MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lambdaone | 2025-12-30 12:38:23+00:00
Also relevant to this topic:

Fred Gruenberger's Measure for Crackpots (1962):

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2006/P2678...

John Baez's Crackpot Index (1998):

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
by jas39 | 2025-12-30 12:38:29+00:00
May I...

augroup fix
autocmd!
autocmd BufWritePost *.go
\ if getline(1) =~# '^// usr/bin/'
\ | call setline(1, substitute(getline(1), '^// ', '//', ''))
\ | silent! write
\ | endif
augroup END
by conartist6 | 2025-12-30 12:38:40+00:00
More than any other effect they have LLMs breed something called "learned helplessness". You just listed a few things it may stay better than you at, and a few things that it is not better than you at and never will be.

Planning long running projects and deciding are things only you can do well!! Humans manage costs. We look out for our future. We worry. We have excitement, and pride. It wants you to think none of these things matter of course, because it doesn't have them. It says plausible things at random, basically. It can't love, it can't care, it won't persist.

WHATEVER you do don't let it make you forget that it's a bag of words and you are someing almost infinitely more capable, not in spite of human "flaws" like caring, but because of them :)
by erelong | 2025-12-30 12:38:40+00:00
I don't get posts like this, I guess I'm wondering:

A. Do people simply want "better" LLMs and AI? To some extent that's a fantasy, the bad comes with the good. To other extents it may be possible to improve things, but it still won't eliminate all the "bad".

B. So then why not embrace the bad with the good, as it's a package deal? (And with saying this, I'll be honest, I don't even think we've seen a fraction of the bad that AI has yet to create...)

C. Assuming the bad is mandatory in coming with the good, have you considered a principled stance against technology in general, less visibly like "primitivists" or more visibly like the Amish? If you want AI, you also must accept "AI slop" of some kind as a package deal. Some people have decided they do not want the "AI slop" and hence also do not want the AI that comes with it. The development of many pre-AI technologies have created problems that have made people oppose technological development in general because of this unwanted "package deal".

To be for being a computer programmer and developing complicated computer systems but against the "AI slop" that programming processes would have inevitably have produced, seems a bit contradictory. Some environmental activists have long been against pre-AI computer systems for being unsustainably destructive to the environment.

I guess I'm just wondering if this conversation intends to be "anti-tech" (against AI) in general, or for "tech reforms" (improving AI), or what the real message or takeaway is from conversations like these.
by fweimer | 2025-12-30 12:39:03+00:00
> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

I'm worried that there is a tendency in LLM-generated code to avoid even local abstractions, such as putting common code into separate (local functions), and even use records/structures. You end up with code that is best maintained with an LLM, which is good for the LLM provider and their future revenue. But we humans as reviewers and ultimate long-term maintainers benefit from those minor abstractions.
by basch | 2025-12-30 12:39:27+00:00
If two $1B companies 'merge' and the surviving entity gives the acquired entity $1B in shares, it didnt 'cost' the acquiring entity anything.

Facebook's stock was up 20% later in the year after the acquisition.

Facebook was worth $134.2-139.2B end of 2013 and $217.5-218.5B end of 2014.

I would say it is misleading to say it cost them $15B in shares if the remaining shares FB kept ended up more valuable after the transaction.
by rwmj | 2025-12-30 12:40:44+00:00
In the UK, HSBC is definitely on the hook: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy94vz4zd7zo

This is both good and bad. It's good because fraud is rife and the banks had little incentive to do anything about it. It took them absolutely years of foot-dragging to add a system that verifies the name of the destination account holder when you transfer money between accounts. It's bad because the reason fraud is rampant is that the police do nothing about it. It's the crime you can get away with. The government saw the easy way out: rather than organizing and funding the police sufficiently, let the banks deal with it.
by 627467 | 2025-12-30 12:41:29+00:00
> We are rapidly losing our freedoms to the will of these companies

which companies? google? I'm the first to blame them for almost anything, but how about Postfinance, twint, health insurers, landlords, all those companies you mention? shouldn't they offer ways to do business with them that does not involve some third party? - for example, OP mentions that hsbc website still works for them on android, this is more than what can be said of other banks that basically removed certain "sensitive" features from their homepages. Or practically all the neobanks who 100% rely on apps.

Even those governments you mention: how hard/easy do they make for citizens to engage in commercial activity without relying on third parties or adversarial systems?

I know the argument used by all of them - companies, governments: we are just "following the rules enforced on us (as interpreted by our lawyers)".

Everyone goes to the "simplest" target - Google in this case - to blame for the status quo, but Google is in this position because everybody else - consumers, companies, governements, etc - buys into the "convenience" and neglect everything else.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-30 12:41:43+00:00
just because something is public doesn't mean it should be shared with everyone, imagine you and your (ex: facebook group) have a nice spot near a public lake that you worked to clean up and even put a nice fireplace / furniture around it and then some tiktoker comes and says check out this amazing spot and now it's ruined.

Yes it's public, anyone outside the group can find and see it, but it's clearly meant to be enjoyed by the people who made it or/and happened to come across it by chance.
by simonw | 2025-12-30 12:41:58+00:00
The DeepSeek v3 paper claims to have trained from scratch for ~$5.5m: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437

Kimi K2 Thinking was reportedly trained for $4.6m: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/alibaba-backed-moonshot-rele...

Both of those were frontier models at the time of their release.

Another interesting number here is Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which may people (myself included) considered the best model for several months after its release and was apparently trained for "a few tens of millions of dollars": https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/a-new-generation-of-ais-cla...
by graemep | 2025-12-30 12:42:46+00:00
It seems to be Linux specific (does it even work on other unix like OSes?) and Linux usually has a system Python which is reasonably stable for things you need scripting for, whereas this requires go to be installed.

You could also use shell scripting or Python or another scripting language. While Python is not great at backward compatibility most scripts will have very few issues. Shell scripts are backward compatible as are many other scripting languages are very backward compatible (e.g. TCL) and they areG more likely to be preinstalled. If you are installing Go you could just install uv and use Python.

The article does say "I started this post out mostly trolling" which is part of it, but mostly the motivation would be that you have a strong preference for Go.
by MagnumOpus | 2025-12-30 12:43:08+00:00
Many European countries still have their own (single-country) versions of debit cards - EC card/giropay in Germany for instance - and they are often accepted more widely than credit cards.

But international travel becomes painful. (Hence EC cards are co-badged as a fall-back with Visa Debit or Maestro, impossible if you are sanctioned.)
by 6stringmerc | 2025-12-30 12:43:15+00:00
I'm so glad to read about this!

Why?

Because it adds significant validation to my premise that AI is simply "automation improved" at this juncture and a crutch more than a viable tool in 90% of use cases.

In short, seeing "I made this because I was tired of wasting time with writing letters while applying for jobs" has me dying with laughter because the translation I come up with is "I am so crippled by laziness I'm recalcitrant to do the work to actually get the position to do work" and that's my take-away.

Of course there will be arguments to my perspective and I welcome them. I would like to feature them in my writings on this subject. AI is a shortcut for lazy, otherwise talentless people. I say this as neither.
by midnitewarrior | 2025-12-30 12:43:21+00:00
Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media. It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.

Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.

We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.

Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.

It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-30 12:43:23+00:00
Software developers being paid well is result of demand, not be cause it's very hard.

Skill and strictness required is only vaguely related to pay, if there is enough people for the job it won't pay amazing, regardless on how hard it is.

> Software is so much easier and safer, till very recently anonymous engineering was the norm and people are very annoyed with Apple pushing for signing off the resulting product.

that has nothing to do with engineering quality, that is just to make it harder to go around their ecosystem (and skip paying the shop fee). With additional benefit of signed package being harder to attack. You can still deliver absolute slop, but the slop will be from you, not the middleman that captured the delivery process
by maccard | 2025-12-30 12:43:47+00:00
Imagine if we said “hey your audio is only usable on iPhone if you use this specific adapter and high end earphones”. Somehow the music industry has managed to figure out a way to get stuff to sound good on high end hardware, and passable on even the shittiest speakers and earbuds imaginable, but asking Hollywood blockbusters to make the dialog literally audible on the most popular device format is too much?
by throw0101c | 2025-12-30 12:44:25+00:00
> HSBC is on the hook if I get hacked? I can't think of companies having to pay up because their customers got hacked because of their doing. Let alone if it wasn't directly their doing. Solarwinds was for example never forced to pay a dime.

Even if they are not on the hook, there is still the hassle/overhead of dealing with the fraud (e.g., opening an investigation), and/or the bad press when a customer gets hacked and you refuse to refund money per the terms of service:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/1pwh...
by WillAdams | 2025-12-30 12:44:28+00:00
A library which was known for having a "last policy" system in place, should not have this difficulty. I would further argue that any library should be willing to accept a copy of any book which they do not have and safely store it until someone wishes to borrow it. I'm still salty that I had to buy a copy of Glenn Reid's _Thinking in PostScript_ when a local library discarded it from their stacks (there are other books which I would check out semi-regularly which have also been discarded which I also need to purchase, but missed seeing on their "discarded" table or at the annual library sale).

Yes, this would require better funding, and yes, I regularly donate to my local library every year.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-30 12:46:10+00:00
Have we though?

1. Fundamentals do change, Yuval Noah Harari made this point in the book Sapiens, but basically there are core beliefs (in fact the idea that things do change for the better is relatively new, “the only constant is change”. Wasn’t really true before the 19th century.

What does “the great disrupter we can’t adapt to” mean exactly? If humans annihilate themselves from climate change, the earth will adapt, the solar system will shrug it off and the universe won’t even realize it happened.

But like, I am 100% sure humans will adapt to the AI revolution. Maybe we let 7 billion people die off, and the 1% of the rest enslave the rest of us to be masseuses and prostitutes and live like kings with robot servants, but I’m not super comfortable with that definition if “adaptation”.

For most of human history and most of the world “the rest of us” don’t live all that well, is that adaptation? I think most people include a healthy large, and growing middle class in their definition of success metrics.
by Shorel | 2025-12-30 12:46:19+00:00
Their level of “polish” extends to dangerous, unreliable levels of automation.

For anything enterprise related, I would avoid Google and their automated account bans without the possibility of contacting a human tech-support agent like the plague.

You pay for a SaaS solution to remove worries to your day-to-day, not to add more things to worry about.
by felurx | 2025-12-30 12:46:19+00:00
The problem is that apparently, often enough that is just not the case.

On laptops, the LED is not powered with the camera, but controlled by it. And on smartphones, if it's a green dot on the display it can obviously be bypassed in different ways given the right vulnerabilities.

Also, aside from that, your condescending attitude is frustrating.
by fragmede | 2025-12-30 12:46:56+00:00
> After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming.

"completely useless" and "real programming" are load bearing here. Without a definition to agree on for those terms, it's really hard not to read that as you're trying to troll us by making a controversial unprovable claim that you know will get people that disagree with you riled up. What's especially fun is that you then get to sneer at the abilities of anybody making concrete claims by saying "that's not real programming".

How tiresome.
by reliefcrew | 2025-12-30 12:46:57+00:00
Cool, ffmpeg commands can definitely get thorny.

Since your README.md starts with an example of ffmpeg and gripes "This is not a normal sentence", it would be nice to simultaneously show the precise analogue as "ffhuman".

That way the reader immediately understands what your tool has to offer. Otherwise it can feel like we're learning two things instead of just one.
Show HN: I built a CLI to dump all JavaScript/CSS/assets from any webpage
by timf34 | 2025-12-30 12:47:10+00:00
I wanted a way to download exactly what the browser loads for a webpage (i.e. all JS, CSS, images, fonts, etc.) with the original directory structure preserved (like what you see in DevTools → Network/Sources). Primarily for context/ prompting an LLM for creating similarly designed websites.

Couldn't find a tool, so here it is:)
by rr808 | 2025-12-30 12:48:11+00:00
The biggest threat to American software engineers is outsourcing, AI is just a distraction. I am an immigrant, I work at a prestigious financial corporation in NYC. Pretty much 95% of the staff were born and did undergraduate degree in other countries. We hire a few grads but they usually quit or get laid off after a few years - most new hires are H1Bs or contractors on H1Bs. Just about to open another big office in a developing country.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-30 12:48:39+00:00
I am intrigued by the fact the US acts despite no US citizen having an arrest warrant put out for them.

Israel can't do sanctions for Israelis?

I mean, the realpolitik of these sanctions by the US is in hope that the USs involvement in Gaza doesn't get arrest warrants for their own officials / Presidents. Or for war crimes and human rights violations against Venezuelan boats.

Does make Israel look either weak or like a small person puppeteering a much bigger person though.

Additionally, tangentially, I find it interesting the reluctance the US has had, for three entirety of Trump's term so far, in extending sanctions on Russia for it's continued bombardment of Ukraine.

Speaks volumes about the (confusing, although maybe just rapid direction/ally change) motivations of the current administration.
by montgomery_r | 2025-12-30 12:48:42+00:00
Just finished ‘On the law of speaking freely’ Adam Tomkins - an excellent survey covering the US, UK and EU. In the middle of: Adventurers, David Howarth, an account of the beginnings of the East India Company, and Witch Wood, a delightful historical novel by John Buchan set in c16th Scotland. Just started: The House of War, the struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate, Simon Mayall. All good so far!
by konart | 2025-12-30 12:48:44+00:00
>It doesn't for me

And it's okay. It doesn't mean it should be this way for everyone else.

It is pretty common (and been so for at least two decades) for web devs to differentiate like so: backend, frontend or both. This "both" part almost always is replaced by "full stack".

When people say this they just mean they do both parts of a web app and have no ill will or neglect towards systems programmers or engineers working on a power plant.
by DivingForGold | 2025-12-30 12:49:03+00:00
Interesting: Unlike other high-profile cases, <plantiff> Carreyrou and the other authors are deliberately steering clear of a class-action lawsuit, which would bundle claims together and allow companies to negotiate a single settlement.

The writers say class actions favor defendants by limiting their exposure.

Indeed, too many class action settlements favor all the lawyers involved: plantiffs lawyers agree to "limit" settlement $$ if they receive 80% or more of the take to cover "their expenses" - - defendants lawyers agree to sign off if settlement is quite reasonable to their side, limiting their losses. In too many cases judges are compelled to accept the deals because both parties have come to an agreement. Too often the participants in the class action only receive a token rebate coupon for the defendants merchandise or something similarly shameful.The plunder continues.
by Bender | 2025-12-30 12:49:12+00:00
Will HN ever get a dark theme?

Probably not. One would have to ask dang for an official reason but I suspect it is due to not making changes to the UI. There have not been any significant changes in a very long time.

If using uBlock Origin here [1] are some HN rules I used to change colors and such. Change the color values to match preferences. May not be reachable on some devices

[1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/hn-ublock-colors-other.txt
by arlort | 2025-12-30 12:49:18+00:00
There's no such flaw in most cases brought to the ICC

The ICC is an international court but it administers trials (mostly) local to the members' jurisdiction so this point is moot. A warrant from the ICC doesn't ask the member states to go to war and hunt the target, it asks them to arrest them if the target is within their jurisdiction

The fact that the ICC warrant was unlikely to lead to Hamas' leaders arrest in the short term is not particularly meaningful

The "mostly" qualifier is because IIRC there are some provisions for truly extraterritorial prosecutions in the Rome treaty but I don't know that they've ever been actually used
by zkmon | 2025-12-30 12:49:39+00:00
It is fantastic to see how a research paper by Google fueled the force that might kill Google. Attention is all that is sold by google. It is an attention broker. Now that very attention is thinly distributed, Attention as the most precious food for businesses, is under fierce struggle. Google has ruled the city center area will all the attention sinks, the billboards. But AI is the new mafia on the scene that kidnapped all attention and hoarded it inside the AI data centers.
by UncleMeat | 2025-12-30 12:49:39+00:00
If you have a program that will unconditionally access uninitialized memory then the compiler can halt and emit a diagnostic. But that's rarely what is discussed in these UB conversations. Instead the compiler is encountering a program with multiple paths, some of which would encounter UB if taken. But the compiler cannot just refuse to compile this, since it is perfectly possible that the path is dead. Like, imagine this program:

int foo(bool x, int* y) {
if (x) return *y;
return 0;
}

Dereferencing y would be UB. But maybe this function is called only with x=false when y is nullptr. This cannot be a compile error. So instead the compiler recognizes that certain program paths are illegal and uses that information during compilation.
by wccrawford | 2025-12-30 12:49:51+00:00
My wife runs one locally. She's pretty happy with it, but I have to bite my tongue when talking about it with her.

People frequently take all the good books, all at once, and don't return them.

Someone just emptied out half of it yesterday, and I don't even think they were picky. They just took a whole shelf of books.

It's such a crappy thing to do, and there's nothing that can be done to stop the bad actors.
by roenxi | 2025-12-30 12:50:04+00:00
Yes and no, there is a bit more to it. When dealing with democracies hypocrisy tends to actually harm the people practising it to some extent. If a polity insists on living in a fantasy rather than reality the political process will start optimising for outcomes in that fantasy world rather than reality. It is quite funny watching US politics where the voter base are unprincipled and opportunistic in how they vote then get hoist on their own petard when they get leadership that reflects their voting patterns. It is also interesting to think how effective a country could be if the voter base tended to be honest and forthright.

With enough power people would rather accept bad in-practice results rather than have to confront the fact that they screwed up. So in practice the people in power don't usually care about hypocrisy. But they would be materially better off if they had actually cared about it. It is a bit like the oligarchs in some traditional communist country. Living the lie got them lifestyles of unbelievable wealth and luxury - but the oligarchs in the capitalist countries got lifestyles of even more unbelievable wealth and luxury, and passed on a much more impressive legacy. Not to say they weren't still hypocritical, but the degree of the disconnect from reality matters.

If you keep your eye on the places where hyper-competent people gather and accumulate power they tend to actually be quite honest. Organised groups of talented people tend to have the easiest time securing a social advantage when honesty and straightfowardness are abundant. The people who would naturally be socially weak are the ones who rely on saying one thing and doing the opposite.
by topspin | 2025-12-30 12:51:00+00:00
It is interesting to note that that github repo may be the first time the code in question has ever been formally version controlled. At the time, the process was essentially Ken et al. writing code in $HOME, dolling it out to users at need, and, when the system was in some semblance of a working state, someone would make a tape from the working system.
by nottorp | 2025-12-30 12:51:11+00:00
>even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title

Newsflash: Witcher and Cyberpunk are CD Projekt Red titles. CD Projekt Red was the initiator of GoG and owned it 100% until 2 days ago.

Every CD Projekt game was available on GoG from day zero.