MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-26 22:23:27+00:00
You are wrong about AI "being a breath of fresh air" in comparison. For one, AI isn't something you use instead of a microblogging platform. LLMs push all sorts of utter trash in the guise of "information" for much the same reasons.

But I wanted to go out of my way to comment to agree with you wholeheartedly about your claims about the irredeemability of the "microblogging" format.

It is systemically structured to eschew nuance and encourage stupid hot takes that have no context or supporting documents.

Microblogging is such a terrible format in it's own right that it's inherent stupidity and consistent ability to viralize the stupidest takes that will nevertheless be consumed whole by the entire self-selecting group that thinks 140 characters is a good idea is essential to the Russian disinfo strategy. They rely on it as a breeding ground for stupid takes that are still believable. Thousands of rank morons puke up the worst possible narratives that can be constructed, but inevitably, in the chaos of human interaction, one will somehow be sticky and get some traction, so then they use specific booster accounts to get that narrative trending, and like clockwork all the people who believe there is value to arguing things out of context 140 characters at a time eat it up.

Even people who make great, nuanced and persuasive content on other platforms struggle to do anything but regress to the local customs on Twitter and BS.

The only exception to this has been Jon Bois, who is vocally progressive and pro labor and welfare policy and often this opinion is made part of his wonderful pieces on sports history and journalism and statistics, but his Twitter and Bluesky posts are low context irreverent comedy and facetious sports comments.

The people who insisted Twitter was "good" or is now "good" have always just been overly online people, with poor media literacy and a stark lack of judgement or recognition of tradeoffs.

That dumbass russian person who insisted they had replicated the LK-99 "superconductor" and all the western labs failed because the soviets were best or whatever was constantly brought up here as how Twitter was so great at getting people information faster, when it actually was direct evidence of the gullibility of Twitter users who think microblogging is anything other than signal-free noise.

Here's a thing to think about: Which platform in your job gets you info that is more useful and accurate for long term thinking? Teams chats, emails, or the wiki page someone went out of their way to make?
by gtowey | 2025-12-26 22:23:40+00:00
> Because people that are against it aren't interested in actually engaging with this new technology.

How do you know that? Are you just assuming anyone who has something negative to say just hasn't used it?

In my case it's absolutely not true. I've used it near daily for coding tasks and a handful of times for other random writing or research tasks. In a few cases I've actively encouraged a few others to try it.

From direct experience I can say it's definitely not ready for prime time. And I like the way most companies are trying to deploy it even less.

There is something there with LLMs, but the way they're being productized and commercialized does not seem healthy. I would rather see more research, slow testing and trials, and a clear understanding of the potential negatives for society before we simply dump it into the public sphere.

The only mind I see not willing to be changed is yours when you characterize any push back against AI as simply ignorant haters. You are clearly wrong about that.
by Bratmon | 2025-12-26 22:23:44+00:00
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable

This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.

Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.
by analog31 | 2025-12-26 22:24:03+00:00
That may be true, but a modern money system could get you pretty close to that ideal, where the main difference is the friction of transactions.

It's close to ideal for a loaf of bread, or a bag of nails. I can hop on my bike and turn my money into either of those things in a few minutes. Turning money into a house is further from that ideal of course.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-26 22:25:24+00:00
var x: int is much easier for a machine to parse and let's you do some neat things.

For example, in C++ because the type must come first, you have to use "auto" - this isn't necessary in langs who put the type after the variable name.

It also helps avoid ambiguous parsing, because int x; conflicts with some other language constructs.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-12-26 22:26:12+00:00
> But then you need two different provisioning tools, one for infra in k8s, and one for infra outside k8s.

Yes, and 99% of the companies do this. It is quite common to use Terraform/AWS CDK/Pulumi/etc to provision the infrastructure, and ArgoCD/Helm/etc to manage the resources on Kubernetes. There is nothing wrong with it.
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-26 22:26:21+00:00
Yes I understand the difference. Yes I think (and know) they are that dumb, especially given their penchant for blanket banning any and all things that happen to include "DEI" terms, starting lawsuits they know they can't win, and constantly walking back guidance they give after realizing how stupid it was. I also know they'll do just about anything for enough money.

But I appreciate you punching down.
by webdevver | 2025-12-26 22:26:23+00:00
people say apple is often the brave company that does something unpopular that is then followed by everyone.

i think, genuinely, the brave thing for apple to do here is to cut the foldable. they could even use this leaker as an excuse to make a big splash in the news (although, maybe that will send a bad signal, that leakers have the power to end products - so maybe not.)

cut this project. nobody wants this, its a dumb gimmick aped by handset guys who are trying to differentiate their product with no real ideas or use cases.

maybe it has merit as a research project and an existence proof. but even so - where would you stick a flexible display? maybe inside the vr goggles? but who wants vr anyway? another tiny niche product with no mass market appeal.

i already left another comment on another apple thread - apple should go for the server market. offer self-hosting, but vertically integrated. do for servers what ubiquiti did for routers/networking. i keep seeing people buying mac studio clusters and hooking them up in ad-hoc thunderbolt networks. yes ofcourse social media is not 'the world', but it is a signal. I see mac minis being rack-mounted in the most janky ass looking rigs imaginable. there is a desire for this. people want servers "done right" with no corners cut, which is what apple is all about.
by tuvshaw | 2025-12-26 22:26:25+00:00
Hello HN,

I’ve been working on an open-source personalized nutrition agent specifically for metabolic health (diabetes/pre-diabetes).

The Project: It is a web app (also support PWA) that generates meal plans using LLMs, but with a focus on data sovereignty and medical safety. I built it because most existing tools are either stateless chat interfaces (no long-term memory) or proprietary apps that don't allow self-hosting.

The Tech:

Stack: Laravel 12 (PHP) and React (Typescript, Inertia JS). Every single line is test which means the world’s most strictest Open Source - PHP project, enforced by PHPStan (static analysis) at level max for rock‑solid reliability

Privacy: It is designed to be self-hostable.

I'd love feedback on!
by immibis | 2025-12-26 22:27:47+00:00
So according to the legal theory expressed in this thread so far, nobody can sue anybody and there's no obligation to provide source code. The copyright holder couldn't sue because the license was followed (an offer was provided) and the end user couldn't sue because the offer doesn't have to be followed up on.

Or, instead of theorycrafting reasons why it shouldn't work, you could "just" sue them and see if the judge agrees.
by mattkevan | 2025-12-26 22:28:11+00:00
It’s pretty easy. I’ve written a fairly detailed guide to help Claude write in my tone of voice. It also coaxes it to avoid the obvious AI tells such as ‘It’s not X it’s Y’ sentences, American English and overuse of emojis and em dashes.

It’s really useful for taking my first drafts and cleaning them up ready for a final polish.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:28:30+00:00
I can't even imagine what "safety" issue you have in mind. Given that "zero-copy" apparently means "in-memory" (a deserialized version of the data necessarily cannot be the same object as the original data), that's not even difficult to do with the Python standard library. For example, `zipfile.ZipFile` has a convenience method to write to file, but writing to in-memory data is as easy as

with zipfile.ZipFile(archive_name) as a:
with a.open(file_name) as f, io.BytesIO() as b:
b.write(f.read())
return b.getvalue()

(That does, of course, copy data around within memory, but.)
by aethros | 2025-12-26 22:28:33+00:00
> As long as LLMs are tools wielded by humans

They're really not though. We're in the age of agents--unsupervised LLM's are commonplace, and new laws need to exist to handle these frameworks. It's like handing a toddler a handgun, and saying we're being "responsible" or we are "supervising them". We're not--it's negligence.
by tarsinge | 2025-12-26 22:28:41+00:00
This is off topic, I’m talking about the environmental footprint of data centers. In the 2010s I remember when responding to RFPs I had to specify the carbon footprint of our servers. ESG was all the rage and every big tech company was trying to appear green. Fast forward to today where companies, investors, and obviously the administration are more than fine with data centers burning all the oil/gas/coal power that can be found.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-26 22:28:54+00:00
So gpl is a licensor-licensee contract, if code and license is not shared to the user, then there is no contract to which the user is a party, rather the user is a beneficiary.

The offer of source code seems to be a way to facilitate the conveyance of source code through opt-in means separately from the object code rather than some legal trickery to create a user-licensee contract.

While the offer may indeed convey a licensee-user obligation, a compliant distribution would attach a license anyway, converting the user into a licensee and licensor to licensee in a recursive fashion

I wonder if lawyers specialize in this, it sounds very cool and not at all standard law, but somehow compatible with contract law

IANAL
by tavavex | 2025-12-26 22:29:07+00:00
> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago.

These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-26 22:30:58+00:00
LLMs will invent all those things without even being asked.

Especially on topics for which there is little data or few sources.

Ask it a really specialized question - the kind of domain-specialized topic not openly and extensively published. Something post-doctoral research equivalent.

It will happily invent all the details. Then if you ask to confirm if those things actually exist, it will apologize and say they do not.

To be blunt, LLMs only seem intelligent because they were trained on moderate intelligence publications and people mainly ask low intelligence questions.
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-26 22:31:03+00:00
Metastatic cancer where our organs and cells grow every direction forever until resources expire is extremely counterproductive and doesn’t matter for the survival of our species because it usually occurs after reproductive age and the reproduction happened. Perpetuating the flawed genes in the next generation.

Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom
by RockyMcNuts | 2025-12-26 22:31:14+00:00
there is light alignment, like throwing nasty things out of the training data, and there is strong alignment, like China providing a test with 2000 questions that an AI must answer non-problematically 95% of the time.

there is no such thing as an AI that is not somehow implicitly aligned with the values of its creator, that is completely objective, unbiased in any way. there is no perfect view from nowhere. if you take a perfectly accurate photo, you have still chosen how to compose it and which photo to put in your record.

are you going to decide to 'censor' responses to kids, or about real people who might have libel interests, or abusive deepfake videos of real women?

if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

ofc it's obvious that Musk's 'maximally truth-seeking AI' is bad faith buffoonery, but at some level everyone is going to tilt their AI.

the distinction is between people who are self-aware and go out of their way to tilt it as little as possible, and as mindfully, deliberately, intentionally and methodically as possible and only when they have to, vs. people who lie about it or pretend tilting it is not actually a thing.

contra Feynman, you are always going to fool yourself a little but there is a duty to try to do it as little as possible, and not make a complete fool of yourself.
by VorpalWay | 2025-12-26 22:31:21+00:00
I think they are making the bet that most modules won't be imported. For example if I install scipy, numpy, Pillow or such: what are the chances that I use a subset of the modules vs literally all of them?

I would bet on a subset for pretty much any non-trivial package (i.e. larger than one or two user facing modules). And for those trivial packages? Well they are usually small, so the cost is small as well. I'm sure there are exceptions: maybe a single gargantuan module thst consists of autogenerated FFI bindings for some C library or such, but that is likely the minority.
by amunozo | 2025-12-26 22:31:43+00:00
Oh, I read that some years ago. I am not sure if it's very similar, but I can recommend Debt by David Graeber. It is an economic history of the world that deals with the use of credit and bullion in different societies during history.

Another book I enjoyed this year is The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. It explains the crucial cultural, economical, and religious influence that India had in Eurasia before and during the middle ages. This one is more similar to Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world, I believe.
by rossdavidh | 2025-12-26 22:31:53+00:00
"The Gentle Grafter" by Henry, O.

"Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic" by Monosson, Emily
"Options" by Henry, O.

"Population Fluctuations in Rodents" by Krebs, Charles J.

"In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey among Ancient Trees" by Fredericks, Anthony D.

"The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024, edited" by McKibben, Bill

"The English Abbey: Its Life and Work in the Middle Ages" by Crossley, Fred H.

"The Stereoscope in Ophthalmology" by Wells, David Washburn

"Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps – Why Nature's Maligned Predators and Pollinators are Essential to Planetary Health" by Sumner, Seirian

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jacobs, Jane <--- best book I read this year

"The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World" by Kimmerer, Robin Wall

"Making Useful Things Of Wood" by Gottshall, Franklin H.

"States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance: Complexity Theory Applied to UN Statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan" by Day, Adam

"Migration Mysteries: Adventures, Disasters, and Epiphanies in a Life with Birds" by Rappole, John H.
by socialcommenter | 2025-12-26 22:32:04+00:00
A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.

LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.
Show HN: An app to learn about the world
by davit_kocharyan | 2025-12-26 22:32:14+00:00
Hi everyone,

I made an app to learn about countries of the world, including landmarks, culture, history, flags, and much more!

The idea is to make learning fun and engaging, but at the same time provide a clear, structured path, that makes learning effective and meaningful.

It has multiple game modes, where you can learn, play, compete and socialize with peers.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

The app is free to download:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/globo-learn-world-geography/id...

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.getglobo.a...
by MBCook | 2025-12-26 22:32:40+00:00
Was Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase?

The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary.

Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.
by azangru | 2025-12-26 22:33:04+00:00
> No, nothing this simple should really be a web component

...he writes about a custom checkbox.

This is one of the things I've been having problems with. Because the way many frontend developers have been trained by react and other component-based libraries is that a custom checkbox should absolutely be its own component that encapsulates the styles and behaviors that are specific to it. It's painful if this now goes against the grain of the web platform.
by MuffinFlavored | 2025-12-26 22:33:34+00:00
> How would the use of sub-libraries help with anything?

* Clearer boundaries - Enforced API contracts between modules prevent the "everything depends on everything" problem that large monolithic codebases develop.

* LLM-friendly architecture - Modular sub-libraries fit within context windows, making it practical to feed specific components to AI tools for documentation, refactoring, or analysis without information loss.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-26 22:34:02+00:00
Natural selection cuts both ways.

Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are adaptations in play on both ends.

There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.

If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous" mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.

Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion, or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with whatever happens to work best at the moment.

Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to a lot of things. So you get all of those weird situations - where sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without even realizing they're there, and sometimes, the defenses work but don't work very well because they evolved to counter something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it to deter consumption by large mammals at all.

And with the level of control humans attained over nature now? The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things they happen to like.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-26 22:34:20+00:00
Yeah. This is like waiting 90 days before releasing a full disclosure on a vulnerability, and then complaining you could have contacted us and given us time, we only had 90 days now. Gaslighting 101. Those 90 days gives all those with a lot if resources and sitting on zero days (such as Cellebrite) time to play for free.
by Wolfenstein98k | 2025-12-26 22:34:30+00:00
I completely agree.

While the other person replying is not technically wrong about why these things are grouped, it is kind of offensive to sufferers of Type 1.

In one case, a 3yo starts randomly getting sick one day, worse by the day, and will be dead if they don't get a diagnosis soon. From that day forth, their parents need to manage EVERY single bite of food they have, stab them with needles multiple times a day no matter what, and inject them with a insulin - where, if you miscalculate, will cause a seizure within an ~hour and death within a few hours. From a single typo.

Nothing will cure them, their life will be much shorter, filled with work and pain and expense with absolutely no relief, and nothing could've avoided it.

Now compare to Type 2, where you basically cannot get it if you maintain a reasonable diet and a reasonable weight.

Once you start showing symptoms, if you listen to your doctor and reform your diet (particularly with the 5% shock weight loss approach), you will almost definitely avoid it.

You will avoid it for the rest of your life just by eating well, which has the added benefit of extending your lifespan and healthspan and saving you money.

These things have nothing in common, for the sufferer or their family.
by make3 | 2025-12-26 22:34:38+00:00
People on HN are not regular users in any way, shape or form.

It's just the "cognitive load" UX idea, with extremely non-technical people having extremely low limits before they decide to never try again, or just feel intimidated and never try to begin with.

It's the Apple story all over again.

https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/
by shsusj | 2025-12-26 22:34:40+00:00
I think some cultures (especially sub Saharan ones) didn’t really have a concept of precise time in their language. It’s lead to things like “Africa time”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time

I think we all suffer from a lot of bias and assumptions about how other cultures operate. I also wonder if above article correlates with race - similar to a lot of other recent declining US education stats, it tracks pretty well with white % of population going down.
by zahlman | 2025-12-26 22:35:03+00:00
The precompilation thing was brought up to the uv team several months ago IIRC. It doesn't make as much of a difference for uv as for pip, because when uv is told to pre-compile it can parallelize that process. This is easily done in Python (the standard library even provides rudimentary support, which Python's own Makefile uses); it just isn't in pip yet (I understand it will be soon).