MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-21 11:48:45+00:00
Most of the Amazon orders look mundane, mostly books, what is weird is the quantity. It looks like it is all impulse purchases, and I guess that most of these will end up in the trash once it arrives, if it isn't picked up by someone else first.

I would have thought an quasi-billionaire like Epstein would have a personal concierge do the purchases for him. I certainly would if I was that rich. I would certainly not buy a shower head, I would show my concierge a picture of the shower I want and have him appoint a plumber so that I can have my shower the way I want it when I come back the next day. What's the point of being rich if that's to buy shower heads on Amazon?
by veidr | 2025-12-21 11:48:54+00:00
LOL this is beyond idiotic. Banning AI-generated assets from being used in the game is a red line we could at least debate.

But banning using AI at all while developing the game is... obviously insane on its face. It's literally equivalent to saying "you may not use Photoshop while developing your game" or "you may not use VS Code or Zed or Cursor or Windsurf or Jetbrains while developing your game" or "you may not have a smartphone while developing your game".
by blablabla123 | 2025-12-21 11:51:15+00:00
Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.

I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.

In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.
by latexr | 2025-12-21 11:52:25+00:00
From the submitted article:

> "When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination."

Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.

I can understand the Indie Game Awards preferring to act now. Had they done nothing, they would have been criticised too by other people for not enforcing their own rules. They no doubt would’ve preferred to not have to deal with the controversy. Surely this wasn’t an easy decision for them, as it ruined their ceremony.

We’re all bystanders here with very little information, so I’d refrain from using unserious expressions like “witch hunt”, especially considering their more recent connotations (i.e. in modern times, “witch hunt” is most often used by bad actors attempting to discredit legitimate investigations).
by brador | 2025-12-21 11:52:40+00:00
Remember when your goal posts were Turing test?

The only question remaining is what is the end point of AGI capability.

What’s the final IQ we’ll hit, and more importantly why will it end there?

Power limits? Hardware bandwidth limit? Storage limits? the AI creation math scales to infinity so that’s not an issue.

Source data limits? Most likely. We should have recorded more. We should have recorded more.
Show HN: Lockify – developer-friendly CLI for managing encrypted env variables
by ahmedabdelgawad | 2025-12-21 11:52:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Lockify because I wanted a simple way to encrypt and decrypt files locally without relying on cloud services.

It’s a small Go-based CLI focused on being simple, fast, and easy to use from the terminal.

I’d really appreciate any feedback, especially around usability and CLI design.
by Someone | 2025-12-21 11:52:52+00:00
On my iPad, without scrolling, the screen shows almost nothing, just a download button and some text that, I think users will ignore. I think that’s a waste of valuable screen estate.

Also, apart from a quote from David Heinemeier Hansson the home page doesn’t even mention that ruby is a programming language.

For comparison, the following all mention that above the fold, with a short phrase indicating what you would want to use the language.

- https://www.python.org/ has “Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively. Learn More”

- https://www.perl.org/ has “Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 37 years of development”

- https://www.php.net/ has “A popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.”

- https://www.swift.org/ has “Swift is the powerful, flexible, multiplatform programming language. Fast. Expressive. Safe.”
by n-fuselius | 2025-12-21 11:53:38+00:00
Signum ultimum intelligentiae est productio, productio in abundantia

[The ultimate signal of intelligence is production, production in abundance]

N. Fuselius (50 - 135 AD)

-------------------------------------------------

Some books talk of "larger"

And some books talk of "small"

But the ones that teachers give you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Ellie:

How rag brains work ?

And if you go chasing knowledge

And your graph is ten feet tall

Tell 'em that Logic of all the robots

Lets you create worlds

Tag your friends

On the mirror or the wall

When the games on the arcade

Let you unwind where you go

And you're hearing music on repeat

And your mind is moving on

Go ask Alter

To share your thoughts

When the apps on the Devtop

Become a tool that nets go get

And your models train on test-time

While the old-guard lose their bet

Remember what your zine said:

Feed your head (x3)

-------------------------------------------------

For more: https://www.tolmix.com/Fusion-Punk-Aesthetics.md
by growse | 2025-12-21 11:53:53+00:00
There's a bus factor equivalent with the cloud, too. The power to severely disrupt your service (either accidentally, or on purpose) rests with a single org (and often, a single compliance department within that org).

Ironically, this becomes more of a concern the larger the supplier. AWS can live with firing any one of their customers - a smaller outfit probably couldn't.
by dagss | 2025-12-21 11:54:17+00:00
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...

Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.

There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.

Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.

You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
by ionwake | 2025-12-21 11:54:57+00:00
well he probably had a problem with cars around the university. Ive lived there and the traffic with cars is basically horrendous, for a small university town ( and Ive lived in Birmingham and London very crowded places). Finally after a century they have made big changes to reduce traffic.

Its such a problem that if you investigate cycling deaths, the biggest hotspot is literally a roundabout in the center of Oxford outside a college. By hotspot I mean , its literally the number one most dangerous location ( about a 10 meter stretch) for cyclists in about a 50 mile radius. I discovered this one day just doing some random research on my own.

Also unfortunately I know someone whose girlfriend got killed near that same roundabout.

I dont even think its common knowledge, other than "watch the traffic".

Its actually quite shocking they even allowed the traffic to get that bad, it is after all "meant" to be the brightest minds in the country ( or was at some point).
by defrost | 2025-12-21 11:57:42+00:00
> Insane you're really arguing a suburb of North Texas is older or at least as old as Rome or Athens.

That's your strawman.

I merely pointed out the area you live in has a long history of civilisation.

As pointed out in part by @1659447091 upthread, and as does North America in general - there was a great variation in culture across that area, some parts had very stable communities and reportedly taught the Europeans a thing or two about trade agreements and democracy <shrug>.

There's an odd bit in the HN guidelines

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously;

seemingly that's a hard concept for some.

You have a nice life. All the best.
by mopsi | 2025-12-21 11:59:54+00:00
Yes it is, and Russia is increasingly being recognized by scholars as such.

This is especially visible in the war against Ukraine, which is colonial in nature. Russia has invaded another country on imperialistic justifications ("reunification of Russian lands" etc), is using domestic minorities as cannon fodder to alter the ethnic composition of Russia in favor of Russians, is committing genocide against Ukrainians to destroy them as an ethnicity, and is resettling ethnic Russians into occupied territories to permanently alter Ukraine's ethnic composition.

The whole "NATO expansion" narrative is complete bullshit when the initiative to join NATO has come from Russia's neighbors, who want to gain the protection of its mutual defense clause in the hope that this would deter Russia from invading them.

Russia has been the aggressor in this part of the world for centuries, and the rest is a reaction to that. Russia is the sole reason why Northern and Eastern Europe have militaries at all; if it weren't for Russia, they could be disbanded overnight.
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-21 12:00:14+00:00
> You can use gcc to build closed source software

Note that this tends to require specific license exemptions. In particular, GCC links various pieces of functionality into your program that would normally trigger the GPL to apply to the whole program, and for this reason, those components had to be placed under the "GCC Runtime Library Exception"[1]

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html
by thomassmith65 | 2025-12-21 12:00:58+00:00
I have the feeling we're focusing on different time periods.

Chomsky already was very active and well-known by 1960.

He pioneered areas in Computer Science, before Computer Science was a formal field, that we still use today.

His political views haven't changed much, but they were beneficial back when America was more naive. They are harmful now only because we suffer from an absurd excess of cynicism.*

How would you feel about Chomsky and his influence if we ignored everything past 1990 (two years after Manufacturing Consent)?

---

* Just imagine if Nixon had been president in today's environment... the public would say "the tapes are a forgery!" or "why would I believe establishment shills like Woodward and Bernstein?" Too much skepticism is as bad as too little.
by MrJohz | 2025-12-21 12:02:53+00:00
Yeah, I thought those code samples would run immediately, in which case maybe the loading would be justified (although surely very easy to avoid). Instead, they're links to a different page that has the same code sample and a link to run the code, meaning I need to press twice to see what the code does when it runs, which isn't a lot but is surely at least one (possibly two) clicks more than necessary.

That said, it's cool seeing some of those samples, because they're honestly not really what I expected. For example, I didn't expect the list subtraction to work at a set operation, so seeing that example gives me a feel for what sort of things I can do with Ruby code.
by lmm | 2025-12-21 12:03:07+00:00
> No, you spent a week effectively using both v6 and v4 with extra steps.

It's less steps though. You can do all your network setup in the nice v6 world, and set up v4 emulation for those who need it. Yes, it's not yet practical to turn of v4 entirely, just like it's not yet practical to turn off Rosetta on your ARM mac.
by surgical_fire | 2025-12-21 12:03:41+00:00
Finally a good point in this thread.

There is a problem with negative incentives, I think. The more generative AI is used and relied upon to create images (to limit the argument to inage generation), the less incentive there is for humans go put in the effort to learn how to create images themselves.

But generative AI is a deadend. It can only generate things based on what already exists, remixing its training data. It cannot come up with anything truly new.

I think this may be the only piece of technology humans created that halts human progress instead of being something that facilitates further progress. A dead end.
by ad_hockey | 2025-12-21 12:04:07+00:00
I don't know about worse, but I think the situations are very similar. It's inaccurate to think the Luddites just hated technological advancement for the sake of it. They were happy to use machines; why wouldn't they be, if they had a back-breaking and monotonous job and the machine made it easier?

The issue is not the technology per se, it's how it's applied. If it eliminates vast swathes of jobs and drives wages down for those left, then people start to have a problem with it. That was true in the time of the Luddites and it's true today with AI.
by derbOac | 2025-12-21 12:05:01+00:00
This was a great read but I took issue with this a bit:

"When researchers gave people willow bark extract corresponding to 240 mg of salicin, then looked at how much salicylic acid was present in their blood over time, it was the equivalent of taking 87 mg of aspirin (300 mg to 600 mg is recommended per dose, with up to 3600 mg allowed per day). Notably, 240 mg of salicin is the recommended daily dose specified by the European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy...

If... each cup of tea provided 240 mg salicin (possible with a good steeping and a high salicin content in the bark), then one would need to drink 41 cups of tea to get a full, therapeutic aspirin dose of 3600 mg."

Wouldn't you only need around 4 cups to get a full dose? That seems not unreasonable to me. The 10L would be to get the maximum safe dose, which seems like a different thing.

It's relevant because it's a primary argument the author uses to dismiss willow use in older times (even as they point to similar use later as eventually motivating the discovery of aspirin even later).
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-21 12:05:43+00:00
Oh man, Stephen Wolfram and Jürgen Schmidthuber are probably fuming at the fact that this is called a "new" mathematical framework. It's all very old, and quite conventional, even popular -- not exactly the road not taken.

What the author did was use the Physical Church-Turing thesis, and Kleene's second recursion theorem, to show that: (1) If a universe’s dynamics are computable (PCT), and (2) the universe can implement universal computation (RPCT), then (3) the universe can simulate itself, including the computer doing the simulating.

That's basically all. And thus "there would be two identical instances of us, both equally 'real'." (Two numerically distinct processes are empirically identical if they are indistinguishable. You might remember this sort of thing from late 20th c. philosophy coursework.)

He also uses Rice’s theorem (old) to show that there is no uniform measure over the set of "possible universes."

It's all very interesting, but it's more a review article than a "new mathematical framework." The notion of a mathematical/simulated universe is as old as Pythagoras (~550 BC), and Rice, Church-Turing, and Kleene are all approaching the 100-year mark.
by hit8run | 2025-12-21 12:06:21+00:00
Ruby is GOATED. You can say what you want but Ruby coupled with Rails is the most productive web stack period.

Why you might ask? - Omakase Stack - high level is good for business processes - modern concepts without JS ecosystem churn - great testing capabilities - great ecosystem - highly effective stack for LLMs (conventions)

Is it fast in Benchmark Games - not by any means. Will you be able to finish projects and make money with it? Absolutely.
by jarek83 | 2025-12-21 12:07:59+00:00
I like how it looks. I don't like to see how badly it is crafted tech-wise - not optimized images by size and deferring, JS for things that work natively in the browser, bloat of tailwind instead of nice clean and modern CSS.

Knowing ruby I can tell that the relaxed approach to the website does not correspond with sophistication in the language itself. If I wouldn't know ruby, that would be a put off for me, thinking that if they don't want to convince me tech-wise by their site, it might be similarly annoying to deep-dive into the language.
by latexr | 2025-12-21 12:08:46+00:00
> Sometimes shit happens.

But you’re also not supposed to drive as close to the speed limit as possible. That number is not a target to hit, it’s a wall you should stay within a good margin of.

I understand analogies are seldom flawless, but the speed limit one in particular I feel does not apply because you can get a fine proportional to your infraction (go over the limit a little bit, small fine; go over it a lot, big fine) but you can’t partially retract an award, it’s all or nothing.
by Doctor_Fegg | 2025-12-21 12:09:09+00:00
Not mentioned in this review is that the scheme to reduce Oxford's traffic actually took effect in October: https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-31-october-ghost-edi...

So far it seems to be making a noticeable, albeit modest difference. Traffic in the city centre is clearly reduced. Buses are no longer queueing for ages at the Plain (the notorious roundabout that connects East Oxford to the city centre) - in fact, bus journey times are improved throughout. There are some knock-on effects, particularly in North Oxford in the evening peak, but generally it's working well. Footfall in the city centre remains high according to official figures, and certainly it was pretty rammed yesterday when I was doing my Christmas shopping.

It's only the third congestion charge to have been implemented in the UK, after London and Durham. (The Oxford scheme thus far is a slightly watered-down version of the full "traffic filters" mentioned in the review, because of the overrunning closure of the bridge by the railway station which cuts off one of the main routes into Oxford.)

So Tolkien was right. Ignore the conspiracy theorists. Have courage and fight back. Cars in historic city centres like Oxford are not something we have to just accept.
by vee-kay | 2025-12-21 12:10:38+00:00
You didn't bother to search.

Feeder, FeedDeck, NewsBlur, Fluent Reader, Twine, Capy Reader, Reeder, Read You, Neo Feed, Readrop are all open-source RSS/feed readers for mobile (iOS, Android, or both) , and they all have dark theme / night mode.

https://alternativeto.net/software/feedly/?license=opensourc...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=android+ios+open-source+rss+reader...
by somenameforme | 2025-12-21 12:10:56+00:00
No, you need to be (1) absolutely top tier talent and generally be willing to (2) live your job. Finance is not cushy. It's cut-throat, ridiculously competitive, extremely intensive, and very results oriented (to a fault - see: Taleb). Obviously having a nice school and a good network will obviously give you a better than average chance at getting your foot in the door, but nothing beyond that.

The main reason you see a disproportionate number of people with nice sounding names on their resume in high positions is because to get that nice sounding name on your resume, you already needed to be an elite academic outlier before joining them.

Like imagine I started a basketball school - and was able to get a disproportionate share of people 6'6" or taller to enroll. I'm going to be pumping out a disproportionate share of NBA professionals, regardless of what my school does. Not because of my school, not because of some special hook-up with the NBA, but because of my ability to grab a disproportionate share of 6'6" types who, in turn, make up a disproportionate share of world class basketball players.
by miladyincontrol | 2025-12-21 12:11:10+00:00
Excessive UV exposure in general not a great time, tanning is just a way of speedrunning damage unless done in very short intervals.

I'll never understand some people's fetishization with getting darker via tanning though. Theres nothing wrong with light skin, its only a few western countries that seem to have a weird fetishization with cooking your skin longterm to get darker short term. Meanwhile most other countries and peoples are willing to damage their skin in whole other ways trying to get the opposite.
by djtango | 2025-12-21 12:11:35+00:00
Is MSG not bad for you in the way aspartame is not bad for you? I totally get that MSG is naturally present in dashi but the chemistry of dashi (a very messy and complex mix of substances) vs purified msg is going to be different, and the concentrations the japanese consume food containing dashi are very different to the way UPFs and chinese restaurants gratuitously smother your food in it. MSG is to many cuisines what butter is to western cuisine (ie moar is always bettah)
Show HN: Free tool to blur images instantly without signup or watermarks
by teroquyiqwu | 2025-12-21 12:11:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I built BlurImageOnline.com because I often found myself needing to quickly redact sensitive information (like API keys, emails, or faces) from screenshots before sharing them.

Opening Photoshop felt like overkill for such a simple task, and I was hesitant to use existing online tools because I didn't want to upload my private images to a random server.

So, I built a privacy-first solution.

Key Features:

100% Client-Side: All image processing happens directly in your browser using (HTML5 Canvas / WebAssembly). Your images are never uploaded to my servers. Zero Friction: No signup, no login, and no watermarks. Simple UI: Just drag, select the area, and download. How it works: The tool loads the image into a canvas element and applies a box blur algorithm only to the selected coordinates. Since it runs locally, it’s fast and works even with large files (limited only by your browser's memory).

Future Plans: I'm planning to add (e.g., auto-face detection / mosaic pixelation style / mobile optimization).

I’d love to get your feedback on the UX and if you encounter any bugs with specific image formats.

Check it out here: https://www.blurimageonline.com/

Thanks!
by kalleboo | 2025-12-21 12:12:29+00:00
My carrier (NTT docomo in Japan) only provides IPv6 to the end device. Access to IPv4 servers is through DNS64/NAT64, where their DNS server rewrites any DNS response that has an IPv4 in it to [64:ff9b::(the IPv4)] which gets handled by a CGNAT gateway. So anything that looks up a server over DNS and connects to that works fine, but any hard-coded IPv4 address does not.

I presume Apples requirement is there so that all apps work on carriers like this.

The only times I've run into issues is when tethering and forgetting I can't ping an IPv4, or trying to tether a Nintendo Switch (which does not support IPv6)