MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonnon | 2025-12-14 17:47:33+00:00
> the negative impact of AI on copywriting and how I think that sucks.)

The extent of your analysis is

> whelp that sucks

with a tone similar to what one might take when describing the impact of flatscreen TVs on the once-flourishing TV repair business, without mentioning all of the legitimate ethical (and legal) objections people have to how AI companies train their models and how the models are used.

> Anything I could do to be less insufferable?

Sure, go do a series on how they use residential IPs to hide their scraping, or on how they're probably violating copyright in a multitude of ways, including software FOSS licenses by disregarding attribution clauses and derivative work licensing obligations, especially for copyleft licenses like the GPL. Write about people using these systems to effectively "rewrite" GPL'd code so they can (theoretically) get around the terms completely.
by jwr | 2025-12-14 17:47:52+00:00
No need to get agitated. Some people enjoy sitting in the car for multiple hours, some people don't. I found it changed for me as I got older.

However, about those 20 minutes — this, again, is a misconception. Stop at a busy rest area or a gas station and actually start your stopwatch. If you are a single male, it might take you shorter. If you are with a family, 20 minutes is pretty much the minimum.
by mmooss | 2025-12-14 17:48:02+00:00
Who has time for videos? I know lots watch them, but wow - reading is so much more efficient. I can skip ahead - and skim - or revisit; I can annotate; I can save, transcribe (copy/paste), I read so much faster than even accelerated video can play .... and all so much more easily.

By sticking to reading, am I missing out on content?

Edit: Not a criticism of watching video, I'm wondering if I'm missing substantial things. If I didn't read, for example, I'd miss a lot that doesn't exist in video or audio. Same thing with podcasts.
by Etheryte | 2025-12-14 17:48:24+00:00
That's fair, but even the commonly cited longest route [0] you could theoretically walk without intentional detours, Cape Town, South Africa to Magadan, Russia, is approximately 14k miles.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/a2mcjq/21212_km_fr...
by dgreensp | 2025-12-14 17:48:36+00:00
Upvoted because educational, despite the AI-ness and clickbait.

I’ve worked at orgs that used Postgres in production, but I’ve never been the one responsible for tuning/maintenance. I never knew that Postgres doesn’t merge pages or have a minimum page occupancy. I would have thought it’s not technically a B-tree if it doesn’t.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-14 17:48:43+00:00
Their choice is between two private clubs who both cut services when in power, and are both taking huge amounts of money from private equity.

The Democrats spent the beginning of the 2016 cycle all pretending to be for universal health care (literally the only reason why Buttigieg and Harris got on stage), then spent the rest of the cycle dishonestly campaigning against it while fixing a primary. As soon as Bernie lost, health insurance and healthcare stocks had their highest stock price bump in history.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

I agree with your opinions on government funding, I just find it gross when it's used as an excuse to put the blame on the powerless. The powerless are not powerless because they choose to be, they're powerless because they are restrained by the powerful. Not only is the information they receive about the world restricted and their educations propagandistic, but if they voted for what the powerful didn't want, their vote would be ignored.

On the other hand, you've been convinced to blame the powerless for the crimes of the powerful, so I don't know how you're any less of a sucker. I guess you're wealthier than they are, so maybe you're a support system for the people doing the suckering.

edit: I had to add the last, because this type of argument is something I consistently hear from people who are paid to do the exploiting. If you're a thief, you figure out a way to blame the people you steal from.
Dissecting AI Agent Applications: Lessons from the Most Innovative Use Cases
by helain | 2025-12-14 17:49:24+00:00
AI agents are pushing the boundaries of what's possible across industries. Their innovative applications are providing invaluable lessons on efficiency and transforming operational methodologies.

From healthcare's predictive diagnostics to automated customer service solutions in retail, AI agents are becoming the backbone of many essential functions. These advanced systems enable data-driven insights and open new avenues for problem-solving.

### Key Takeaways: - *Cost Efficiency:* Automating repetitive tasks can allocate human resources towards more strategic roles, greatly enhancing productivity. - *Customer Insights:* Personalization through AI leads to better user engagement and satisfaction, crucial metrics in today’s market. - *Real-time Analytics:* AI agents analyze massive datasets, yielding actionable insights that can inform business strategies.

As AI continues to develop, these use cases underscore the need for companies to adapt and adopt these technologies to remain relevant. What innovative use cases have you encountered in your field?

#AI #Innovation #MachineLearning
by jrowen | 2025-12-14 17:49:35+00:00
Notably, the terms "UX" and "experience" are not present in that document. UI and UX are different things. UX is a newer concept that is more based on observing users and their emotional reactions to using the product.

UML and functional definitions and iso standards are still important, it's just not UX.

Good luck never observing users using your product. Not everything is a space shuttle, recall that we are talking about toothbrushes here.
by doodlebugging | 2025-12-14 17:49:35+00:00
Thanks for that link. Before reading I was in the process of migrating all my stuff from a Windows7 machine, deduping archives and identifying software that I may still need to run in a VM somewhere or on a tablet. I had considered flipping to Apple devices since I have an iPhone but have never pulled the trigger on any of that. I was considering iMacs instead of a Linux box for a more seamless interface with the phone.

After reading that article where it is apparent that Apple has intentionally used terms that sound similar to obscure what the customer is actually gaining when they upgrade versus update and they intentionally omit the part about older devices not getting all the security updates that are pushed in the updates. I now have some clarity.

I can focus on moving to Linux and in time will be ditching the iPhone. Should've done this years ago.
by Hnrobert42 | 2025-12-14 17:50:27+00:00
That's great! I often measure technological progress by how close we are to TNG. Like, there is a new lithotripsy wand that breaks up kidney stones with ultrasound. That feels like something you would see Beverly Crusher use in sick bay.

Side note, the wand was developed to solve for: trip to Mars -> bone density loss -> minerals in blood -> debilitating kidney stone 1 year from a hospital.
by exceptione | 2025-12-14 17:50:37+00:00
A high quality documentary by ARTE about the history of American capitalism and its relation to democracy. Very helpful to place current affairs in historic context, but the historic footage alone is already worth it. (I would love if some American friends can comment to which extent they think this history is part of a common, shared memory in society.)

Available until 31/01/2026. This is the first of 3 episodes. The other two are:

Part II: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-002-A/capitalism-in-ame...

Part III: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-003-A/capitalism-in-ame.... This part concentrates on Silicon Valley.
by preinheimer | 2025-12-14 17:50:46+00:00
We really don't want to operate our own hardware. The situation in Peru at the time was that there wasn't anyone offering the bandwidth we needed who could actually back up their bandwidth claims. Forget 95th percentile, bandwidth there was straight "you pay for a pipe, we give you that size pipe (but somewhat oversold)". But no one could do more than like 5mbit that was actually more like 3.
by nchmy | 2025-12-14 17:50:56+00:00
I really thought that cookstoves would be safe from hacker news' erroneous self-importance and condescension, but here we are.

You've evidently never left your ivory tower to live in a sheet metal (or worse) shack, which a significant proportion of the world's poorest try to eek out an existence in.

And especially haven't carried the load of smoke-fueled, sleep-deprived women who exist to serve as household appliances.

There's so much so disgracefully wrong with what you said that i don't even know where to begin with setting the record straight.

I'll simply point out the absurdity of saying that there's wisdom in filling homes, eyes and lungs with creosote (and worse) when more people die from smoke inhalation than malaria and aids combined. And saying people shouldn't reduce their biomass consumption 4-fold, which saves forests, erosion, co2, and extremely limited and time/money - just so they can have a bit more ash to make some lye with.

Go live in extreme poverty somewhere for a while - it'll do you some good.
by kmelve | 2025-12-14 17:51:10+00:00
Fair point, we appreciated that courtesy, and I should have reached out first. That was a miss on my part.

My thinking was that it became public pretty quickly once your post went viral (folks were already connecting the dots in the replies), and it felt awkward to respond to the substance without being direct about the context.

But you're right that a heads-up would have been the better move.
Show HN: Container-Maker–A standalone CLI for DevContainers(run without VS Code)
by DEVINHE111 | 2025-12-14 17:51:16+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Container-Maker (cm) because I really liked the concept of "DevContainers" (defining your development environment as code in `devcontainer.json`), but I didn't want my development workflow to be tightly coupled to VS Code. I wanted a tool that felt as fast as `make` but offered the isolation of Docker, usable from any terminal or IDE.

Container-Maker is a standalone CLI tool written in Go that manages development environments.

Key features: - *Standalone:* Fully compatible with the `devcontainer.json` spec but runs independently of VS Code. - *Zero-Config:* The `cm setup` command auto-detects your OS and installs/configures the optimal runtime (Docker Desktop, Docker Engine, or Podman). - *Native Experience:* It handles signal proxying (SIGWINCH) and TTY correctly, so tools like `vim` and `htop` feel native inside the container. - *BuildKit Powered:* Leverages Docker BuildKit for aggressive layer caching to speed up environment spin-up. - *TUI Dashboard:* Includes a terminal UI (`cm status`) to manage running containers and view logs. - *Cloud Integration:* Can provision GPU instances (AWS, GCP, etc.) for AI/ML workloads directly from the CLI.

It aims to solve the "works on my machine" problem by making the container the first-class citizen for your shell.

The project is open source (AGPL-3.0).

Repo: https://github.com/UPwith-me/Container-Maker

I'd love to hear your feedback on the TUI experience and the setup flow!
by sibeliuss | 2025-12-14 17:51:23+00:00
Exactly! Once its working, it can be very healthy. And especially on the client. For a very, very, very long time. We started using GraphQL at the very beginning, back in 2015, and the way it has scaled over time -- across backend and frontend -- has worked amazingly well. Going on 10 years now and no slowing down.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-14 17:51:38+00:00
> "tool of thought"

I felt compelled to make a comment about that last week[1]; I stopped thinking of it like "APL is a tool for thought [and nothing else is]" and started thinking of it like the Sapir-Whorf idea; all programming languages and mathematical notations are tools for thought and we don't normally talk about them like that. Their designs promote/encourage/ease some ways of thinking about problems and reveal some patterns in the data and the algorithms, and on the flip side by making design choices they necessarily demote/discourage/frustrate other ways of thinking and obscure some patterns.

It's not just that Go has Goroutines in it as a technical feature, it's that having a first class way to express that feature encourages Go developers to think about solving problems in terms of Goroutines. A bit like "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to looks like a nail". But we still go down the direction of making a kitchen-sink language which has a bodge of half-implemented mismatched features from different areas wedged awkwardly into its syntax, and then saying "this company only does Java" or "only uses C++" instead of making smaller simpler tools that fit particular problems and working on ways to learn about them and integrate them.

> "I wish multidimensional arrays were a first-class citizen in my main languages though."

It has not helped you but you wish you had access to it because it's changed the way you think? Same; it has changed the way I think about bulk-transforming arrays of data, and using intermediate array structures, and thinking it's good to have an interpreter layer which transforms a whole array using SIMD/vector extensions instead of a loop which does individual non-SIMD tests on items so it can exit part way through the array to "save time".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183808
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-14 17:51:52+00:00
The other thing that private arms buys you is international support. If you show that you can make the most of limited offensive capabilities, you attract allies whose interests are aligned to your own, as seen from the American Revolution to modern-day Ukraine.

If you disarm and roll over meekly, nobody is going to want to help you.

And if you know anything about Rahm Emanuel's background, you'd think he'd be the one waving this particular banner, but... (shrug)
by louthy | 2025-12-14 17:52:43+00:00
> Hi, can you give an example? Not sure I understand what you're getting at there.

An utterly trivial example is constraining the day-field in a date structure. If your constraint is at the level of the field then it can’t make a decision as to whether 31 is a good day-value or not, but if the constraint is at the record-structure level then it can use the month-value in its predicate and that allows us to constrain the data correctly.

When it comes to schema design it always helps to think about how to ‘step up’ to see if there’s a way of representing a constraint that seems impossible at ‘smaller’ schema units.
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-14 17:52:45+00:00
If your process is shit, you're just automating shit at lightning speed.

If you're bad at your job, you're automating it at lightning speed.

You need have good business process and be good at your job without AI in order to have any chance in hell of being successful with it. The idea that you can just outsource your thinking to the AI and don't need to actually understand or learn anything new anymore is complete delusion.
by Alifatisk | 2025-12-14 17:53:04+00:00
> As a writer of very-short-form stuff like emails, it's probably the best model available right now.

This is exactly my feeling with Kimi K2, it's unique in this regard, the only one that comes close is Gemini 3 pro, otherwise, no other model has been this good at helping out with communication.

It has such a good understanding with "emotional intelligence" (?), reading signals in messages, understanding intentions, taking human factors into consideration and social norms and trends when helping out with formulating a message.

I don't exactly know what Moonshot did during training but they succeeded with a unique trait on this model. This area deserves more highlight in my opinion.

I saw someone linking to EQ-bench which is about emotional intelligence in LLMs, looking at it, Kimi is #1. So this kind of confirms my feeling.

Link: https://eqbench.com
by christoph123 | 2025-12-14 17:53:19+00:00
A fully automated time-tracker that feeds screenshots into llms to help you spend your time where it matters to you.

https://donethat.ai

With lot's of built-in data privacy safeguards https://donethat.ai/data

Also made an overview of similar tools out there https://donethat.ai/compare

Recently broke on Linux with a Wayland security update, working on a fix! Using Electron for cross-platform.
by Pikamander2 | 2025-12-14 17:53:23+00:00
I agree wholeheartedly with this.

While "the classics" may have some educational and cultural value, many of them came off as dry and pretentious.

There are countless anecdotes online of people who loved to read books as a kid but thoroughly hated reading by the end of high school or college, which is a terrible outcome.

I think that English classes in general are far too prescriptive and narrow in what they assign students to read, particularly when it comes to fiction. They seem to adopt the attitude of "These books are well-written classics. You have to read them, and if you don't enjoy them then there's something wrong with you."

Forcing students to read specific boring material might make sense in other classes like History or Science where there are very specific facts that they need to remember, but the required reading portion of English classes doesn't need to be handled in such a rigid way.

I suspect that we would end up with far better results if we gave students a curated list of popular books and had them pick out their favorites to read rather than just telling them to go read Ethan Frome and write an essay on loneliness afterwards.
by simonw | 2025-12-14 17:53:26+00:00
Has it been proven that the major labs are scraping via residential IPs? If so I will absolutely write about that.

I know there are a ton of fly-by-night startups abusing residential IP scraping and I hate it, but if it's Anthropic or OpenAI or Google Gemini that's a story worth telling.

I have written a lot about training data - https://simonwillison.net/tags/training-data/ - including highlighting instances where models attempted to train on ethical sources.

I've also pointed out when a model claims to use ethical data but still uses a scrape of the web that's full of unlicensed content, eg https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/7/comma/ and https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/5/pleias-llms/
by codexb | 2025-12-14 17:53:33+00:00
I think it's a stretch to call having to make a living in a career other than your preferred job "suffering". Even before AI, there were surely millions of people who grew up wanting to be an artist, or an astronaut, or an architect, or any number of things that they never had the skills or the work ethic or the resources to achieve. I'm sure before cars there were people who loved maintaining stables of horses and carriages, and lamented the decline of the stable master profession. It's no different now.
by radimm | 2025-12-14 17:54:04+00:00
Author here – it’s actually funny, as you pointed out parts that are my own (TM) attempts to make it a bit lighthearted.

LLM is indeed used for correction and improving some sentences, but the rest is my honest attempt at making writing approachable. If you’re willing to invest the time, you can see my fight with technical writing over time if you go through my blog.

(Writing this in the middle of a car wash on my iPhone keyboard ;-)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-14 17:54:17+00:00
I was an avid viewer until he stepped in my area of expertise and leveraged technicalities, half-truths, and misrepresentation to really juice up the click-baityness and "wow!" factor.

My interest in his videos plunged after that, and it seemed like he was re-alinging for consistent high views over straight hard factual education. Frankly I wish I could purge him from my feed at this point (youtube still recommends all his videos incessantly, despite me not watching one for at least a year now. On paper I am the ideal viewer though, so...)
by mmooss | 2025-12-14 17:54:20+00:00
> The world changes

We change the world. It's not happening to you; you're doing it. You're doing it right now with your parent comment - you're not an observer on the sideline, you're in the thick of it, doing it, your every action - my every action - has consequences. Who will we be in our communities and societies?

> I have read pieces nearly a hundred years old saying this

You can read pieces 100 years old talking about famine, polio, Communist and fascist dictatorships, the subordination of women, etc. We changed the world, not by crying about inevitability but with vision, confidence, and getting to work. We'd better because we are completely responsible for the results.

Also, inevitability is a common argument of people doing bad things. 'I am inevitable.' 'Human nature is ...' (nature being inevitable). How f-ing lazy and utterly irresponsible. Could you imagine telling your boss that? Your family? I hope you don't tell yourself that.
by hannasanarion | 2025-12-14 17:54:29+00:00
> All of these AI outputs are both polluting the commons where they pulled all their training data AND are alienating the creators of these cultural outputs via displacement of labor and payment

No dispute on the first part, but I really wish there were numbers available somehow to address the second. Maybe it's my cultural bubble, but it sure feels like the "AI Artpocalypse" isn't coming, in part because of AI backlash in general, but more specifically because people who are willing to pay money for art seem to strongly prefer that their money goes to an artist, not a GPU cluster operator.

I think a similar idea might be persisting in AI programming as well, even though it seems like such a perfect use case. Anthropic released an internal survey a few weeks ago that was like, the vast majority, something like 90% of their own workers AI usage, was spent explaining allnd learning about things that already exist, or doing little one-off side projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened at all, because of the overhead, like building little dashboards for a single dataset or something, stuff where the outcome isn't worth the effort of doing it yourself. For everything that actually matters and would be paid for, the premier AI coding company is using people to do it.
by nubg | 2025-12-14 17:54:42+00:00
This tell us more about your (lacking) skills at using AI than the state of AI tools themselves.

You're probably using the free lobotomized versions of LLMs, and shooting a one-off short ambiguous prompt and wondering why it didn't turn out the way you imagined.

Meanwhile people spend hundreds of dollars on pro LLM access and learn to use tool calling, deep research, agents and context engineering.
by everforward | 2025-12-14 17:55:56+00:00
Let me preface this by saying it is wildly impractical, but you could boot into a separate, minimal OS that mounts your primary OS disk and manages those permissions.

For an extra layer, have the “god mode OS” installed on physically read-only media, and mount the primary OS in a no-exec mode.

Regular OS can’t modify permissions, and the thing that can modify permissions can’t be modified.

It’s too clunky for home use, but could probably be used for things like VM images (where the “god mode OS” is the image builder, and changing permissions would require rebuilding the image and redeploying).
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-14 17:55:57+00:00
I agree with your broader political point re: voting preference. I also don't understand why this is a thing.

Re: farmers - are farms themselves a big farm risk? I can imagine farm workers living in nearby towns requiring fire service, but not the farms themselves or farm owners. I can see the case for public funding of fire service for such towns, but density still matters - if 1000 farm workers each live on their own acre (~42,000 sqft), it's going to cost more to provide fire service than they live on a 1,000 sqft lot, or in a 1,000 sqft apartment in a 4 storey building. Most of North American land use will require them to live much less densely than they might have otherwise, driving up the cost of infra & fire service.