MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simoncion | 2025-12-27 13:29:22+00:00
> something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI

A gorgeous otherwise-monochrome painting that happens to use a little bit of mauve isn't a worse painting because of the mauve. If that painting is nominated for inclusion to a contest that requires the use of only one color, it is correct to reject that painting from consideration. This rejection would only be a problem if the requirement wasn't clearly disclosed up-front.

As for the rest of your commentary; you're free to gather likeminded buddies and start the "Robot-Generated-Art-Inclusive Indie Awards". As a bonus, I expect the fuckoff-huge studios would be quite excited to quietly help fund the project through cutouts.
by techdmn | 2025-12-27 13:30:51+00:00
I read this phrase in a Spiderman comic, probably 1990 +/- 5 years. If memory serves Harry Osborne said it to Peter Parker, something regarding Norman Osborne's activity as the Green Goblin. Anyway, it's one of those phases that immediately etched itself into my brain and replays itself whenever the situation seems appropriate. I've always wondered if the quote had a more respectable original source, but haven't been able to find one.
by ben_w | 2025-12-27 13:31:15+00:00
> Are there really many unsupervised LLMs running around outside of experiments like AI Village?

My intuition says yes, on the basis of having seen precursors. 20 years ago, one or both of Amazon and eBay bought Google ads for all nouns, so you'd have something like "Antimatter, buy it cheap on eBay" which is just silly fun, but also "slaves" and "women" which is how I know this lacked any real supervision.

Just over ten years ago, someone got in the news for a similar issue with machine generated variations of "Keep Calm and Carry On" T-shirts that they obviously had not manually checked.

Last few years, there's been lawyers getting in trouble for letting LLMs do their work for them.

The question is, can you spot them before they get in the news by having spent all their owner's money?
by chongli | 2025-12-27 13:31:23+00:00
Since my friends gamble on sports and I enjoy sports a lot I’ve placed a few bets here and there. I don’t find it addictive at all. My sense of loss aversion must be just too high for it or something. Every time I lost a bet I wanted to uninstall the app it annoyed me so much. Once I lost the initial bankroll and bonus bets I uninstalled the app.

I think the folks who get addicted must have much lower loss aversion and higher thrill-seeking. People like me can’t become even regular recreational gamblers (betting small amounts without ruining their lives) because it’s too frustrating.
by simonw | 2025-12-27 13:31:45+00:00
The hardest problem in computer science in 2025 is showing an AI cynic an example of LLM usage that they find impressive.

How about this one? I had Claude Code run from my phone build a dependency-free JavaScript interpreter in Python, using MicroQuickJS as initial inspiration but later diverging from it on the road to passing its test suite: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/claude-code-mic...

Here's the latest version of that project, which I released as an alpha because I haven't yet built anything real on top of it: https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript

Again, I built this on my phone, while engaging with all sorts of other pleasant holiday activities.
by CatMustard | 2025-12-27 13:32:57+00:00
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"

"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."

"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."
by sghaz | 2025-12-27 13:33:08+00:00
Liked the focus on standards and ecosystem decisions rather than just “it’s fast because Rust.”

One small timeline nit: the article mentions PEP 517 as being from 2017, but the PEP itself was created in 2015. From the PEP header:

Created: 30-Sep-2015 [1]

It did see important revisions and wider adoption around 2017, so I assume that’s what was meant.

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/
by Bender | 2025-12-27 13:33:18+00:00
Attention seeking doesn't really work because until recently reporting this sort of thing through official channels would get a pilot grounded.

That brings up a good question. Should some of these pilots be forced into a psychological evaluation in addition to a retake of their 3rd class medical? Or perhaps include a mandatory psychological evaluation as part of the medical. So many people these days are on some really nasty off label mental health drugs. I am honestly surprised more people do not report being tailed by a Romulan Warbird.
by poisonborz | 2025-12-27 13:34:41+00:00
This "we, >smart< people will be able to >illegally< disable these artificial barriers, but those >old aged dumb people< will and should not" plan is not really a good setup for enforcing a "democratic" order. It is a much more authoritarian and naive approach, and a similar system is what led to the recent rise in social bubbles, conspiracy and fascism. For a more specific example, it made western society believe racism was a solved case since the 80s, because us, "smart people" controlled the mainstream discourse.

Absolute and true freedom of speech, with all its drawbacks and legal greyzones needs to exist.
by kcordoc | 2025-12-27 13:35:07+00:00
There are excellent free open-source TTS and STT models like KokoroTTS, Whisper etc. But most of us don't have a ready setup to access these.

So, I built a website that lets you use these models quickly. The website helps you download a small model quickly to your device.

Privacy-focused since everything runs locally. Unlimited free use.

Most browsers now support webGPU and the models are optimized for browser use.

Free Chrome extension as well
by pron | 2025-12-27 13:35:26+00:00
I don't think anyone minds this. The purpose of a formal foundation is to prove useful theorems. Junk theorems are just a side effect. But I'm always tickled by logicians who think type theories are philosophically superior to set theories because in some of the latter you might be able to prove something like 1 ∈ 2, whereas type theories, even without their own junk theorems, have a pragmatic difficulty with division (hence they tend to define 1/0 = 0). Junk theorems just come with the territory, and foundations need to be considered based on their utility, not philosophical purity, which is never achieved anyway (at least not without a cost to utility).
by ndai | 2025-12-27 13:35:39+00:00
As an expert in air conditioning repair… a thing is a dynamically maintained waveform of interacting modes. The proton demonstrates that reality is resonance… music, not machinery… processes over objects. The universe isn’t built from particles, it’s built from oscillatory relations which remain stable. The first utterance set the constraint that selects the allowed oscillations that gave rise to structure from undifferentiated oscillatory potential.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-27 13:35:40+00:00
I wish I could get defensive protection against the millions and millions of bad software parents out there. But there is no such thing.

Did you know that Facebook owns the patent on autocompletes? Yahoo owned it and Facebook bought it from them as kind of a privately owned nuclear weapon to create a doctrine of mutually assured destruction with other companies who own nuclear-weapons-grade patents.

Of course the penalty for violating a patent is much worse if you know you are doing it, so companies are very much not eager to have the additional liability that comes with their employees being aware that every autocomplete is a violation of patent law.
by lemonlime227 | 2025-12-27 13:35:45+00:00
Yeah, to add some context for people reading this, jj fix works best for edits local to the diff, and it’s meant for edits mostly. With some trickery you could run some analysis, but it’s not what jj fix is meant for right now.

The intended future solution is `jj run` (https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/design/run/), which applies similar ideas to more general commands.
by piva00 | 2025-12-27 13:36:18+00:00
It's betting but even better for the house: they don't need to put anything on the pot to lose it, just taking a cut from the zero-sum game others are betting on.

That's why Kalshi/Polymarket don't care about winners, they don't lose money to them, others do.

It's all gambling, as most of day trading also is.
by roenxi | 2025-12-27 13:37:34+00:00
We do have AI systems that write stories [0]. They work. The quality might not be spectacular but if you've ever gone out and spent time reading fanfiction you'd have to agree there are a lot of rather terrible human writers too (bless them). It still hits this issue that if we want LLMs to compete with the best of humanity then they aren't there yet, but that means defining human intelligence as something that most people don't have access to.

> If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do.

AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.

[0] https://github.com/google-deepmind/dramatron
by DangitBobby | 2025-12-27 13:38:26+00:00
Yeah the grain thing is weird because they've over-represented grains on the pyramid because grain products are what the companies were trying to sell, but they also added a ton of unnecessary sugar to a bunch of these grain products and mislead people about the nutritional value Remember those commercials? Shows a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch next to a glass of orange juice "Part of this balanced breakfast!" How about the ones where people would buy and eat Honey Nut Cheerios because they are "heart healthy"? Lol I actually believed that as a kid. They've been sued over this multiple times but courts tend to hold that false advertising is fine as long as there's still some FUD about how bad sugar is for you.

> Also, we talk of corporate lobbies altering the public narrative on nutrition, but honestly, how much does it really matter? How much heed do most people pay to their image of a healthy diet? Is anyone really fooled into thinking soda, or fast food, is good? I don't think so.

I personally think that if people understood how habit forming, addictive, unhealthy, and fattening all the junk food is they would make sure their children ate a lot less of it, and eventually that would move the needle. Due to my struggles with childhood obesity that I've managed to get under control as an adult, I'm definitely going to limit my kids' intake of junk food if I ever have any.

> but one who gives in to their monkey brain rage and commits murder will still rightfully end up imprisoned.

In theory prison is part of a solution, but the goals should be to protect the general public and to reform the incarcerated so they can rejoin society and participate more harmoniously than before. Prison as it stands is... Well it's like it was designed by a committee of angry monkeys.
by mellosouls | 2025-12-27 13:39:01+00:00
Interesting idea - I'm not sure this is quite the right approach but I like the idea of pivoting from the standard filesystem view of code.

In olden procedural times utilities that showed how routines related were genuinely useful in helping build a mental map but became rather redundant as calls moved from static to dynamic and then to objects.

One counter argument to showing an alternative view is that in a well designed app the file layout represents a mix of specific application and general development models of behaviour and functionality, so is adequate (if not optimal) and standard for a reason.
by bavell | 2025-12-27 13:39:48+00:00
1) No one asked why it's being down voted (to... -1, the horror). I'm not here for internet points.

2) This isn't my field - I am not making any claims, merely relaying what I thought was an interesting concept/mechanism I hadn't heard of before, that I thought other curious individuals here might also think was interesting. Isn't that the entire point of HN? I would have very much appreciated links or something to Google over this bizarre analysis of why my comment is downvoted. I didn't know this wasn't novel and was accepted science.

3) I understand Bret/Joe aren't looked upon favorably by certain crowds, particularly on this forum. I tried to get ahead of the "but didn't you know they can't be trusted!" comments and attempt to focus on the substance. If the substance is wrong, great! Let's talk about that.

4) You are assuming malice where there is none, and calling me disrespectful and insisting I must know things. I find that quite disrespectful and uncalled for. Not everyone has your opinions or knows what you know. 10k a day and all that https://xkcd.com/1053/

HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
by samsep10l | 2025-12-27 13:40:31+00:00
(async function() {
const UNFOLLOW_LIMIT = 800;
const delay = (ms) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
const findButton = (txt) => [...document.querySelectorAll("button")].find(btn => btn.innerText === txt);

console.log("Start");

for (let i = 0; i < UNFOLLOW_LIMIT; i++) {
const $next = findButton("Following");
if (!$next) {
console.log(`No more users to unfollow, stopping at ${i} unfollows.`);
break;
}

$next.scrollIntoViewIfNeeded();
$next.click();
await delay(100);

let $confirm = findButton("Unfollow");
if ($confirm) {
$confirm.click();
await delay(100);

// Verify if the unfollow was successful
$confirm = findButton("Follow");
if ($confirm) {
console.log(`Unfollowed #${i + 1}`);
} else {
console.log(`Failed to unfollow #${i + 1}`);
i--; // Do not count this as a successful unfollow
}
} else {
console.log(`Failed to find the "Unfollow" confirmation button for #${i + 1}`);
i--; // Do not count this as a successful unfollow
}

await delay(20 * 1000); // Wait 20 seconds, Instagram allows about 200 unfollows per hour
}

console.log("The end");

})();

https://github.com/eyeblech/insta-unfollow.js
Show HN: Chat-DeepAI – DeepSeek pricing and getting-started guides (fan project)
by addressGen | 2025-12-27 13:41:01+00:00
Hi HN — I built a small fan reference site for DeepSeek:
https://chat-deepai.com

What it is:
- A lightweight place to learn what DeepSeek is (V3, R1, Coder, etc.)
- A community-written pricing overview so you don’t have to chase screenshots
- Getting-started guides (web/app/API) and a small blog

What it is NOT:
- Not affiliated with DeepSeek
- Not a checkout page / not selling “Plus” subscriptions
- All “use DeepSeek” buttons lead back to official DeepSeek properties

Why I made it:
Information about DeepSeek is spread across announcements, console pages, and social posts.
I wanted a simple, readable page I could send to friends and teammates, and I tried to be
extra careful about not impersonating the official service.

Would love feedback on:
- What’s missing / confusing
- Anything that feels misleading
- What would be most useful for developers evaluating DeepSeek (API, limits, pricing diffs)

I’m around to answer questions.
by btreecat | 2025-12-27 13:41:08+00:00
Shameless link to my own blog where I use a yubikey to store my SSH private key, a long with some advice for use in macos and Linux.

https://stephentanner.com/ssh-yubikey.html

Hopefully someone finds it useful.

The biggest issue I ran into was when folks wrote some tools that rely on ssh sock auth to automate connection to remote boxes. Not fun if you have to tap for every box.
by deadbabe | 2025-12-27 13:41:14+00:00
Why wouldn’t you ban clever people?

Isn’t the point to let all players have a fairly equal chance? Someone’s going to win the money regardless, so it’s not like you’re saving money.

If the same data savvy people are just going to win most of the time, why would people bother playing? Ultimately you would not have enough players and the industry collapses. I don’t understand why this makes the casinos the bad guys.
by qbow883 | 2025-12-27 13:41:29+00:00
Days since last ffmpeg CLI wrapper: 0

It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well.

Now, granted, ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great, which can create some footguns, but as long as you remember to pass `-c copy` by default you should be fine.

Also, hiding those footguns is likely to create more harm than it fixes. Case in point: "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux.

Similarly, "ffmpeg extract audio from video.mp4" will unconditionally reencode the audio to mp3, again losing quality. The quality settings are also hardcoded and hidden from the user.

I can sympathize with ffmpeg syntax looking complicated at first glance, but the main reason for this is just that multimedia is really complicated and that some of this complexity is necessary in order to not make stupid mistakes that lose quality or waste CPU resources. I truly believe that these ffmpeg wrappers that try to make it seem overly simple (at least when it's this simple, i.e. not even exposing quality settings or differentiating between reencoding and remuxing) are more hurtful than helpful. Not only can they give worse results, but by hiding this complexity from users they also give users the wrong ideas about how multimedia works. "Abstractions" like this are exactly how beliefs like "resolution and quality are the same thing" come to be. I believe the way to go should be educating users about video formats and proper ffmpeg usage (e.g. with good cheat sheets), not by hiding complexity that really should not be hidden.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-27 13:41:42+00:00
Right, but my idea was to do something like shove the mainboard up into the bezel above the keyboard and battery into the palm rest, with nothing sitting under the keyboard except maybe ribbon cables. That’d get you a laptop with a thickness of under an inch that still has a keyboard that’s not compromised and keeps weight shifted to the front. It’d simplify repairs to some degree too since there’d be very little stacking.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-27 13:42:11+00:00
You couldn’t offload and use the refocus feature without their software and 4MP was half what smartphones were doing in 2012 (rapidly increasing above 8MP after that). Fixed lens so you couldn’t improve the image quality with glass - that’s totally understandable given the product but it is still a limitation to the visual quality.

That’s a bad recipe for casual and professional users alike. Can’t ingest into your workflow quickly, images are low res, can’t improve the image, and your smartphone was better just missing one, admittedly neat, feature. If that existed in phones people would use it like crazy I imagine.

Too narrow of a use case IMO, too many compromises for one feature, hence why it failed.
by piva00 | 2025-12-27 13:42:35+00:00
> The idea of personal responsibility will always be completely abhorrent to some part of the population.

The idea of personal responsibility is also way overrated by some part of the population like you, gambling is addictive and a net negative to society. Problem gamblers ruin not only their life but of their families as well, it's an addiction with a very high rate of suicide.

Allowing it to be done through your phone is like supplying opioids at the candy store. Not everyone gets addicted but you certainly increase access to the ones in most danger of becoming one, and for what purpose?

Personal responsibility doesn't ever solve systemic issues, you are defending the increase of a systemic issue and blaming the victims which it's the actual abhorrent thing...
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-27 13:43:22+00:00
Thanks.

> If you find that you're depending on a junk value in a way that's incompatible with what you wanted to prove

This is the part I'm struggling with. How would you actually know/realise that you were doing this? It seems like "the mathlib way" you describe is choosing to rely on programmer discipline for something that could be enforced automatically.

My fear is that relying on the junk values of functions (values where their "proper" partial counterparts are not defined) is somehow unsound (could lead to proving something untrue). But perhaps my intuition is off here? If so, I think the specific junk values chosen must not matter at all -- e.g., having sqrt return 42 for negative x values should work just as well, am I right?
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-27 13:43:29+00:00
The Turing Institute in Glasgow hosted the First Robot Olympics on 27–28 September 1990 at the Sports Centre at the University of Strathclyde, featuring 68 robots from 12 countries.

Our robotic overlords have come a long way in 35 years!

Check out the cool retro robot photos:

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

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

My favorites:

Robug II disqualified for trying to mount Russian competitor during race.

Torchbearer NEL carrying flame to Olympic Venue from Greek Restaurant.

Walking pizza box Biped Walker, University of Wales. Paul Channon & Simon Hopkins.

The Seventh Incarnation of Dr Who (Sylvestor McCoy) opens the event with Sue Mowforth.

Richard 1st robot head commentator from The Turing Institute, Glasgow. (I use this as my Slack avatar!)
by magnitudes | 2025-12-27 13:43:56+00:00
Again another common take; hint: if you’re against AI or the current investment in AI you have so many better and more nuanced arguments at your disposal than “AI is chicken little”. It’s already here. I’ve built so much stuff with Claude and Codex I’d have never have been able to build at a speed that is already incredible and it’s getting better and better every 6 months. Be worried about alignment or centralized unregulated power, worry about what wars will look like and how this is a pre packaged Stasi for any dictatorship. But “this is a fad equivalent in stupidity and hype to cryptocurrency and tripropellant rockets” is just kind of silly
by KronisLV | 2025-12-27 13:45:08+00:00
I once spoke in favor of remote work (around 2020) and someone here on HN told me to get cancer and die, before it was flagged enough times to get out of the way.

On YouTube, I also sometimes get mean comments, though at least there the automatic moderation catches them so they don't show up publicly and I can shadowban the offenders off the channel easily. None of the content is even controversial, YouTube just attracts a lot of angry people that feel entitled to speak what's on their mind.

I wouldn't publish in an environment where blocking or banning people is difficult. They're not entitled for me to engage with their hateful drivel. My blog also doesn't have comments. At the end of the day, I will say what I want to say.