MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ricardo81 | 2025-12-14 16:04:58+00:00
American tech companies have been pushing the needle on privacy ever since Google. Then Facebook. They've gradually normalised that privacy does not exist, all for their own capital gain.

There are European alternatives but they need support.

IMHO it requires conscious choices by European citizens to choose more carefully which online services they dedicate their time and money to. Or expect unintended consequences.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-14 16:05:11+00:00
This doesn't really address anything, though. The human part will be 10x more productive when they're polishing than when they're having to start with a blank page, and now nine nearly as competent, experienced people have been fired and are offering to work for less than you're being paid. Poof! It's now a minimum wage job, and has barely gotten any easier.

They can actually just hire the worst of you (who will do unpaid overtime, and let you call him a dummy when you're upset), because it's not a big deal that he's only 5x as fast as you used to be compared to your 10x as fast as you used to be. They can't even attract that much business now because the lowest end of the market completely disappeared and is doing it at home by themselves.

Prepress/typesetting work went from a highly-specialized job that you spent years mastering and could raise a family with to a still moderately difficult job that paid just above minimum wage within a single generation, just due to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Those tools don't even generate anything resembling a final product, they just make the job digital instead of physical. In the case of copywriting, AI instantly generates something that a lazy person could ship with.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-14 16:06:09+00:00
[Woman walking on beach at sunset, holding hands with husband]

Voiceover: "Miracurol cures cancer."

[Couple now laughing over dinner with friends]

"Ask your doctor if Miracurol is right for you."

[Same footage continues, voice accelerates]

"In clinical trials, five mice with lymphoma received Miracurol. All five were cured. One exploded. Not tested in humans. Side effects include headache, itchiness, impotence, explosion, and death. Miracurol's cancer-free guarantee applies only to cancers covered under Miracurol's definition of cancer, available at miracurol.org. Manufacturer not responsible for outcomes following improper use. Consult your doctor."

[Couple walking golden retriever, sun flare]

Voiceover: "Miracurol. Because you deserve to live cancer-free."

Patient: "I exploded."

Miracurol: "That's extremely well documented on miracurol.org."
by kawfey | 2025-12-14 16:06:13+00:00
>he doesn't seem to realize intent is a thing

at 2m9s [0],

>theoretically, that type of pattern could randomly show up if you were just driving through mud. Is it the intent that makes it illegal? Is it the presence of it that makes it illegal? If you have a certain amount of mud on your license plate and that cop doesn't likeyou, could he use this law and be a dick and put you in jail the same way that he would if you were driving with an open bottle of Absolut and swerving in and out of your lane?

Not only does he acknowledge intent is a thing, I think this is more a commentary on the ambiguity of the bill, which states:

>A person may not alter the original appearance of a vehicle registration certificate, license plate, temporary license plate, mobile home sticker, or validation sticker issued for and assigned to a motor vehicle or mobile home, whether by mutilation, alteration, defacement, or change of color or in any other manner.

The lack of the word "knowingly" makes it ambiguous whether intent matters. A person who drives with a plate covered in mud, bugs, or bird shit could be theoretically be charged by this law not because of intent to obscure it, but because of the person neglected their duty to keep the plate clear of obstructions so it could be read by these LPR cameras that infringe his Fourth Amendment right.

I'm sure theres a lot of other legal context and case law but laws shouldn't be written with loopholes or ambiguity like that in the first place.

[0] https://youtu.be/qEllWdK4l_A?t=413 [1] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/253/BillText/File...
by xp84 | 2025-12-14 16:06:17+00:00
This is interesting because for some people, it would be a feature to be operating with, say, a US VPN tunnel that is “on paper” in the Bahamas. Better latency. For instance, the average person downloading Torrents.

Of course, for the most high-stakes stuff if you were worried about some kind of major state level actors or something, you want to keep a very tight control over where your actual traffic is physically transiting. So it seems only proper that they disclose these discrepancies to customers.

Even still, I suspect encryption and proper lack of logs provides sufficient cover for most people for most actually likely threats.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-14 16:07:05+00:00
Maybe off-topic, but what is going on with this website?

"Step forward the ‘fully biodegradable’ shoe that leaves no footprint" - Hilariously awful idea. Which sane person wants shoes which are designed to literally disintegrate?

"The smartphone for children that blocks porn" - AI being used to surveil children phones for nudity. (???)

"Solar project reimagines railway network as clean energy lifelines " Literally Solar roadways again. Which is a idea worthy of so much ridicule.
by mapmeld | 2025-12-14 16:08:35+00:00
I went back to their posts in November for this

> One of my AirTags is inexplicably 1600 miles away in Texas. It's one of my floating ones that I throw into bags when traveling as needed.

> Maybe it dropped out of my bag only to be found by someone who thought it'd be fun to confuse the owner. Or maybe it became e-waste to be dumped in another country.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 16:08:58+00:00
Lottery system solves this issue but then people start thinking of reasons that they deserve to visit more than someone else and try to implement quotas affording priority access to their group (e.g. local residents, ethnic minority, etc.)

It’s an intractable problem encountered when dealing with scarce resources; the key is navigating to a point that the functional number of people consider to be fair.
by egypturnash | 2025-12-14 16:09:18+00:00
"You can poke new values into the start-of-program pointer to speed up jumps to the end of the program, and speed up loop execution" is pretty tricky. So's "you can poke new values into another pointer to jump to arbitrary statements within a multi-statement line, and here[1] is a 3d maze program that abuses the heck out of this to become a one-liner".

1: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/21001/ZX-Spectrum/1_Li...
by flanked-evergl | 2025-12-14 16:09:41+00:00
I guess the Europeans have to ask themselves if they are okay being entirely useless and always crying to daddy USA when the Russians push their shit in while also crying that daddy USA is not kind enough to them. It's honestly pathetic and I don't want this anymore.

We either need to squash Russia like the toxic vermin it is, or accept that we are too useless to even do that.
by dgellow | 2025-12-14 16:09:49+00:00
Yes, I completely agree, I did feel insulted by it. There is a real anti-European/EU narrative in the US, with European countries described as collapsing, failed, etc (which is pretty obvious bullshit). if people are on the fence and ask stupid questions I think it’s ok? I hope they will be corrected, like happened here.

Of course there is no way for me to know if the poster was trolling or pushing an agenda. Some other commenters in this whole comment section are more obvious to identify
by array_key_first | 2025-12-14 16:10:06+00:00
I think everyone knows most reviews are bullshit.

Look, you're describing how it should work, and I agree. But how it actually works is far, far different.

No, first the product is introduced with no ads. You sign a EULA that might contain language around ads, but guess what - the EULA is 100 pages long and nobody is reading that shit because we have jobs and families.

The product gets glowing reviews, probably because it's cheap and subsidized by the mega-corp (aka sell product at a loss for market capture). Then, the product enshittifies from under your feet.

There's nothing you can do at that point, because you already bought it. Your "market", so to speak, is 1. You were deceived. You thought you were buying a fridge, but really you were just licensing access to a fridge.

But say you didn't buy it. Even then, you're fucked. There's no trustworthy online reviews, well, anywhere basically. And it's just not reasonable to expect consumers to do hours of research prior to buying anything. No, I should be able to go to the store and ascertain the quality and nature of the product. But I can't, so I get tricked and hoodwinked.

This is all very purposeful. Companies know if they're honest about their products that consumers might look at the competition. So everyone just scams and lies. Even multi-billion dollar multi-nationals are basically running scams at this point. And guess what? All their competition is doing it, too. Because if your competitor is scamming, you have no choice but to be a con artist yourself, lest you become irrelevant.
by derriz | 2025-12-14 16:10:33+00:00
The most annoying thing about iPhone Maps for me is the inaccuracy of the direction indicator. I've googled and it doesn't seem to be a universal complaint even though I've experienced this on multiple devices over the years even after following instructions to re-calibrate multiple times. Maybe I've just been unlucky.

It intensely frustrating to use maps for direction finding while walking or cycling when the app is telling you are facing one direction when in fact you are facing another.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-14 16:10:35+00:00
Address sanitizer won’t panic/crash your program on all memory safety violations. Attackers know how to achieve remote code execution in processes running Asan. Asan’s docs specifically call out that you should not use it in prod. In other words, Asan is not memory safe. It’s just a bug finding tool.

Fil-C will panic your program, or give some kind of memory safe outcome (that is of no use to the attacker) in all of the cases that attackers use to achieve remote code execution. In other words, Fil-C is memory safe.

The fact that Fil-C achieves memory safety using runtime checks doesn’t make it any less memory safe. Even rust uses runtime checks (most importantly for array bounds). And, type systems that try to prove safety statically often amount to forcing the programmer to write the checks themselves.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-14 16:11:18+00:00
> Let's go with blast furnaces. They're definitely tools. They change over time - a team might constantly run one for twenty years but still need to monitor and adjust how they use it as the furnace itself changes behavior due to wear and tear (I think they call this "drift".)

Now let's make the analogy more accurate: let's imagine the blast furnace often ignores the operator controls, and just did what it "wanted" instead. Additionally, there are no gauges and there is no telemetry you can trust (it might have some that can the furnace will occasionally falsify, but you won't know when it's doing that).

Let's also imagine that the blast furnace changes behavior minute-to-minute (usually in the middle of the process) between useful output, useless output (requires scrapping), and counterproductive output (requires rework which exceeds the productivity gains of using the blast furnace to begin with).

Furthermore, the only way to tell which one of those 3 options you got, is to manually inspect every detail of every piece of every output. If you don't do this, the output might leak secrets (or worse) and bankrupt your company.

Finally, the operator would be charged for usage regardless of how often the furnace actually worked. At least this part of the analogy already fits.

What a weird blast furnace! Would anyone try to use this tool in such a scenario? Not most experienced metalworkers. Maybe a few people with money to burn. In particular, those who sing the highest praises of such a tool would likely be ignorant of all these pitfalls, or have a vested interest in the tool selling.
by diarrhea | 2025-12-14 16:11:30+00:00
> just another kind of complex?

To some extent yes. If all you have is 2 GitHub Actions YAML files you are not going to reap massive benefits.

I'm a big fan of CUE myself. The benefits compound as you need to output more and more artifacts (= YAML config). Think of several k8s manifests, several GitHub Actions files, e.g. for building across several combinations of OSes, settings, etc.

CUE strikes a really nice balance between being primarily data description and not a Turing-complete language (e.g. cdk8s can get arbitrarily complex and abstract), reducing boilerplate (having you spell out the common bits once only, and each non-commit bit once only) and being type-safe (validation at build/export time, with native import of Go types, JSON schema and more).

They recently added an LSP which helps close the gap to other ecosystems. For example, cdk8s being TS means it naturally has fantastic IDE support, which CUE has been lacking in. CUE error messages can also be very verbose and unhelpful.

At work, we generate a couple thousand lines of k8s YAML from ~0.1x of that in CUE. The CUE is commented liberally, and validation imported from native k8s types, and sprinkled in where needed otherwise (e.g. we know for our application the FOO setting needs to be between 5 and 10). The generated YAML is clean, without any indentation and quoting worries. We also generate YAML-in-YAML, i.e. our application takes YAML config, which itself is in an outer k8s YAML ConfigMap. YAML-in-YAML is normally an enormous pain and easy to get wrong. In CUE it's just `yaml.Marshal`.

You get a lot of benefit for a comparatively simple mental model: all your CUE files form just one large document, and for export to YAML it's merged. Any conflicting values and any missing values fail the export. That's it. The mental model of e.g. cdk8s is massively more complex and has unbounded potential for abstraction footguns (being TypeScript). Not to mention CUE is Go and shipped as a single binary; the CUE v0.15.0 you use today will still compile and work 10 years from now.

You can start very simple, with CUE looking not unlike JSON, and add CUE-specific bits from there. You can always rip out the CUE and just keep the generated YAML, or replace CUE with e.g. cdk8s. It's not a one-way door.

The cherry on top are CUE scripts/tasks. In our case we use a CUE script to split the one-large-document (10s of thousands of lines) into separate files, according to some criteria. This is all defined in CUE as well, meaning I can write ~40 lines of CUE (this has a bit of a learning curve) instead of ~200 lines of cursed, buggy bash.
by eimrine | 2025-12-14 16:11:41+00:00
Paper books are too hard to sell after you have read it.

Ereaders can not render PDF/DJVU with formulas. My reading list has nothing able to be read from that kind of devices.

Installing some more proprietary code will not lead to "deshittifying" some existing proprietary code. You just add 1 guy more of your dependances. You even can not do this once for whole life of the device. So many time perfect for reading goes inte nowhere with Woedows OS.
by Too | 2025-12-14 16:12:20+00:00
But that dependency order is usually just one big blob of ”COPY src/ . + RUN make”, within that block you have none of the benefits. Bazel/Buck has much finer awareness down to every individual file.

Out of curiosity, would it be feasible to take a big cmake project and generate thousands of compile rules into dagger and use it as a substitute for make with sandboxing? I’ve never seen builkit used with such many nodes, how would it fare?
by kirb | 2025-12-14 16:12:34+00:00
To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)
by mothballed | 2025-12-14 16:12:39+00:00
>I'm not talking about you, but the rhetoric, the ideas. But another part of the rhetoric is to shift the conversation to being a victim, and away from the merits of the ideas so one doesn't have to talk about them. Heck, looking back, I even took trouble to say it wasn't about you.

A survey of the 'rhetoric' (which you've somehow shifted to even though it's quite obvious you are personifying the rhetoric to reflect the person) of Friedman's life and the people espousing his 'rhetoric' finds your accusation to be blatantly and utterly false. Nothing about Friedman's 'rhetoric' was focused around shifting away from the merits of the ideas. I recommend watching "Free to Choose" series where you will learn almost none of the 'rhetoric' is focused around 'victimhood' and almost entirely around how to deal with the circumstances he's recognized.

This 'victim' peddling of your 'rhetoric' assessment is purely aimed at assassinating Friedman's assessment with a thought terminating dismissal as appeal to victimhood, not grounded in truth nor is it even aimed at understanding what was said.
by firefax | 2025-12-14 16:12:43+00:00
I feel like what's interesting to the technically minded will stay evergreen? (You mentioned Neuromancer for example)

"A Brief History of Time" was one of my favorite books as a pre-teen beginning to wonder how the world works.

On the fiction side I've heard good things about Cory Doctorow's works -- I purchased a copy of "Little Brother" a while back and enjoyed it. Maybe not as high literature as 1984 or Catch 22 but it was engaging and if I had kids I'd gift it to them when they were the right age.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-14 16:13:51+00:00
Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge.

I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-12-14 16:14:09+00:00
Your washing machine can only deal with certain classes of clothing. It will completely destroy others, and has no way to determine what clothing has been put into it. Meanwhile, the average untrained-but-conscientious human will, at worst, damage a small portion of an item of clothing before spotting the problem and acting to mitigate it. (If the clothing is "absolutely must never come into contact with water" levels of dry-clean only, they might still trash the whole item, but they aren't likely to make the same mistake twice.)

Programming is far more the latter kind of task than the former. Data-processing or system control tasks in the "solve ordinary, well-specified problem" category are solved by executing software, not programming.
by dogemaster2032 | 2025-12-14 16:14:16+00:00
It’s because you were not really tallying.

I did the tallying for you. When specifically two countries were mentioned and it wasn’t clear which country the good deed happened in, I awarded 0.5 points to each of those countries.

The top country that is specifically mentioned is the USA. Of countries that are specified as non USA, they accumulated 34.5 points. The USA accumulated 37.5.

The tallying was done at 4:03 PM UTC on December 14, 2025

Here is the {position, score, country} list

#0. 42 Country not mentioned

#1. 37.5 USA

#2. 6.5 UK

#3. 5 Japan

#4. 4 Australia

#5. 2.5 Germany

#6. 2 Canada

#6. 2 India

#7. 1 Argentina

#7. 1 Bethlehem (Roman Empire, ~4 BCE)

#7. 1 Costa Rica

#7. 1 Iceland

#7. 1 Jordan

#7. 1 Nigeria

#7. 1 Norway

#7. 1 Philippines

#7. 1 Poland

#7. 1 Spain

#7. 1 Tahiti

#7. 1 Taiwan

#8. 0.5 France
by ninkendo | 2025-12-14 16:14:22+00:00
It doesn’t even need to be the case that the LLM produces worse code. Software development is like a gas that expands to fill its container. If the schedule allows a fixed amount of time before shipping, and the time to write the code shrinks to zero, it just means the other parts of the process will fill the remaining time, even if the LLM did a decent job in the first place.
by thunky | 2025-12-14 16:14:27+00:00
> If we can really vibe something production-ready in no time, why aren't industry-standard tools being replaced by custom vibe clones?

That's a silly argument. Someone could have made all of those clones before, but didn't. Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.

I feel like these anti-AI arguments are intentially being unrealistic. Just because I can use Nano Banana to create art does not mean I'm going to be the next Monet.
by IceDane | 2025-12-14 16:14:38+00:00
> Or even a real one. The hypothetical part is that you'd be able to understand it. The languages with complex type systems are complete bears to work with, as I am sure you can image.

I have written Haskell professionally for several years and worked with Idris and other similar languages. I'm perfectly aware of what is possible.

> The compiler would give you an error if you got the syntax wrong, and in isolation it's fair that you could, say, get the domain name wrong as long as it is syntactically valid. I suppose what I failed to convey, making some assumptions about your understanding of type systems, is that the types would not just specify RFC-compliance. You would also spec out other dependencies such that you also couldn't even provide the wrong domain name without a compiler error. So, no, the implementation of the function couldn't be wrong.

Wow, wouldn't that be something. This is hilariously wrong. You can build tiny functions and then compose those into larger functions and then the larger functions are all correct but only as long as their components are correct. It would be lovely if there was some magic construct that prevented you from writing incorrect code. Maybe it could be extended to hacker news comments, and then we could have just skipped this entire discussion.

> You could mis-spec the contract, of course. Then the function could be "wrong". Maybe this is the intent behind what you are trying to say here. But the idea has always been here that I would also read and accept the contract, so it wouldn't actually be "wrong". It would be exactly what we both expect. My side will be written to what the contact specifies. If you try to deviate from the contract later, you'll face the wrath of the compiler.

A truly baffling take. Bravo! Even on Hacker News, that was truly something. I don't even know where to begin. I guess I don't really have to, since when it comes to explaining the ease with which you transfer words straight from your ass to hacker news comments, it does a better job than I could possibly hope to do.

> As you point out, that's not the case in Typescript. If you try to change the contract (even if by accident) the compiler/typechecker will never say a word. I won't know until my code starts breaking. Your tests are the only thing you have to keep you in line with what we agreed upon. Tests define the contract in its case.

At this point, it's fairly clear that you are just thoroughly confused about how any of this works and what is actually possible. If you disagree, I'd love to hear how you would implement some sort of construct that allows you to write a function of the type `String -> Email` that doesn't throw if the email is invalid, can process arbitrary user input (not just string literals in your code), and somehow makes it a compiler error if your code is ever incorrect at all. PS: Explicitly returning and carrying around proof of validity doesn't count.