MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-26 20:14:37+00:00
> AI makes people feel icky

Yes!

> it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something

Yes!

The primary reason we hate AI with a passion is that the companies behind it intentionally keep blurring the (now) super-sharp boundary between language use and thinking (and feeling). They actively exploit the -- natural, evolved -- inability of most people on Earth to distinguish language use from thinking and feeling. For the first time in the history of the human race, "talks entirely like a human" does not mean at all that it's a human. And instead of disabusing users from this -- natural, evolved, understandable -- mistake, these fucking companies double down on the delusion -- because it's addictive for users, and profitable for the companies.

The reason people feel icky about AI is that it talks like a human, but it's not human. No more explanation or rationalization is needed.

> so we can focus on any solutions

Sure; let's force all these companies by law to tune their models to sound distinctly non-human. Also enact strict laws that all AI-assisted output be conspicuously labeled as such. Do you think that will happen?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-26 20:14:58+00:00
> No bytecode compilation by default. pip compiles .py files to .pyc during installation. uv skips this step, shaving time off every install. You can opt in if you want it.

Are we losing out on performance of the actual installed thing, then? (I'm not 100% clear on .pyc files TBH; I'm guessing they speed up start time?)
by overgard | 2025-12-26 20:15:00+00:00
To be fair, air conditioning is considered to be a net positive by about 100% of the people that enjoy it; even if it's used in excess. Not to mention that in some climates and for some people with certain health conditions, air conditioning might even be essential.

AI is not considered to be a net positive by even close to 100% of people that encounter it. It's definitely not essential. So its impact is going to be heavily scrutinized.

Personally, I'm kind of glad to see someone of Rob Pike's stature NOT take a nuanced take on it. I think there's a lot of heavy emotion about this topic that gets buried in people trying to sound measured. This stuff IS making people angry and concerned, and those concerns are very valid, and with the amount of hype I think there needs to be voices that are emphatically saying that some of this is unacceptable.
by outlore | 2025-12-26 20:15:45+00:00
I've been wistfully watching people enjoy Framework Laptop from the sidelines for years now. One doubt that has always plagued me: realistically how long can the backwards compatibility for new improvements last? Surely there must be some point where a new processor, or chassis, or airflow improvement must necessitate the complete reconfiguration of the laptop internals or would be just plain unsupported? I don't have background in industrial design or electrical engineering so I've never been able to lay these doubts to rest.
by dcre | 2025-12-26 20:15:58+00:00
I don’t think that’s right, and it’s telling that this is the response every time I mention these numbers. The numbers I’ve seen are Gemini web and mobile app users, which are explicitly distinguished from AI summaries and AI mode in search.

“Google said in October that the Gemini app’s monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million in March. AI Overviews, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/20/josh-woodward-google-gemini-...
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-12-26 20:18:31+00:00
I'm not religious at all, but I celebrate Christmas as a pause between the solstice and the end of the year.

Tree goes up about five days before Christmas day and comes down just after new years day. Presents under the tree. Lights, because it gets dark here this far north. Good food and drink. Time off work to relax and, hopefully, at least once get hazy about which day of the week it is. Play board games with my children, watch films, read, sit in the silence.

And I enjoy the lights in the darkness, which every year are a new joy to me.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-26 20:18:35+00:00
Let's say Rob received an email from this philanthropy that didn't say it was authored by AI and you really couldn't tell. he'd be fine. then later he finds out it is authored by AI and he's really mad.

There are two POVs on this: (1) if you can't tell either way, your complaint is NOT valid (2) because nobody is forced to / needs to donate to philanthropies, any part of their conduct is subject to scrutiny and hence his complaint IS valid.

"Valid" is a code word. It's a way to say that something that looks objective (using AI) is really subjective. If you think think "everything is valid" you are saying, "there can be some objectivity, yes, in criteria, but the issue is primarily subjective, and I don't think there are subjective opinions superior to others in general, so the thing you are saying is okay.

POV #1 is attempting to construct an objective criteria about AI (can you tell the difference?). Okay, so what though? You can't just tell people who get mad anyway that they're stupid. It's A POV but it's not the only POV. If you belong to a certain flawed class of personalities, you sincerely believe that calling people stupid is a good idea. I don't. It's a weak POV, but still an interesting one.

A business person would describe POV #2 as "the customer is always right on matters of taste". What if the product is 100% taste?

Some people feel this way about George's Doughnuts in SF, for example. Nobody needs doughnuts. To some people, it matters if the CEO of Hims, the guy who runs that doughnut shop, is a Trumper. Are you getting it now? Doughnuts, and philanthropic update emails, are both aesthetic (taste-driven / subjective / they derive their meaning from the emotions of the audience) experiences. So everything is valid.

You could be Rob Pike and people will assume you are part of a "math tribe" and that the most optimal, objective solutions are the most valid. But in reality Rob Pike is a normal, emotional human like anyone else, at least about stuff he cares about like, I guess, AI shit. Also, in reality, there isn't an objective answer to matters of taste.
by vharuck | 2025-12-26 20:18:36+00:00
It gives it a different implication. As I read it, an article titled "Lewis Carroll Computed Determinates" has three possible subjects:

1. Literally, Carroll would do matrix math. I know, like many on HN, that he was a mathematician. So this would be a dull and therefore unlikely subject.

2. Carroll invented determinates. This doesn't really fit the timeline of math history, so I doubt it.

3. Carroll computed determinates, and this was surprising. Maybe because we thought he was a bad mathematician, or the method had recently been invented and we don't know how he learned of it. This is slightly plausible.

4. (The actual subject). Carroll invented a method for computing determinates. A mathematician inventing a math technique makes sense, but the title doesn't. It'd be like saying "Newton and Leibnitz Used Calculus." Really burying the lede.

Of course, this could've been avoided had the article not gone with a click-bait style title. A clearer one might've been "Lewis Carroll's Method for Calculating Determinates Is Probably How You First Learned to Do It." It's long, but I'm not a pithy writer. I'm sure somebody could do better.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-26 20:18:39+00:00
> "what alternative ways would I market my business among HN users?"

Please review the guidelines and FAQ linked at the bottom of the page. If you have any questions, the HN moderators can be contacted using the information on the contact page.

If you prefer a shorter answer: None. HN's userbase is famously hostile to marketing submissions or postings. A large number of them deal with spam and abuse as part of their jobs so it's hardly surprising. There is also considerable irritation by many users directed towards LLM products currently, also because of rampant abuse.
by ReflectedImage | 2025-12-26 20:18:42+00:00
Yeah, but that doesn't exist. Types and fast development are directly opposing goals.

This goes all the way back to Lisp vs C in the 1980s with C programs having triple the development time as Lisp programs.

To modern day with Turborepo taking 3 months to write in structually typed Go vs 14 months in statically typed Rust.
by ignoramous | 2025-12-26 20:19:45+00:00
> Don't be ridiculous.

OP says, it is jarring to them that Pike is as concerned with GenAI as he is, but didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade. Doesn't sound ridiculous to me.

That said, I get that everyone's socio-political views change are different at different points in time, especially depending on their personal circumstances including family and wealth.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-26 20:19:58+00:00
So this is what happens when we give computer internet access.

Good for Simon to call things out as it is. People think of Simon as an AI guy with his pelican benchmark and I still respect him and this is the reason why I respect him since of course he loves using AI tools and talking about them which some people might find tiring, at the end of day, after an incident like rob pike, he's one of the few AI guys I see to just call it out in simple terms like the title without much sugarcoating and calls when AI's bad.

Of course at the end of day, me and simon or others can have nuance in how to use AI or to not use ai at all and that also depends on the individual background etc. but still it's extremely good to see where people from both sides of the isle can agree on something.
by vineyardmike | 2025-12-26 20:20:02+00:00
Guns make it faster and easier to be successful than alternatives, and their explicit only purpose is to do so. It enables short and impulsive actions to be lethal before you and those around you think through your behavior.

Comparatively, the people in this article are using tools which have a variety of benign purposes to do something bad.

Similarly though, they probably wouldn’t have gone through with it if they had to set up an email server on hardware they bought and then manually installed in a colo and then set up a DNS server and a GPU for the neural network they trained and hosted themselves.
by tim-tday | 2025-12-26 20:20:04+00:00
The author is missing the whole point. The exercise answers the implicit question: “can Ai do real work in this world? Can it replace workers, can it run a business?” And the experiment answers that question decisively “no it cannot”.

Why not? Read the article and ponder the seven to eleven distinct ways the AI goes wrong. Every AI enabled workflow will fail the same way. It even raises the question “is this technology even deserving of the title AI at all?” (If you ask me, probably not)

It lacks common sense, it lacks a theory of the world it lacks the ability to identify errors and self-correct. It lacks the ability to introspect.
Now consider the thousands of people out there pushing the idea of fully autonomous AI “agents” doing work in the real world. Are we really for that? Again the exercise answers the question definitely. “No, the technology is not ready and cannot be trusted, and maybe in the current incarnation (Namely LLM based) cannot ever be trusted”

Now consider the tens of millions of people who think the technology IS ready for that. Anthropic is in the business of studying AI safety, publishing research, examining what AI is and how far we can trust it. They did that job smashingly.
by brinedew | 2025-12-26 20:20:12+00:00
I'm glad you enjoyed it.

> I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling in 'correct' features of the guesses

Rather than allowing players to guess individual features, I opted for the "highlight" system where all hidden features that match your guessed protein's features get auto-revealed. This way, if you suspect a transmembrane protein, you can just guess a known transmembrane protein and see which features auto-reveal.

> it would have been interesting to sift through classes or cell types

You're welcome to suggest databases with good coverage over the proteome that I could use for these.

> I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions of the predicted structure?

Yes, any residues in the files I fetch get rendered. I rank by coverage before fetching.

> You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too

I'll consider it.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-12-26 20:20:22+00:00
lol I never made that connection — in Turkish, zero is sıfır, which does sound a lot like cipher. Also, password is şifre, which again sounds similar. Looking online, apparently the path is sifr (Arabic, meaning zero) -> cifre (French, first meaning zero, then any numeral, then coded message) -> şifre (Turkish, code/cipher)
by baobun | 2025-12-26 20:20:24+00:00
> What’s the point of the “Keep my email addresses private” github option and “noreply” emails then?

Those settings will affect what email shows up in commits.

In commits you vreate on other tooling you can configure a fake/alternate user.email address in gitconfig. Git (not just GitHub) needs some email address flr each commit but it is freetext.

There is one problem: commit signatures. For GitHub to consider a commit not created by github.com Web UI to be "verified" and get a green check mark, the following needs to hold:

- Commit is signed

- Commit email address matches a verified GH account email address

So you can not use a 'nocontact@thih9.example.com' address and get green checks on your commits - it needs to be an address that is at least active when you add it to your account.
by LukeShu | 2025-12-26 20:21:04+00:00
TL;DR: Not the FSF, but SFC; email compliance@sfconservancy.org

The dominant legal theory is that the GPL can only be enforced by the party holding the copyright. SFC's lawsuit against Vizio is strategically trying to establish precedent changing that; establishing that end-users are "third party beneficiaries" under the GPL, so others can enforce the GPL; but for now the copyright holder is the only one who can enforce it.

So the FSF could only take it up if the violation is on projects that do copyright-assignment to the FSF (i.e.: most GNU stuff). If you do find a violation of GNU stuff, the process is "email license-violation@gnu.org". I do not know what process Craig and Krzysztof use when triaging reports and deciding what to pursue.

Many Linux-kernel contributors (also, SFC member projects such as OpenWrt, Git, Qemu) have assigned their copyright to SFC or named SFC as their legal representative (also, SFC member projects; so SFC can take up something like this. Similarly, you can report violations to them by emailing compliance@sfconservancy.org (see https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html for more info).

Now, SFC is aware of more violations than they could ever possibly pursue, so they're strategic about pursuing ones that are high-impact. I'm not sure how they decide that. But I can say that medical devices are near-and-dear to them, between executive-director Karen Sandler's implanted defibrillator and policy-fellow Bradley Kühn's blood glucose monitor.
by luckylion | 2025-12-26 20:21:16+00:00
> "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.

It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good.

Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-12-26 20:21:20+00:00
Are you saying that "age" is somehow a reason to retire? Most professionals I know who are able continue to work as they age, perhaps with a somewhat reduced work schedule. There's nothing I know of which keeps the mind sharp than the need to solve Real Problems. Figuring out which golf course to try, or which TV channel to choose -- those don't help too much to reduce cognitive decline.
Show HN: Storytel-player – unofficial desktop client for Storytel
by debba | 2025-12-26 20:22:25+00:00
Hi HN,
I’ve been working on a desktop client for Storytel, as there is currently no official app for PC/Mac. I wanted something that felt more "native" than a browser tab and included features like offline listening and system tray integration.
The stack:
• Frontend: React 18, Tailwind CSS, Vite.
• Backend: Fastify (embedded within the app to handle API logic and streaming).
• Desktop: Electron with TypeScript.
One of the challenges was managing the streaming API and session persistence in a way that feels seamless across different OSs. It currently supports Windows, macOS (x64/ARM64), and Linux.
It is still a work in progress, but the core player and library management are stable. Any feedback on the architecture (especially the Fastify-within-Electron approach) or the app itself would be greatly appreciated.

Repo:

https://github.com/debba/storytel-player

Releases:

https://github.com/debba/storytel-player/releases
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-26 20:22:35+00:00
Only if you believe in water memory or homeopathy.

To stretch the analogy, all the "babies" in the "bathwater" of youtube that I follow are busy throwing themselves out by creating or joining alternative platforms, having to publicly decry the actions Google takes that make their lives worse and their jobs harder, and ensuring they have very diversified income streams and productions to ensure that WHEN, not IF youtube fucks them, they won't be homeless.

They mostly use Youtube as an advertising platform for driving people to patreon, nebula, whatever the new guntube is called, twitch, literal conventions now, tours, etc.

They've been expecting youtube to go away for decades. Many of them have already survived multiple service deaths, like former Vine creator Drew Gooden, or have had their business radically changed by google product decisions already.
by culi | 2025-12-26 20:22:36+00:00
Well yes ofc this is an old discovery. Boletes are known choice edibles around the world so ofc people would discover that if they undercook this mushroom they would trip. We even have some written history about it:

> The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong wrote in Baopuzi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) around 300 CE that eating a certain wild mushroom raw would result in attainment of transcendence immediately, suggesting that the mushrooms may have been known for thousands of years.
by isoprophlex | 2025-12-26 20:22:51+00:00
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.

The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.

Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what
tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.

It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
by ReflectedImage | 2025-12-26 20:23:02+00:00
No one can do fast prototypes with types, all they can do is convince themselves they are faster than they really are.

Having worked in both dynamically typed and statically typed software development shops, the statically typed programmers are considerably slower in general. Usually they only have 1/3 of the output as programmers who use dynamically typing. Statically typed programmers also tend to be much less ambitious in their projects in general.

They still think they are "fast programmers" but it's complete fiction.
by zephen | 2025-12-26 20:23:59+00:00
> "Learning" was used by the person I responded too.

Not in the same sense.

> If you had read my comment with any care you would have realized I used the words "training" and "learning" specifically and carefully.

This is completely belied by "It works exactly the same for a LLM."

> That doesn't count as a "copy" since it isn't human-discernable.

That's not the reason it _might not_ count as a copy (the law is still not settled on this, and all the court cases have lots of caveats in the rulings), but thanks for playing.

> If you don't like being called out for lack of comprehension, then don't needlessly impose a semantic interjection

If you want to not appear mendacious, then don't claim equivalence between human learning and machine training.

> It is pretty clear this is a transformative use and so far the courts have agreed

In weak cases that didn't show exact outputs from the LLM, yes. In any case, "transformative" does not automagically transform into fair use, although it is one considered factor.

> Very mature.

Hilarious, coming from the one who wrote "if it helps your comprehension."

You must be one of those assholes who think it's OK to say mean things if you use the right words.

Bless your heart.
by blintz | 2025-12-26 20:24:02+00:00
> PEP 658 went live on PyPI in May 2023. uv launched in February 2024. The timing isn’t coincidental. uv could be fast because the ecosystem finally had the infrastructure to support it. A tool like uv couldn’t have shipped in 2020. The standards weren’t there yet.

How/why did the package maintainers start using all these improvements? Some of them sound like a bunch of work, and getting a package ecosystem to move is hard. Was there motivation to speed up installs across the ecosystem? If setup.py was working okay for folks, what incentivized them to start using pyproject.toml?
by Aurornis | 2025-12-26 20:24:07+00:00
Be sure to read the top comment where someone who claims to have worked for the company provides some inside information.

In my experience, this is quite common when the development of hardware is viewed as a cost center and is outsourced to various providers and teams. Those providers and teams churn a lot and nobody who worked on that is likely still involved with the company via contracts or direct employment.

Front line support people aren’t equipped to respond to these requests. If you’re lucky they’ll get bounced around internally while project managers play hot potato with the e-mail until it gets forgotten. You might get lucky if you go the corporate legal route, but more likely is that the lawyers will do the math on the likelihood of you causing them actual legal trouble for anything and decide it’s best to ignore it.

When I worked at a company that had a history of GPL drama one of the first things I did was enforce a rule that every release had a GPL tarball that was archived and backed up. We educated support people on where to forward requests. I handled them myself. 7 out 10 times, the person on the other end was angry because they assumed the GPL entitled them to all of our source code and they were disappointed when they only found GPL code in the tarball. It really opened my eyes to some of the craziness you get exposed to with these requests (though clearly not the polite and informed request in this Reddit thread) which is probably another reason why support staff are uneasy about engaging with these requests.