MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by billy99k | 2025-12-04 13:17:20+00:00
Tech companies already shape elections by intentionally targeting campain ads and political information returned in heavily biased search results.

Why are we worried about this now? Because it could sway people in the direction you don't like?

I find that the tech community and most people in general deny or don't care about these sorts of things when it's out of self interest, but are suddenly rights advocates when someone they don't like might is using the same tactics.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-04 13:17:51+00:00
You're missing the point entirely. He's saying it's horses for courses, each tool has its use and you use the right tool for the job.

And he's right. LLMs are fancy text query engines and work very well as such.

The problem is when people try to shoehorn everything into LLMs. That's a disaster yet being perused vigorously by some.
by Traster | 2025-12-04 13:18:08+00:00
There's a difference between a good product and a good business. It's easy to see this is a great product but it's really difficult to see how it's a great business. All the traditional things we look for from great businesses seem to be absent here - they don't have network effects like facebook or uber, they don't have lock-in they way Apple has, and to a large extent they don't have the traditional economics of SAAS. They have a product that is interchangeable with 3 or 4 other companies, they have extremely high initial investment costs to train models, and it's not clear they can actually sell tokens for more than it costs to make them.

It's like the foundry business, an ever increasing cost of moving to the next node requires ever increasing scale which naturally kills off competition.
by Covenant0028 | 2025-12-04 13:18:30+00:00
And those humans would be looking for a new job or face other consequences. An AI model can merrily do this with zero consequences because no meaningful consequences can be visited upon it.

Just like if any human employee publicly sexually harassed his female CEO, he'd be out of a job and would find it very hard to find a new one. But Grok can do it and it's the CEO who ends up quitting.
by metalman | 2025-12-04 13:19:26+00:00
why I specified, prostitute, as the restrictions with online sexiness, will push unrequited demand, back into real life, where nobody is concerned with bieng all nicy nice about the "titles" involved, it's kinks for sale, maddness, life on the edge, or cartoon's, so for those too chicken to buy a piece of tail, then they can buy a blow up doll, or something else in brown paper, or soon enough, personal AI...assistants, rather then the variety you can see getting lunch at noon, on the corner of young and bloor, which AI will never be able to simulate, ha!, anybody who can make it past a receptionist like those, still able to conduct serios negotiations, is made from stern and focused material indeed.
by Gormo | 2025-12-04 13:19:39+00:00
Well, considering that it doesn't seem to be an accurate statement, it shouldn't be so amazing that people don't "get" it.

By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-04 13:19:53+00:00
Speaking of shooters of roughly that era, the Timesplitters Rewind fan project also just put out their first release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzWSrgQ3eMI

It's basically a modernized anthology of the three Timesplitters games that were quite popular on consoles of the PS2 era.
by idiotsecant | 2025-12-04 13:20:22+00:00
I think you're wildly underestimating the heritage foundation. It's called project 2025 but they've essentially been dedicated to planning something like it since the 1970s. They are smart, focused, well funded, and successful. They are only one group, there are similar think tanks with similarly long term policy goals.

Most people are short sighted but relatively well intentioned creatures. That's not true of all people.
Show HN: I used Gemini 3 Pro to design my landing page
by englishcat | 2025-12-04 13:20:58+00:00
I'm a backend engineer with almost zero design experience. I experimented with a “Dual AI” workflow to brute-force a professional landing page.

What I built

A landing page for Lingoku (language learning extension): https://lingoku.ai/en/learn-japanese

The workflow (short)

- The Hands (Figma Make): auto-generated raw UI drafts from my feature list. - The Brain (Gemini 3 Pro): I fed screenshots and asked it to act as a Senior Designer — critique colors, visual hierarchy, clarity, and trust signals. - The Loop: I applied Gemini’s specific feedback in Figma and repeated — dozens of “roast & fix” iterations.

What I want from HN

Be blunt — is this page actually professional? If not, what are the top 3 things you’d change immediately? Also: can you suggest a step-by-step AI-assisted workflow I can follow to improve this (tools, prompts, and order of operations)?

Context / constraints

I'm a solo backend dev; I want a reproducible process I can run with AI + Figma. UX/performance tradeoffs are fine — prioritize visual clarity, trust, and conversion.

Thanks for any critiques, specific edits, or prompt examples — I’ll iterate and share updates.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-04 13:20:59+00:00
These days to get a snappy experience, one has to aggressively block everything and only selectively unblock the bare minimum, so that one doesn't get tons of bloat thrown in the direction of one's browser. Oh and forget about running JavaScript, because it _will_ be abused by websites. And then sites have the audacity to claim one is a bot.

Many websites are so shitty, they don't even manage to display static text, without one downloading tons of their JS BS.
Show HN: Avatar Cropper – Quickly Crop Avatar for Discord, X, etc.
by yong1024 | 2025-12-04 13:21:18+00:00
I built Avatar Cropper to help users frame perfect avatars without sending photos to a server.

It runs 100% in your browser for maximum privacy.

The tool now supports fetching images via URL, applying filters, and works offline. It is free, open-source, and requires no signup.
by tiborsaas | 2025-12-04 13:22:47+00:00
I used iTerm2 a lot, configured it to my liking, but then I tried Ghostty for curiosity and for some reason I sticked to it. I think it's just cleaner and leaner and the default looks pretty cool and minimalistic, I don't really miss anything from iTerm.

Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-04 13:22:49+00:00
Summary: Good potential, but it's complicated.

And far more complicated than the article describes. The supply chain runs back to forests, and deforestation and lumber industry misbehavior are a real problems in may places. Everyone from the lead architects to the tradesmen torquing the bolts needs to really understand the new type of construction. Building codes, inspections, and maintenance for skyscrapers are all extremely complex subjects, and there are plenty of developers who'd be happy to make a quick buck by building a cut-rate tower of toothpicks.
by rjh29 | 2025-12-04 13:22:50+00:00
I am reading this with very little maths knowledge (since university 15 years ago) and I found this confusing:

"The multiplicative group of integers modulo n that we saw above gets more interesting when you consider a composite number such as 15 which has factors of 3 and 5. Repeated multiplication by 2 will never produce a multiple of 3 or 5 and this time there are only 8 numbers, {1,2,4,7,8,11,13,14} less than 15 that are not multiples of 3 or 5."

I understood the earlier example of "mod 3" because you only have {1,2} but then it becomes a lot more complicated but there's no explanation of it. Multiplying by 2 repeatedly under mod 15 only yields {1,2,4,8}.

After writing this, I saw you explained it a bit later in the document, so perhaps a note to that effect would help other readers.
by dvgrn | 2025-12-04 13:24:07+00:00
This is one of those tricky things, highly dependent on context.

If you're talking about Conway's Game of Life patterns, then "gliders" are the 5-cell spaceships that travel diagonally, and all other moving things are "spaceships" but not "gliders". If you call a Conway's Life non-glider spaceship a "glider" you'll mostly just confuse people.

But if you're talking about other CA rules -- especially rules where there isn't any 5-cell diagonal spaceship -- then "glider" is very commonly used to refer to other moving patterns.

For example, David Eppstein's "Gliders in Life-Like Cellular Automata" database was active for decades -- recording spaceships across a large rulespace, not just Conway's Life. It's an accepted generalization of the term, somewhat like saying "Xerox machine" for any old copying machine whether or not it was built by Xerox.
by pjc50 | 2025-12-04 13:24:12+00:00
> I assume you think you're not in these sections? And probably a lot of people in those sections say the same about your section, right?

You're saying this a lot in this thread as a sort of gotcha, but .. so what? "You are not immune to propaganda" is a meme for a reason.

> private manipulation - convincing someone of something they should not talk about with regular people because they wouldn't understand, you know - is a lot more powerful than public manipulation

The essential recruiting tactic of cults. Insider groups are definitely powerful like that. Of course, what tends in practice to happen as the group gets bigger is you get end-to-end encryption with leaky ends. The complex series of Whatapp groups of the UK conservative party was notorious for its leakiness. Not unreasoable to assume that there are "insiders" group chats everywhere. Except in financial services where there's been a serious effort to crack down on that since LIBOR.
by yong1024 | 2025-12-04 13:24:40+00:00
I got tired of uploading my personal photos to random servers just to crop a Discord avatar. Simple tasks shouldn't cost privacy. I built this over a weekend using the Canvas API to ensure everything stays client-side. It’s lightweight, requires no backend for image processing, and solves the hassle of 'upload to crop' tools. Hope you find it useful!

You can access to the web app by: https://avatarcropper.app
by AnonC | 2025-12-04 13:24:57+00:00
Edit: The only way to even see this page without the popup is to try to print it.

Previously posted comment: I’m not sure if this is due to any content blocker on my phone (though I tried disabling Safari’s content blockers too) or if it’s not mobile optimized, but I can’t seem to get rid of the “Hello! If you print this page…” popup. I tapped elsewhere, tapped on the top right of the popup (even though there isn’t any close button), nothing helped.

Am I supposed to be doing something else to see and print it?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-04 13:25:13+00:00
What trees?

Near this specific volcano, not in a forest but in a dry, "sparsely vegetated" region (1). I don't expect any substantial trees at all.

Google maps has the satellite imagery, it's pretty rocky and barren.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_Region#Land_features
by wiz21c | 2025-12-04 13:25:32+00:00
I've been coding since 40 years old and professioannly since about 30. And let's set this straight: it is much (much, like really much) better nowadays.

We have super powerful editors, powerful languages, a gazillion of libraries ready for download.

I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.

And for Java, yeah, things have improved so much too: the language of today is better, the tooling is better, the whole security is more complex but better, the JVM keeps rocking...

And now we've got Claude.

I'm really happy to be now.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-04 13:25:48+00:00
> The most popular is “VS Code”, which needs only a few gigabytes of RAM to render the text.

> We used Eclipse, which was a bit like VS Code.

This made me laugh. You can't possibly be a serious person if you think Eclipse was better in any way shape or form than VS Code.

I don't have a great memory, but one thing I can absolutely still remember with 100% clarity is how bloated and memory hungry Eclipse was. It was almost unusable.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-12-04 13:25:58+00:00
> why cant you just stop your own kid going on the internet?

May I ask if you are a parent? Because every parent knows that kids will try to cross any boundary set (which is how they learn, not a problem). If there is additional friction at each step before they access something which is harmful for them, chances are they would have matured well enough to prepare them before they are exposed to harmful content.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-04 13:26:26+00:00
Aren't most people who are "locked into house" a seller that's removed from the market, but also a buyer that's removed from the market?

I can see how someone who decides to keep their current house to use as a rental and buy a new owner-occupied property would tend to increase house purchase prices slightly (but also increase rental availability and lower rent prices slightly), but also think that’s a tiny minority of current homeowners.
by pyrale | 2025-12-04 13:27:28+00:00
The link you give documents warfare that happened significantly later than the era discussed by the above poster.

To suggest that the lack of evidence is enough to support continuity of a behaviour is also flawed reasoning: we have many examples of previously unknown social behaviour that emerged at some point, line the emergence of states or the use of art.

Sometimes, it’s ok to simply say that we’re not sure, rather than to project our existing condition.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-04 13:27:50+00:00
I don't care about most ridiculous "battles" people are trying to wage, let alone this one, I was bluntly saying there are better things to spend money on if you do wish to "win battles". You're allowed to criticize things without offering a solution, especially if you don't care all that much about the topic at hand.

As a sidenote, Regarding your comment on my perceived lack of pragmatism, I'd point you to a definition: "dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations", which I'd say my comment very much was. Winning against a company that has succeeded in part due to government favouritism isn't realistic.

> In which case: maybe take your own advice and give up on changing anyone's mind?

I post on HN because it is a public forum and I wished to share my thoughts, not to change people's minds.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-04 13:28:34+00:00
That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense.

Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-04 13:28:56+00:00
Use Linux/KDE. None of the gains from the switch to SSDs have been lost. Everything is instant even on an n100. You only need something more powerful for compilation, gaming, or heavy multimedia (like the 200 Mbps 4k60 video my camera produces, which isn't accelerated by most processors because it's using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling).
by Gormo | 2025-12-04 13:29:01+00:00
They can, but whether they have is something to be determined by observation, not simply assertion.

It's unfortunately commonplace for people using words inconsistently with established usage, or coming up with novel usages that create ambiguity with respect to existing terms, to use "language evolves" as a blanket excuse.

But saying "language evolves" merely describes the process by which the current state of the language emerged, and doesn't actually substantiate any specific claim about what that current state actually is.

The point here is that this novel usage of the term "agent" is in conflict with what actually is the current standard meaning of the term, and actually does inhibit communication with people who aren't immersed in tech jargon.

I've encountered this myself when discussing AI tooling with the team managing a customer service call center, where "agent" is a pervasive term that already refers to human staff.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-04 13:29:31+00:00
I value my time, learned the lesson some time ago. When I was younger I tinkered for just the fun of doing it. Young me would've gone your route too, just for the challenge of it.

Now I do the math in my head, is it easier to just pay for the optimal way to do things instead of faffing about with all kinds of extra tools.

For this case I still have my 7-8 year old AppleTV 4k (1st gen). Haven't touched my "smart" TVs "smart" features. It threatened to install an AI update a while ago so took it offline.

ATV just keeps chugging away, our family uses it at least an hour a day, sometimes more - especially on the weekends. No lag, no slowness, every major streaming provider has an app for it - no-one wants to ignore one of the largest set-top box markets.

I did the same thing with Youtube, I pay them every month for Family Premium rather than figure out adblocking on about a dozen devices around the house - I do NOT want my kids being exposed to the kind of ads YT runs.

(Which was fun, you _cannot_ add children under 13 to a family account on Youtube, they MUST watch the ads, no way to pay for them to not see them...)
by hnthrow0287345 | 2025-12-04 13:30:04+00:00
>Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is.

Not VS Code, but maybe YAML and Docker if your company is trying to align what tools it uses. C# places might still force you to use Visual Studio proper. Everyone says use the right tool for the job, but for bog standard CRUD web development, we do have a shitload of tools that work and there's multiple ways to get to a fast, working product.

I still chuckle that my laptop is 3 times as fast as the cloud thing that serves our CRUD app and we pay many more times for it, but also knowing full well I do not ever want to be RDP'ing into a production box again and pouring through IIS or Windows logs.

What I definitely do see is a degradation in making choices about when to adopt a more complicated technology because of the incentives of the hiring market.

People have loudly beaten the drum to keep your skills up to date and so people choose stuff that's popular because it benefits them personally, even when the product doesn't need it. This in turn leads companies to only select people who know that stack, and the more that companies do that, the more people make technical choices to get them the best job that they can handle.

We absolutely, very much 100% see that happening now with LLM AI if you ever needed a bigger piece of proof. Pretty much everything that is happening now has just been a louder example of every bad practice since the run up to the dotcom bust.

Because of that, I'd frankly never suggest running on-prem or building a local-only app unless there was a much bigger reason (legal, security, whatever) especially if the other products in the company have chosen the cloud.

Why? Because convincing the next job that that would have been the right choice is too hard.

Edit: and to someone else's point, I made the choice to be in the Microsoft/Azure/Windows hell hole but digging myself out and moving to something else is practically working a second full-time job and holding 2 ecosystems in my head at once
by donatj | 2025-12-04 13:31:43+00:00
I've said it before, I'll say it again. We should just stop using the term JavaScript. It's a bad choice of name and always has been.

It's caused way too much confusion over the years making people wrongly associate it with Java. My guess would be that associations exactly why Oracle doesn't want to give it up.

I would like to say go back to the original name of LiveScript from before Netscape tried to woo Sun, but the name LiveScript has been co-opted.

Something else with a J would probably be the least painful. JScript is permanently associated with Microsoft's terrible IE implementation. I offer up "JaScript" as it sounds largely like JavaScript but said with a drawl while retaining "JS".

Heck, I'll call it ECMAScript if that's what it takes. I'd rather not, but it's better than "JavaScript"
by kasey_junk | 2025-12-04 13:31:47+00:00
It is not broadly believed in corporate governance circles that there is a legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. Nor will you find court judgements that require it.

If anything Milton Friedman is more responsible for this idea that shareholder maximizing is the corporate goal. That is an efficient market argument though not a legal one and he framed it long after the dodge suit. He needed to frame that argument because so many firms were _not_ doing that.

But just because a Chicago school economist says something about governance doesn’t mean it’s broadly applicable in the same way an Austrian economists opinions about inflation aren’t iron rules about monetary policy.
by compsciphd | 2025-12-04 13:32:12+00:00
It has been said loud and clear.

the supreme court in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952) said communist party affiliation (even past membership) was reason to deport non citizens.

This is well known in legal circles. This isn't something hidden. A US Citizen can be a member of the communist party (same first amendment, right of assembly), while a non citizen doesn't have the same right.

One can argue that this decision was wrong. One can argue that it is immoral, but its well known, and any immigration lawyer should know this decision, and know the risks their clients are taking on by some actions of theirs.
by lionkor | 2025-12-04 13:32:34+00:00
> statically linked

I'm not sure where you got this idea. The binary you distribute is dynamically linked:

> fresh: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, [...], dynamically linked, [...]

and it links with libc, libm, and libgcc_s, which means the distro will matter, because GLIBC is not compatible that way.

How did you, after building this entire app, come to the conclusion that its statically linked? Rust apps typically aren't, by default.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-12-04 13:32:36+00:00
My kids are millenials. They are fine too, but that is only because my wife and I worked really hard to regulate their access. We caught our 7 year old son searching for some offensive stuff on the internet and when asked, his answer was "my friends are looking for it".

In his teen years, we started hearing some stuff you'd typically associate with the toxic manosphere. A number of discussions later it turned out he was picking this off the internet.

Parents who talk about the difficulty of dealing with all this are labelled as hysterical, emotional, helicopter parents...the list goes on. My only response to that is what I tell most people - don't judge parents too harshly until you've had the opportunity to be one.
by sd9 | 2025-12-04 13:32:39+00:00
What do you mean? The quoted text is the exact strategy I always use.

I don't want or need to be told top down what to do, it's better to think for myself and propose that upward. Execs appreciate it because it makes their jobs easier; users get the features they actually want; I get to work on what I think is important.

What am I missing that makes this a bad strategy?
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-04 13:33:11+00:00
on the contrary. this is the place they can try out new tech, new cores, new drivers, new everything with very little risk. driver crash? the gamer will just restart their game. the AI workload will stall and cost a lot of money.

basically, the gaming segment is the beta-test ground for the datacenter segment. and you have beta testers eager to pay high prices!

we see the same in CPUs by the way, where the datacenter lineup of both intel and amd lags behind the consumer lineup. gives time to iron out bios, microcode and optimizations.