MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phyzome | 2025-12-12 02:06:20+00:00
To make this more concrete: There are a lot of "legally sanctioned" government actions happening in the US right now that are pretty dubious. That includes digging up old laws and giving them spicy new interpretations that legal experts agree are an abuse of power and not in the intent of the original law.

Some of these are getting batted down by judges, so right now the category of "legal" is especially vague. That's why I phrased it like that.

But also, we see cops just straight up stalking people using government tools. So that's another reason to be concerned about "legal" government actions.

Nothing to do with libertarianism.
by alex77456 | 2025-12-12 02:06:47+00:00
Not that kind of predict. And this reverse-time brain instantly forgets things it saw for the last time.

Consider a black box. A person opens it, sees a dice with a number, closes it. In our version of the time flow, the person finds out there's a dice and remembers it. In the 'reverse time' persons brain, they would know they would open the black box and know which number they will see. Then they will close it and completely forget what was inside forever.
by postalcoder | 2025-12-12 02:08:08+00:00
> There’s an odd tendency in modern software development; we’ve collectively decided that naming things after random nouns, mythological creatures, or random favorite fictional characters is somehow acceptable professional practice. This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

I worked in finance – we gave our models names that endeared us to them. My favorite is a coworker naming his model "beefhammer".
by eru | 2025-12-12 02:08:35+00:00
> Incidentally, one of the reasons I haven't gotten much into subscribing to these services, is that I always feel like they're triaging how many reasoning tokens to give me, or AB testing a different model... I never feel I can trust that I interact with the same model.

That's what websites have been doing for ages. Just like you can't step twice in the same river, you can't use the same version of Google Search twice, and never could.
by istjohn | 2025-12-12 02:08:37+00:00
Dunn was jailed eight weeks for posting three memes:

> Prosecutor George Shelley said Dunn had posted three separate images. The first one showed a group of men, Asian in appearance, at Egremont crab fair 2025, with the caption: “Coming to a town near you.”

> The second also showed a group of men, Asian in appearance leaving a boat on to Whitehaven beach. This, said Mr Shelley, had the caption: “When it’s on your turf, then what?”

> A final image showed a group of men, again Asian in appearance, wielding knives in front of the Palace of Westminster. There was also a crying white child in a Union flag T-shirt. This was also captioned, said Mr Shelley, with the wording: “Coming to a town near you.”

https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/24513379.sellafield-worke...
by colechristensen | 2025-12-12 02:08:44+00:00
I like particularly Idahoan instant mashed potatoes, other instant mashed potatoes are inferior (and or horrid cardboard flavored mush). Perhaps there are preparation details, perhaps the ones in the plastic cups are awful as opposed to packets or Costco sized cartons, perhaps (this is much more likely) the excessive amount of butter and often good sharp cheese I include makes a difference.

Instant mashed potatoes are a common lazy meal or a "I forgot to eat now I find existence infuriating for some mysterious reason" meal. I find them quite satisfying. They are nutritionally complete enough, filling enough, and easy enough to fill a solid niche in my food repertoire. And an easy vehicle for four of the satisfaction food groups: salt, butter, cheese, and carbs.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-12 02:09:01+00:00
You can call yourself a victim of whoever you want, but that doesn't change the fact that from the perspective of other HN users, you are hyper focused on posting stories about a topic other users aren't interested in. Those users are flagging your stories. If you don't want them to flag, find stories about topics they are interested in, or find a site where people are interested in a non stop of stream of "Israel bad, US bad, <thing u like/support> bad, <thing I like/support> good" etc.
by Johanx64 | 2025-12-12 02:09:13+00:00
GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything. There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.

The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!

No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".

GIMP is quintessential example of this.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-12 02:09:15+00:00
Thank you for the Leiden references. I hadn't encountered this framework before. The "language symbiont" framing resonates with what I've been circling around: a system that operates with its own logic, sometimes orthogonal to conscious intention.

The mule analogy is going to stick with me. LLMs have inherited the statistical structure of the symbiont without the host: pattern without grounding. Whether that makes them useful instruments for studying the symbiont itself, or just misleading simulacra, is exactly what I'm trying to work out.

Going to dig into Kortlandt tonight.
by JimDabell | 2025-12-12 02:10:05+00:00
McDonalds were recently criticised for an AI-generated Christmas advert:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-r...

It seems like an excellent advert because it got everybody talking about McDonalds. Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title. The people who came up with the McDonalds ad were wildly successful in what they set out to do; they even have all the people who hate AI talking about their new ad, even when attempting to showcase somebody else’s ad.
by subscribed | 2025-12-12 02:10:17+00:00
It's not a "citizen SSO", even non-residents use it when paying taxes, for self-assessment purposes.

It's Government services SSO.

And no, Digital ID wasn't sold as something like this, it has been sold as a way to prevent (?) "illegals" from working, by introducing system entirely similar to the current eVisa.

Unless you slept through all these televised discussions where Keir Starmer with a stern face explained how a wholly-digital system replacing wholly-digital system will stop these pesky immigrants from getting work (it's almost like in the current systems employers didn't have to do these checks already).

There's been SO, SO MANY lies, like that this system wi be similar to the Polish/Estonian, only these two are primarily physical documents, additionally bearing certificates that can be used to authenticate against the participating systems.

Sure, some countries ALSO have a digital form of the ID, but never advertised as a hate-whip against the others.

The primary problem with the only-electronic Certificate you call ID, is that it's supposed to be always online (never cached, like, say...... Um.....actual Digital ids or cards in the normal phones), so it can be cancelled at any point, also due to the errors of the government employees or systems.

The problem is that MANY people had a very serious problems with eVisa already, leading to being bounced off the Border Patrol or failing to prove right to rent.

Even if the idea of the ID was in general good (and I use one I really love, works wonderfully well), this government lied too many times and is forcing us to eat the frog that we've seen many times prior, is half baked and will burst in someone's face.

This idea is tainted because we're lied to and it's half-baked, and hostile in principle, not helpful.
by ekianjo | 2025-12-12 02:11:08+00:00
> National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes.

Vichyssoise is not French food. it's a dish made by a French chef who worked in New York. ask any French and they would have no idea what a Vichyssoise is.
by shunia_huang | 2025-12-12 02:11:10+00:00
This is somehow real as I'm not so good at English but as a native Chinese speaker it feels a little bit hard to find the word/phrasing to express what I want to, but I guess your target audience should be more clear on what you are trying to express since it's the native thought process that the audience be familier with.

To me personally, the same meaning requires a lot of extra work to be expressed in English rather than in Chinese.
by SigmundA | 2025-12-12 02:11:31+00:00
Yeah so not sure why but Look around coverage is much better in Europe than the US for some reason which seems odd since Apple is US based.

You can see the very poor US coverage here: https://brilliantmaps.com/apple-look-around/

Of course compared to Google Street view there is no comparison on a world wide basis as you can see on the same page.
by eru | 2025-12-12 02:11:53+00:00
> Is this why everyone thinks AI sucks?

Who's everyone? There are many, many people who think AI is great.

In reality, our contemporary AIs are (still) tools with glaring limitations. Some people overlook the limitations, or don't see them, and really hype them up. I guess the people who then take the hype at face value are those that think that AI sucks? I mean, they really do honestly suck in comparison to the hypest of hypes.
by pmyteh | 2025-12-12 02:12:59+00:00
The 31 months was for literally inciting a mob to burn down a building with asylum seekers inside, in the middle of a riot. Yes, from the Internet rather than in person, and she's now very vigorous in claiming she didn't intend anyone to actually do it. But yeah. Likely criminal even in the US under the "imminent lawless action" exception.

Musk had bugger all to do with the rape gangs scandal, which broke literally years ago, and has been brought up with regularity by the newspapers here since. (For what it's worth there have also been plenty of non-Pakistani groups doing similar things and getting away with it. The main problem seems to be that no one in authority misses, or listens to, dropout teenage girls who have fallen off the radar - which makes them easy pickings for nonces.)

I don't know about the others. The sign holder was likely within the 150m buffer zone put around abortion clinics last year, though. Given the content of the sign (which just steps over the letter of the statutory prohibition not to influence patients' decisions while being entirely morally unobjectionable) I suspect it was a deliberate setup for arrest for outrage, just like the Palestine Action people. But I could be wrong.

It's perhaps also worth noting that Britain's traditions of free speech have never been as absolutist as the US (the last successful prosecution for blasphemous libel was as recent as the 70s and it's still technically a crime to advocate for a republic) but that raucous objections to government have very rarely been the target in recent centuries. The major difference in practice is that being grossly offensive isn't constitutionally protected. You're still not likely to get done for it, though.
by elzbardico | 2025-12-12 02:13:05+00:00
Because there are not a lot of high quality examples of code edition on the training corpora other than maybe version control diffs.

Because editing/removing code requires that the model output tokens for tools calls to be intercepted by the coding agent.

Responses like the example below are not emergent behavior, they REQUIRE fine-tuning. Period.

I need to fix this null pointer issue in the auth module. 
 {"id": "call_abc123", "type": "function", "function": {"name": "edit_file", "arguments": "{"path": "src/auth.py", "start_line": 12, "end_line": 14, "replacement": "def authenticate(user):\n if user is None:\n return False\n return verify(user.token)"}"}}
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-12 02:13:31+00:00
> "unalive" is an empathetic mood.

Sure, I guess that's something people say. Though it's very new English.

In case I wasn't clear. By empathy I mean the ability to accurately predict how someone else will feel about something. For me to do this, I have to set aside my own values and beliefs, to know the other person's values and beliefs, and then use theirs to simulate how they may feel about something.

The point is I can't empathize with another person accurately unless I know their values and beliefs.

So to be empathetic is to be curious about other people's values and then accurately predict how they will feel about something.

So to me '"unalive" is an empathetic mood.' sounds something like "I am in an unalive mood (feeling apathetic and defeated), and people who can relate to my values beliefs and experiences will emapthize with me"

> Unwant could be too familiar, conjuring "unwanted".

This is a really interesting point on multiple levels. I've been so hung up on the ambiguity in the language I never even noticed the connection to "unwanted".

Given you brought this up and I assume immediately saw the parallel, when you think of "unwanted" do you think of an absence of being wanted (apathy, ignored, indefference), or a feeling of being repulsed (negative want, hate, disgust, fear, loathing, etc)?
by tylervigen | 2025-12-12 02:13:40+00:00
Two years ago I re-vamped my "Spurious Correlations" side project, which is mostly just a bunch of charts. However, I couldn't find a charting software I liked that would display clean, simple visuals with the constraints I wanted. (I had used pCharts and HighCharts in the past, but didn't like charting in Javascript or PHP.)

I decided to "roll my own" and write Python scripts that outputted SVG markup. I was worried this would go about as well as every other "roll your own" project does, but was pleasantly surprised. It is surprisingly easy to output reliable, good-looking SVG graphics using Python. If you are making a chart, everything is just math.

The infinite scalability is almost just a happy upside to the simplicity of creating the visualizations, which is annoying in raster format. It made me like SVG even more.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-12 02:14:39+00:00
I think what they're actually struggling with is costs. And I think they're all behind the scenes quantizing models to manage load here and there, and they're all giving inconsistent results.

I noticed huge improvement from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 4.5 when it became unthrottled a couple weeks ago. I wasn't going to sign back up with Anthropic but I did. But two weeks in it's already starting to seem to be inconsistent. And when I go back to Sonnet it feels like they did something to lobotomize it.

Meanwhile I can fire up DeepSeek 3.2 or GLM 4.6 for a fraction of the cost and get almost as good as results.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-12 02:15:01+00:00
> Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

You may not see this as calling for a new Pearl Harbor, but it's incredibly conspicuous considering that it's exactly what an administration made of PNAC alums got, predicted a year in advance, via nationals of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_Club states with connections to intelligence services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Saudi_role_in_the_Sept...
Show HN: An agent that analyzes both structured and unstructured data in minutes
by LunarFrost88 | 2025-12-12 02:15:03+00:00
I’ve been building a small AI agent that can analyze both structured and unstructured data in minutes, things like CSVs, product logs, support tickets, CRM notes, PRs, etc.

The motivation is personal: at every company I’ve worked at, our data was scattered across warehouses, Slack, GitHub, Asana, and a dozen other tools. I spent way too much time copy-pasting from one source to another just to answer basic questions.

This project is still really early and rough around the edges, but it can already generate dashboards, summaries, and insights without any modeling or setup.

I’m genuinely not sure how useful this is beyond my own workflows, so I’d really love some brutally honest feedback from y'all.

Here’s a short video of it in action if you’re curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTp8flEeZao

And you can try it here: app.arka.so
by WatchDog | 2025-12-12 02:15:08+00:00
When I looked into RSC last week, I was struck by how complex it was, and how little documentation there seems to be on it.

In fairness react present it as an "experimental" library, although that didn't stop nextjs from widely deploying it.

I suspect there will be many more security issues found in it over the next few weeks.

Nextjs ups the complexity orders of magnitude, I couldn't even figure out how to set any breakpoints on the RSC code within next.

Next vendors most of their dependencies, and they have an enormously complex build system.

The benefits that next and RSC offer, really don't seem to be worth the cost.
by Razengan | 2025-12-12 02:17:24+00:00
People are complacent. Even me, even you. We're not going to get off our 21st-century comforts asses and actually do anything to disrupt anything.

At best I may avoid using products from certain companies until I really have to, like Google and Microsoft's AIs, or clear cookies after signing into YouTube so it doesn't sign you into everything else, or write a comment here and there about how some Apple APIs like the iCloud Keychain allow Facebook etc to track you across devices and reinstalls, but I'm not ever going bother doing anything more that would actually challenge all this dystopian fuckiness.
by kretaceous | 2025-12-12 02:17:44+00:00
> We’ve seen 2x speed improvements in type checking times for internal projects when using TSGO.

That's a lot less that what TSGO promised when it was first announced (A 10x faster Typescript¹). Hopefully this is just the result of it being experimental.

1: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...
by cafxx | 2025-12-12 02:18:08+00:00
> GOGC was introduced in Go 1.5

yes, that's quite literally what I meant by "GOGC has always been there". 1.5 was released 10 years ago, just 3 years after 1.0.

So to summarize: there is one knob (that has been there from basically the beginning), plus a second one (if you squint hard enough: GOMAXMEM), and absolutely no plans to add further ones, or to add alternative GCs.
by nearbuy | 2025-12-12 02:18:28+00:00
> If that really bothers you then write your own on-disk compression format.

Why? What are you trying to solve here? You're going to have a hard time making a new format that serves you better than any of the existing formats.

The most common solution for instant playback is just to store the sound uncompressed in memory. It's not a problem that needs solving for most games.

ADPCM and PCM are both pretty common. ADPCM for audio is kinda like DXT compression for textures: a very simple compression that produces files many times larger than mp3, and doesn't have good sound quality, but has the advantage that playback and seek costs virtually nothing over regular PCM. The file sizes of ADPCM are closer to PCM than mp3. I should have been clearer in my first comment that the delay is only for mp3/Vorbis and not for PCM/ADPCM.

There isn't a clean distinction between compressed and uncompressed and lossy/lossless in an absolute sense. Compression is implicitly (or explicitly) against some arbitrary choice of baseline. We normally call 16-bit PCM uncompressed and lossless but if your baseline is 32-bit floats, then it's lossy and compressed from that baseline.
by fao_ | 2025-12-12 02:19:14+00:00
The first example was "man arrested for wearing the exact same outfit as a man who intentionally blew himself up, killing 22 people". It's not "he was wearing the same chequered shirt!" either. As a UK citizen... I don't see how that fits under "free speech", lol

Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the current US administration's attitude towards trans people (that, in Charlie Kirk's words, we are "abominations unto god" that should be "taken care of" "as in the 50s/60s", which can only be taken to mean lynching), as well as the attitude of the US presidency towards democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_transgender_peo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14290 (were PBS and NPR "biased"?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/25/transg...
by mbg721 | 2025-12-12 02:20:49+00:00
You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.
by brandensilva | 2025-12-12 02:21:58+00:00
They just won't stop. We needed to have laws in place to prevent digital IDs being continuously pushed on people because the powers that be want total control of all information.

It's happening in the US now under the guise of AI data centers for consumers but I suspect it will be instead used to surveillance everyone who doesn't agree with the fascist government. This is Larry Ellison's public vision but Musk and Thiel also play a role.
by squigz | 2025-12-12 02:22:01+00:00
It's the plot of an episode of SG-1 [1]

A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak

https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_X-Treme!_(episode)
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-12 02:23:06+00:00
A better approach IMO would be to simply turn off comments entirely on controversial topics.

Whether flagging is available or not, nothing is gained in such polarized discussions. Of course it would be best if we could lower that polarization over time, but I am pretty skeptical that discussion boards & comments are a mechanism that will achieve that. I suspect their actual effect is to increase it.
by fao_ | 2025-12-12 02:23:12+00:00
Based on those descriptions... it sounds like he was pretty clearly racist? From the article:

> Sentencing Thompson, Judge Temperley had said of the zero tolerance approach being taken by courts:

> “This offence, I’m afraid, has to be viewed in the context of the current civil unrest up and down this country. And I’ve no doubt at all that your post is connected to that wider picture.

> “I don’t accept that your comments and the emojis that you posted were directed at the police. I’ve read in the case summary of the comments you made on arrest which clearly demonstrate to me that there was a racial element to the messaging and the posting of these emojis.

> “That has to be reflected in the sentence...there to be a deterrent element in the sentence that I impose, because this sort of behaviour has to stop.

> “It encourages others to behave in a similar way and ultimately it leads to the sorts of problems on the streets that we’ve been seeing in so many places up and down this country. This offence is serious enough for custody.”

So the actual news here is "man jailed for sharing memes that Asian people are invading the UK and coming to murder you".