MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 14:16:14+00:00
> and launder it whenever

Again, there is no "LaunderBTCAndTurnIntoUSD" function in the Bitcoin protocol...

> get it out of the banking system into crypto

And please describe how you do so without involved A) banks who look the other way and B) registered companies who handle the on/off-ramping from/to BTC.

When people argue that it makes it so much easier to launder money, please spend at least a minute to actually figure out how that will work in practice, and you'll understand that Bitcoin makes the laundering HARDER than what it is with cash, not easier...
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-07 14:16:33+00:00
> And this is why the EU is stagnant and unable to innovate.

Can you help me understand how the EU is stagnant? Granted, they have lower economic growth than the US, but they're (mostly) not running large fiscal deficits.

And unable to innovate is quite simply, untrue. Deepmind (you know the people that invented LLMs) were a UK based company and were purchased by Google. Spotify & Skype were also both relatively innovative.

If by innovative, you mean are highly valued in the stock market above what a rational person would pay, then yeah Europe doesn't have as much "innovation". Now, if there was a single EU capital market (which honestly should be in London, despite the political complexities) then that might not be true.

Also worth noting that a lot of the US market is propped up by EU/EEA investors. Like, the Norwegian oil fund owns an appreciable amount of the US stock market. What would happen if all the European money was withdrawn from the US market? Nothing good for US "innovation".

And on the core point here, social media is now the public sphere, and as such is definitely worthy of investigation by academics. Like, if FB can do this (with much more personal data) then Twitter/X can do it. In fact, it would be super easy as they used to do it before Elon decided to attempt to monetise it badly.

Like, most studies of social media were performed on Twitter data, precisely because of this.
by jongjong | 2025-12-07 14:16:54+00:00
I think the second line is touching on something. The implication is that there may be a kind of legal cross-nation counterfeiting happening. Stablecoins likely play a part. When I worked in crypto back in 2017, all the successful people would tell me that they thought there was something really wrong with Tether and they all believed it was propping up Bitcoin. They expected it to collapse any day... But here we are 8 years later.

Ideally, countries should only be allowed to issue their own currency. It's not hard to see why a country being able to print another country's currency would pose a problem... With all money being digital and stored on thousands of distinct bank ledgers which basically don't have consensus, it would be very difficult to track with manual audits and with the current incentives in place. It would be trivial to hide these transactions under legitimate names as various forms of international payments.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-12-07 14:17:45+00:00
Congrats you turned Slack into (an even worse version of) Jira.

This got me thinking though. Instead of turning your chat into a ticketing system, has anyone ever turned the ticketing system into a chat?

Like instead of “comments” on a ticket, you get a live chat channel (that can be reviewed later as “comments” for historical data).

Most companies I’ve worked for will setup channels on slack in a similar fashion for projects and initiatives but these are not really ergonomic for someone that prefers to “live” in the ticketing system for work management. And context gets lost the older things get.

You could pair this with a general channel for unfocused chitchat, but all relevant work would be discussed under the work item itself. Perhaps a “slack-like” view where you can see all your watched work items at once in “channels”.
by antiquark | 2025-12-07 14:20:39+00:00
I seriously looked into it many years ago...

One problem with "literate programming" is it assumes that good coders are also good writers, and the good writers are also good coders.

Another problem is that the source files for the production code will have to be "touched" for documentation changes. Which IMHO is an absolution no-no for production code. Once the code has been validated, no more edits! If you want to edit docs, go ahead, just don't edit the actual source.
by arevno | 2025-12-07 14:22:00+00:00
I also do third party software development, and my approach is always: bill (highly, $300+/hr) for the features and requirements, but do the manual refactoring and architecture/performance/detail work on your own time. It benefits you, it benefits the client, it benefits the relationship, and it handles the misunderstanding of your normie clients with regard to what constitutes "working".

Say it takes 2 hours to implement a feature, and another hour making it logically/architecturally correct. You bill $600 and eat $200 for goodwill and your own personal/organizational development. You're still making $200/hr and you never find yourself in meetings with normie clients about why refactoring, cohesiveness, or quality was necessary.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-12-07 14:22:04+00:00
I agree, but it also feels like it would be so difficult. It requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so people are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks to be a big blocker when adopting open source tech) and finally Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against it. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to actively sabotage any adoption.
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-07 14:23:22+00:00
I've been using LibreOffice Calc and Writer for years. I've used Microsoft Office Excel and Word, too.

I can't say I've ever suffered from my choices or that I missed any features. As for "polish" - that's subjective, isn't it? I can access all the features I want quickly and efficiently. It's a tool, after all.

There are some minor bugs with Calc that I'd rate 2/10 in importance - annoyances mostly. I haven't used Excel in a while, but it had annoyances, too.

But even if Microsoft Office is more polished and feature-rich, I still think that the trade-off is worth it - we get data and software sovereignty, privacy and cost savings. The workers need to relearn how to access feature X in the menu or how to live without feature Y.
by gmuslera | 2025-12-07 14:24:03+00:00
The article covers a lot of ground, but where he was explaining artists, rights, and copyrights, I couldn't stop thinking that in good part, what artists (and programmers, and a lot of other professions that are threatened by AIs) is more or less the kind of work that AI does.

We are meme machines, we mix, combine, reshuffle or just ensemble different memes and patterns we saw somewhere, mostly System 1 work, and then put a "it's only mine" label to it and proceed to sell that with exclusive rights. We can go further away with AIs, as we can mix things from very different fields, extrapolate trends that are just not there, make System 2 play here, and not go much more farther than that, in the sense that other humans can follow and understand it.

And the lion's share of what is around, those "owned" mixes that everyone else is forbidden to think or express on their own, don't go much further than what a current AI can do. A lot of music, books, and other pieces of "art" are just an algorithm result (performed by humans or not).

There are things with the use of AI that may be wrong or a bad trend at the very least, but don't lose sight of what we essentially are. We can take a step forward, but most of the time we are not so different.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-07 14:24:22+00:00
Its been a very long time since I was a Sysadmin, but I'm curious what managing a fleet of Linux desktops is like today? Has it vastly improved?

When I last tried in a small pilot program, it was incredibly primitive. Linux desktops were janky and manual compared to Active Directory and group policy, and an alternative to Intune/AAD didn't even seem to exist. Heck, even things like WSUS and WDS didnt seem to have an open version or only had versions that required expensive expert level SME'S to perform constant fiddling. Meanwhile the Windows tools could be managed by 20 year old admins with basic certitifcations.

Also, GRC and security seemed to be impossible back then. There was an utter lack of decent DLP tools, proper legal hold was difficult, EDR/AV solutions were primitive and the options were limited, etc.

Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.
by pxc | 2025-12-07 14:24:35+00:00
> A problem I’ve found with LLMs for docs is that they are like ten times too wordy

This is one of the problems I feel with LLM-generated code, as well. It's almost always between 5x and long and 20x (!) as long as it needs to be. Though in the case of code verbosity, it's usually not because of thoroughness so much as extremely bad style.
Show HN: Driftos-core – Conversation routing for AI apps
by scott_waddell | 2025-12-07 14:24:59+00:00
Built this after months of wrestling with AI context management.

Every chat system treats conversations as flat lists - works until topics branch mid-conversation. This routes messages to semantic branches (STAY=continue, ROUTE=reconnect, BRANCH=split), extracts facts with provenance, and assembles focused context for LLM calls.

20 messages instead of 100's. Sub-500ms.

Quick start: `make up` then `make dev` in the repo. Bring your own Groq API key.

Looking for feedback on the overall concept - is conversation branching solving a real problem or over-engineering? What would make this more useful?

Happy to answer any questions.
by h2zizzle | 2025-12-07 14:25:12+00:00
It's still thousands in unnecessary spend. You've likely thrown away a few years of post-retirement funds, and at least a few months of runway in the case of a crisis or emegency. It doesn't matter if it seems like a reasonable expense as a percentage of revenue, because the marginal improvement in productivity, for the vast majority of people, is going to be insignificant.

You can justify it to yourself however you like, but outside of your bubble, it's a poor allocation of money.
by marzell | 2025-12-07 14:25:31+00:00
There's good arguments for the case that gatherer communities actually had generally better health and far more free time than farmers and agrarian society.

Farming provided the calories necessary for a population that hunting and gathering could not support (so no going back) but required basically working all day to make it work and survive less than ideal conditions. But prior to farming people often had significant more free time.
by MichaelRo | 2025-12-07 14:25:35+00:00
Yes, pretty much this. If they worked in the fields 12 hour per day as in a Victorian industrial setting, they would have perished from exposure, not having time to attend obligatory work around the house and to process the food and materials used to make food. Basically peasants worked all the time to maintain a level of "comfort" like in the article's picture: https://i0.wp.com/juliawise.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/S...

Also idealization of rural life and past rural life tends to come almost exclusively from city dwellers, basically people who never set foot in a rural area let alone grow or live there.

I grew up in rural Romania and even though the conditions were (and are) exponentially better than what the non-industrial non-mechanized non-chemical (herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers) past offered, all I thought growing up was get the funk out of there. Agriculture (and it's relatives, animal husbandry) sucks and I hate it! :)

And without mechanization it's incredibly labor intensive to tend to a farm. Just to keep the animals alive over winter you have to dry and deposit a lot of hay, but before that you gotta scythe it. Scything is no walk in the park and basically you gotta do a lot of that every day to cover enough area to keep the cattle fed. Then plowing without a tractor and using animals: not just dangerous but backbreaking work. Then hoeing the weeds, funking need to do it all the time because without herbicides, the weeds grow everywhere and by the time you "finished" going once over all crops, they've grown back where you first started. At some point my father had this fantasy of what is now called "organic" crops, in fact cheapskating at paying the price for herbicides, so I did so much hoeing that it got out of my nose. I don't recall me saying it but my mother told me that at some point in a middle of a potatoes hoeing session I said that I'd rather solve 1000 math problems than do even just another row of potatoes. Definitive moment in my career choice, which is a lot closer to solving math problems now than hoeing organic potatoes :)
by desdenova | 2025-12-07 14:26:06+00:00
Airbnb, Uber and Amazon were already making everything worse. We're past the "bleak threshold" for over 10 years now.

Airbnb is inflating the real-estate bubble everywhere. Apartment building now are mass produced, tiny, and expensive, targeting investors who are only interested in Airbnb.

Uber/ifood and other transport/delivery apps are just working around labor laws, undoing centuries of progress towards worker rights and approaching slavery-like situations.

Amazon is just another monopoly, not sure why you put it beside the others, but it's one of the companies lobbying to make the world a worse place.

Then came crypto"currency", which started the "age of anything goes", where tons of money are thrown in the trashbin for the next speculative pseudo-tech bubble.

AI is just the bubble that came after crypto, little practical utility with lots of hype from billionaires who threw money at it.

After it bursts, there'll probably be another.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-07 14:26:41+00:00
Ok you seem to be pretty outdated I won't blame you for that so I'll catch you up to speed and when I refer to bitcoin I generally refer to any tier 1 crypto currency:

There is actually a BitcoinToUSDPipeline. The real problem is that the exchange crypto transactions are NON REFUNDABLE as you know, that means once it leaves the banking system (via making victim register a coinbase or kraken account, or register it for them using their credential information and compromised webcam for liveliness checks) you have an unlimited amount of time to do whatever. There are also various real life ways of bitcoin atm, using card to buy <1k giftcards (no kyc).

Okay you have your money in bitcoin, now what? Well, welcome to dex - decentralized exchanges. Using smart contracts you can wrap your btc into eth-btc, using etc-btc you can now trade it to any other crypto currency no strings attached and the most popular currently is tron.

Tron has tons of merchants which will simply swap from a to b from two different liquidity pools and those transactions are done off-chain and exist only on their database, since there are usually dozens of transactions mixed it becomes increasingly difficult to continue your investigation without having to use the slow legal route which is especially difficult if the merchant is offshore often ending up in a dead-end, at that point only INTERPOL really has the power and resources to trace it. Liquidity pools are used for perfectly legal reasons and it is not like tornado cash.

Now you have two choices: just spend the money directly (in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto), buy giftcards or if you don't really care and aren't doing anything interpol would be interested in just deposit to binance and withdraw to your bank account, depending on your local government they might not even care.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-07 14:26:53+00:00
Really bad AI code is no different than really bad sushi.

It can be a lot harder to tell if it's bad.

You can either vet it thoroughly or you can consume it and see what happens.

Business pressures often lead to the latter approach. Managers that would balk at bad sushi pressure developers to consume AI code that is known to often be "bad"--- and then blame developers for the effects.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-12-07 14:28:44+00:00
I had the pleasure of Sandi Metz coming to a company I worked for and going us a “boot camp” of sorts for all of the engineering principles she espouses and it had a profound impact on how I view software development. Whatever the company paid for her to come - it was worth every penny.

“Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction”
by fermigier | 2025-12-07 14:28:54+00:00
Cf. "The rise and fall of Limux" (2017) https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/

Initiated by the city of Munich, LiMux aimed to migrate public administration systems from Windows to a Linux-based OS to increase control over IT infrastructure and reduce costs. Despite initial success (announced at LinuxTag in 2014, I was there for the announcement), the project faced intense political lobbying by Microsoft leading to a reversion to Windows.

More examples in this note: https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Linux/Sovereign%20OS%20-%20%22E... (in particular https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Linux/Sovereign%20OS%20-%20%22E...)
by creata | 2025-12-07 14:28:54+00:00
I don't understand the author's reasons for dismissing the Euler spiral / clothoid squircle.

> the center of curvature of the circular portion moves as a function of the smoothing parameter ξ — ideally, it would remain fixed.

Why should it ideally remain fixed?

> More importantly, the power of the arc length s in the terms we’ve kept to produce the plots can be as high as nine. In Figma, continuous paths must be representable by cubic Bézier curves

Why didn't they use multiple segments instead of seemingly just truncating the approximation? They mentioned earlier in the article that "designers would rather deal with fewer Bézier curves at the expense of having a mathematically perfect curvature profile"; is that the only reason?
by rcxdude | 2025-12-07 14:29:33+00:00
I think the poster is looking at it from the other way: purely machine-generated content is not generally copryrightable, even if it can violate copyright. So it's more a question of can a coplyleft license like GPL actually protect something that's original but primarily LLM generated? Should it do so?

(From what I understand, the amount of human input that's required to make the result copyrightable can be pretty small, perhaps even as little as selecting from multiple options. But this is likely to be quite a gray area.)
by al_borland | 2025-12-07 14:30:02+00:00
Today when a government pushes for a backdoor we often see companies push back. The FBI publicly complained about iMessage encryption a lot, and currently Apple is also telling the government of India they aren’t going to install their “security” software… those are just a couple examples.

What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?
by input_sh | 2025-12-07 14:30:11+00:00
I hate when switches like these get advertised first and foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying open source ecosystem as some cheap knock-offs of their commercial alternatives.

How about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.
by mythrwy | 2025-12-07 14:30:52+00:00
Borlaug was a very important figure in global food security but he was a plant breeder, not the guy(s) who figured out how to fix nitrogen from the air into fertilizer. Nitrogen people were Haber and Bosch.

Millions of probably do owe their very existence to these men though, agree with that.

However part of me (maybe a slightly misanthropic part?) wonders if it might be a bit like feeding stray cats, and now we have a huge herd of cats that are rapidly outstripping the ultimate carrying capacity of their environment and it doesn't end well. But since I'm one of the cats, I say we just go with it and see what happens.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 14:31:04+00:00
Dude, it's kids. Their mind isn't set in stone, their opinions aren't very founded. Basic military service also includes ethical/political education. People are not getting packed into trenches yet, it's not prison. If anything, this is going to help tensions in society. They will share rooms, showers, dirt and sweat. We're all the same. Nothing has been shown more effective at tearing down prejudices than actual exposure and confrontation.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-07 14:31:13+00:00
I like to read about the Industrial Revolution a lot, and I think a thing that’s lost in the the way we talk about luddites was the change from guild/skilled labor to factory labor. Software engineering is a lot like that old guild labor, you understand the whole of your craft (at the time called “mysteries”) and work to build things understanding that entirety.

When things changed to factory / assembly lines, sure, products got a lot cheaper and more plentiful for everyone else, but if you were a blacksmith or stone mason or etc. you lost both your middle class income, status in society, and day to day joy from being an expert with autonomy — we talk a lot about how engineers value autonomy when building engineering cultures. With AI that’s starting to slip away.

I actually think the twentieth century is a global culture-tech inflection point, and while I’m reluctant to say things will just continue to get worse (there are a lot of years ahead of us and lots of eras and changes to go through). The one thing I’m sure of is that for all the benefits technological change brings they’re not evenly distributed.

So as many I think have pointed out, if you like spending 8+ hours a day on the nuts and bolts of software engineering, and you’re really invested in the sort of late nineties to early 2020’s technological paradigm, subjectively —- things are probably getting worse from here on out.
by locknitpicker | 2025-12-07 14:31:22+00:00
> Don't take the agency from them. Kenyans are not stupid, (...)

What? It's pretty clear it's the other way around: claiming that Kenyans are pressed to Russia's frontline because they are too stupid to Google the job proposals they accept is undescribable. Again: what Russia is doing throughout the world is blatant human trafficking to amass cannon fodder. They even do this to Russians who sign military contracts, who are promised cushy logistics positions back in Russia but then they see themselves rushed to the front lines to form suicide assault groups.
by sarchertech | 2025-12-07 14:31:30+00:00
There’s no reason to assume that. Antibiotics and anti-parasitic drugs have only been around for a century or so. That’s not enough time for our immune systems to have lost the ability to fight them.

>Think about it: if what you say were that big of an issue, hunter-gathers would have been sickly and died out before getting to us.

Most wild animals are riddled with parasites and it’s common for for animals in captivity to have 2x the lifespan of their wild counterparts.

You don’t need to make it to 70 to raise children. If 50% of people make it to 30 and each person has an average of 5 kids the math works out fine for population growth.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-12-07 14:32:23+00:00
> Airbnb, Uber, Amazon

literally none of these are good for society.

> countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things

> false nostalgia

I think so... the more time that passes the clearer it becomes that techno-optimism and silicon valley were really just a thin veil, and techno-feudalism was the real motive the whole time. See Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin et al.