MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strogonoff | 2025-12-12 05:28:44+00:00
“In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell it to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists <…>”

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/
by retsibsi | 2025-12-12 05:29:14+00:00
What's your specific concern here? I certainly wouldn't want to, e.g., give young kids unmonitored use of an LLM, or replace their books with AI-generated text, or stop directly engaging with their games and stories and outsource that to ChatGPT. But what part of "generate fun images for my kids - turn photos into a new style, create colouring pages from pictures, etc" is likely to be "unhealthy and bad for their development"?
by prodigycorp | 2025-12-12 05:30:35+00:00
Mercury's customer data breach was soooo damaging.

For those unaware, there was a breach at mercury that gave attackers the following information (from their site):

- Business and Beneficial Owner Information: - Name(s) - Phone numbers - Addresses - Email addresses - Account Details: - Overall account balance - Business bank account numbers - Business EIN - Transaction Information: - Entities you transact with - Sender and receiver’s address - Account number - Transaction amounts

Despite all that, a web search does not reveal a post-mortem by Mercury. I don't know why you'd trust them.
by erelong | 2025-12-12 05:31:06+00:00
A bit tangential but I was going to make a post of my own on naming with the problem of "filenames"

so many times I download something and the filename has nothing to do with the file or it's too much of an abbreviation so when I go to look for the file it's hard to find or if I come across one of these files I have no idea what it actually contains
by areoform | 2025-12-12 05:31:18+00:00
I'm replying to your central thesis,

information is never divorced from a person (sometimes it's a programmer). You're not smart enough to evaluate knowledge unless you have expertise yourself

A few loosely connected points,

– outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run. – I quote the literature for a reason. *I don't want you to take my word for it.* You can read Caesar's and Robert McNamara's thoughts; you can get context directly from historians; and then see the story told via tapestry to draw your own conclusion. – I also do my best to link to specific pages of the sources so that you can read the quotes in context. It takes a lot of effort to do this. As things aren't always publicly available, and it's a PITA to keep track of everything. – you're harkening to the idea that there "adults" in the room. There are no adults in the room. Never have been. Not for anything of consequence; definitely not for something at the cutting edge of technology. It feels like that because we write hagiographies after the fact.

A piece I'm working on right now examines Apollo and ARPANET in context — both programs were despised by the experts of their day. If they'd failed, we'd be quoting those critics. But they succeeded and so their names are forgotten. Science advances one funeral at a time.

— learning how to screen ideas for yourself on a self-developed baloney scale is one of the most important skills an educated adult can inculcate. It's sad that we've shied away from its explicit cultivation. – "smart"-ness is partly inculcated. A tool (or a mind) grows rusty with disuse. – why someone is saying something is tied to them, but information itself can be neutral. Its *presentation* can be biased. What's told / left out can be an issue. But the fact that the moon exists or William the Conqueror used castles for his invasion has nothing to do with me. Those facts will be true no matter who I am as a person. – yes, the way I have presented the information / the facts is tied to me. It's tied to my quirks of personality and my thought process as well as my personal biases (of which there are many). Which is why I make the effort of quoting primary / secondary sources. – I write these things because I want to learn from people who are more knowledgeable / smarter than me. And I want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than me. – you don't have to read it. it's just like a blogpost man, on the internet. doesn't really matter in the long run.
by anon291 | 2025-12-12 05:31:25+00:00
So then this is an easy problem. Issue liquor stores a terminal. Liquor guy checks licenses. If you're an adult, the clerk presses a button. A public key is generated and uploaded to a public list. You get a private key that shows you're an adult and is not tied to you. Regular laws that apply to liquor also apply to this private key QR code... You cannot give it to a minor or sell it without a license.

To view adult content, use the code to sign a thing. Content company sees the signed code, verifies against the public list and sends the content.

Privacy preserved, no adult content to kids... Easy.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-12-12 05:32:53+00:00
I've been using this method for 25 years, but ruthlessly delete completed tasks and things I decided I don't want to do after all. Kind of like inbox 0, but for my _todo.txt

I would probably keep my notes if I had to report to anybody or needed to keep a track of what I was doing, but luckily I haven't needed to do that for a long time.
by nish__ | 2025-12-12 05:32:55+00:00
What if who's wrong? Sam? If right means turning a profit, he's most certainly wrong. It would be a very stupid investment to give money to him but it turns out there no shortage of dumb money. Can't blame the guy for taking money people are literally throwing at him. If you know anything about the guy he has no interest in business or profit. He just wants to create AGI. Mostly out of curiosity it seems.
by awestroke | 2025-12-12 05:35:44+00:00
The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.

Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.

So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-12 05:36:33+00:00
>I’m not sure I like awk, sed, or cat

sed is not "stream editor" as it says above, it's "stream ed", where ed was another prexisting program which was essential and everybody knew it. its name was from "editor" shortened.

the sed commands are the ed commands. so, it's almost not possible to say "i don't like the name", it rests on a rich tradition, it's the stream version of ed. (ed commands are very similar to vi commands at heart.) it's sad the unix crowd never grokked teco because teco was already a programmable stream editor from a tradition that was not particulary streamy. it predated ed by a decade and would have fit the unix world perfectly. maybe it was already too big? I'm sure they would have known about it. Emacs does come from the teco tradition.

grep got its name from what the "grep" command would look like typed within the ed editor.

awk should not be thought of as a tool, it's a programming language, and has every right to the name as ada or pascal or haskell does.

back in those days, filenames had to be short, long names were not allowed, no space, and also, people liked typing short commands. concatenate shortened is... well, cat is as good a name as any. back then the word console was popular for the name of the terminal connected directly to the computer (frequently already logged in), perhaps con was already in use then, it definitely had a meaning already on DEC operating system machines as inherited on Microsoft machines, CON: is still console, and Bell Labs was using DEC machines.

btw at some sites there is a "dog" command. it's like the "cat" command, but it starts at the end of the file and then shows any additions. so, if you want to see if anything is being added to a logfile, you can "dog" the file (which is completely broken when VMS Windows dorks show up and decide to make everything binary) now the verb "to dog" in English means "to follow closely", so it's a cute wordplay on cat and means what it does, similar to "less is more". in less, you can accomplish something like "dog" (dog with more context) with the "F" command. these individual pieces of wordplay don't form a coherent network in the end, but as new things are invented over time they are fun and help you remember new commands till you get used to them.
by robocat | 2025-12-12 05:38:16+00:00
> waitlists beyond something like a week mean the capacity of the medical system is insufficient

It means that the medical system doesn't have unlimited money/resources.

Voters hate reality: medical systems grow to take as much resources as you can give them. Waiting lists are often accepted in situations where a dollar limit is disliked.

Noone wants to say what a life or procedure is worth, yet a medical system has to indirectly do so because of finite resources (taxation, insurance premiums, donations).
by FreakLegion | 2025-12-12 05:38:18+00:00
> I've felt like frozendict was missing for a long time, though.

Type the dict as a mapping when you want immutability:

x: Mapping[int, int] = {1: 1} x[1] = 2 # Unsupported target for indexed assignment ("Mapping[int, int]").

The only problem I've seen with this is:

y = {} y[x] = 0 # Mypy thinks this is fine. Mapping is hashable, after all!

The issue here is less that dict isn't hashable than that Mapping is, though.
by mizzao | 2025-12-12 05:39:28+00:00
One can see he knows little about AI and relies on the judgments of others. Yet, he knows a lot more about economics, finance, and history than most AI practitioners.

As a founder of an AI company, I actually agreed with most of the article and found it to be very close to my mental model of the world. Turns out you might actually not need to understand what's causing the hype if you know that history rhymes...!
by bulbar | 2025-12-12 05:39:50+00:00
In your example, virtually everybody died, even with fire arms.

So I still wonder against what / who you are really defending.

Needing a seat belt is much more likely than needing a fire arms, at least in Europe. Focusing on fire arms means focusing on the wrog things. It's about a feeling of security, not actual security. To use your wording: You'd give the world to have focussed on something else instead of buying a fire arm.
by mlrtime | 2025-12-12 05:39:57+00:00
You're missing the collective action problem. When 95% of kids have TikTok, telling your kid "no" doesn't just mean having a conversation about social media harms, it means making them a social outcast. Sure, you can be that parent, but you're choosing between your kid's mental health from algorithmic content versus their mental health from social isolation. Individual parents can't solve network effect problems, that's exactly what policy is for. This isn't laziness, it's recognizing that some problems require coordination beyond the family level.
by solumunus | 2025-12-12 05:40:26+00:00
Do you really think the creative or intellectual element of programming is the tapping of keys? I don't understand this at all. I enjoy solving problems and creating elegant solutions. I'm spending less time tapping keys and more time engineering solutions. If tapping keys is the most fun part for you, then that's fine! But let's not pretend THAT is the critical part of software engineering. Not to mention, it's not all or nothing. The options aren't writing code or not writing code. You can selectively not write any boring code and write 100% of the bits you find interesting or care about. If an LLM is failing to deliver what is in my minds eye then I simply step in and make sure the code is quality... I'm doing more and better software engineering, that's why I'm happy, that's the bit that scratches my itch.
by rkomorn | 2025-12-12 05:41:26+00:00
I was a gboard user on iOS for years but it progressively got so inexplicably unusably slow I gave up.

Maybe your comment means it's got back to being usable.

Edit: https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/gboard-the-google-keyboard/id1...

No updates in 3 years? And search results complaining about gboard on iOS 26? Doesn't sound promising.
Show HN: Ocean Wave simulation: one-shotted by Gemini 3
by freakynit | 2025-12-12 05:42:58+00:00
https://ocean-wave-simulation.pagey.site/

Prompt used:

Prompt: Create a single-page app in a single HTML file with the following requirements:

- Name: Ocean Wave Simulation

- Goal: Display realistic animated waves.

- Features: Change wind speed, wave height, lighting.

- The UI should be calming and realistic.
by dkbrk | 2025-12-12 05:43:25+00:00
Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.

Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.

Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.

Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-12 05:44:03+00:00
I mean, so do I, if you think about it like that. I just have a much lower chance of successfully retrieving the correct information.

In the comparison I was making with respect to accuracy was that the bot is much more likely to accurately answer fact-based queries, and much less likely to succeed at any tasks that require actual 'thinking'. Especially when that task is not particularly common in the training set, such as writing a memory allocator. I can write and debug a simple allocator in half an hour, no worries. I'd be surprised if any of the current LLMs could.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-12 05:44:10+00:00
> I wouldn't say that Democratic Socialism as practiced today plans the future and allows only planned changes.

In other words, Democratic Socialism can't account for the future either, maybe it can mitigate some risks a bit better but it's still capitalism with similar risks of disruption-inducing changes.

If we exclude planned socialism from consideration, there would be no reason to single out capitalism for its unpredictability because the rest aren't materially better and arguing about it wouldn't add any insights.

> fundamental politics plays a far greater role than many people suspect.

It does indeed.

> I would say that Americans should be learning this lesson at this very moment.

Popular understanding cannot increase itself, it can only follow education, media and academia but it's lacking there either.
by bamboozled | 2025-12-12 05:45:03+00:00
The institutions you're talking about are under attack by online propaganda and smear campaigns by countries that want to see them taken down. Open online speech is important but it's also been hijacked to do a lot of harm.

Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail server and people would leave it a lone, but we don't.

Maintaining the status quo means western democracy is fucked. There is no anti-dote to propaganda and lies being spread through social media. Maybe getting rid of online anonymity would help but I understand why people don't want a digital ID either.
by morsmodr | 2025-12-12 05:47:55+00:00
Remix 2 is beautiful in its abstractions. The thing with NextJS Roadmap is that it is tightly coupled with Vercel's financial incentives. A more complex & more server code runs ensure more $$$ for them. I don't see community being able to do much change just like how useContextSelector was deprioritized by the React Core team.

Align early on wrt values of a framework and take a closer look at the funder's incentives.
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-12-12 05:48:14+00:00
We keep all workflows running on Sim cloud backwards compatible always. The idea is that you build, deploy, and never have to make modifications again unless you want to.

If we release a breaking change that requires a migration for existing local workflows, we release notice at least a few weeks ahead of time/bake it into the db migrations.

Incase there are significant changes made, everything is versioned so you opt-in to upgrading.
by edent | 2025-12-12 05:48:18+00:00
There are plenty of "synthetic" flavours - Takis, Twinkies, and bubblegum drinks spring to mind.

There are also a wide variety of textures that are heavily industrialised. If you go to some fine dining restaurants, you'll find smells and colours which you simply cannot replicate at home - let alone make from scratch.

Most synthetic meat and fish is really just a flavour carrier for whatever sauce people like. I've had imitation chicken, shrimp, beef, crab, etc. They all taste great - but that's mostly because the sauces are the same as their meaty counterparts.
by troupo | 2025-12-12 05:50:07+00:00
> There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.

Like Top Gun: Maverick, Ford vs. Ferrari, Napoleon, The Martian, 1917, Barbie, Alien: Romulus... to name just a few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46238167
by curious_nile | 2025-12-12 05:50:16+00:00
This is awesome, thanks for sharing and building it.

Yeah, that is a challenge we also faced and gave it a good amount of thought. Something like exposing LSP find references capabilities to the agent. Didn't follow this approach though ourselves.

On the documentation front, with ProdE we actually map out the features mentioned in docs to the actual code files, and diff against new commits to see if any file was edited. Edit means docs need to be updated. Working well this way.

Nia is great, but i believe they are indexing the open source world. Are they indexing private repos as well?
by amypetrik8 | 2025-12-12 05:50:32+00:00
>Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.

You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.
by maerch | 2025-12-12 05:52:02+00:00
The closest I come to working with part-time, minimum-wage workers is working with student employees. Even then, they earn more and usually work more than five hours a week.

Most of the time, I end up putting in more work than I get out of it. Onboarding, reviewing, and mentoring all take significant time.

Even with the best students we had, paying around 400 euros a month, I would not say that I saved five hours a week.

And even when they reach the point of being truly productive, they are usually already finished with their studies. If we then hire them full-time, they cost significantly more.
by spauldo | 2025-12-12 05:52:04+00:00
Yeah, V8 is the shape of the engine - 8 cylinders in two rows offset at an acute angle (i. e. V-shaped). Likewise a V6 has the same number of cylinders as an inline 6 but performs very differently. There's a handful of different engine shapes - I'm fond of the rotary engines used in early aircraft. Traditionally, the name of an engine was just the year, the manufacturer, and the displacement (like 1965 Ford 352). You often leave off the year and even the manufacturer if it's not required by context.

The Ford 351 is a bit special because there were two different engines made by Ford in the same time period with the same displacement, so they tacked on the city they were manufactured in (Windsor or Cleveland).
by fakedang | 2025-12-12 05:54:14+00:00
It's markedly more difficult and expensive for even highly skilled individuals to obtain Swiss residency, speaking from personal experience. Unlike the rest of Western Europe where you can claim to be a Dr. Engineer on asylum and become a citizen a few years down the line so that you can threaten Christmas markets and take shits in churches without repercussion in future. Maintaining a low target population helps in the vetting process and ensures companies prioritize skill needs over lowering costs. The drawback here being it becomes more appealing for companies to export jobs abroad, at the citizens' expense.

Another country which has a similar strict immigration regime - Singapore. And for a direct opposite, there's the Gulf countries, which let everyone and their dog in, so that they can be part of the slaving class for the locals.
by yencabulator | 2025-12-12 05:56:44+00:00
Also, your first N refunds are automatic for smaller prices. I think the only reason GP needed to talk to a human was the larger price. But once you're used the mechanism a few times, the site starts offering the benefits of good customer service less and less.

I don't know if it's individual, regional or country-wide, but I've lost free UPS pickups for returns and I'm offered free trials way less often now.
by rayiner | 2025-12-12 05:58:05+00:00
I’m not trying to persuade you about the premises, but only that—as a result of those premises—the slippery slope you fear is longer than you assume. For people who draw fundamental inside/outside distinctions, things that are intolerable for outsiders to say are tolerable for insiders to say.

I view America as a hot cup of coffee, and the outside world as lukewarm day old coffee. I’m not worried about how hot or cold individual molecules inside America are—the average will work out. My concern is about dumping lukewarm coffee from the outside into the cup.
by protocolture | 2025-12-12 05:59:48+00:00
>outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run.

Right but thinking doesnt occur in a vacuum. Thinking is a garbage in/garbage out process. Stopping and looking at a source to determine whether it is suitable to be processed is a worthy task.

To be clear, I dont think the parent comments criticism of the blog is worthwhile, but this element of your criticism of his criticism is also pretty useless.