MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drunner | 2025-12-11 12:14:43+00:00
I was all for this legislation, thinking the positives outweighed the cost, but after reading the list of affected services, I now disagree.

Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.

They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.

If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.

This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.

Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.
by miladyincontrol | 2025-12-11 12:15:29+00:00
On a note of Gundam, an unpopular opinion but I actually do really enjoy how in the moment G Reco is, and while not quite Gundam another of Tomino's works similarly, Overman King Gainer. The latter being vaguely based off of La Compagnie des glaces.

Some people find it harder to follow along in light of a rather anti-expository method of storytelling, personally I find it all the more compelling for story occurring during wartime. Combat is complex, people take action in the moment, not everyone's thoughts or plans need to be spelled out, leaving plenty to inference rather than narration builds for a better story.
by sph | 2025-12-11 12:15:52+00:00
That is not a proof, that is opinion.

And I do not agree. LLMs are literally incapable of understanding the concept of truth, right/wrong, knowledge and not-knowledge. It seems pretty crucial to be able to tell if you know something or not for any level of human-level intelligence.

Again, this conversation has been had in many variations constantly since LLMs were on the rise, and we can't rehash the same points over and over. If one believes LLMs are capable of cognition, they should offer formal proof first, otherwise we're just wasting our time.

That said, I wonder if there are major differences in cognition between humans, because there is no way I would look at how my brain works and think "oh, this LLM is capable of the same level of cognition as I am." Not because I am ineffably smart, but because LLMs are utterly simplistic in comparison to even a fruit fly.
by ohans | 2025-12-11 12:15:55+00:00
Hi HN,

When Anthropic published their Skills system (https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills), the idea clicked for me immediately: take a general-purpose agent and turn it into a specialized one with procedural knowledge that no model can fully memorize.

In my own projects I wasn’t using Claude (most of my workloads were on Gemini 2.5 Flash, mostly cos it was affordable and got the job done), but I still wanted that architecture: a way to define Skills once and use them with whatever LLM made sense for a given use case.

So over the past few weeks I put together a solution that does roughly that. Right now it supports:

- Bundling metadata, instructions, reference files, and optional scripts into a Skill - Running scripts in Python or JS runtimes (with automatic package installation) - A simple files API so the LLM can create files, reference them, mint temporary download links, and let me upload docs for analysis - A CLI to manage skills locally (push/pull), a Typescript SDK and a web app to manage API keys, PATs, playground etc.

There’s a playground at http://www.bluebag.ai/playground with example Skills (mostly adapted from Anthropic’s public Skills repo at https://github.com/anthropics/skills). On the right-hand side you can see how different models progressively load files and metadata, so you can inspect how selection and loading behave across models.

There are still some open questions I’m thinking about, especially around VM reuse and isolation at scale, and how to handle large Skill libraries over time (cold starts with very large package sets and 15+ Skills are slow).

But it’s been useful enough in my own work that I wanted to share it and get feedback. I’d be interested in:

- obvious failure modes I’m missing - prior art I should be looking at (e.g., agent frameworks)

Happy to answer any questions or dig into implementation details if that’s useful.

Cheers
by esperent | 2025-12-11 12:16:05+00:00
I believe that reddit and HN are social media. They're a different form than Facebook or TikTok, but we come here to be social just the same.

If someone used HN to find interesting articles, then spends 90% of their time reading the articles and only comes to the comments briefly to see that other people think, then it would be fair to call HN a news aggregator site for that person.

But realistically, for most people, it's the opposite - 90% of time chatting with people in the comments, with the actual articles (or even just their titles) mostly just used as conversation starters, with the conversation often veering into wildly different threads that barely relate to the original topic. That's social media.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-11 12:16:31+00:00
Social media never really caught my interest, so quitting made zero difference to anything. I do want a fair bit of YouTube for periods of time, then almost nothing, and instead read a ton of books for a few months and then switch back.

I really want to swap out the YouTube part of more programming, but I find that I need at least an hour or so of quiet time before my brain sort of switches mode and can start enjoying it, so it's harder to get started on and disturbances quickly snowballs into not getting anything done.
by eesmith | 2025-12-11 12:17:39+00:00
Nothing like a snakeoil-monger bemoaning pesky government regulations with misguided exaggerating of the dangers of Big Government.

I'm shocked the same government which supports global warming and mass species extinction, and which threatens to bomb "shithole countries" "back to the Stone age", has a less than perfect attitude about nuclear weapons. Shocked I say!

Next I suppose you'll say that this same government hasn't clamped down hard on coal power plants which, in addition to their CO2 emissions, generates ash which destroys waterways, kills people, and is full of radioactive waste?

I'm so glad our governments always know better than that!

It would be a shame if food and drug laws were in place mostly because even rich people and politicians can't ensure their food and drugs are safe.

It's time to take my protein powder supplements. I'm glad the government inspects every manufacturer so I don't have to worry about doing my own lead tests each time I buy some. Thank you Orrin Hatch for your diligence!
by nickjj | 2025-12-11 12:17:41+00:00
> The startup time of a simple .py script can easily be in the 100 to 300 ms range

I can't say I've ever experienced this. Are you sure it's not related to other things in the script?

I wrote a single file Python script, it's a few thousand lines long. It can process a 10,000 line CSV file and do a lot of calculations to the point where I wrote an entire CLI income / expense tracker with it[0].

The end to end time of the command takes 100ms to process those 10k lines, that's using `time` to measure it. That's on hardware from 2014 using Python 3.13 too. It takes ~550ms to fully process 100k lines as well. I spent zero time optimizing the script but did try to avoid common pitfalls (drastically nested loops, etc.).

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/plutus
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-11 12:18:06+00:00
Yes!! It's incredible when I go on holiday and intentionally put myself in really boring situations for like 2+ weeks, I start having random ideas. This is absolutely true.

The cynical in me even wonders if this isn't by design in capitalism. If you're really busy all the time you won't be having ideas and be a better worker.
Ask HN: GCP account got compromised and ran million dollar bill
by gcp_issue | 2025-12-11 12:18:26+00:00
Hi, I am a developer using GCP for last 5 years. Last month, I saw more than a million dollar invoice for vertex that I never used. Due to specific family issue, I was not able to check my emails/ gcp last month but this is going to be devastating for me. I have stopped bleeding by closing access to vertex, removing my services etc. But, how do I recover from this?

Help is very much appreciated.
by technothrasher | 2025-12-11 12:18:35+00:00
> I just watch a movie [...] We should at the very least do some exercises at home.

I bought a treadmill and do not allow myself to watch TV shows or movies I really enjoy without being on said treadmill. It makes me look forward to the exercise, and it allows me to "double up" the time spent by doing two things at once.
by unwind | 2025-12-11 12:19:06+00:00
This was very interesting, and it's obvious from the majority of the text that the author knows a lot about these languages, their implementation, benchmarking corners, and so on. Really!

Therefore it's very jarring with this text after the first C code example:

This uses a static variable to have it persist between both the compare function calls that qsort makes and the main call which (potentially) changes its value to be 1 instead of 0

This feels completely made up, and/or some confusion about things that I would expect an author of a piece like this to really know.

In reality, in this usage (at the global outermost scope level) `static` has nothing to do with persistence. All it does is make the variable "private" to the translation unit (C parliance, read as "C source code file"). The value will "persist" since the global outermost scope can't go out of scope while the program is running.

It's different when used inside a function, then it makes the value persist between invocations, in practice typically by moving the variable from the stack to the "global data" which is generally heap-allocated as the program loads. Note that C does not mention the existence of a stack for local variables, but of course that is the typical implementation on modern systems.
by metalman | 2025-12-11 12:19:33+00:00
"Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits." this is EXACTLY the oposite of the way it is supposed to work, and brings to mind agricultural sayings concerning greed and taking unfair advantage, "taking the low hanging fruit", and "cherry picking" with the blame of "inefficiency" going to fall on the plants, and a bigger push to breed "robot friendly" crops or no doubt "cant we just print this shit?"
by cess11 | 2025-12-11 12:20:05+00:00
Close to a hundred thousand israelis were evacuated from the north at the peak of it. Out of thousands of attacks something like 45 israeli civilians were killed, like when the IDF brought civilians to repair power lines and Hezbollah attacked them. More IDF soldiers were killed between October 2023 and the so called ceasefire agreement, which makes it quite clear that Hezbollah practiced restraint in this regard.

I still agree with e.g. HRW that Hezbollah did not do enough to protect civilians, but adjacent to the crimes of the IDF it's a rounding error.

IDF discplaced something like 1.5 million people in Lebanon, many of whom still aren't allowed to return to their homes and those that try are commonly murdered, and similarly those that try to repair their homes have their equipment destroyed or are killed. Recently Israel bombed a parking lot filled with bulldozers and excavators and the like, to halt reconstruction in Lebanon.

Claiming that one of the largest parties in lebanese politics "is an occupying power" is insane. Israel is building military facilities in Lebanon and controlling territory, as well as attacking both Beirut and the Beqaa valley every now and then in violation of the so called ceasefire agreement.

Courtney Bonneau has been reporting for a long time from the area, https://xcancel.com/cbonneauimages .
by lynx97 | 2025-12-11 12:20:21+00:00
I don't know why you picked that particular example to make your point. I do notice though that you framed it in a pretty sexist way. You realize the dark figure of men getting abused by their wives is higher then the media reports? In any case, my point is, violence in relationships happens both ways.

Why that confirms that humans are in general not capable of being empathy is beyond me. My point still stands. You cant fix the whole world. BUT, you definitely can make sure you surround yourself with decent people, at least to a certain extend. I know the drill. I have a disability, and I had (and have) to deal with people treating me in a very inappropriate way. Patronisation, not being taken serious, you name it, I know it. But that still didn't make me the frustrated kind of person you seem to be. You have a choice. Just drop toxic people and you will see, most humans can be pretty decent.
by qwery | 2025-12-11 12:20:34+00:00
> I find it hard to believe anyone would argue in good faith against this ban.

This is a problem. You will not accept an argument against the ban.

Instead you paint anyone presenting any opposition to any part of it as a stooge of predatory businesses.

> We are simply [...]

It's a simple idea, but the implementation is anything but.

> The real villains here are the social media companies [...]

They're getting out of this easy. You're giving them a free pass.

Tax them. Sue them.

Hold them liable for the content they show users.

Ban social media for children without empowering the social media companies or the government.
by roenxi | 2025-12-11 12:21:00+00:00
Sure, I assume some sociopaths would have extremely high levels of cognitive empathy. It is really a question of semantics - but the issue is I don't think the people arguing against AGI can define their terms at all without the current models being AGI or falling into the classic Diogenes behold! a man! problem of the definition not really capturing anything useful - like intelligence. Traditionally the Turing test has been close to what people mean, but for obvious reasons nobody cares about it any more.
by jojobas | 2025-12-11 12:21:18+00:00
Chinese coal power outgrows renewables still. A Western country with already cleaner energy destroying whatever remains of their manufacturing only to be moved to China and powered by mostly coal is not only treason of its own citizens but also bad for the climate. Feels so good to be "net zero" while importing materialized coal with not much to trade back (other than coal of course).
by zjzbab | 2025-12-11 12:21:28+00:00
> The problem is oligarchy not inefficiencies

I agree with your problem assessment, but it’s been known since the Greeks that democracy inevitably ends in oligarchy. It’s why the US did not start out as a democracy as the founders knew this as well.

And if you think about it from first principles, of course it’ll end like that. Mass groups of people are easily manipulated by a smaller group. Cambridge analytica is the modern form of this but it’s happened for centuries. You say regulation, but who writes and enforces that regulation? The oligarchs.

This gets uncomfortable when you look inward and start to question “why do I have this idea in my head that democracy is an objective good thing for society”. The same oligarchs benefiting from democracy write the history books, own the media, etc. Elon musk knows exactly what he is doing and is laughing with the other billionaires at us.
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 12:21:33+00:00
> the labour market has not much to do with whether it is a bubble or not

How can the very market we're talking about not indicate whether there is a bubble in that market or not? Do you think we should be looking at the price of soybeans instead?

> definition of bubble is that the market cap must precipitously reduce, which it hasn't.

Incorrect. It has, just not by very much. Which isn't surprising as we already established that there wasn't a crash.
by close04 | 2025-12-11 12:21:41+00:00
Same here. I used to be on classic social media (e.g. FB) but never went overboard with it. I reeled even that in to almost nothing more than 10 years ago. But other things filled that void before reading did. Other hobbies, family, kids, work, you name it.

So my reading is in bursts too now, on a plane, on a train, on a bus, on a ferry... in the hospital... You get the gist, in places where I'll be stuck for some time and need more than the usual "HN bite" for a few minutes every hour. And I adjust my reading speed and choice of book so I can actually finish withing the allotted time or else risk forgetting everything by the time I next have a slot. I read Daniel Suarez' Delta-v in ~5-6h because that's how long I had on the 2-way ferry ride.

My challenge with books vs. social media is that social media is like fast food but a book is like a gourmet meal. I can't read a book a few minutes at a time while on the toilet, or in public transport. Last time I did that I ended up in the middle of nowhere, 15min after we left the city, where the train stopped for a planned workers strike. But I can post a comment on HN just fine in 3 minutes and be done with it. So if the choice is 3h locked in somewhere with nothing but my mobile I'll choose to read. If I am at home with 1000 options, almost anything else will necessarily win.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-11 12:21:58+00:00
I've tried "reading at work" and failed. I was trying to read scientific papers that are only tangentially related to work, and couldn't manage to do it. I attribute that to the fact that scientific papers, like coding, requires a lot of time of "building your mental environtment" so you can't be switching all the time.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-11 12:22:11+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. 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.
by Yokohiii | 2025-12-11 12:22:14+00:00
I am currently learning go and your comment made me sort some things out, but probably in a counterintuitive way.

Assuming to everything allocates on the heap, will solve this specific confusion.

My understanding is that C will let you crash quite fast if the stack becomes too large, go will dynamically grow the stack as needed. So it's possible to think you're working on the heap, but you are actually threshing the runtime with expensive stack grow calls. Go certainly tries to be smart about it with various strategies, but a rapid stack grow rate will have it's cost.
by esperent | 2025-12-11 12:22:43+00:00
That works for me with nonfiction books that I'm actively or casually studying. Not for novels though, and if I'm reading a few nonfiction books then start a (good) novel, all the nonfiction takes a backseat until I'm finished.

So I tend to cycle - a good novel, or two, followed by some time with everything fictional removed from my ereader.

This also depends on my personal and work life - fiction is usually much less effort than nonfiction, so when work or personal life gets busy, I find some good novels to enjoy, then when things calm down I'll go back to cycling between several nonfiction books.

Things don't always sync up perfectly of course - the trick is to avoid huge multi-book series, otherwise I'll end up reading them far into the time when I'd be better served by learning something new.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-11 12:23:25+00:00
"My requests get bigger" is the issue here. You're not talking to a real human with common sense or near-infinite working memory.

It's a language mode with finite context and the ability to use tools. Whatever it can fit into its context, it can usually do pretty well. But it does require guidance and documentation.

Just like working with actual humans that aren't you and don't share your brain:

1) spec your big feature, maybe use an LLM in "plan" mode. Write the plan into a markdown file.

2) split the plan into smaller independent parts, in github issues or beads or whetever

3) have the LLM implement each part in isolation, add automatic tests, commit, reset context

Repeat step 3 until feature is done.

If you just use one long-ass chat and argue with the LLM about architecture decisions in between code changes, it WILL get confused and produce the worst crap you've ever seen.
by Aromasin | 2025-12-11 12:23:37+00:00
My progression was something like:

Video Games > Social Media > YouTube > TV > Reading

I had to cut quite a few things out of my life before I defaulted to books, because all of the prior activities tapped into my brains inherent desire for stimulating, low effort consumption. Reading is quite often hard, boring, or difficult, but generally more rewarding in the end. I retain more useful information, explicitly because it is more difficult and my brain denotes it a higher reward value.
by bigmealbigmeal | 2025-12-11 12:23:43+00:00
> I quit social media many years ago and to answer the question: No, I just watch Youtube. If I could stop watching Youtube, I'm totally sure I'd finally be able to read books again /s

You /s, but when I quit the internet completely, I did become a voracious reader of books. I also spent hours practicing piano. And I went to bed on time.

Like you I also have diagnosed and untreated ADHD. But at this point it feels like it's a misdiagnosis and I'm simply incompatible with the internet.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-11 12:24:06+00:00
On the Web I see very frequently foreign names, user handles or URLs where I am confused about whether there is an I or an l, because that Web page has chosen to use a bad sans serif font that does not differentiate these letters.

Sometimes there is no problem because the words or links containing ambiguous letters can be copied and pasted. Other times there is an annoying problem because either the stupid designer has disabled copying (or like in the output of Google and some other search engines, copying does not copy the visible text, but a link that cannot be used in a different context, outside the browser), or because I want to write on my computer a link or name that I have received on my phone.
by extraduder_ire | 2025-12-11 12:24:15+00:00
You reminded me of the flipper zero video game module[0] with it's "video out port" which "transmits a video signal in DVI-D format to an external TV, monitor, or projector".

They are not quite the size of Valve though, and can expect people to figure out what that that port is.

0: https://docs.flipper.net/zero/video-game-module
by BasilofBasiley | 2025-12-11 12:24:24+00:00
>Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.

This reads like your CEO is mixing an argument against serifs with an argument against Times specifically. Later on they make a case against Times' lack of support for more modern features in digital fonts, which is a fine argument, but a question comes to mind: is the solution a sans-serif font?

It seems to me upon reading the article that Rubio's staff, or Rubio himself, is being overly specific with the font and I suspect that, being uninformed, what they really want is a serif font rather than Times New Roman, specifically. Maybe I'm wrong.

In any case, I'd like for you/your CEO to make it clearer, if you will: do you believe official government communications should use a sans-serif font altogether or is it just a problem with Times? Or both?

On a more personal note, is there any serif font you'd suggest as an alternative?

Thank you. (And sorry if I read this wrong.)