MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmotea | 2025-12-11 15:14:16+00:00
> I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call.

That's an example of a weird heuristic I frequently see applied to corporations: assume some awful decision is the result of some scarily hyper-competent design process, and construct a speculative explanation along those lines.

But must of us have worked in corporations, an know how stupid and incompetent they can be.

> Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

Occam's razor points to this as the reason.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-11 15:15:05+00:00
There are lots of health insurance companies operating in the USA. United Health is the largest but they only have a 15% market share.

All these companies follow suit with the market forces described above. They all want to insure young healthy people and deny old sick people --- simply because they make more money by doing so.

Over time, everyone (including you) will naturally gravitate from young and healthy to old and sick --- aka uninsurable.

Are you content for yourself or your family to be uninsured when they need it most --- after a lifetime of paying premiums? This is what private, for-profit health insurance manifests.

This is not due to "red tape" or lack of competition but is a fundamental and unavoidable characteristic of the "free market" itself.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-11 15:15:50+00:00
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach landmark agreement to bring beloved characters from across Disney’s brands to Sora - https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ - December 11th, 2025

Disney making $1 billion investment in OpenAI, will allow characters on Sora AI video generator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231585 - December 2025
by bilbo0s | 2025-12-11 15:16:17+00:00
This.

Don't believe for a second that Sora will allow you to make racist content with Disney characters.

That said, there are a lot of other models out there that care about neither licensing nor alignment. So those will allow you to make racist content. Then you can do whatever you like with that generated content.

A lot of IP owners will learn that there is more than one way to skin a cat. It's easier than people think to turn children's characters, like say, Hermoine, into a raging racist. And there's very little technically speaking that they can do to stop it.

But yes, on OpenAI specific properties, they can definitely stop it dead in its tracks. They can even get better at stopping it over time. In fact, the more users try to generate it, the better the system will get at stopping it.
by grimgrin | 2025-12-11 15:16:32+00:00
you made a non-comment, that's why you're downvoted

comments don't have to be substantial, but they should be adding something that might merit more responses, or could. yours does not. what kind of reply could you even give to "this place [and so, its users] hates [thing]"

I'd ask you to qualify it, but you can't really qualify such a statement
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-11 15:16:37+00:00
For one, meth addict or homeless or violent drunk parents would probably not be able to do homeschooling. Then, homeschooling is probably only better because it is 1 on 1, and not 1 on dozens as it is in public schools. For me, it doesn't make sense that parents are somehow magically better than professional educators, if you assume that the professional educators are actually motivated and care (there are people in this thread who are arguing that generally parents care and professionals don't).
by MisterMusion | 2025-12-11 15:16:41+00:00
You already have access to device pixels, you just have to calculate it yourself.

Anti-aliasing is not a good solution for orthogonal lines with low device pixel ratios like 1.25 or 1.5. which will be around for a long time. Browsers disagree with you - they don't use anti-aliasing for orthogonal measurements, they round. Which means they do in fact pixel-snap.

I agree that it can be misused like using device pixels for UI, but my suggestions makes the distinction more explicit.
by jan_Inkepa | 2025-12-11 15:16:48+00:00
>Trying to optimize to some kind of perfect pixel alignment shouldn't be a goal anymore.

If you're trying to display pixel art (or make games with pixel art), being able to have integral upsizing is very useful. Antialiasing doesn't cut it, and the eye notices when you do non-integral nearest-neighbour upscaling and some pixels are the wrong size.
by AlanYx | 2025-12-11 15:17:14+00:00
This is my view as well. That being said, Time New Roman is marginally better because there are several good, modern open source alternatives with the same metrics that can be substituted. And there's good tool support virtually everywhere for those alternatives, like in TeX.

There is a metric-compatible open alternative to Calibri (Carlito) but it seems more vulnerable to lawyer shenanigans and doesn't have extensive tool support.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-11 15:17:46+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560

DonHopkins on Feb 16, 2022 | prev | next [–]

When I implemented the pixelation censorship effect in The Sims 1, I actually injected some random noise every frame, so it made the pixels shimmer, even when time was paused. That helped make it less obvious that it wasn't actually censoring penises, boobs, vaginas, and assholes, because the Sims were actually more like smooth Barbie dolls or GI-Joes with no actual naughty bits to censor, and the players knowing that would have embarrassed the poor Sims.

[...]

The other nasty bug involving pixelization that we did manage to fix before shipping, but that I unfortunately didn't save any video of, involved the maid NPC, who was originally programmed by a really brilliant summer intern, but had a few quirks:

A Sim would need to go potty, and walk into the bathroom, pixelate their body, and sit down on the toilet, then proceed to have a nice leisurely bowel movement in their trousers. In the process, the toilet would suddenly become dirty and clogged, which attracted the maid into the bathroom (this was before "privacy" was implemented).

She would then stroll over to toilet, whip out a plunger from "hammerspace" [1], and thrust it into the toilet between the pooping Sim's legs, and proceed to move it up and down vigorously by its wooden handle. The "Unnecessary Censorship" [2] strongly implied that the maid was performing a manual act of digital sex work. That little bug required quite a lot of SimAntics [3] programming to fix!

[1] Hammerspace: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Hammerspace

[2] Unnecessary Censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ayfR3UtcY [broken link updated]

[3] SimAntics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987435 and https://simstek.fandom.com/wiki/SimAntics
by antonymoose | 2025-12-11 15:17:53+00:00
When the ACA plans first came online in South Carolina, I switched over immediately. I was paying something like $300 per month as a young healthy single male with my small company plan. I got a Marketplace plan for about $120 per month. The next year my insurer went out of business but I found another insurer in the 200s, barely cheaper. The following year this insurer also went under. I was now left with Blue Cross as my only real option charging I believe $350 per month and this continued to rise year on year, very painful for me when I was launching a startup with a minimal salary draw. Maybe your state is different but for me it killed numerous companies and left me with expensive, low quality options.
by phkahler | 2025-12-11 15:18:10+00:00
>> To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence

I knew two brothers that would mix words from different languages while speaking to each other because they shared the same set of languages and presumably used the best words to express their thoughts.

Your daughter probably knows other people generally speak and understand one language at a time and just conforms because its most effective.

I'm not sure if or at what age it might be good to start mixing languages with others who can.
by the__alchemist | 2025-12-11 15:18:30+00:00
I wish Python could move away from types-as-mutability-determiners. Or paper over them; all could have mutable and non-mutable variants, with "to_mut()" and "to_immut()" methods. And in the same vein, explicit control over whether functions mutate a variable in place, or make a local copy. Python is my first lang, and I still am unable to consistently reason about these.
by lopis | 2025-12-11 15:18:32+00:00
> That's just another way of saying "my opinion is acceptable, and theirs isn't".

No, it's not. There are laws in several countries of what kind of things you can publish in public. Sure, the line is definitely blurry, but there are lots of cases where it's not. Of course, Meta being an American company often means that local laws have less of an effect.
by dugidugout | 2025-12-11 15:18:38+00:00
If you look at the site in question closer, it states that the "green, blue, and red bars" mean "constructive, technical, and flame war".

If I had to guess, you likely have some heavy premises that blind you from engaging with the content of a post. I'm not going to pretend there isn't some truth in your premises, however I would imagine there would be "many significant issues with [any] community" if we all operated this carelessly.
by winchester6788 | 2025-12-11 15:18:57+00:00
Ooh, love the UX, the heat meter and contrarian detection are very nice ideas.

I recently released https://trackernews.app/browse which surfaces out and groups content from hn, reddit .. for user defined topics and extracts user defined structured data along with summaries.

a tangential take on similar problem with focus on grouping posts by topics.

would love to get any feedback on the UX/ understandability of the interface
by quitit | 2025-12-11 15:19:07+00:00
I wonder if this will weaken Disney's suit against Midjourney.

A tenant of seeking damages in a copyright complaint is the loss of control over how the intellectual property is used, and the potential damage done to the intellectual property by those who are not the rights holder. However this agreement demonstrates that they're not only willing to give up control (and allow content to be created without their vetting), but that they'd even financially contribute the acceleration of such through a very large initial investment with a carve out to contribute even more down the road.

I was aiming to write a counterpoint here, but so far many are quickly debunked by Disney being the company that is the financial backer of the agreement.
by kelnos | 2025-12-11 15:19:24+00:00
I don't put much stock in slippery-slope style arguments. If you're going to make an argument like that, you need to support it with other instances where the same group/government has actually fallen down that slippery slope, to great detriment, in a similar enough situation for it to be likely to happen here.

Without that, it just comes off as hand-wavy anti-government fear-mongering. It's telling that you used the term "authoritarians", as if any law that's passed that can restrict what someone can do is necessarily authoritarian... which, well, as I said, it's telling.

I'm more concerned with the fact that these sorts of laws don't just affect kids: they require adults to supply government-issued identification in order to use these services, which I think is crap.
by browningstreet | 2025-12-11 15:19:38+00:00
I have a Gemini gem for HN where I share a thread and it pulls out insightful comments, interesting links, and avoids that flame war stuff entirely. It's less compact than this format but has more actionable takeaways for me. Tips, tricks, insights, and links is what I want from a lot of these conversations. And there are some specific HN-isms that I've coded into the gem to restrict from the report.
by pkroll | 2025-12-11 15:19:40+00:00
Not a shareholder, but on first try, it won't do it because it recognizes Iger's name. And clearly the deal is fresh because it balked at Mickey Mouse too. But it has no trouble with just, "mouse": https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_693ae0d25bbc819188f6758fce3f90c...
by havblue | 2025-12-11 15:19:40+00:00
There is a lot of YouTube content that is basically people playing with toys like Paw Patrol and having them interact in doll houses. I'm not a fan of this for my kids, and there will be a ton more of it. And yes, there will be political slop as well.

On the other hand there was a video about what happened to Mickey and Goofy in Vietnam... I'm probably okay with an updated version of that.
by ramesh31 | 2025-12-11 15:19:41+00:00
It's depressing the state of modern (6/7) Civ given its lineage. Really it's a microcosm of the software industry in general. Half baked ideas poorly implemented and shipped with the intent of patching later on. To this day, 5 remains the reference version, as evidenced by Steam numbers. It seems there was some magic from that era of early pioneers that has become impossible to recreate.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-11 15:19:56+00:00
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems:

1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close.

And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
by nomel | 2025-12-11 15:20:16+00:00
> I realized that this task is actually a really good fit for LLMs

I've found the opposite, since these models still fail pretty wildly at nuance. I think it's a conceptual "needle in the haystack sort of problem.

A good test is to find some thread where there's a disagreement and have it try to analyze the discussion. It will usually strongly misrepresent what was being said, by each side, and strongly align with one user, missing the actual divide that's causing the disagreement (a needle).
by conartist6 | 2025-12-11 15:20:19+00:00
Once you make the content it's just content, no? How the hell are you going to ban racism? A lot of racism is "dog whistle" stuff anyway -- it's designed to convey a message to people who already know what is being suggested while seeming innocuous to any enforceable standards of decency... The racists will surely have no trouble bending the models to produce Disney content that is in practice used to promote and celebrate racism.
by zrobotics | 2025-12-11 15:20:42+00:00
I'm sure that's what Disney's lawyers specified in the contracts and what their execs expect. However, judging by how LLM controls have gone in the past, I'm fully expecting to see a slew of awful content featuring Disney's characters in the days after this launches. OpenAI also probably won't ever be able to actually stop people from generating harmful content with the characters, but the volume of awful stuff will probably eventually slow down as people get bored and move onto the next controversial thing.
by lopis | 2025-12-11 15:22:00+00:00
It's not an obsession, it's network effects. I say this as someone whole mostly uses Telegram and Signal and has requested friends to text me on those apps instead of Whatsapp. But most people don't want to have several apps and to have to choose which is the correct one to contact each friend. So the status quo seems to be Whatsapp for people they only have the phone number, and Instagram for the rest.
by Extropy_ | 2025-12-11 15:22:18+00:00
The assertion is not that something will inevitably happen because of this other than the further normalization of government authority over individual autonomy. That is an inherent result of this, as well as the prohibition of sale of alcohol and drugs to kids. You can argue on and on whether or not these are good, righteous, moral laws, but you cannot deny the intrinsic fact that widespread acceptance and even support of widening the scope of government control normalizes government control
by andsoitis | 2025-12-11 15:22:33+00:00
> LGBT is sexually explicit topic.

No it is not. When I say “my husband and I”, I am asserting a fact and who I am as a gay guy and I’m not stating anything sexual.

> being US companies retain a puritanical attitude

I do not know that to be true. The US is an also a playground of very explicit pornographic online services. But everything has its place.

There is a real practical problem that is not easily solvable, and that is how to draw a reasonable line at scale across different cultures and legal frameworks. Anyone saying it is easy or clear is not a serious thinker.
by close04 | 2025-12-11 15:22:34+00:00
Shares are always "x% of whatever this thing turns out to be worth in the future". It can be something, it can be nothing.

Disney is giving them money in the hopes that the AI market (bubble?) keeps growing and the value of OpenAI grows with it. And importantly, Disney wants to shift to AI generated slo... content so partnering with a top player with a proven product is a safe choice. Disney licenses its IP to OpenAI, OpenAI can then provide tools that generate said content Disney-style.

> Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees
by wat10000 | 2025-12-11 15:22:56+00:00
It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.

I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
by bostik | 2025-12-11 15:23:09+00:00
As someone who writes both Python and Go (and I've been using Python professionally since 2005), I remember that the scoping behaviour has changed.

Back in Python 2.1 days, there was no guarantee that a locally scoped variable would continue to exist past the end of the method. It was not guaranteed to vanish or go fully out of scope, but you could not rely on it being available afterwards. I remember this changing from 2.3 onwards (because we relied on the behaviour at work) - from that point onwards you could reliably "catch" and reuse a variable after the scope it was declared in had ended, and the runtime would ensure that the "second use" maintained the reference count correctly. GC did not get in the way or concurrently disappear the variable from underneath you anymore.

Then from 2008 onwards the same stability was extended to more complex data types. Again, I remember this from having work code give me headaches for yanking supposedly out-of-scope variable into thin air, and the only difference being a .1 version difference between the work laptop (where things worked as you'd expect) and the target SoC device (where they didn't).
by businessmate | 2025-12-11 15:23:40+00:00
Most enterprises still treat AI visibility as a marketing or search-adjacent concern. The technical reality is different. Assistants now influence supplier assessments, competitive analysis, customer journeys, and even internal decision chains. These systems are unstable by design, update without notice, and produce outputs that organisations do not log, monitor, or verify.

Boards have begun asking whether these outputs are under control. Technical leaders cannot answer that question without a measurement and control layer. This article defines the operating model that allows engineering organisations to build one.

The objective is not compliance theatre or defensive positioning. It is operational reliability for a new class of externalised reasoning systems that influence decisions far earlier and more often than most enterprises realise.
by ndr | 2025-12-11 15:24:28+00:00
You don't have to copy everything.

Look up persistent data structures [0]

The main trick is to store everything in a tree with a large branching factor.

The elements are on your leaves. When you want to make an edit you need to create only the nodes from the root to the actual leaf. Then you return the new root. Everything else you can share.

This is a log operation, normally implemented with branch 32.

It works with vectors as well as dicts. Creating a copy is constant, it's immutable can be shared freely (especially on GC'd languages).

Insert/Delete are O(log32(n)) instead of O(n) they'd be with a full copy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure#Pers...
by alephnerd | 2025-12-11 15:24:46+00:00
Additionally, ICE sales have started recovering over the past few years now that EV subsidizes have started being phased out in most markets [0].

Even in China, most consumers "despite buying more EVs, are less interested in how their cars are powered, and more in their digital lifestyle integration" [0].

I like EVs but I think that in most markets they're at the same point today that hybrid cars were in the 2010s - proven, but still a difficult financial sell in the short term due to high upfront costs for consumers.

Edit: can't reply

> Which seems odd in an article claiming the global tide has turned against EVs

Becuase China is not the world. Most other markets have seen either a slowdown or a reversal in EV sales - especially following the reduction of EV purchase subsidizes in most markets.

It also highlights the fact that a large portion of customers are indifferent about ecological sentiment, and that EVs can only outpace ICE if their upfront cost or net-new features (in China's case, EVs tended to have better features than ICE cars sold domestically) outpace ICE vehicles.

Even Chinese automotive players (primarily SOEs that couldn't compete with private sector BYD) have been taking advantage of this market shift, become major ICE car exporters now [1].

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/combustion-engine-ca...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-floods-world-wi...
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-11 15:25:59+00:00
> It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.

People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models.

A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it.

In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
by mgkimsal | 2025-12-11 15:26:23+00:00
But it's not a joke. We've had a decade of reports with insiders indicating he doesn't read daily briefings. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-looks-at-charts-in-int...

Can he read? No doubt he can read some. I can't say he's illiterate. But functionally, he's nowhere near the reading and comprehension skills of what we should expect from a national leader.