable of organizing specifically for the purpose of war (they were largely responsible for crushing ISIS, and are still holding against Turkey).
by simpaticoder | 2025-11-20 04:29:46+00:00
Yes, and the antithesis of rhetoric is reason.

The quality I value in myself (and others when I find it) is a bias to doubt evidence of things I already believe, and to accept proof of things I do not believe. The bias isn't strong (that way lies madness!), but it makes your mental model of the world stronger. It's also a much better filter than "intelligent", "polite" or "articulate", which are all orthogonal to the kind of rational, open skepticism I advocate. The big downside is that such qualities are subtle and hard to judge. Tribal affiliation is, for all its faults, easy to measure.

Another point of optimism: being a persecuted (or neglected) minority can have some positive effects, if you can find your people.
by amiga386 | 2025-11-20 04:30:38+00:00
Isn't this very similar to the 2020 paper that covered WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal? https://encrypto.de/news/contact-discovery

What concerns me is that only thing stopping someone from enumerating the entire set of all possible phone numbers is effective server-side rate limiting. What are the current rate limits for each messenger, and are they sufficient? (per this paper, probably not)
by triceratops | 2025-11-20 04:30:58+00:00
> does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?

> what is the punchline?

It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."

I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-11-20 04:31:28+00:00
I wonder if there was ever a path for solving this early, like, we made email and that proliferated, if only we'd landed on better identity management first, would we be in some digital messaging utopia.

Would the world be better if we'd been saying "whats your public key?" instead of "whats your email?" in the 90s?
by llbbdd | 2025-11-20 04:31:47+00:00
> would need

I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.

Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
by chris_wot | 2025-11-20 04:31:57+00:00
When Microsoft updated office.com to immediately bring up a copilot prompt, and made it harder for me to find the menu items, I was pretty annoyed.

Foisting AI on people in the way they have means we lose a bit more control, for a feature we don't want. There is a certain level of AI burnout in the market - not every product needs AI. In fact, if a vendor says they have "AI" in their product, I immediately ignore that aspect and ask even more questions about their actual capabilities. Often they are hiding things behind an AI smokescreen.
by didibus | 2025-11-20 04:31:57+00:00
Personally, what I would want, is for the model to predict the most likely outcome of any political choice or policy, based on the vast training set and learning it encoded.

Where I think the AI should remain neutral is when deciding what outcomes are desired. That's inherently human. Say you want to pay no taxes and don't care about people poorer than you. You wouldn't want it to patronize you or try to convince you otherwise here. But for any given political platform, policy, and so on, you'd want to know what it predicts would be the outcome related to your goal, would it most likely result in me paying less tax or not, at what cost, what else would I lose, etc.

I wouldn't want it here to be neutral about all proposed ideas for say improving the economy and lowering taxes. I need it to be an AI and actually provide predictions.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-20 04:32:29+00:00
Remote uses Stripe's Tempo chain [1] to offer USDC payments to remote workers. Revolut seems to use Stablecoins also in their Fintech products [2], though I'm not sure exactly where or how. Western Union launched [3] their own stablecoin.

One I am familiar with is Polymarket, a big prediction market, who uses USDC on Polygon [4] to denominate their bets and to post bids and asks.

[1]: https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2024/remote-and-stripe...

[2]: https://www.bastion.com/blog/the-state-of-stablecoins-March-...

[3]: https://ir.westernunion.com/news/archived-press-releases/pre...

[4]: https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/get-started/how...
by ywain | 2025-11-20 04:33:20+00:00
Is that what really happens though? EU countries usually don't immediately punish violations unless they're particularly egregious. You're more likely to get a warning and a grace period to meet the requirements. So the rational approach would be to not bother with consent banners, GDPR and whatnot until you attract the attention of the regulators, at which point you should definitely hire a legal team that can tell you what exactly you need to do to comply.