MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by awillowingmind | 2025-12-09 19:17:07+00:00
Your argument seems overly reliant on the definition of an adult. What is an adult? Is it a measure of responsibility, mental maturity? Because I would wager the level of responsibility and mental maturity of the average 18 year old has been on the downtrend.

I’m not advocating for completely restricting access to AI for certain age groups. I’m pointing out that historically we have restricted prolonged interactions with certain stimuli that have shown to be damaging to cognitive development, and that we should make the same considerations here.

I think it’s hard to deny that younger generations have been negatively affected by the proliferation of social media engineered around fundamentally predatory algorithms. As have the older generations.
by sshadmand | 2025-12-09 19:17:16+00:00
I agree with the marketing side, but I am more on the implementation side. Could you imagine iPhone having a section "coming soon" in their OS? To me it seems impatient and wishful thinking than prioritized and thoughtful execution. When I talk to other founders/designers I feel like their reasoning falls apart pretty quickly when asked "why did you add that there?".
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-12-09 19:17:18+00:00
You think that a minimum of 35% of demand being artificial isn't a factor that can be seen to increase overall demand?

edit: I say "minimum 35%" because that is just the percentage of immigrant-demand that managed to secure housing. Hard to say exactly how many more immigrants are bidding on SF & LA-County housing but 35% is the absolute floor.
by radanskoric | 2025-12-09 19:17:20+00:00
I'm with you on the one assertion per test. I bundled two assertions into the same test here because my whole point was to have them effectively together describe a single test, just in a more maintainable manner.

Regarding the fact that I'm not fully testing the contract of the method, you're absolutely correct. But also, no example based test suite is fully doing that. As long as the test suite is example based it is always possible to find a counter-case where the contract is violated but the test suite misses it.

These counter-cases will be more contrived and less likely the better the test suite. So all of us at some point decide that we've done enough and that more contrived cases are so unlikely and the cost of mistake is so small that it's not worth it to put in the extra testing effort. Some people don't explicitly think about it but that decision is still made one way or another.

This is a long way of saying that I both agree with you but that also, in most cases, I would still take the tradeoff and go for more maintainable tests.
by nsasch | 2025-12-09 19:17:20+00:00
It’s nice to see this finally launch publicly! The early releases of this is what got me to switch from Claude Code only to try out Codex. I use both now, and Contextify has been helpful to switch between the two.

What I really want is context “check-ins” so I can save and restore state between agents easily. Keeping conversation history gets close
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-09 19:17:22+00:00
You whiffed on the point (note the word "but" in parent comment). The depreciation strategies are where the real benefit is. PE buyers use 60% bonus depreciation and cost segregation studies to create a $70-80K writeoff on a $120K asset, which often larger than the check they cut for the property in the first place

The final phase is to exit via UPREIT for OP units rather than cash, with the REIT getting a step up in basis that can be depreciated again, while still not triggering any capital gains for you until you convert
by remyp | 2025-12-09 19:17:55+00:00
I think you're right. Desensitization has to be a big factor.

I'm certain that I just _like_ text, but I've also noticed recently that I miss very large attention-grabbing print (eg. "SALE" or "FREE WIDGETS JUST GIVE US YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS") as well. I think my brain has started flagging it as misleading noise along with the rest of the detritus.
by lonelyasacloud | 2025-12-09 19:18:03+00:00
TL;DR; Until we are sure we have the moderation systems to assist surfacing the good stuff I would be in favour of temporary guidelines to maintain quality.

Longer ...

I am here for the interesting conversations and polite debate.

In principle I have no issues with either citing AI responses in much the same way we do with any other source. Or with individual's prompting AI's to generate interesting responses on their behalf. When done well I believe it can improve discourse.

Practically though, we know that the volume of content AI's can generate tends to overwhelm human based moderation and review systems. I like the signal to noise ratio as it is; so from my pov I'd be in favour of a cautious approach with a temporary guidelines against it's usage until we are sure we have the moderation tools to preserve that quality.
Show HN: Pixel text renderer using CSS linear-gradients (no JavaScript)
by nizarmah | 2025-12-09 19:18:11+00:00
I've been playing around with rendering pixel text using only CSS. No JS in the final result, and no per-pixel DOM elements (too heavy).

The demo page is rendered as a long list of CSS linear-gradients. Each letter is an 8x8 matrix. Each pixel becomes a tiny background image.

Demo: https://taktek.io Gallery/Debugger: https://taktek.io/gallery Code: https://github.com/taktekhq/taktekhq.github.io

At first, I wrote each linear-gradient pixel manually... When I came to resize each pixel's size, I wrote the generator script.

1. It takes the text -> 2. breaks it into letters -> 3. gets its matrix -> 4. returns the linear-gradients list.

It chooses a variant based on the context window. For example, a period after a sentence ("hello.") should look different than inside a domain ("example.com").

My workflow now is: open the gallery -> generate the CSS in the console -> copy the result into the static page.

It's very small and a dumb tool, but I want it for an upcoming project.

If you have any feedback, maybe some pitfalls, or a better approach, I'd love to hear them.
by zby | 2025-12-09 19:18:33+00:00
Well - the point of involving the AI is that very often it explains my intuitions way better than I can. It instantiates them and fills in all the details, sometimes showing new ways.

I find the second paragraphs contradictory - either you fear that I would agree with random stuff that the AI writes or you believe that the sycophant AI is writing what I believe. I like to think that I can recognise good arguments, but if I am wrong here - then why would you prefer my writing from an LLM generated one?
by vadepaysa | 2025-12-09 19:18:42+00:00
The core of Apple's problem boils down to apathy towards their product quality. I just recently switched from using Siri to Google Gemini in my car. The experience is dramatically better.

And this is the case across the board.

My friend's Fitbit works way better than my Apple watch.

Third and final example is how bad Apple's native dictation engine is. I can run OpenAI Whisper models on my Mac and get dramatically better output.

As a long time Apple fan who's had everything since before the first iPhone, I feel this apathy towards product quality cannot be disguised as some strategic decision to fast follow with AI.
by Cpoll | 2025-12-09 19:18:42+00:00
> What do game engines have to do with this?

You seemed to imply that the developer chose isometric to make development easier. I'm rebutting that this is unlikely; they're equally easy with an engine (and if you're not using an engine, you're skilled enough that they're still equally easy).

> But neither of those make the critiques, themselves, improper or even wrong.

Are you referring to my critique of your critique of razzmatak's critique ("Handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites")? Surely if you're allowed to disagree with them, I am with you.
by sfink | 2025-12-09 19:19:02+00:00
That was my immediate thought too, but I'm still in favor of banning it in order to make it a community norm. Right now, people generally seem to think that such comments are adding some sort of signal, and I don't think they're stupid to think that. Not stupid, just wrong. And people feel personally attacked and so get defensive and harden their position, so it would be better to just make it against the guidelines with some justification there rather than trying to control it with individual arguments (with a defensive person!) or downvoting alone. (And the guidelines would be the place to put the explanation of why it's disallowed.)

People will still do it, but now they're doing it intentionally in a context where they know it's against the guidelines, which is a whole different situation. Staying up late to argue the point (and thus add noise) is obviously not going to work.

I'd prefer the guideline to allow machine translation, though, even when done with a chatbot. If you are using a chatbot intentionally with the purpose of translating your thoughts, that's a very different comment than spewing out the output from a prompt about the topic. There's some gray area where they fuzz together, but in my experience they're still very different. (Even though the translated ones set off all the alarm bells in terms of style, formatting, and phrasing.)
by MarkusWandel | 2025-12-09 19:19:18+00:00
I'm not a watch person, and the only reason I occasionally wear one is because it's a Garmin and I'm recording an outdoor activity with it. But while cycling, when the phone in my backpack makes a notification noise, it is kind of handy to just be able to look at the watch to see what kind of notification it is - the kind hardly worth looking at or the kind worth stopping and pulling out the phone to reply to. This particular gadget doesn't have a microphone and any app interaction on it involves a multi-button dance. But if there was a single button audio recording app, I can totally see myself using it. Especially as you get older (I'm guessing - can't interview younger me) fleeting thoughts can be awfully fleeting.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-09 19:19:19+00:00
Hehe. In the "someone should make a website"™ department: using a crap tons of legacy protocols and plugins semi-interoperable with modern while offering legacy browsers loaded with legacy plugins something usable to test with, i.e.,

- SSL 2.0-TLS 1.1, HTTP/0.9-HTTP/1.1, ftp, WAIS, gopher, finger, telnet, rwho, TinyFugue MUD, UUCP email, SHOUTcast streaming some public domain radio whatever

- <blink>, <marquee>, <object>, XHTML, SGML

- Java <applet>, Java Web Start

- MSJVM/J++, ActiveX, Silverlight

- Flash, Shockwave (of course), Adobe Air

- (Cosmo) VRML

- Joke ActiveX control or toolbar that turns a Win 9x/NT-XP box into a "real" ProgressBar95. ;)

(Gov't mandated PSA: Run vintage {good,bad}ness with care.)
by LexiMax | 2025-12-09 19:19:23+00:00
> Frankly, the law should be "you can sue social media if you can link their service to a problem with you'r child's mental health"

So you want to make it legally viable for religious parents to sue social spaces that allow for their children to question the religion of their parents? That's totally something that I could picture happening under such a regime. And that's ultimately indicative of a larger conundrum we face as a society.

The fact that as a society we seem to favor giving parents the ability to make their children in their own image, over giving their children the leeway to figure out who they truly are outside of their parent's guidance. And that's a truly difficult line to tack. Sometimes the parents are 100% right and the children would self-destruct under their own supervision. Other times, the children are being abused and tortured for not following the whims of their selfish parents.

I was lucky, all things considered. My parents were well meaning, just extremely overbearing and micro-managing. Some of the outright abuse that some of my acquaintances describe undergoing would make y'all sick if repeated here. I don't know if there's any solution, but I'm not sure giving helicopter parents more leverage against social spaces is the right play.
by bambax | 2025-12-09 19:19:26+00:00
> Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly?

I do vibe code in C; I'm not a C programmer and I certainly couldn't do a security audit of any serious C codebase, but I can read and understand a simple C program, and debug and refactor it (as long as it's still quite simple).

And it's super fun! Being able to compile a little C utility that lives in the Windows tray and has a menu, etc. is exhilarating.

But I couldn't do that in assembly; I would just stare at instructions and not understand anything. So, yes for C, no for assembly.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-12-09 19:20:15+00:00
I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API call is transparently made to a secure computed environment on Apple’s servers that are documented to preserve privacy.

A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift / SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don’t see much evidence that many developers are using the model in their apps.
by Aloisius | 2025-12-09 19:21:03+00:00
The research on social media harm is far from conclusive, despite what people seem to believe. To quote the National Academies report:

> The committee’s review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.

Having read through the couple hundred page report, causality was not established and the studies found both positive and negative effects in different subgroups.

Given banning social media might cause harm to a some groups of children, perhaps decisions on whether to forbid use are better left with parents for now.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27396

or the one pager for Parents: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Social_Medi...
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-09 19:21:05+00:00
This kind of meets with my experience - AI tends to follow specific patterns for each language, earlier this year I was finding that AI was presenting me with 4 different approaches to a problem, none of them were working so it would cycle through each of the four approaches.

I lost a day chasing my tail cycling through those 4 approaches, but the experience was worthwhile (IMO) because I had beeen becoming lazy and relying on AI too much, after that I switched to a better style of using AI to help me find those approaches, and as a sounding board for my ideas, whilst staying in control of the actual code.

(Oh, I should also mention that AI's conviction/confidence did cause me to believe it knew what it was talking about when I should have backed myself, but, again, experience is what you get after you needed it :)
by m463 | 2025-12-09 19:21:56+00:00
> calculators cannot do math because they don’t really understand numbers

I don't think that's an appropriate analogy at all.

He's not saying that AI is not useful. He's saying that it doesn't understand or reason, so it does not generate the truth.

So you can ask chatgpt a question about the german tax system, but it would be a mistake to have it do your taxes.

in the same way, a calculator could help with your taxes, because it has been engineered to give precise answers about some math operations, but it cannot do your taxes.
by jmathai | 2025-12-09 19:22:03+00:00
> It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban.

Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up.

> I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice

That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 19:22:39+00:00
That's a really, really interesting point.

It makes me imagine a programming language designed for LLMs but not humans, designed for rigorous specification of every function, variable, type, etc., valid inputs and outputs, tightly coupled to unit tests, mandatory explicit handling of every exception, etc.

Maybe it'll look like a lot of boilerplate but make it easy to read as opposed to easy to write.

The idea of a language that is extremely high-effort to write, but massively assists in guaranteeing correctness, could be ideal for LLM's.
by subscribed | 2025-12-09 19:22:42+00:00
What do you mean? Graphene OS devices DO support Hardware-based attestation (AOSP standard), they just don't support STRONG or DEVICE Play integrity checks.

Now developers can choose to support it (and some of the developers do!) aside or apart of google "attestation". How it should be, reliable providers should be able to certify it equally firmly.

Google should be forced to accept a valid hardware-attestation certification as their own. GOS have raise the issue with the European Commission and I hope Google will get fined and forced.

in quotes because it mostly confirms that google runs in the privileged mode and can't detect one of the issues. But google also gives a pass to many very old, insecure, rooted devices. It's a scam.
by epolanski | 2025-12-09 19:23:00+00:00
No I'm not, I'm just sick of these edgy takes where AI does not improve productivity when it obviously does.

Even if you limit your AI experience to finding information online through deep research it's such a time saver and productivity booster that makes a lot of difference.

The list of things it can do for you is massive, even if you don't have it write a single line of code.

Yet the counter argument is like "bu..but..my colleague is pushing slop and it's not good at writing code for me", come on, then use it at things it's good at, not things you don't find it satisfactory.
by palmotea | 2025-12-09 19:23:07+00:00
>> If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners."

> I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.

No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I'm basically just applying the logic of capitalism and automation to a new technology, and the same thing has played out a thousand times before. The only difference with AI is that; unlike previous, more limited automation; it's likely there will be no roles for displaced workers to move into (just like when engines got good enough there were no roles for horses to move into).

It's important to remember that capitalism isn't about providing for people. It's about providing for people with wealth to exchange. That works OK when you have full employment and wealth gets spread around by paying workers, but if most jobs disappear due to automation there's no mechanism to spread wealth to the vast majority of people, so under capitalism they'll eventually die of want.
by RankingMember | 2025-12-09 19:23:39+00:00
100%! I will always give the benefit of the doubt when I see odd syntax/grammar (and do my best to provide helpful correction if it's off-base to the extent that it muddies your point), but hit me with a wordy, em-dash battered pile of gobbledygook and you might as well be spitting in my face.
by radanskoric | 2025-12-09 19:23:39+00:00
Author here. I didn't mention it because I wasn't writing an evaluation of fixtures. Just writing about how to make better use of fixtures. I actually use both fixtures and factories depending on the project specifics and also whether it is even my decision to make. :)

Personally, I even slightly prefer to use Factories and I also previously wrote about a better way to use them: https://radanskoric.com/articles/test-factories-principal-of...
by Veserv | 2025-12-09 19:24:08+00:00
perf is a sampling profiler, not a function tracing profiler, so that fails the criteria I presented.

I used FunctionTrace as a example and evidence for my position that tracing Python is low overhead with proper design to bypass claims like: “You can not make it that low overhead or someone would have done it already, thus proving the negative.” I am not the author or in any way related to it, so you can bring that up with them.
by onethought | 2025-12-09 19:24:23+00:00
your heuristics is "last 50 years of US history", and you've now applied that to "That's how the whole multi planetary blob of humanity will operate".

I think "handywavy logic" is now being generous.

What about widening your heuristics to consider all of human history and see how much more freedom, autonomy and large scale coordination we have in place compared to say... the dark ages, or earlier.
Is there an hour by hour model quality tracker?
by sshadmand | 2025-12-09 19:24:27+00:00
I'd love to put some actual science behind a feeling I think a lot of us share: certain hosted models seem to dip in quality at certain times of day. In my group, it’s almost treated as a “yeah, of course” kind of thing. Having something near-real-time that shows which models are performing best at any moment would be… honestly, pretty awesome.

I asked Perplexity and got nothing: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-there-an-hour-by-hour-model-8.03Z_BlSomAY7o9F5HwmQ#0
by chrilleweb | 2025-12-09 19:25:41+00:00
Hello everyone,

I recently built a tool that I personally needed for my own projects, and now I’m super curious if other developers would actually find it useful.

It’s called dotenv-diff, and the main feature is a codebase scanner that finds problems with environment variables before they break things.

Why I built it

I kept seeing the same issues in real projects:

Feature breaks because .env is missing variables

New developer joins → app crashes due to missing env

.env.example goes out of sync

Someone accidentally leaves a secret inside a TS file

Frontend frameworks misused env naming (NEXT_PUBLIC, VITE_, etc.)

I wanted one CLI command that gives me a full health check of environment usage in my project.

Honest question:

Would this be useful in your workflow?

If you want to check it out:

npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/dotenv-diff Docs: https://dotenv-diff-docs.vercel.app
by slg | 2025-12-09 19:25:55+00:00
And that is a relatively harmless academic pursuit. What about topics that can lead to true danger and violence?

"You're exactly right, you organized and paid for the date, that created a social debt and she failed to meet her obligation in that implicit deal."

"You're exactly right, no one can understand your suffering, nothingness would be preferable to that."

"You're exactly right, that politician is a danger to both the country and the whole world, someone stopping him would become a hero."

We have already seen how personalized content algorithms that only prioritize getting the user to continue to use the system can foment extremism. It will be incredibly dangerous if we follow down that path with AI.
by burningChrome | 2025-12-09 19:25:59+00:00
I love most of their stuff and the writing is pretty eloquent as it takes you on a journey that's easy to follow and flows easily from one paragraph to another.

This was just a slog that I felt went nowhere and the points were buried in between rambling information about Sacks and his gay lifestyle, lovers and living in NYC and the gay lifestyle there at the time.

Not only was it not interesting, it was poorly written and hard to read. Sometimes writers just need to stick to the facts instead of trying to write another "The Phenomenology of Spirit" for a "middlebrow magazine".