MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JimmyBuckets | 2025-12-18 13:14:20+00:00
That is unfair. The largest co2 producers are also large in size. I think 1km resolution is more than sufficient to identify the source of the majority of emissions - e.g. factories, power plants, buildings, etc. Even if the resolution is not fine-grained enough for definitive identification it reduces the scope to manageable size for more detailed investigations.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-18 13:14:27+00:00
NB: "West" is less a term of hemispheric fidelity (Australia and New Zealand are typically seen as "western" countries, despite being in the eastern hemisphere), than it is of cultural derivation (on which Brazil has additional claims, via Portugal), and far more prominently, geopolitical and industrial significance, focusing on the industrial, colonial, and financial powers of the world, largely the US, western Europe (a large portion of which is ... in the eastern hemisphere), AU and NZ as mentioned, and arguably Japan.

The term is often used to avoid (or sometimes conflate) what have become problematic and/or obsolte terms, including colonial empires, advanced vs. undeveloped countries, NATO vs. Soviet Bloc states, or the similarly cardinal-directed "Global North" vs. "Global South".

Pedantry on the point (my own included) isn't particularly illuminating or interesting.

Wikipedia's disambiguation page suggests the vagueness of the term: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_(disambiguation)>.

Edit: /Brazil has claims/s/has/& additional/
by phannhothinh | 2025-12-18 13:14:49+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’ve been using AI daily, but my biggest frustration is what I call the "Context Gap." Valuable ideas and prompt chains always get lost in the endless scrolling of chat history or scattered across random text files. It feels like we are just "spending" effort instead of "investing" in logic we can actually reuse.

To fix this, I’m building Stratum. Think of it as a Conversation Vault—a visual workspace where prompts aren't just messages, but persistent assets you can connect and build upon.

Link video: https://youtu.be/jqLXEYoc7pU

How it changes the workflow:

Visual Architecture: Instead of a long chat thread, you see your logic as a map (nodes).

Reusable Context: You can save specific data (like your coding style or project docs) as "nodes" and plug them into any new conversation instantly.

Stop Repeating Yourself: Build a complex workflow once, save it in the vault, and trigger it whenever you need it.

I’ve attached a quick video showing how I use it to organize my AI workflows. I’m currently in the development phase and would love to get your honest thoughts:

Does a visual "map" of your thoughts feel more intuitive to you than a standard chat box?

What’s the one feature that would make you move your prompt library into a tool like this?

Thanks for watching and for any advice!
by Xylakant | 2025-12-18 13:14:58+00:00
> I’d be more willing to pay if GH Actions wasn’t so flakey and frustrating (for hosted or self-hosted runners, I use both).

This is indeed a reason I do consider leaving GHA. The underinvestment into this part of the product shows. But they also did announce quite some investment into new and (for us relevant) features alongside the pricing change, so I'll have a look at how this changes with some sorely needed work on the product.
by kristofferR | 2025-12-18 13:15:27+00:00
The next one is likely Utah, they are drying up the Great Salt Lake for alfalfa production, producing the next Owens Lake, likely making Salt Lake City and other cites unhabitable within a decade or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake#Shrinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq0FhcfAbG0
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-12-18 13:15:29+00:00
> And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...

I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.

Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.
Ask HN: Rules for a desirable, non-toxic and less exploitable social platform?
by patresh | 2025-12-18 13:16:01+00:00
From what we have learned about the different flaws of different social platforms (networks and content), can we come up with some first principles that would make the platforms have the properties of being:

- Desirable: Most people actually want to be on it and find some use or pleasure in using it

- Non-toxic: I also added this one because some people might enjoy being on a toxic platform, this is not what this is about

- Less exploitable: Difficult to manipulate which is increasingly important in the age of cheap LLMs, but can also be a tradeoff with desirability as barriers are erected to prevent bot manipulation / vote brigading.

Taking Hacker News as an example of a desirable, non-toxic and less exploitable social platform. I believe several attributes make it so:

- Voting: Upvoted content rises up, contributes towards desirability / non-toxicity of the content

- Strict rules / moderation: Keeps the content on topic, constructive, friendly, more pleasant to parse. Contributes towards desirability / non-toxicity and also makes it less exploitable as manipulation can be detected.

- Novelty / surprisal: This third one is somewhat special, it is less a mechanistic property of the platform but a content focus choice. It contributes towards desirability but I believe also towards lower exploitability: it is more difficult to fake novel or thought-provoking content.

Now I do realize I could have phrased the target properties differently and semantics can always be discussed ad infinitum so take the spirit of what I mean rather than the exact wording.

What I'm specifically asking HN here is what sets of rules / mechanisms could have the above as emergent properties?

Is Hacker News a desirable, non-toxic, less exploitable platform also because it focuses on novel, thought-provoking content or could there be mechanistic rules that would allow having these properties for any kind of social platform?

I'll include some possible mechanistic rules that crossed my mind that each have their flaws:

- Member verification (ID / Credit card): Less exploitable but likely very undesirable for many

- Vouching: Start with a kernel of trusted members, include only members vouched for

- Contribution limits: Members can only contribute / vote n times per day / week

- Active discussion limits: Not everyone involved in the same conversation e.g. have two people discussing a topic, have a system for others to "raise hand" to participate in the conversation

- Exposure limits: Your post can never reach more than n random people, it has to be actively reshared by someone to spread further.
by busyant | 2025-12-18 13:16:10+00:00
I don't know the specifics of efforts to "repair" DNA replication repair (if you get my drift), but I suspect there is some effort in that area.

There definitely are efforts to correct enzymes involved in tumor-suppression (p53 is probably the best known tumor suppressor protein). e.g., here's a study on a small molecule designed to correct mutated p53 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8099409/
by renjieliu | 2025-12-18 13:16:13+00:00
Wow hey Nick, I took your docker course on udemy a few years ago. Even these days, I am revisiting it. Gotta say it's one of the best courses I have taken. For me, it was not the recommending system from udemy brought me to it, it was just a google search. I was interested in docker container at that time. Maybe SEO works better for the niche.
by gosub100 | 2025-12-18 13:16:14+00:00
Or the next shooter will disguise their gun to look like a musical instrument.

Edit: I can't find it now but there is a body cam video of a Colorado school shooting where this almost happened. It wasn't due to an AI mixup but the school police was armed and I believe fired at one of the bad guys, but as the local PD responded he almost got shot because of the confusion: "school shooting, respond, guy with a gun"
by fallinditch | 2025-12-18 13:16:38+00:00
My friend is one of those 'overly involved' parents with his daughter: tennis lessons and competitions, sailing lessons and competitions, skiing lessons and competitions. He sacrificed a huge amount of time to give his daughter every opportunity.

I asked him one time "do you think she might end up hating you for making her do all these activities?"

He thought it would be ok. He said "it will open doors for her. She's now so good at tennis that wherever she goes she'll be in demand to join the ladies team."

Looks like he was right: she got into a good university with a sailing scholarship, she is athletic, has a good relationship with her parents and is an all round happy and pleasant person.
by N_Lens | 2025-12-18 13:16:47+00:00
Funnily this is satire/educational code - notice the license is "GLWTPL" (Good Luck With That Public License).

Repo is based on exploiting this bug - https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/25860 (Open since 2015)

The bug allows you to "extend" any lifetime 'a to 'static in safe code:

This converts a reference with any lifetime into a 'static reference, which violates Rust's safety guarantees. Once you can do this, you can create dangling references, access freed memory, etc.

This is a type system bug, not just an implementation bug. From the discussions:

- The easy fix (banning contravariance in function arguments) would eliminate valid Rust programs

- The proper fix requires changes to how higher-ranked lifetime variables carry subtyping relations

- The Rust team chose to pursue the more rigorous solution as part of replacing the trait solver (the "Chalk" project)
by dlisboa | 2025-12-18 13:17:00+00:00
That's a useless statistic in this context. Statistically you're more likely to be killed by yourself than someone else. So, do you kill yourself to get it over with? Do you let a shooter shoot you because statistically it's better that the gun is on their hands than yours? Ridiculous, right?

It's just a zero insight use of numbers.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-18 13:17:05+00:00
good one! My idea is: Yes, it should be possible up to a distinct degree to automate most of the stuff. The thing is: An AI itself does not have any intrinsic motivation, not a goal or something that it would pursue "for its will" - does a company work, if there "is no goal to be pursued"? The AI is not subject to capitalist working constraints like most of us - so what do you do if the AI says: "I dont like this business anymore, so lets close it" :-)
by kevincox | 2025-12-18 13:17:35+00:00
> It's too expensive to prove that a drug works

I'm not sure that is necessary a bad reason. You need to factor in a lot of concerns to determine what "too expensive" means.

But if you are going to spend billions of dollars to develop a drug that only treats about 2 people a year it is likely too expensive even if it is 100% effective. That money would be better spent on treatments that have wider applicability.

Of course this is not simple to measure. Costs aren't known upfront and the research may end up proving invaluable to more widely applicable treatments.

So it is a judgment call and not necessarily a bad reason.
by breppp | 2025-12-18 13:17:39+00:00
As far I remember a large reason for the water crisis is subsidizing water for agriculture which does not fit the local climate

This is based on some ideological pillar of being autarkic, as the Islamic Republic was generally built upon the fear of outside influence

sounds like if 90% of their water goes to agriculture, mostly export, and their country is cash strapped due to their habit of kidnappings, then maybe there's a simple solution here
by isolli | 2025-12-18 13:18:02+00:00
This reminds of a question I had when I played chess for a couple of years. I was a lot better (as evidenced by my ELO score on chess.com) when playing long games (1 turn per day) than short games (say half an hour total).

At the time, I read that everybody is better at "slow" chess. But does that explanation make sense? If everybody is better, shouldn't my ELO score have stayed the same?
by frenchmajesty | 2025-12-18 13:18:15+00:00
Historically this has never flown.

There's only 1 billionaire for every what, 10M people, 100M ? They are outnumbered. At some point the underclass may band together and kick off a revolution to overthrow the ruling class.

Kings have gotten their heads chopped off when the people had enough.

I can see a version of history where the end of capitalism was AI and the AI-owning class with their robots and capital essentially dispose of the majority of the society. Society decides this system is screwed and decides to overthrow capitalism and we invent a new system.

After all, at some point, smart people came up with capitalism to solve the previous system's problems. We may not go to socialism but invent something new entirely to address the flaws of late stage capitalism.
by UncleMeat | 2025-12-18 13:18:47+00:00
It really is amazing that Jack Ripper esque "they are poisoning the water supply to reduce sperm counts" conspiracies seem to be taking hold of so many people today.

Businesses selling testosterone boosting have managed to convince men to have major body image issues that have previously been mostly only present in women so they can sell them supplements. Good job, society.
by nanobananapro | 2025-12-18 13:18:48+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve built a small web app around the new Nano Banana Pro image model: https://www.nanobananapro.org/

It’s a simple, hosted playground focused on two key features:

Text to Image – Type a prompt and get a high-quality image.

Image to Image – Upload an image and edit it with text instructions (change style, background, lighting, objects, etc.).

No local setup, no API keys, no fine-tuning. Just sign up, buy credits, and use the model directly in your browser.

What you can do on the site

Generate images from text prompts (up to 2000 characters).

Upload an image and restyle/edit it.

View cost and remaining credits next to the generator (2 credits = 1 image).

Download the result for use in social posts, thumbnails, marketing visuals, etc.

Currently, there are three paid annual plans (Starter / Standard / Premium), each with a different monthly credit allowance. The goal is to make pricing predictable and keep the UI minimal so non-technical users can easily interact with the model.

What this is not

To clarify:

This is not a fine-tuning or training platform.

This is not a local setup tool.

This is not an official product from the team behind the model.

It’s simply an independent wrapper around the Nano Banana Pro image API with a credit system and a clean UI.

Why I built it

I’m an indie developer experimenting with small AI SaaS products. Nano Banana Pro launched with powerful image capabilities, but most non-technical users don’t want to deal with API docs, SDKs, or complex dev environments.

This project is primarily:

A way to understand how people actually use the model (what prompts, what use cases).

A testbed for pricing, credits, and onboarding flows.

A minimal tool for creators who just want to “type prompt → get image.”

Feedback I’m looking for

Is the UI and flow clear enough for you?

Does the credit and pricing structure make sense?

What’s missing for your real workflows (e.g., batch generation, history, presets)?

If you have thoughts on the UX, pricing, or landing page copy, I’d love to hear them. Thanks for checking it out!

This version is more concise and focuses on clarity, with the website link updated as requested. Let me know if you'd like any further tweaks!
by manuelmoreale | 2025-12-18 13:19:01+00:00
> It's kind of the point of the computers.

It kind of isn't? If I read your comment and rather than taking the time to think about what you said and respond to you I simply prompted one of the many tools to "write a comment that disagrees with TeMPOraL" something would be lost.

And the point of the computer is not to replace me everywhere it can. Also, automating something is one thing. It requires deliberate actions. Outsourcing is another thing.
by pron | 2025-12-18 13:19:14+00:00
> It may sound like executing your specification, but it is a bit smarter,

It's more than just "a bit smarter" I would say, and explicit state enumeration is nothing at all like executing a spec/program. For example, TLC will check in virtually zero time a spec that describes a nondeterministic choice of a single variable x being either 0 or 1 at every step (as there are only two states). The important aspect here isn't that each execution is of infinite length, but that there are an uncountable infinity of behaviours (executions) here. This is a completely different concept from execution, and it is more similar to abstract interpretation (where the meaning of a step isn't the next state but the set of all possible next states) than to concrete interpretation.
by agotterer | 2025-12-18 13:19:48+00:00
Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.

Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-18 13:19:54+00:00
Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun

With a hundred and ten cornets right behind

The AI thought about it long and hard

calling up the national guard

Cause of the horns of ev'ry shape and kind.

---

There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons

Thundering, thundering all along the way.

Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons,

And Swarming SWAT Teams Goons so they say

---

There were cross fires and blown tires

And reporters from the local news

Clarinets of ev'ry size

And trumpeters who'd improvise

And video games that went pew-pew!

----

on multiple edits: tried to find a layout that fit the song
by Silhouette | 2025-12-18 13:20:02+00:00
If anyone wants an honest answer to that question it is fairly simple. Polling has suggested - very consistently and over a long period of time - that a majority of the British public (though often a fairly slim majority) tend to support authoritarian interventions by our governments in the name of protecting the public. Most of the time our governments and government agencies do appear to use such powers responsibly and so they tend to maintain that public trust. There has always been a significant minority who were more cautious on civil liberties grounds and there has always been an issue that the supportive majority aren't always very well informed about what could happen if the laws were applied more strongly in practice.

As a personal observation - I think this might start to change over the next few years and the current positions of MPs and government might start to look very out of touch. We are seeing the fall of our long-standing "big" political parties and the rise of a very right wing populist party that is increasingly looking like it might actually win significant power at the next general election. I think awareness of the potential for abuse by the next people to run the government and agencies is growing among the general public. Whether it grows enough to stop some of these policies from becoming law in the near future is a different question of course.
by nucleardog | 2025-12-18 13:20:03+00:00
Not sure how much that would help overall.

Unless it's completely clear that it's not a gun, the reviewer is essentially always going to pull the alarm. The risk of a false alarm is going to be seen as minimal, while the risk of a false negative is catastrophic.

False alarm makes the news for now because it's novel, we all go "What the hell, guys?" and life goes on.

Nobody wants to end up sitting in front of a prosecutor, the media, etc explaining why they chose not to pull the alarm, when the AI _clearly_ identified the gun, and instead chose to let all those kids die.
by laurentiurad | 2025-12-18 13:20:05+00:00
Exactly, and currently I'd say that AI is not too helpful with distribution/marketing. I still do copyrighting myself as with AI it really feels impersonal and "artificial". By distribution I also refer to social media following and users that trust you to test/buy your product. IMHO this is still the most challenging part to solve, as it takes a lot of time to improve your social media presence to reach a state where it's guaranteed that you will have customers from the moment of the launch of your product.
by miroljub | 2025-12-18 13:20:12+00:00
The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.

> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.

Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
by dawnchorus | 2025-12-18 13:20:12+00:00
>most people would agree that being able to solve new difficult problems is a much more economically valuable skill than being able to quickly solve moderate problems that have already been solved

Do most people agree with that? I agree with that completely, and I have spent a lot of time wishing that most people agreed with that. But my experience is that almost no one agrees with that...ever...in any circumstance.

I don't even think society as a whole agrees with this statement. If you just rank careers according to the ones that have the highest likelihood of making the most money, the most economically valuable tend to be the ones solving medium difficulty problems quickly.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-18 13:20:22+00:00
I'm not sure the problem is how 'dirty' a source is, whatever you think that means. What's important is how much that source increases the net carbon content in our atmosphere. Unless you're burning wood (which is a vanishingly small proportion of all carbon release) you're releasing carbon that was bound on geological timescales, which is massively changing that balance.
by Y_Y | 2025-12-18 13:22:14+00:00
> The provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 restricting unions, corporations, and profitable organizations from independent political spending and prohibiting the broadcasting of political media funded by them within sixty days of general elections or thirty days of primary elections violate the freedom of speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. United States District Court for the District of Columbia reversed.

I'm sure we're on the same side, but I want to point out that that case didn't make a huge difference. By that I mean it removed a ban on political broadcasts near elections, most of the "money is speech, super pacs can do anything at all" stuff was already legal.
by windexh8er | 2025-12-18 13:22:29+00:00
One can only hope OpenAI continues down the path they're on. Let them chase ads. Let them shoot themselves in the foot now. If they fail early maybe we can move beyond this ridiculous charade of generally useless models. I get it, applied in specific scenarios they have tangible use cases. But ask your non-tech caring friend or family member what frontier model was released this week and they'll not only be confused by what "frontier" means, but it's very likely they won't have any clue. Also ask them how AI is improving their lives on the daily. I'm not sure if we're at the 80% of model improvement as of yet, but given OpenAIs progress this year it seems they're at a very weak inflection point. Start serving ads so the house of cards can get a nudge.

And now with RAM, GPU and boards being a PitA to get based on supply and pricing - double middle finger to all the big tech this holiday season!