MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metadope | 2025-12-31 20:08:51+00:00
"My goal is to save what is left of our country, and I think this site can be instrumental in restoring what the locusts have eaten."

-- from the Support Us page at https://www.somaliscan.com/support

I did five minutes of due diligence and I can confidently declare that this site is itself a fraud; a political front, public-facing vaporware weaponized to further the recent mostly-inflated-or-fictional narrative agreed upon by the righteous, part of the propaganda campaign designed to smear Tim Walz with guilt by association.

There is likely some very real fraud occuring in applications for federal grants, funding expressly purposed for the betterment of childcare. Bears investigation to be sure, but my question becomes, what will you make of it?

It's all hands on deck for this publicity campaign, which has all the favorite ingredients to brew up a new rabble-rousing hate-flavored stew-in-your-juices "news" story.

Your money is being stolen! By foreigners! Immigrants scarfing federal grants (stealing your tax money), in a Demon-cratic city/state, see how they do!

Like, as if, this isn't happening everywhere, all the time, when federal money is made available. There's good intentions, legislations, and the road to hell.

There will be more of this cruft, unfortunately, in our future, because they (the righteous) are really good at coordinated media campaigns to push minor flamebait stories to heights of outrage. And you can tell by the people involved (JD Vance, Kash Patel, Fox News, and those ever-ready YouTube papirazzi) that this will go on, like with previous outrage campaigns, designed to make you look here instead of there.

He didn't bring his long rifle, just a friend with a camera, but Nick Shirley personally went a-hunting for fraud from the outside of various childcare sites in Minnesota. He is making it real by doing his own research. He could see the signs of fraud, just by standing outside and sniffing the air!

Which reminded me a little of nine years ago, when a Mr. Edgar Welch personally went (armed) looking for the basement of Comet Pizza in Washington DC, back in those crazy QAnon fantasy child abuse daze (December of 2016).

This will last longer than Cracker Barrel or Bud Light. But this too will pass.
by Spivak | 2025-12-31 20:10:20+00:00
> But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before

It's not, which is the point. They're trying to get people off the old way of extending the shell. If they just wanted to reskin the right click menu to look "modern" they could have done that.

https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...
by somenameforme | 2025-12-31 20:10:20+00:00
The USD was metal based, in one way or another, from 1792-1971, with convertibility briefly suspended following the Great Depression. The economy grew by many orders of magnitude over that time, vastly more (relatively) than it has since 1971, which is when Bretton Woods ended and the USD finally became completely free floating.

Now, just 50 years beyond that point, think about how fragile everything already seems. It's only being held together by massive fed involvement, quantitative easing, and ever more archaic economic concepts like zero or even negative interest rates. And this all during (1) extremely stable years (relative to the World Wars and much more that we previously overcame) and (2) unprecedented growth enabled by the computing revolution. Without these factors, do you really think this experiment would've seen 50?

From 1800 to 1950 there was inflation of less than 50%. [1] From 1971 to 2007 (to go just before your cutoff date) there was inflation of 528%. That in-between era of 1950 to 1971 is when the money printer started. We were still bound by Bretton Woods and so when France made a 'gold call', on all the worthless dollars they had accumulated, we simply defaulted and withdrew. A fun quote from Nixon's treasury secretary at the time, "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem."

[1] - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
by Mobius01 | 2025-12-31 20:10:48+00:00
Definitely a perfect timing situation, though with substantial risk. Considering the time the game was in development, an alternative could have showed up in the market.

However, I believe Stardew Valley’s appeal wasn’t simply of fulfilling a void in the market. It is great because there is genuine passion for the subject in the execution, and the content in the game is truly compelling for a wide audience. An amazing story.
by badc0ffee | 2025-12-31 20:10:51+00:00
I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).

Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.
by robocat | 2025-12-31 20:10:56+00:00
Why don't laptop manufacturers deliver models with Linux?

I presume the problem is that users cause support costs?

Or that Linux and App updates cause costs?

Windows users have many support issues, however the users don't blame the laptop manufacturer?

I guess Chromebooks serve that market. And Google allow Linux installs on Chromebooks (helps attack Windows instalbase, but too little)
by lovich | 2025-12-31 20:11:52+00:00
Because your account was created after general access to chatGPT and other LLMs was available to the public and your writing style looks similar.

Anonymous text on the internet, especially from accounts made after 2022/2023, are like steel post nuclear tests. Everything on the planet is tainted and the only things that can be relatively trusted are steel/text created prior to the tainting event
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-31 20:11:53+00:00
Someone just gave me a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home

I have not had a non-work computer running Windows to play with in several decades

It has enough RAM that I can boot UNIX-like OS with rootfs mounted as tmpfs. This is how I prefer to run UNIX-like OS

Not interested in connecting a non-work computer running Windows to the internet but it might be useful for offline usage
by illiac786 | 2025-12-31 20:12:12+00:00
Heavy metals [1]
Nitrate and nitrite [2]
PFAs most probably (couldn’t find anything about this, but since it’s everywhere…)

[1] https://www.webpronews.com/study-exposes-airline-water-conta...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310709/#:~:text=Beside...
by nej24swei | 2025-12-31 20:12:18+00:00
And I am going to restate how it’s an absolutely terrible idea, and will always fail with its perverse incentives. This does not solve any problems and creates many more.

Your idea will create a massive black market for “adult validation tokens”, handing billions of dollars to criminal groups reselling these things.

And then where such a system goes in 5-10y. Sure it’s sorta anonymous today, but then new government decides - “let’s make it mandatory to be sold with a binding identity and credit card.” Suddenly you need that token to log in to any public website. And Chinese, European and American authorities demand realtime access to the global logs.

Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about. Don't design or build oppression technology.

The very idea that you can realistically enforce Point of Sales age checks at scale is not sensible.
by cathyreisenwitz | 2025-12-31 20:12:27+00:00
"Blogging starts conversations with people I have never met. Blog posts become invitations that never expire. They wait patiently for the right moment to be found. Someone reads an old post, reaches out, and suddenly we are talking. Even in person, conversations start more easily because people already have a sense of who I am or what I care about." This is so true. I was just thinking, most of my BFFs came into my life because they or someone they knew read something by me and wanted to know more.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-31 20:12:32+00:00
One bit of the story which isn't widely recognized is that the Japanese language and music are remarkably legible to westerners.

In particular, westerners "just get" the emotional tone and rhythm of Japanese and right away feel the emotions of anime characters. My wife is skeptical of my Japanese obsession but she frequently remarks that she finds commercial Japanese music surprisingly relatable. I can still sing Japanese theme songs from old Rumiko Takahashi anime like Urusei Yatsura and Ranma ½ regardless of knowing or not knowing what they mean -- it's just easy.

This is not at all the case for Chinese, where the conflict between grammatical tone and the tone in music is immense, where Chinese music frequently sounds like the worst of Eastern European traditional music, and where I struggle to feel the feeling behind Chinese speech despite pop culture exposure and taking every chance I can get to watch the faces of Chinese speakers while they converse. No wonder games like Azur Lane, Genshin Impact and Arknights default to Japanese vocals in the West.

On top of that, Hollywood productions seem like they were made by the people who were too cool to hang out with me in high school, whereas anime is in the space of fantasy and science fiction that I grew up with. (Frickin' O'Neill colonies in 1979 Gundam)

I'm inspired by the story of how Kirby, Ditko, Lee revolutionized comics in the 1960s but even more inspired by how Type/Moon made a low-budget game, then a series of increasingly complex games culiminating in the multi-billion Fate/Grand Order, or how web novel authors get a publishing contract and then a manga and an anime that becomes a global sensation. Or how anime's reach often exceeds it's grasp like the botched ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the bungled first firing of the wave motion gun in Space Battleship Yamato or the flawed anime of Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon with terrible character designs that turned me on a light novel that I greatly enjoy -- Hollywood just doesn't do that.

And it's about the superfan. Maybe you spend a bit on a Crunchyroll subscription but when my son got into Bocchi the Rock! he's spent hundreds on collecting volumes of the manga as soon as they come out
by xp84 | 2025-12-31 20:12:50+00:00
I think the adtech-industrial complex has thrown in the towel on wanting quality ads and customers who trust those ads. It's easier to just welcome in the scammers and accept that the top 80% "savviest" people all know their ads are mostly scams. There will always still be enough marks that the scammers, who have excellent margins to play with, will come to feed at the trough of the ignorant and naïve by buying the ads. If needed, the platform can adjust the ad:content ratio to near 100%. Their 'competition' is all doing the same thing anyway, so they won't lose eyeballs in the aggregate.
by Closi | 2025-12-31 20:12:59+00:00
I think your definition of it being 'human level' is sensible - definitely a lower bar to hit than 'as long as people can do work that a robot cannot do, we don't have AGI'.

There is certainly a lot road between current technology and driving a car through a construction zone during rush hour, particularly with the same amount of driving practice a human gets.

Personally I think there could be an AGI which couldn't drive a car, but has genuine sentience - an awareness of being alive, although not necessarily the exact human experience. Maybe this isn't AGI, which more implies problem-solving and thinking rather than sentience, but in my gut if we got something sentient but that couldn't drive a car, we would still be there if that makes sense?
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-12-31 20:13:15+00:00
I don't hate Windows 11, I just don't give a shit about it. I can run nearly any software I might possibly need professionally on MacOS or Linux. The latter is also so good at gaming, that I don't really need Windows for that either.

At this point, Windows is just something I occasionally dual boot from my laptop, for the rare piece of software that I can't use on MacOS or Linux easily.
by Gormo | 2025-12-31 20:13:18+00:00
I don't think that's correct. Prices for retail goods aren't usually even attached to the product in interstate commerce, and are shown locally on store shelving.

Any applicable unit pricing requirements would be at the state/local level, not federal, but only a few states have such requirements. See: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/national-legal-metrology/us-ret...
by lern_too_spel | 2025-12-31 20:14:36+00:00
> With that said, the magic comment is a wart

Not only a wart but a massive foot gun, not shared by any other language, as I said. It is incredibly common to create hash tables using strings as keys, and Ruby makes this dangerous by default.

> Having immutable objects by default isn’t incredibly commonplace outside of functional languages

They make it easy to create immutable objects. Python has tuples and immutable data classes. Strings are immutable.

> The Ruby Core team is keen to keep the lessons learned from the Python 2 -> 3 migration in mind.

In the meantime, this ridiculous foot gun that no other language shares exists. That is a fact, and the fix being hard does not make it any less of a fact.
by cheschire | 2025-12-31 20:14:48+00:00
Ehh, nothing so strong as "failed". For example in Cinnamon I will occasionally install an app that doesn't have a tray icon. Or if I install an app using a chromium based browser, it doesn't have an icon associated with it. So then I tell claude to fix it. It goes out to the internet and finds a suitable icon and will set it up for me.

Or trying to get Steam to work, which is wildly better than it used to be thanks to proton, but still not quite a perfect experience. For example there's a menu compatibility setting you have to enable for some menus to work, and other menus don't work when you have hover-click enabled in the accessibility settings of Cinnamon. Those weren't fixed by Claude CLI like the icons example, but definitely identified through chats with Claude.

The only "fail" states I get into are when I'm doing homelab power user stuff, setting up ownCloud, configuring Caddy, proxmox, etc. I don't blame Linux for that though.

All in all, I would say Linux is absolutely in a state I would install on my parents' computer without fear like I would've had in perhaps 2010.
by docjay | 2025-12-31 20:14:48+00:00
The thing that blows my mind about language models isn't that they do what they do, it's that it's indistinguishable from what we do. We are a black box; nobody knows how we do what we do, or if we even do what we do because of a decision we made. But the funny thing is: if I can perfectly replicate a black box then you cannot say that what I'm doing isn't exactly what the black box is doing as well.

We can't measure goals, autonomy, or consciousness. We don't even have an objective measure of intelligence. Instead, since you probably look like me I think it's polite to assume you're conscious…that's about it. There’s literally no other measure. I mean, if I wanted to be a jerk, I could ask if you're conscious, but whether you say yes or no is proof enough that you are. If I'm curious about intelligence I can come up with a few dozen questions, out of a possible infinite number, and if you get those right I'll call you intelligent too. But if you get them wrong… well, I'll just give you a different set of questions; maybe accounting is more your thing than physics.

So, do you just respond with text when you’re promoted with input from your eyes or ears? You’ll instinctively say “No, I’m conscious and make my own decisions”, but that’s just a sequence of tokens with a high probability in response to that question.

Do you actually have goals, or did the system prompt of life tell you that in your culture, at this point in time, you should strive to achieve goals[] because that’s what gets positive feedback?
by riazrizvi | 2025-12-31 20:15:33+00:00
Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?

All you find is stuff, presented as super valuable, and people very very keen to sell it to you. They’ll do whatever you want. It attracts a certain kind of person. The people who have the means for this lifestyle seem mostly disappointed.

It’s not the situation this guy has created for himself. His life has meaning, he’s of value to his employees and customers and partners.
by sedatk | 2025-12-31 20:16:11+00:00
I'm glad that I released my book in 2022 before AI-hype took off. I'm familiar with the type of publisher mentioned in the article too. Those are very strict in their format and content guidelines, and I had also felt that such constraints were limiting at times. I can relate. But, I also learned a lot from the process, and in the end, my book got fantastic feedback. It became one of the print bestsellers in 2022, and got translated to many languages. I've found the whole experience positive.

But, I totally understand author's reasoning, and it's one of the reasons I want to explore different publishers as I want to deviate from writing strictly technical books.
by nyx | 2025-12-31 20:16:14+00:00
Agree that "control" is a much better framing, since it doesn't suggest a need for secrecy and therefore embarrassing/unacceptable/untoward behavior that needs to stay behind drawn window blinds. I'm also fond of "agency" and "digital self-sovereignty" as alternatives.

But fine, I'll be the one to say it: Cloudflare isn't one of the good guys here and as an entity it shouldn't be trusted. It doesn't matter how pure their stated motives appear to be now, or how unmarred their track record is so far. It's a corporation that has control over an ever-increasing share of internet infrastructure, and is susceptible to the same risks as any other tech monopolist basket that we all decide to put our eggs in. Maybe more risky than the others, given how deep in the stack its influence is buried.

What happens when a government forces it to NXDOMAIN porn or put nuisance captchas in front of dissident blogs? Is there some reason people think this one is different?
by josephg | 2025-12-31 20:16:22+00:00
Yes, this has been my experience too! Another tool in the toolbox is property / fuzz testing. Especially for data structures, and anything that looks like a state machine. My typical setup is this:

1. Make a list of invariants. (Eg if Foo is set, bar + zot must be less than 10)

2. Make a check() function which validates all the invariants you can think of. It’s ok if this function is slow.

3. Make a function which takes in a random seed. It initializes your object and then, in a loop, calls random mutation functions (using a seeded RNG) and then calls check(). 100 iterations is usually a good number.

4. Call this in an outer loop, trying lots of seeds.

5. If anything fails, print out the failing seed number and crash. This provides a reproducible test so you can go in and figure out what went wrong.

If I had a penny for every bug I’ve found doing this, I’d be a rich man. It’s a wildly effective technique.
by joeriddles | 2025-12-31 20:16:43+00:00
Great read. C# has the concept of nullable reference types[1] which requires you to be explicit if a variable can be null and the compiler is aware of this. I would love to see a similar feature in languages like TypeScript and Go.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-ref...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-31 20:17:18+00:00
> Tesla has basically solved it

Waymo has solved it. Tesla and BYD probably will solve it. And then everyone else will solve it for the same reason everyone likes having car factories: jobs and tanks.

I say this as someone who was in a Waymo and used Tesla’s latest FSD less than a month ago. One of them still fails spectacularly ungracefully. In the other I can take a nap.
by xp84 | 2025-12-31 20:17:26+00:00
Seriously. I actually want a bunch of renovation work done to my house, and door-to-door salesmen come by all the time to try to sell me that type of service. After one horrible experience that started with such a salesman, never again. I assume everyone out there is a freaking scammer because too many are.

And even the companies and industries that used to be pretty benign have realized that all the growth is in scams, so they've added whole divisions of their business to try to get you onto recurring payments for stuff you probably don't want, which can all be signed up for with like 1 click, but cancelling needs a phone call during Eastern Time business hours and a 25 minute wait on hold.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-31 20:17:50+00:00
Wildly different situation: the DnD thing was simply a tabloid and evangelical moral panic. Not a real thing. Nobody sensible expects those two sources to have anything to do with truth. As far as I'm aware there aren't similar stories from tabletop RPGs at all, that made it to court?

This is an actual court case where if a human had sent the messages they would be facing charges.
by arionmiles | 2025-12-31 20:17:53+00:00
As much as I'd love to daily drive an OS like GrapheneOS, the risk of running into apps that use Google Integrity API thereby making it impossible to run those apps on Graphene is too much of an inconvenience.

I took a look at this curated list of bank apps[1] supported on Graphene OS and I'm glad that a large majority of them work on Graphene. However, just my luck that one of the banks I use on this list isn't supported.

In my country, the state is enforcing a lot of essential workflows to be digital-first (and in extreme cases digital-exclusive) and I dread to think needing these services at a crticial moment and the choice of my OS making it impossible for me. This is more of a commentary on my government's choices but it's a reality for me.

In any case, I don't think it's practical to go cold turkey and switch to a privacy focused phone without testing waters first to see which of your of workflows break and then reason about the tradeoffs/workarounds.

I do admire folks who use GrapheneOS as a daily driver, I'd like to chat them up if I find them in the wild.

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
by skeltoac | 2025-12-31 20:17:56+00:00
OpenAI will want this tragedy to fit under the heading of “externalities” which are costs ultimately borne by society while the company keeps its profits.

I believe the company should absorb these costs via lawsuits, settlements, and insurance premiums, and then pass the costs on to its customers.

As a customer, I know the product I am using will harm some people, even though that was not the intent of its makers. I hope that a significant fraction of the price I pay for AI goes to compensating the victims of that harm.

I also would like to see Sam found personally liable for some of the monetary damages and put behind bars for a symbolic week or so. Nothing life-changing. Just enough to move the balance a little bit toward safety over profit.

Lastly, I’m thinking about how to make my own products safer whenever they include LLM interactions. Like testing with simulated customers experiencing mental health crises. I feel a duty to care for my customers before taking the profits.
by suralind | 2025-12-31 20:18:13+00:00
I still appreciate that you shared this even though other comments are correct that there isn’t much content on the page. Frankly speaking, more devs should put more thought into performance.

I’m currently working on a small e-commerce store for myself, written in SvelteKit (frontend) and Go (backend) and one of my core objectives is to make it fast. Not crazy fast, but looking for TTFB < 50-70ms for an average Polish user. Will definitely share it once it’s public.