MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aiahs | 2025-12-26 17:56:56+00:00
I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-26 17:57:35+00:00
> it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance.

I don't think that's the relevant distinction. "Benevolent dictatorship" is still one of the most efficient forms of governance, if you actually have a benevolent dictator.

The real problem is perverse incentives. If you have a situation where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person through some minimal-overhead transfer mechanism, that's maybe not ideal, but it's a lot better than the thing where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person by imposing a 90% efficiency cost. In the first case you lost ~10% of your resources so someone else could have 100 times as much, but in the second case you lost >90% of your resources only so that someone else could have 10 times as much as they'd have had to begin with, because now the pie is only 1/10th as big.

But the latter is what happens when corruption is tolerated but not acknowledged, because then someone can't just come out and say "I'm taking this because I can get away with it and if you don't like it then change the law" and instead has to make fanciful excuses for inefficiently blocking off alternative paths in order to herd everyone through their toll booth, at which point they not only get away with it but destroy massive amounts of value in the process.
by newswangerd | 2025-12-26 17:58:03+00:00
It’s always humbling when you go on the front news of HN and see an article titled “the thing you’re doing right now is a bad idea and here’s why”

This has happened to me a few times now. The last one was a fantastic article about how PG Notify locks the whole database.

In this particular case it just doesn’t make a ton of sense to change course. Im a solo dev building a thing that may never take off, so using git for plug-in distribution is just a no brainer right now. That said, I’ll hold on to this article in case I’m lucky enough to be in a position where scale becomes an issue for me.
by rovr138 | 2025-12-26 17:58:15+00:00
> If society feels that's "unethical", maybe pony up the cash because you all still want to rely on their work product they are giving out for free.

I like OSS and everything.

Having said that, ethically, should society be paying for these? Maybe that is what should happen. In some places, we have programs to help artists. Should we have the same for software?
by throwaway_7274 | 2025-12-26 17:58:19+00:00
It’s not, but I can understand how it might look that way to a tech industry professional used to dealing with scams (indeed, there are lots of scam-adjacent startups with quantum-flavored branding). Real science and engineering are just very difficult and take a long time. You can go to the arXiv, read the papers, and see the progress and breakthroughs that are made every year. But scientists are relatively honest, so even their breakthroughs are incremental.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-26 17:58:22+00:00
> Characterizing the discussion behind this as "sophistry" is a fundamentally unserious take

What a joke. Sorry, but no. I don't think is unserious at all. What's unserious is saying this.

> and the training material was obtained legally

And assuming everyone should take it at face value. I hope you understand that going on a tech forum and telling people they aren't being nuanced because a Judge in Alabama that can barely unlock their phone weighed in on a massively novel technology with global implications, yes, reads deeply unserious. We're aware the U.S. legal system is a failure and the rest of the world suffers for it. Even your President routinely steals music for campaign events, and stole code for Truth Social. Your copyright is a joke that's only there to serve the fattest wallets.

These judges are not elected, they are appointed by people whose pockets are lined by these very corporations. They don't serve us, they are here to retrofit the law to make illegal things corporations do, legal. What you wrote is thought terminating.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-26 17:58:26+00:00
Uncertain if this is OT, but given that the CCC is politically inspired organization, I hope not:

One thing that still seems absent is awareness of the complete takeover of "gadgets" in schools. Schools these days, as early as primary school, shove screens in front of children. They're expected to look at them, and "use" them for various activities, including practicing handwriting. I wish I was joking [1].

I see two problems with this.

First is that these devices are engineered to be addictive by way of constant notifications/distractions, and learning is something that requires long sustained focus. There's a lot of data showing that under certain common circumstances, you do worse learning from a screen than from paper.

Second is implicitly it trains children to expect that anything has to be done through a screen connected to a closed point-and-click platform. (Uninformed) people will say "people who work with computers make money, so I want my child to have an ipad". But interacting with a closed platform like an ipad is removing the possibilities and putting the interaction "on rails". You don't learn to think, explore and learn from mistakes, instead you learn to use the app that's put in front of you. This in turn reinforces the "computer says no" [2] approach to understanding the world.

I think this is a matter of civil rights and freedom, but sadly I don't often see "civil rights" organizations talk about this. I think I heard Stallman say something along these lines once, but other than that I don't see campaigns anywhere.

[1] https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/

[2] https://youtu.be/eE9vO-DTNZc
by hu3 | 2025-12-26 17:58:27+00:00
Not your parent commenter but at least they back their argument.

Your comment lacks any content other than a shallow emotional reaction.

To add to the discussion, this anecdote ending says it all:

> I honestly liked and respected the guy; but it was agreed among us Apple engineers that having Steve Jobs know who you actually were was usually not a good thing. It meant your future with Apple was going to be shorter than you would probably like.

https://www.quora.com/How-awful-was-Steve-Jobs-as-a-person
by tim-tday | 2025-12-26 17:59:20+00:00
Because the science was suppressed.
If people don’t have the facts they can’t make wise decisions about managing risk and governments from can’t make wise decisions about regulation.

That infamous tv spot where the inventor washed his hands in leaded gas was immediately followed by him having a psychiatric break and being committed. If they’d shown what really happened we’d have restricted it far earlier.
by beasthacker | 2025-12-26 17:59:56+00:00
I wanted to share a quick piece of feedback from a potential reader's perspective: There are several small inconsistencies in the intro text (e.g., inconsistent capitalization of 'Rust' vs 'rust', grammar typos).

In a domain like OS development where extreme precision is required, these small errors can subconsciously signal to readers that the technical details might also be imprecise. A quick polish of the documentation would go a long way in establishing authority and trust for the rest of the book.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-12-26 17:59:57+00:00
OMG, what a blast from the past. I loved my Rio Karmas - I had several, because they kept breaking and Best Buy (extended warranty) kept replacing for me, until they could no longer replace with a Karma and let me switch to an equivalent iPod (but no further replacements after).

I remember that there was a technique where you could smack it at a certain angle and it would "fix" some of the hard drive issues for people.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-26 18:00:25+00:00
What amazes me is back in the day ICQ ran in the background happily on a computer with 8MB RAM and 60Mhz CPU. Same with IRC clients.

These days Slack is occupying 4-8GB of RAM and is less snappy than a native app.

Yeah, in-lining giphy images is kinda fun. But 1000X memory consumption seems like a horrible trade off.

A modern desktop PC would have been a damn supercomputer not long ago. Today it’s kinda adequate.
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-12-26 18:00:45+00:00
Are people still in denial about the daily usage of AI?

It's interesting people from the old technological sphere viciously revolt against the emerging new thing.

Actually I think this is the clearest indication of a new technology emerging, imo.

If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important because what's actually happening is that the new thing is a direct threat to the people that are against it.
by wannabebarista | 2025-12-26 18:01:01+00:00
I mostly read non-fiction and technical articles.

My favorite book this year was "Differential Privacy" (2025) by Simson Garfinkel. Differential privacy is a mathematical theory of data privacy sandwiched between cryptography, databases, and ML. This is the first book-length non-technical introduction, and it's well executed.

Here's my full book list for the year: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2025/.
by permonst | 2025-12-26 18:01:40+00:00
> I'm in the camp that paying makes you a customer. Inversely using a free service makes you a user, not a customer.

I agree, but what do you do when a large player like Google kills the competition by making their service available for free? I used to pay for email hosting with good customer support. That company went out of business when free GMail wrecked their business model. I moved to another hosting service, which almost immediately went out of business for the same reason.

Something similar happened with YouTube. It's chock full of ads and/or subscriptions now because they subsidized it long enough to ensure competitors couldn't gain a foothold.
by flax | 2025-12-26 18:02:22+00:00
Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.
by bevdecloud | 2025-12-26 18:03:06+00:00
I find all this outrage confusing. Was the intent of the internet not to be somewhere where humanity comes to learn. Now we humans have created systems that are able to understand everything we have ever said. Now we are outraged. I am confused. When I 1st came across the internet back in the days where I could just do download whatever I wanted and mega corps would say oh this is so wrong. Yet we all said it's the internet. We must fight them. Now again we must fight them. In both times individuals were affected. Please stop crocodile tears. If we are going to move forward. We need to think about how we can move forward. From here. Although the road ahead is covered in mist. We just have to keep moving. If we stop we allow this rage and fear to overtake us. We stop believing in the very thing we are a part of creating. We can only try to do better.
by allturtles | 2025-12-26 18:03:25+00:00
> The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”.

Of course they could. (1) People are capable of changing their minds. His opinion of data centers may have been changed recently by the rapid growth of data centers to support AI or for who knows what other reasons. (2) People are capable of cognitive dissonance. They can work for an organization that they believe to be bad or even evil.
by kentm | 2025-12-26 18:03:29+00:00
> did I write that paragraph?

No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.
by daheza | 2025-12-26 18:04:02+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about ICE and how quickly we are escalating. I attend some minor protest and rallies against them but its not enough.

I do like how Illinois has setup a commission to track accountability. https://ilac.illinois.gov/

I feel like those of us in the technology sector have a obligation to assist in the counter balance to the police state that is rapidly building up. After all the executives of our companies have clearly chosen their side (Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg).

One idea is creating a site to track incidents, collect testimony, video evidence of events as they happen. If we can't be physically there to confront them at least we can share evidence and put it in front of as many eyeballs as we can. It wouldn't be a pleasant project, being a sin eater has its own costs. It would at least be something though.

Does anyone else have projects or ideas that can be contributed to?
by palmotea | 2025-12-26 18:04:15+00:00
> Nope, that ship has already sailed as well. An AI-powered service to do handwritten spam: https://handwrytten.com

FFS. AI's greatest accomplishment is to debase and destroy.

Trillions of dollars invested to bring us back to the stone age. Every communications technology from writing onward jammed by slop and abandoned.
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-26 18:04:39+00:00
I feel you. All that time in the beginning of the mp3 era the record industry was perusing people for pirating music. And then when an AI company does it for books, its some how not piracy?

If there is any example of hypocrisy, and that we don't have a justice system that applies the law equally, that would be it.
by mmooss | 2025-12-26 18:04:55+00:00
Whenever I see any front page OP I assume HN comments will dump on it, even one about a high schooler winning a science prize with a genuine scientific discovery. I hope you don't treat your own and your loved ones' news and accomplishments the same way.

Congratulations Matteo Paz. You not only won the science prize, you got the Hacker News front page treatment.
by SimianSci | 2025-12-26 18:05:17+00:00
Its pretty clear that ICE is being used as a means of forming an industry similar to that of the Military Industrial complex, but focused on law-enforcement and domestic action.

What alarms me here is that once a certain level of investment and industry is built, it will necessitate a means of self-sustaining itself and will attempt to find this through political investment.
I fully expect a domestic version of the "perpetual foreign wars" concept to appear within my lifetime where we go from one domestic emergency requiring huge policing resources to another, ensuring the industry gets funding.
by isitcontent | 2025-12-26 18:05:32+00:00
Thanks! That is just my small custom experimental mini shell. This project started as a retro DOS-like cyberdeck, and first thing I tried to run there was DOS programs, which is why it looks like that. Only got to COM files, when I learned about elf_loader, so I now focus on that. I might extract and release whatever is valuable/reusable in that shell later on.
Ask HN: How to gain a solid understanding of IMUs?
by feefifoflux | 2025-12-26 18:05:46+00:00
My background is primarily software (Python, AI/ML, large-scale data). This is my first serious hardware-heavy product.

I’m working on a company concept that depends on embedded IMUs, and I’m trying to front-load learning so I don’t lock myself into poor architectural, software or component decisions early on, especially those pitfalls that someone with more knowledge/expertise would know how to avoid.

I understand “learning by doing” is essential, but I suspect there are canonical pitfalls and resources I should study before committing deeply to hardware.

Here are the parameters of the project:

* The IMU environment will be abusive, with vibrations and impacts. The vibrations and impacts are not the object of analysis (i.e. noise), but I do want to account for them so they do not pollute the data and design the platform so the platform survives.

* I will need low-power/sleep/wake-on-accel in order to achieve the desired battery life.

* The IMUs will transmit to a gateway via bluetooth in short bursts of less than 60 seconds, 10-20 times per day, and sleep the rest of the time.

* There could be 20-40 IMUs transmitting simultaneously.

* The production IMU platform needs to be very short, i.e. height = 3-6mm.

* The implementation requires that the batteries on board are not rechargeable, but last the life of the IMU unit, i.e. 2+ years.

* The way the IMU units are implemented, there should be an opportunity to sample the unit at rest for calibration purposes, e.g. biases, etc.

Here are some subject areas I have marked for further study/inquiry:

* Handling biases

* Kalman filtering

* Error propagation in single/double integration, i.e. velocity and position

* Low-power configuration

* Bluetooth communications

* Battery/power options that meet the 2+ year goal

I am seeking guidance/wisdom to better prepare myself for the core challenges I will face on the IMU/hardware portion of this project.

Specifically, I am seeking cherished, esteemed, favorite resources on the following subjects areas as well as the addition of any resources/subjects you deem important:

* Underlying IMU physics, i.e. first principles

* Handling bias/calibration

* Error propagation, single/double integration

* Kalman filtering for IMU data

* Bluetooth comms for IMUs

* Low-power/sleep configurations

* Battery/power options, i.e. under 5mm, 2+ years

* IATF-16949 compliant manufacturers and how it will benefit the project? Perspectives/opinions?

I have made the standard appeals to Google search and GPT, but I am not convinced I have found all the preliminary materials required for this project to succeed.

Here is an example of a resource that I think is informative, but again, I don't have the expertise to make that judgement definitively: An Introduction to Inertial Navigation by Oliver J. Woodman

FWIW, I am using the Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 Sense for prototyping. The inquiry above is for both prototyping and production.
by lambda | 2025-12-26 18:05:49+00:00
I think you're referring to Figure ES-1 in that paper, but that's kind of a summary of different estimates.

Figure 1.1 is the chart I was referring to, which are the data points from the original sources that it uses.

Between 2010 and 2020, it shows a very slow linear growth. Yes, there is growth, but it's quite slow and mostly linear.

Then the slope increases sharply. And the estimates after that point follow the new, sharper growth.

Sorry, when I wrote my original comment I didn't have the paper in front of me, I linked it afterwards. But you can see that distinct change in rate at around 2020.
by kentm | 2025-12-26 18:06:08+00:00
> The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.

Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.
by rayiner | 2025-12-26 18:06:44+00:00
> Languages should be small, not large.

Yes. At the very least, features should carry a lot of weight and be orthogonal to other features. When I was young I used to pride myself on knowing all the ins and outs of modern C++, but over time I realized that needing to be a “language lawyer” was a design shortcoming.

All that being said I’ve never seen the functionality of Rust’s borrow checker reduced to a simpler set of orthogonal features and it’s not clear that’s even possible.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-26 18:06:54+00:00
> what laptop? what hardware?

Does it matter? Your claim is that everything works, and I am here to tell you that I am a real person running real machines that do not work. Unless you're planning to fix the particular bugs and missing features that I'm hitting I don't see where the specifics actually matter. (Anyways, the first machine is a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T490 with Intel graphics; this appears to work but is less stable than Xorg. The second machine is a https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Flex_3_Chr... that doesn't run Wayland at all, which I grant is bizarre since the stock ChromeOS uses Wayland. You are welcome to point out that this is more than a little off the beaten path, at which point I will of course point out that Xorg somehow handles it just fine.)

> but most of this is on the toolkit side, not Wayland (even though here one thing is mentioned as Wayland specific, just briefly went through the post)

It varies; a11y isn't a single thing. Deep application integration to allow eg. screen readers to work well probably needs toolkit integration. But there are also things like dwell click, which is really helpful when my RSI is flaring up. In X, I just run `mousetweaks --dwell` and it works, and it works in any window manager or desktop environment, with absolutely no help needed from toolkits or applications. In Wayland, it's sometimes available on a per-compositor basis, which I would describe as purely inferior. On which note, observe that you've linked a blog post about a prototype for GNOME. They note that they're open to working with other desktop environments, but 1. that means it doesn't exist as of that blog post, and 2. I've seen how GNOME operates over the years; I fully expect portability to be a very distant second priority, and whatever they export will be an attempt to force everyone else to do everything the way GNOME does, which will go poorly. I have no interest in ever going back to GNOME, so the actual takeaway, AFAICT, is that the a11y situation on Wayland is bad and will remain bad for the foreseeable future.