MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lm28469 | 2025-12-31 17:27:07+00:00
I like movies, I still torrent them, if tomorrow a police officer is being my back 24/7 I will just stop torrenting, but I still won't pay $20 a pop to go to the cinema.

> Also, maybe I'm missing something, but no amount of free accounts on ChatGPT gives you what you get with a paid subscription, especially with a $200 one

These days I'm mostly running opus 4.5 through "antigravity" and I'd rather become a potatoe farmer than give $8 to Altman
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-12-31 17:27:10+00:00
the whole Smalltalk saga is a bit of a tragedy looking back (EDIT: as someone who didn't live through that era) through the context of the current state of consumer computing being so "non-convivial", if I can borrow a phrase from Ivan Illich. Empowering users by allowing them to conform the tools to their own usecase often feels like the exact opposite paradigm of the modern milieu.

Or maybe I'm just entering my "old man yells at cloud" phase of life haha
by erfgh | 2025-12-31 17:27:21+00:00
I have to challenge the paper authors' understanding of the Turing test. For an AI system to pass the Turing test its output needs to be indistinguishable from a human's. In other words, the rate of picking the AI system as human should be equal to the rate of picking the human. If in an experiment the AI system is picked at a rate higher than 50% it does not pass the Turing test (as the authors seem to believe) because another human can use this knowledge to conclude that the system being picked is not really human.

Also, I would go one step further and claim that to pass the Turing test an AI system should be indistinguishable from a human when judged by people trained in making such a distinction. I doubt that they used such people in the experiment.

I doubt that any AI system available today, or in the foreseeable future, can pass the test as I qualify it above.
by nine_k | 2025-12-31 17:28:10+00:00
Imagine that you're a highly intellectual, highly technical, and highly responsible person in control of large sums of governmental or corporate money. You don't want to waste the money, you want stellar results (in spacecraft industry, maybe literally so).

Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time?

"If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-31 17:28:15+00:00
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.

Unnecessarily smug?

Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to be built without much understanding of the public utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this argument.

> The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.

I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral timeframe that may or may not exist.
by wincy | 2025-12-31 17:28:33+00:00
Happy new year!

I’m going into 2026 about 100 pounds down since last new years. I’m excited to see what the future holds when I’m in the best physical shape of my life. GLP-1 inhibitors are a modern miracle (admittedly to solve a modern problem). I realize now I wasn’t active because I was fat, not vice versa. I rode hundreds of miles on my bike this year, towing my wheelchair using daughter along for the ride in a bike trailer. If you’re in a situation where you feel losing weight is hopeless, I strongly encourage you to consider these medications. It could change your life for the better, in strange ways you might not expect. I also paid off all my credit cards (and cancelled them) this year, and I swear it was only possible because losing weight has allowed me to be a better and more cognizant long term planner.

Here’s to a great year of self improvement and refinement. Happy new years everyone!
by sneak | 2025-12-31 17:29:24+00:00
Gifts do not confer obligation. Copying deprives the original party of nothing. Absolutely nothing about free software requires or even implies any responsibility to “give back”. This idea that anyone making money with free software somehow owes the original authors anything (or “should” donate a portion of their profits) is ridiculous.

If the authors wanted money for their software, they would have sold it instead of giving it away for free as a gift.

By releasing software under free software licenses you are explicitly stating that you do not expect or anticipate payment for it. The licenses (that they freely chose) are clear. Free software, in addition to being free as in speech, is also always free as in beer.

My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?
by sigseg1v | 2025-12-31 17:29:51+00:00
How is this poorly thought out?

They released software with a requirement to use it (license, attribution) and it's been immensely helpful to people, yet these tools come and use it without even following the simple requirements. Yes they care about this thing more than others, but I don't think that it's poorly thought out.

Let's say you have a newborn so you can't easily answer the door for Halloween. So you put out a bowl of candy with a sign that says "take 2 per person, please". Every year the kids come by and take 2. They are happy, you are happy, you gave them candy and they accepted it under the conditions you desire to share it under. Then one year let's say someone makes a robot that scurries from door to door picking up the entire bowl and dumping it into a container then leaving. You will be pissed. If it just took 2 you probably won't even care, but the fact it takes the whole thing is a violation of the conditions you agreed to put the candy out under. The reasonable thing to do would be for it to either take 2 or none, but it doesn't care. I don't think this is a puzzle to understand why that violation of the agreement of use would make someone mad.
by hypeatei | 2025-12-31 17:30:02+00:00
Sure, but that article literally contradicts your original point about Americans wanting a "free market" as it lists the complicated nature of existing laws, Medicare, PBMs etc. and the incentives those create.

You could just say "Americans need to vote better and cleanup their laws around this" and yes, that would be ideal, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. It's part of why some want the government to not involve themselves at all: no matter how good the politicians you elect, others can come into office and fuck it all up while everyone is forced to deal with it because they have the monopoly on violence. Not to mention the glacial pace at which our legislative bodies move.
by autoexec | 2025-12-31 17:30:32+00:00
> Who is really at fault on a systematic level if the population decides lower costs is what they really wants regardless of what sacrifices have to be made.

It's always the people who are actually forcing slaves to work for them. Always. Consumers will always want lower prices but that doesn't justify slavery. It's not as if a company like Apple is being forced to abuse workers because they'd be bankrupt otherwise. These companies are pulling in massive amounts of profits year after year. It's not "market pressures" that force them to abuse their workers it's just greed.

> see how many people claim to want a nicer experience, yet airlines are always focused on cutting costs. Is that the fault of the airlines? Or is it the fault of the consumers who, despite what they say, show extreme preference for lower costing tickets?

Every customer wants low cost tickets. Of course they do. There's a lot that goes into that though. Almost nobody wants to fly in the first place. It's annoying, expensive, stressful and uncomfortable. What people actually want is to get to their destination. Consumers are basically forced to deal with airlines since it's the fastest, and often the only, way they can get to where they want to go when they need to. It's just a necessary evil that must endured.

That's not the airlines fault, but it does put airlines in a position where they know they can take advantage of travelers at every opportunity and so they do. They overbook their flights, they charge endless bullshit fees, they cram as many people into the plane as they can, their ticket prices change by the minute and airlines aggressively charge people as much as they think they can get away with.

Mergers and the high cost of entry into the airline industry have greatly hurt competition and often most people have only one choice in airline when flying to certain destinations. Airlines have consumers bent over a barrel and they pound away at them relentlessly. That's all on the airlines, not the consumers.

The only real thing consumers have any control over is the price of their ticket, and because airlines play so many games with ticket pricing they enable a certain amount of gaming the system to "get a better deal" so many flyers do work hard to limit what they pay for what will inevitably be a shitty service.

There's also a question of how much consumers can even afford. Many consumers would love to pay more to get a less shitty air travel experience but they can't if it means they'd no longer be able to afford their trip. ULCCs are often the only viable options travelers have and even then many people go into debt to travel. Others may figure that going with a cheap airline or putting in the effort to get a cheap ticket will be worth it because while the flights will be a miserable 6-8 hours it means they'll be able to afford a nice dinner or have a little bit more spending money when they reach their destination. Those kinds of choices can be put squarely on the consumer.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-31 17:30:54+00:00
I have a few vibe coded bots hanging around on discord and reddit that are helping out. One's posting cards for the game terraforming mars in response to users requesting it for example. They're appreciated by the community.

It's simple but i wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't a 10minute "Hey Claude create a ..." job. Having programmed a Reddit bot back in 2014 for xwing miniatures it took me several days to create it back then.
by ChildOfChaos | 2025-12-31 17:31:10+00:00
Why do you care if people acknowledge your existence?

Some people would love that and see it as a super power. Lots of interesting things going on in the world to explore, you should consider that what you think is the issue is not the answer, it has enough of it's own problems. People are annoying and get in the way of enjoying many things. Go enjoy life and stuff first, your 19, plenty of time to find friends along the way.
by tzs | 2025-12-31 17:32:11+00:00
If we took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and converted the C into graphite and spread that uniformly over the top 10 subtropical deserts it would be around 2 cm deep.

This suggests a long term approach of building solar powered carbon capture plants in subtropical deserts, the capture it and convert to graphite, which is then spread out under the solar panels.

I once did the math on this, using the specs for currently available solar powered carbon capture, and it came out to something like if we used 100 years worth of the current production annual production of solar panels for this we could carbon capture at a rate that could drop the atmosphere from current levels of CO2 to pre-industrial levels in a few years even if we do not reduce emission rates.

So...not practical now, but might be feasible as a very long term project that over many decades builds out enough capacity to get things under control as long as we can keep everything from going to hell over that time.
by dan-bailey | 2025-12-31 17:33:04+00:00
Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was:
Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover
Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover
Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover
Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover
Eindhoven -> Amsterdam

As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.

Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.
by Sharanxxxx | 2025-12-31 17:33:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building small tools in public over the last few weeks, mostly to solve my own problems around product launches and visibility.

Today I crossed a small but meaningful milestone: $107 in total revenue from these tools.

Nothing viral, no ads — just shipping, iterating, and sharing in communities where founders hang out.

What I learned so far:

Shipping fast > waiting for “perfect”

Distribution matters more than features early on

Even tiny tools can make money if they solve one clear problem

Feedback from early users is gold

Happy to share what worked, what didn’t, and answer questions about how I built or marketed them.
Would also love feedback from the HN community on how to improve or what to build next.

Thanks for reading and Happy new year
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-31 17:34:12+00:00
Eh, with user links, user commentary, profiles and votes HN is "basically the same" on several key aspects and there is quite a bit of demographic overlap. It's just reached a very different equilibrium as to what goes on here due to the 2nd and 3rd tier aspects that are different.

Take two cesspools (I'm not gonna pass up the chance to use the analogy, sorry not sorry). Assume they are both serving the same quantity and quality of people. Feed one a bunch of inorganic matter, laundry bleach and only the finest most heavy duty multi-ply shit tickets. Feed the other nothing that shouldn't go down a drain, no bleach and Scott 1-ply. The latter will perform way better and go way longer between needing service despite the only differences being minor differences that don't even matter in system design.
by mothballed | 2025-12-31 17:34:21+00:00
Huh. I have not paid hospital bills before. Because they were, in my estimation, fraudulent.

The hospital bothered me for a bit so then I blocked all their e-mail and phone numbers. Then they sold it to collections. I sent the collections a cease and desist and then never heard from them again. Every few years they sell it to another collections and then I send another cease and desist. Occasionally they bother me anyway and then I send the CFPB after them and then I don't hear from them again until they sell it after a few years. I've never paid a dime.

I don't know if this works if you use credit. I built my house buying one piece of wood at a time with cash and all my vehicles are cash clunkers so I've never tried to find out.
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-31 17:34:25+00:00
> I can, and have done several times, actually, for different systems.

The reason I asked that question isn't to be argumentative, it's because, IMO, the answer to those types of questions are exactly what does not exist in the software engineering world.

And talking through the details of our different opinions is how we can understand where each one is coming from and possibly, maybe, incorporate some new information or new way of looking at things into our mental models of the world.

So, if you do think you have an answer, I am truly interested in when you think OOP is appropriate and when functional is better suited (or neither).

If someone asked me that question, I would say "If we're in fantasy land and it's the first system ever built and there are no variables related to existing systems and supportability and resource knowledge, etc., then I really can't answer the question. I've never built a system that was significantly functional, I've only built procedural, OOP and mixtures of those two with sprinklings of functional. I know there are significant pros to functional, but without actually building a complete system at least once, I can't really compare"
by coldtea | 2025-12-31 17:34:32+00:00
Because there aren't so many great alternatives.

There's MacOS, which requires expensive dongles (an Apple computer), and has some of its own systemic issues.

And there's Linux, in different subtly incompatible distros, with its own share of problems, and a non-starter if you need and/or want to use many proprietary staples, from the Creative Suite to video, music, and business apps...
by dahart | 2025-12-31 17:35:08+00:00
Pans looking juddery no matter what you do in 24 fps is a very well known issue. Motion blur’s ability to help (using the 180-shutter rule) is quite limited, and you can also reduce it somewhat by going very slow (using the 1/7 frame rule), but there is no cure. The cinematographer cannot fix the fundamental physical problem of the 24 fps framerate being too slow.

24 fps wasn’t chosen because it was optimal or high quality, it was chosen because it’s the cheapest option for film that meets the minimum rate needed to not degrade into a slideshow and also sync with audio.

Here’s an example that uses the 180-shutter and 1/7-frame rules and still demonstrates bad judder. “We have tried the obvious motion blur which should have been able to handle it but even with feature turned on, it still happens. Motion blur applied to other animations, fine… but with horizontal scroll, it doesn’t seem to affect it.” https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/horizontal-panning-ani...

Even with the rules of thumb, “images will not immediately become unwatchable faster than seven seconds, nor will they become fully artifact-free when panning slower than this limit”. https://www.red.com/red-101/camera-panning-speed

The thing I personally started to notice and now can’t get over is that during a horizontal pan, even with a slow speed and the prescribed amount of motion blur, I can’t see any details or track small objects smoothly. In the animation clip attached to that creativecow link, try watching the faces or look at any of the text or small objects in the scene. You can see that they’re there, but you can’t see any detail during the pan. Apologies in advance if I ruin your ability to watch pans in 24fps. I used to be fine with them, but I truly can’t stand them anymore. The pans didn’t change, but I did become more aware and more critical.

> 60fps will always look like cheap soap opera to me for movies

Probably me too, but there seems to be some evidence and hypothesizing that this is a learned effect because we grew up with 24p movies. The kids don’t get the same effect because they didn’t grow up with it, and I’ve heard that it’s also less pronounced for people who grew up watching PAL rather than NTSC. TVs with smoothing on are curing the next generation from being stuck with 24 fps.
by peterspath | 2025-12-31 17:35:31+00:00
Happy New Year!

In 2025 I:

- read 52 books with a total of 17924 pages

- hiked 41 times with a total of 533.1 kilometres

- wrote 225 blog posts --> https://peterspath.net

- moved 2781.2 kilometres by walking, hiking, biking, swimming, running, etc.
by Someone | 2025-12-31 17:35:39+00:00
and, depending on how you define the rationals, -0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer: “An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, ...), or the negation of a positive natural number (−1, −2, −3, ...)”

According to that definition, -0 isn’t an integer.

Combining that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_number: “a rational number is a number that can be expressed as the quotient or fraction p/q of two integers, a numerator p and a non-zero denominator q”

means there’s no way to write -0 as the quotient or fraction p/q of two integers, a numerator p and a non-zero denominator q.
by areoform | 2025-12-31 17:36:04+00:00
> "As Forbes reports, a whopping 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10 - despite half of them technically being eligible for an upgrade. During PC maker Dell's November quarterly earnings call, the company's COO, Jeff Clarke, admitted that "we have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," referring to all PCs, and not just Dell machines."

> In other words, those who own a whopping third of the estimated 1.5 billion PCs worldwide are outright refusing to upgrade, indicating Microsoft is seriously struggling to woo them. That’s likely due to a number of reasons, from simple frustrations over a tweaked and unfamiliar interface to the need to run software that isn’t Windows 11 compatible — and annoying ads.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/windows-users-r...
by DivingForGold | 2025-12-31 17:36:28+00:00
"outperform" by only one metric too often fails usefulness. It's a one shot unless you heat the calcium carbonate to 900C, the compound in the article only requires 70C, and has quite a bit of ability to re-process CO2 absorption multiple times. Although solar ovens could reach over 900C, probably too dangerous for residential use.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-31 17:36:31+00:00
That's interesting, I think you're probably right.

> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.

The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.

I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)

Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
by lenkite | 2025-12-31 17:36:32+00:00
Kindly use the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) - which accounts for government benefits (e.g., tax credits, SNAP), taxes, and expenses like medical costs.

This does not show your "steady downward trend", but has considerably fluctuated over the last few years. It is an increase to 12.9% in 2024, compared to 7.1% in 2020-21. Will need to wait till end of 2026 for the 2025 computation.
by mxkopy | 2025-12-31 17:36:48+00:00
> US textbooks cost multiple times more than the international version of the textbook

I mean, I think a lot of the incentives behind textbook pricing in the US are honestly not that dissimilar to the ones in healthcare. I know Pearson is particularly egregious for price gouging students because they have exclusive deals with schools to provide the textbook for some specific class or subject. They raise prices because f*ck it why not, they won’t get pushback, which is not a valid reason to do so in most other countries.