MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-15 13:09:23+00:00
I can only dream of writing english as well as OP. Kudos for mastering the language!

The formal part resonates, because most non-native english speaker learnt it at school, which teaches you literary english rather than day-to-day english. And this holds for most foreign languages learnt in this context: you write prose, essays, three-part prose with an introduction and a conclusion. I've got the same kind of education in france, though years of working in IT gave me a more "american" english style: straight to the point and short, with a simpler vocabulary for everyday use.

As for whether your writing is ChatGPT: it's definitely not. What those "AI bounty hunters" would miss in such an essay: there is no fluff. Yes, the sentences may use the "three points" classical method, but they don't stick out like a sore thumb - I would not have noticed should the author had not mentioned it. This does not feel like filling. Usually with AI articles, I find myself skipping more than half of each paragraph, due to the information density - just give me the prompt. This article got me reading every single word. Can we call this vibe reading?
by goku12 | 2025-12-15 13:10:25+00:00
Both examples you linked are people talking casually about the nature of Rust, rather than about the specific rule. That goes very much with your parent commenter's assertion that nobody takes it literally. The first example even starts with 'Most of the time' (this is true, though not guaranteed. I will explain further down). Human languages are imperfect and exaggerations and superlatives are common in casual communication.

But I have not seen any resource or anyone making technical points ever assert that the Rust compiler can verify program logic. That doesn't even make sense - the compiler isn't an AI that knows your intentions. Everybody is always clear that it only verifies memory safety.

Now regarding the 'most of the time' part. The part below is based purely on my experience and your mileage may vary. It's certainly possible to compile Rust programs with logical/semantic errors. I have made plenty. But the nature of C/C++ or similar manually memory-managed languages is such that you can make memory safety bugs quiet easily and miss them entirely. They also stay hidden longer.

And while logical errors are also possible, most people write and test code in chunks of sizes small enough where they feel confident enough to understand and analyze it entirely within their mind. Thus they tend to get caught and eliminated earlier than the memory safety bugs.

Now since Rust handles the memory safety bugs for you and you're reasonably good at dealing with logical bugs, the final integrated code tends to be bug-free, surprisingly more often than in other languages - but not every time.

There is another effect that makes Rust programs relatively more bug-free. This time, It's about the design of the code. Regular safe Rust, without any runtime features (like Rc, Arc, RefCell, Mutex, etc) is extremely restrictive in what designs it accepts. It accepts data structures that have a clear tree hierarchy, and thus a single-owner pattern. But once you get into stuff like cyclic references, mutual references, self references, etc, Rust will simply reject your code even if it can be proven to be correct at compile time. You have three options in that case: Use runtime safety checks (Rc, RefCell, Mutex, etc. This is slightly slower) OR use unsafe block and verify it manually, OR use a library that does the previous one for you.

Most of the code we write can be expressed in the restricted form that safe Rust allows without runtime checks. So whenever I face such issues, my immediate effort is to refactor the code in such way. I reach for the other three methods only if this is not possible - and that's actually rare. The big advantage of this method is that such designs are relatively free of the vast number of logical bugs you can make with a non-tree/cyclic ownership hierarchy. (Runtime checks convert memory safety bugs into logical bugs. If you make a mistake there, the program will panic at runtime.) Therefore, the refactored design ends up very elegant and bug-free much more often than in other languages.
by komali2 | 2025-12-15 13:11:24+00:00
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.

Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.

The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.
by enz | 2025-12-15 13:11:25+00:00
The problem with this approach is that you now have to manage a secret key/secret for a (maybe) a very long time.

I shared this article a few weeks ago, discussing the problems with this kind of approach: https://notnotp.com/notes/do-not-encrypt-ids/

I believe it can make sense in some situations, but do you really want to implement such crypto-related complexity?
by moviet | 2025-12-15 13:11:37+00:00
We shouldn't need to have people bearing false witness. Anyone who uses AI tools to produce published works should offer a clear disclaimer to their audience. I share the same concerns as the author: "Will my written work be used to say that I plagiarize off ChatGPT?"

All the toil of word-smithing to receive such an ugly reward, convincing new readers that you are lazy. What a world we live in.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-12-15 13:11:57+00:00
The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other forums, that we know for a fact has been used in these frontier models. Great... where's my royalty check?

Pay us, not the government. We'll have to pay taxes regardless, and yes, close the tax loopholes on security-based capital gains (don't tax me for all the investment in my primary residence, that's a double dip).

I heard this called "Coasian" economics (as in Coase). I'm not sure what that actually means, though.
by rbanffy | 2025-12-15 13:12:23+00:00
If someone gave me one for free, I'd totally make it my daily driver. I don't do much AI, but I always wanted to have a machine with lots of puny cores since the Xeon Phi appeared.

The justification is that processors cores aren't getting much faster, but what they are is getting more numerous - entry-level machines have between 4 and 8 cores - and adapting code to run across multiple cores is important if we want to utilise all those cores.
by mattbee | 2025-12-15 13:12:37+00:00
I'm not sure I've read any of Marcus' previous writing, but there's no way that essay could have been written by an AI. It's personal and has a structure that follows human thought rather than a prompt.

For sure he describes an education in English that seems misguided and showy. And I get the context - if you don't show off in your English, you'll never aspire to the status of an Englishman. But doggedly sticking to anyone's "rules of good writing" never results in good writing. And I don't think that's what the author is doing, if only because he is writing about the limitations of what he was taught!

So idk maybe he does write like ChatGPT in other contexts? But not on this evidence.

I have seen people use "you're using AI" as a lazy dismissal of someone else's writing, for whatever reasons. That usually tells you more about the person saying it than the writing though.
by aqme28 | 2025-12-15 13:13:03+00:00
And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.

I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-15 13:13:08+00:00
This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social systems.) If you wish to tax some forms of "capital", or rather assets, you should focus on pure rent-generating assets like valuable urban land, or local exclusivity rights to parts of the EM spectrum.
by horsawlarway | 2025-12-15 13:13:24+00:00
Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now).

Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.

And that's outside of the whole "unofficial" replacement parts ecosystem that popped up online.

3 years doesn't track with my experience on this one. I'd bet it's 5 to 10.

---

For context, Amazon tried to buy them for exactly the same purpose ~2 years back (home/house data) and failed to get EU regulatory approval, so scrapped the deal.

I'm not thrilled to have ownership transferred to another company (I was also very unhappy to hear the Amazon rumors back then) and I think this is a pretty clear risk.

Even if a user is no longer using the device, Roomba still likely has plenty of data about their home floating around.
by graemep | 2025-12-15 13:13:36+00:00
> Remember a famous speech in Parliament in which she said that the single currency was political union by the backdoor. Exactly right.

I do not think it was much of a backdoor. Anyone who looked at it could see where it should lead.

1. Further political integration was expected at the time of currency union 2. A currency union requires some amount of fiscal union to be stable so its idiotic to have one without the other

> Now there were claims that the EU would not evolve into a federal state, and this aligns with what I wrote about EU political integration being insiduous and often deceiptful

I think part of the problem is that people do not understand how the EU works. A lot of people have a very poor understanding of how their national political system works.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-15 13:14:15+00:00
Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with minimal-at-best regard for Westerners.
by snapcaster | 2025-12-15 13:14:39+00:00
I think this is the wrong mental model (attempt to articulate threats from a specific information leakage). The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores "sensor fusion" by treating each leak as independent and defining threats as "things i can picture happening".

I think the correct mental model for this is "leaking bits". Leaking bits is bad, it doesn't take many bits to uniquely identify you and you're also not able to anticipate how those bits might be used in future or correlated with other bits.

Just stop leaking bits when you can avoid it. Then you don't have to mentally model every threat you come across
by jameshart | 2025-12-15 13:14:53+00:00
From a practical end user perspective, being able to buy a device, and download and install binaries onto it to make it perform a specific purpose by plugging it in and dragging the file over, is considerably easier than installing an IDE, and downloading compiling and installing from source.

Look at how Ben Eater built and set up the SIDKPico to serve as a SID audio chip in his 8 bit breadboard computer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nooPmXxO6K0
by rorytbyrne | 2025-12-15 13:15:02+00:00
https://opensciencearchive.org

I’ve started building a domain-agnostic scientific data archive, inspired by the Protein Data Bank. It handles the deposition, validation, curation, storage, and searching of scientific data, with plugin interfaces for domain-specific components.

The goal is to accelerate AI-for-science efforts by making it easy for scientific organisations to spin-up professional-grade data infrastructure in a matter of days. “PDB-in-a-box”.
by baalimago | 2025-12-15 13:15:29+00:00
https://github.com/baalimago/kinoview

An agentic media player, intended as home media server for.. uhh.. seasonal vacation videos with subtitles. I've experimented a lot with different "levels" of AI automation, starting from simple workflows, to more advanced ones, and now soon to fully agentic.

Pretty good practice project! All written in Go with minimal dependencies and an embedded vanillja-js frontend built into the binary (it's so small it's negligable)
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-12-15 13:15:48+00:00
It's going to make accountability very, very difficult. We were nearly at the point in politics anyway, where people could just claim evidence was fake and get away with it. Now, it's an easy get-out. I am fully expecting that, if any particularly incriminating photos were to appear, say of powerful people engaging in activities with Jeffrey Epstein, that they will simply dismiss them as "fake news AI".
by Treegarden | 2025-12-15 13:16:01+00:00
This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate that work and this automation does not get taxed.

Following that line of thinking makes sense, but it also contradicts the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

If the goal of redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal, given that automation is arguably one of the strongest natural drivers of higher living standards overall.

Of course, the counterpoint to “what and how much should the state provide” is “who should pitch in, and how much,” which is what you’re focusing on. I mostly agree that everyone should be taxed fairly, but I also see many exemption cases, because taxes are friction and we often want certain things to be frictionless. For example, I would oppose taxes on life-saving surgeries. But where do you draw the line? What about automation that indirectly enables or improves life-saving surgery?
by fnands | 2025-12-15 13:16:20+00:00
Recently went through this. Not exactly an independent researcher, but my current field (ML) is different from my educational field (physics), so needed to get someone to endorse me so I could upload a paper to cs.CV

I asked someone who organised a workshop I had spoken at. If you haven't met anyone in the field, then look at the papers you cite, see if any of the authors of those papers can endorse you (you can see it at the bottom of a paper's ArXiv abstract page), and ask them.
by legacynl | 2025-12-15 13:16:57+00:00
> I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.

So if I'm reading your comment right, you think it would be ethical under normal circumstances, but also believe we don't live under those normal circumstances? In that case i think the answer you're looking for is: it is not ethical to develop these tools under the current circumstances.
by sombragris | 2025-12-15 13:17:09+00:00
This resonates with me. LLM output in Spanish also has the tendency to "write like me", as in the linked article.

On that regard, I have an anecdote not from me, but from a student of mine.

One of the hats I wear is that of a seminary professor. I had a student who is now a young pastor, a very bright dude who is well read and is an articulate writer.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged" (with apologies to Jane Austen) that theological polemics can sometimes be ugly. Well, I don't have time for that, but my student had the impetus (and naiveté) of youth, and he stepped into several ones during these years. He made Facebook posts which were authentic essays, well argued, with balanced prose which got better as the years passed by, and treating opponents graciously while firmly standing his own ground. He did so while he was a seminary student, and also after graduation. He would argue a point very well.

Fast forward to 2025. The guy still has time for some Internet theological flamewars. In the latest one, he made (as usual) a well argued, long-form Facebook post, defending his viewpoint on some theological issue against people who have opposite beliefs on that particular question. One of those opponents, a particularly nasty fellow, retorted him with something like "you are cheating, you're just pasting some ChatGPT answer!", and pasted a screenshot of some AI detection tool that said that my student's writing was something like "70% AI Positive". Some other people pointed out that the opponent's writing also seemed like AI, and this opponent admitted that he used AI to "enrich" some of his writing.

And this is infuriating. If that particular opponent had bothered himself to check my student's profile, he would have seen that same kind of "AI writing" going on back to at least 2018, when ChatGPT and the likes were just a speck in Sam Altman's eye. That's just the way my student writes, and he does in this way because the guy actually reads books, he's a bonafide theology nerd. Any resemblance of his writing to a LLM output is coincidence.

In my particular case, this resonated with me because as I said, I also tend to write in a way that would resemble LLM output, with certain ways to structure paragraphs, liberal use of ordered and unordered lists, etc. Again, this is infuriating. First because people tend to assume one is unable to write at a certain level without cheating with AI; and second, because now everybody and their cousin can mimic something that took many of us years to master and believe they no longer need to do the hard work of learning to express themselves on an even remotely articulate way. Oh well, welcome to this brave new world...
by syga | 2025-12-15 13:17:15+00:00
Thank you for sharing this — I found it really fascinating and insightful. It's a shame it didn’t get more attention here. I work in an environment similar to yours and have come to similar conclusions, though not quite as "radical," for the most part.

The part about the query/values/projection of the readers layer was the most foreign to me, but I have to say, it really clicked and finally put my finger on something that’s been nagging me for a long time.

Since you mention that this came out of your work projects, I’m curious — how has your experience been onboarding developers with this way of managing Django projects?
by mark_l_watson | 2025-12-15 13:17:15+00:00
I am a day late to this conversation: while I sometimes find full-on agent-first based coding assistants like Claude Code, Google Antigravity, OpenAI codex, etc. useful, I think it is a mistake giving away too much of our autonomy as developers to default to agent-first.

I like to start any new code, or modification task by writing out design and possible implementation notes. I have a few simple command line tools that will combine one of my hand crafted notes files with code into one big beautiful prompt, submit it as a one-shot request. Then I review and use the results, doing an iteration if required.

Absolutely there are times when I feel that first dropping into something like Antigravity or Claude Code is the best approach, but I don’t want that as my default.
by tim333 | 2025-12-15 13:17:17+00:00
Not surprising really given:

>Trump says he ‘doesn’t rule out’ using military force to control Greenland https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/04/trump-greenl...

Also the recent US National Security Strategy is worrying. Apparently in the longer version:

>Trump’s vision is to dump the G7 as a key forum for international diplomacy. The NSS proposes creating a new body of major powers, one that isn’t hemmed in by the G7’s requirements that the countries be both wealthy and democratically governed. In place of the G7, the unpublished NSS talks of a Core 5 composed of the US, China, Russia, India and Japan. Europe is not included. (https://www.counterfire.org/article/trumps-secret-version-of...)
by seabayoyo | 2025-12-15 13:17:57+00:00
Hello HN,

My friend has just released *paper*, a minimalist drawing app for Android. My friend insists that given its limited feature set, it might be the simplest, most focused application currently on the Play Store.

I’m hoping this community can tell me if that claim holds up!

The design philosophy was brutal simplicity: strip away every feature that doesn't directly contribute to the core act of drawing. It currently only supports three functions: *drawing, color switching, and clearing the canvas.*

The simplicity in UI allowed me to heavily optimize the drawing performance. The rendering engine is built to minimize input latency and buffer delays, aiming to make the drawing experience feel instant, like pen on paper.

I'm interested to know what technical complexity you believe an app needs before it stops being considered "simple." Is simplicity a feature count, or a UX/technical focus?
by smallmancontrov | 2025-12-15 13:18:01+00:00
"Is the capital being deployed for rent seeking or for taking economically useful risks?" is a judgement call. You won't find it listed in a FRED time series.

When every industry is on a multi-decade streak of consolidation, when McDonalds is about land speculation rather than serving food, farming is about land ownership rather than growing food, airlines are about credit cards rather than transportation, it's not unreasonable to believe that a substantial amount of capital is being deployed towards rent-seeking rather than economically useful risk taking.