MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-21 14:05:06+00:00
> Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.

If it was malicious they wouldn't say a word. They probably interpreted the rule as "nothing in shipped game is AI" (which is reasonable interpreteation IMO), they implemented policy to replace any asset made by AI and just missed some texture.

Also the term was pretty vague, like, is using automatic lipsync forbidden ? That's pretty much generative AI, just the result is not picture but a sequence of movements.
by el3ctron | 2025-12-21 14:05:47+00:00
correct me please if i am missing something, but i read that Chomsky messages and looks like normal conversations, i mean, surely Epstein offered dark services for some guest, but not for all. Even that conversations looks very smart. Social media people moves in majority cases on morbid assumptions. Correct me please if i am missing something, but Chomsky is a great guy, an one of the greatest minds on earth.
by tpdly | 2025-12-21 14:06:28+00:00
I've always been surprised by how rarely one encounters Pirandello, having read that he was one of the top Italian writers, but the story about his open support of Mussolini explained it pretty quick.

In 1924 a leading socialist was stabbed to death with a file by Mussolini "deputies", and in the ensuing public outrage Pirandello wrote an open letter to Mussolini: 'I will consider it the greatest honor to become one of your humblest and most obedient followers'.

Not a huge fan of the way these 'literary critique' pieces are written, but it was interesting nevertheless. The author alludes to some topicality of the 20th century fascist's mind, but doesn't provide anything specific.
by Zigurd | 2025-12-21 14:07:21+00:00
This is all supposedly Epstein's property. Dead people have a very short list of rights or things that resemble rights that belong to their estate. Privacy and protection from slander aren't among those rights. You could argue that digging him up and gratuitously posting pictures of a postmortem would violate the right to dignity for corporeal remains. But apart from that, if you emailed Jeffrey, he has no power to keep that correspondence private.
by muzani | 2025-12-21 14:08:17+00:00
I see it as a punching bag analogy. It's a strike. A repetitive strike. I try to make the strike shorter and stronger each time.

The last time I tried to make a goth girl dating sim, it took half a day. The next time, I hope it would take an hour to reach the same level. Or be a better simulation.

Is it pointless? Maybe. But like with strikes, I enjoy the power. AI might add some distance, but striking a punching bag with a club is still satisfying.
by metalman | 2025-12-21 14:08:38+00:00
an unwritten assumption is that when talking about gears/power transmission is 100% duty cycle at specified power and rotatiinal speeds. go price a single gear from a small turboprop engine dig a bit into the tollerances allowed for those gears, and the tools used to measure and certify them now blush, at the thought of pestering the people who do the design and making of such things. I have.
by alex-moon | 2025-12-21 14:08:49+00:00
"If a SMTP mailer trying to send email to somewhere logs 'cannot contact port 25 on <remote host>', that is not an error in the local system and should not be logged at level 'error'."

But it is still an error condition, i.e. something does need to be fixed - either something about the connection string (i.e. in the local system) is wrong, or something in the other system or somewhere between the two is wrong (i.e. and therefore needs to be fixed). Either way, developers on this end (I mean someone reading the logs - true that it might not be the developers of the SMTP mailer) need to get involved, even if it is just to reach out to the third party and ask them to fix it on their end.

A condition that fundamentally prevents a piece of software from working not being considered an error is mad to me.
by cryptica | 2025-12-21 14:09:08+00:00
As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.

The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.

Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.
by kshahkshah | 2025-12-21 14:09:18+00:00
I used cursor over the past three weeks to update a 12 year-old Ruby on rails project. While it has been slightly updated throughout the years, this was my first proper modernization of the code base.

It’s been a real pleasure getting back into Ruby after so many years in typescript, python, and rust.

Happy to see the update. Real shame about the haters here, the Ruby community is a supportive and positive bunch that has shipped real products while others seem to worship at the altar of computer science alone… that’s about as counter snarky as I want to be here
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-21 14:09:51+00:00
That's what semi-recent whining about Larian saying they use AI was about. They just use it to cut some of the boring work and iterate over some ideas, once the idea is in stone actual artist does it.

I don't see the problem because it isn't cutting more artists out of the loop, if anything they get more of the meaningful work
by raincole | 2025-12-21 14:10:31+00:00
It's ridiculous lol.

Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.

If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.

[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-21 14:10:52+00:00
Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem.

Nowadays, most people attempting to explain bitcoin's value proposition tend to coalesce around "digital gold".

But *real gold* is now fully digitized as well. You can easily buy and sell *real gold* in a fully regulated marketplace without any fees and without storing physical bouillon.

And by the way, *real gold* is up over 60% in 2025.

So the question once again is, why buy *fake gold*?
by qayxc | 2025-12-21 14:11:27+00:00
I would consider this if someone was able to demonstrate a way to distinguish these phenomena from altered states of mind (i.e. hallucinations). We know and can demonstrate that the human psyche can easily be manipulated in various ways (psychological manipulation, drugs, magnetic fields, sleep depravation, stress, etc.) to cause such experiences.

Some actual evidence for for "past life regressions" and "astral projection" would be nice...
by asadotzler | 2025-12-21 14:11:39+00:00
If you join a contest with a rule that doesn't make sense, lie about following the rule when you did not, and the contest disqualifies you, it's not the rule that's the problem, it's the lying about complying with the rule when you did not. Are you really so confused by this whole thign that you don't get that or are you just another Big Tech AI fanbro?
by sokoloff | 2025-12-21 14:12:01+00:00
There are schools that can serve in that manner, but it’s a tiny minority of them. No (or virtually no) public schools with 125+ students per grade will have that tight community structure.

A private school with 20 per class and 60 per grade has a fair shot at it. Maybe a small public district could as well, but I’ve never seen it happen there.

Sports teams with strong non-athletic aspects to their program are another possible source of values transmission.

I agree that it’s not the sign on the building that matters, but the content and consistency of what happens inside it.
by omnimus | 2025-12-21 14:12:08+00:00
Finding variations in constrained haystack with measurable defined results is what machine learning has always been good at. Tracing most efficient Trackmania route is impressive and the resulting route might be original as in human would never come up with it. But is it actually novel in creative, critical way? Isn't it simply computational brute force? How big that force would have to be in physical or less constrained world?
Show HN: Executing Hello World in many languages
by joelalcedo | 2025-12-21 14:13:22+00:00
I stumbled upon the Hello World collection (here: http://helloworldcollection.de), and discovered a couple of other similar resources (like this: https://github.com/leachim6/hello-world).

Instead of just reading these snippets, I wanted to actually execute them — without installing dozens of compilers, interpreters, and runtimes locally.

So I built a small framework that does just that. As of now it supports ~50 languages, and I’ll keep adding more over the next couple of weeks — I’d love to hit ~300 soon.

Eventually I'd like to extend this into something more feature rich - still figuring out what those features are... :-)

Quickstart (requires Docker):

Step 1, git clone https://github.com/joelalcedo/polyglot-helloworld

Step 2, cd polyglot-helloworld && ./run_all.sh

What I’d love feedback on: better ways to structure the language definitions, and ideas for what this framework could evolve into beyond Hello World. PRs welcome.
by dathinab | 2025-12-21 14:13:55+00:00
> If AI use produces obviously inferior work, how did it win in the first place?

they uses some AI placeholders during development as it can majorly speed up/unblock the dev loop while not really having any ethical issues (as you still hire artists to produce all the final assets) and in some corner case they forgot to replace the place holder

also some of the tooling they might have used might technically count as gen AI, e.g. way before LLM became big I had dabbled a bit in gen AI and there where some decent line work smoothing algorithms and similar with non of the ethical questions. Tools which help removing some dump annoying overhead for artists but don't replace "creative work". But which anyway are technical gen AI...

I think this mainly shows that a blank ban on "gen AI" instead of one of idk. "gen AI used in ways which replaces Artists" is kinda tone deaf/unproductive.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-21 14:16:03+00:00
They don't call normies derogatorily, they just use it as proxy for "non-tech people"

> “hey, I have built a machine to replace all of you! Our next goal is to invent something even smarter under our control. Wouldn’t that be neat?” No wonder the average person isn’t really keen on this sort of development.

Nope, most are just annoyed from AI slop bombarding them at every corner, AI scams getting news of claiming another poor grandma, and AI tech industry making shit expensive. Most people's job are not in current direct threat of being employed, unless you work in tech or art.
by codingdave | 2025-12-21 14:16:56+00:00
If that future came to fruition we'd stop hearing "it works on my machine", and start hearing "it worked with my LLM".

The problem with refactoring code, re-writing codebases, and such major work is not the effort of re-coding. It is that you lose the code that has been battle-tested in production over years of use, millions of man-hours of beating on the code and turning it into a product that has survived every real-world edge case, attack, and scaling concern throughout the entire history of the product.

When you re-write code for for the sake of re-writing code, you throw that all out and have a brand new codebase that needs to go through all the production pain all over again.

So no - the trend I'm hearing of people thinking code will just become an output of an LLM-driven build process sounds quite naive to me.
Ask HN: How do you follow the news?
by Adrig | 2025-12-21 14:17:42+00:00
Over the past few years, I got pretty overwhelmed by the intensity and the constant news cycle, so I started checking out of it. Big filter list on social media, only one "good enough" publication if I needed some quick overview and important things surface up eventually.

Lately, I started using Perplexity Discover a bit more, and it got me curious about similar solutions to curate and summarize news based on what I find important, not what everyone is trying to push down my throat.

How do you keep yourself informed? AI curation? Trusted publications? Social media follows?

I feel we have all the bricks to have a great experience of learning about what's happening in the world, but instead we're drowning in clickbait articles, propaganda pieces, and even previously reputable publications have the quality of their work taking a steep dive.
Need Product Testers
by Bluhorizon | 2025-12-21 14:18:16+00:00
If you sell via WhatsApp and answers same pricing questions or send product details one by one... Daily.

I built a site that sends your customers Cart directly to your WhatsApp chat.

I need five people who actually sells and not 'interested' comments.

You will break the site, tell me what's stupid and leave.

You are to test: 1. Can you set up stores without guidance. 2. Do you understand the value In 30sec. 3. Does the product actually saves time. 4. Where you got confused and quit.

You are not : 1. checking UI. 2. Replying with 'this is nice bro'. 3. Feature idea.

Tasks: 1. Create a store and add three products(requires signups).

2. Get the store link.

3. Ask a friend to pretend to buy.

https://linkdirect.bluhorizon.work
by tymscar | 2025-12-21 14:18:52+00:00
Yeah, so DDR5 is 8GT and GDDR7 is 32GT. Bus width is 64 vs 384. That already makes the VRAM 4*6 (24) times faster.

You can add more channels, sure, but each channel makes it less and less likely for you to boot. Look at modern AM5 struggling to boot at over 6000 with more than two sticks.

So you’d have to get an insane six channels to match the bus width, at which point your only choice to be stable would be to lower the speed so much that you’re back to the same orders of magnitude difference, really.

Now we could instead solder that RAM, move it closer to the GPU and cross-link channels to reduce noise. We could also increase the speed and oh, we just invented soldered-on GDDR…
by rstuart4133 | 2025-12-21 14:20:19+00:00
Feast your eyes on this: https://cpldcpu.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent-mcu/

The HT68F001 stands out: 512 words of program flash and 16 bytes of RAM. ... can only be clocked from an internal 32 kHz oscillator. Since each instruction takes 4 cycles to execute, this results in only 8000 instructions per second!
by bobbyschmidd | 2025-12-21 14:20:29+00:00
nobody seems to listen or value? then crying out loud and raging against the dying of whatever is exactly the right measure.

maybe the author is just too nice? that does not work when everybody is manic and obsessed.

Rationality can be just as manic and obsessed as irrationality and madness. Most of those "EA" peeps are perfect examples. As is this Eliezer AI or dude, I still can't decide.

With all this stuff maximizing our fallacies and biases, sometimes inverting them to support some cultural narrative while leaving us with a sense or certainty of being "based" and/or "grounded" even though we, as a collective of individuals, have just been successfully normalized--our critical thinking reduced to a bobblehead, and our agency to that of a maneki-neko, there is absolutely no need to "turn down for what?" (dial it down) ... you are not playing Lil Jon at 200 db in the middle of the night in a neighborhood full of newborns, after all.

wait, maybe I got something poetic ...

in the absence of the echoes of gold and truth, only noise remains.

... which is a problem because then our brain's internal Kalman filters got nothing to work with ...
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-21 14:20:59+00:00
Exactly, I just don't understand the grandparent's point, why have a "Postgres person" at all? I hire an engineer who should be able to do it all, no wonder there's been a proliferation of full stack engineers over specialized ones.

And especially having worked in startups, I was expected to do many different things, from fixing infrastructure code one day to writing frontend code the next. If you're in a bigger company, maybe it's understandable to be specialized, but especially if you're at a company with only a few people, you must be willing to do the job, whatever it is.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-21 14:21:03+00:00
The metadata alone is incredibly valuable for researchers. Having 186 million ISRCs catalogued with associated genre, tempo, and popularity data is a goldmine for music analysis that doesn't even require touching the audio files.

I've always found it interesting how streaming services have become the de facto music library of record, yet they can and do remove content at will. When Spotify pulled out of Russia, entire catalogs became inaccessible. Physical media and personal archives suddenly matter again in ways we thought were obsolete. The copyright discussion is complex, but from a pure preservation standpoint, I'm glad someone is doing this work.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-21 14:21:16+00:00
I've been self-hosting Postgres for production apps for about 6 years now. The "3 AM database emergency" fear is vastly overblown in my experience.

In reality, most database issues are slow queries or connection pool exhaustion - things that happen during business hours when you're actively developing. The actual database process itself just runs. I've had more AWS outages wake me up than Postgres crashes.

The cost savings are real, but the bigger win for me is having complete visibility. When something does go wrong, I can SSH in and see exactly what's happening. With RDS you're often stuck waiting for support while your users are affected.

That said, you do need solid backups and monitoring from day one. pgBackRest and pgBouncer are your friends.
by Majromax | 2025-12-21 14:21:59+00:00
> When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models. [...] So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.

To nitpick: the independent game awards are the Luddites here. The Luddites were a protest movement, not just a group of people unfamiliar with technology.

In the historical context that's apparently become appropriate again, Luddites violently protested the disruptive introduction of new automation in the textile industry that they argued led to reduced wages, precarious employment, and de-skilling.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-21 14:22:02+00:00
I've found the most practical rule is: "Would I want to be paged for this at 2 AM?"

If yes: ERROR If I want to check it tomorrow: WARNING If it's useful for debugging: INFO Everything else: DEBUG

The problem with the article's approach is that libraries don't have enough context. A timeout calling an external API might be totally fine if you're retrying, but it's an ERROR if you've exhausted retries and failed the user's request.

We solve this by having libraries emit structured events with severity hints, then the application layer decides the final log level based on business impact. A 500 from a recommendation service? Warning. A 500 from the payment processor? Error.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-21 14:22:22+00:00
This is absolutely wild. Rendering graphics with just combinational logic and no frame buffer is the kind of constraint that breeds creativity.

The HAKMEM sine/cosine generator is such an elegant choice - it's numerically stable in fixed-point and requires only adds and bit-shifts. Perfect for hardware. I used a similar approach once for generating test patterns in an FPGA.

The fact that you can iterate on this in simulation, then deploy to actual silicon via Tiny Tapeout for $150 is honestly mind-blowing. We're living in the future.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-21 14:22:42+00:00
OpenSCAD is perfect for the "programmer's brain" approach to CAD. Being able to parametrize everything means I can design something like a project enclosure once, then generate variants for different screen sizes or component layouts by just changing a few variables.

Pro tip: Use the latest nightly build and switch to the Manifold backend in preferences. Render times drop from minutes to seconds for complex models. The official 2021 release is painfully outdated.

Also, the BOSL2 library is essential - it adds proper filleting, rounding, and attachment operations that vanilla OpenSCAD lacks. Makes the difference between toy projects and actually useful designs.

The Git-friendliness is underrated too. Diffing .scad files is trivial compared to trying to understand what changed in a binary Fusion 360 file.
Show HN: PicX Studio – AI image generator pivoting B2C to B2B after NSFW abuse
by Yash16 | 2025-12-21 14:22:47+00:00
Built an AI image gen app, got $850 revenue, but users kept abusing it for NSFW. Tried rate limits, paid-only, moderation APIs. Nothing worked. B2C image gen attracts wrong crowd. Now pivoting to B2B for product photos and headshots. Anyone dealt with similar abuse problems?
by codingdave | 2025-12-21 14:22:57+00:00
> Think of it as trying to do for WhatsApp what Resend did for email or Stripe did for payments

If you were a PM, you should be able to see what is wrong with this statement. You are trying to do for a specific product what your examples did for more generic needs. You are 100% dependent on the success of WhatsApp, which ultimately puts you in less control of the success of your product, not more. And that sounds like it is in direct conflict with the reason you left your cushy PM role.
by ajmurmann | 2025-12-21 14:23:24+00:00
Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.

In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.