MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chaseadam17 | 2025-12-16 16:27:56+00:00
Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't.

Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds.

But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food took it too far. Similarly, most software is net positive, but some apps take it too far.

Perhaps a good indicator of which companies history will view negatively are the ones where there's a high concentration of executives rationalizing their behavior as "it's inevitable."
by drob518 | 2025-12-16 16:27:57+00:00
Seems hung up on defining a ring buffer as something non-blocking (dropping). Having used ring buffers in both software and hardware systems for 40 years, we always called them ring buffers without this distinction. We would have called them all ring buffers. One nice thing about them is that it’s very easy to pass buffers back and forth between a single producer and single consumer without any locks or fancy memory atomics. All you need is a guarantee that memory writes occur in order. The AMD LANCE Ethernet controller (and many later derivatives) used this scheme to allow smooth overlapping of software frame processing with hardware transmission and reception way back in the 1980s.
by delichon | 2025-12-16 16:27:57+00:00
I'm burning dead wood in a very high wildfire area. It is going to burn. The county takes a small percentage away ... to burn in huge pits. It really isn't possible that much if any of this wood will just slowly decay. All I'm doing is diverting a couple of cords a year to heat my home. There is additional risk to me, but I'm probably deferring the risk to others by epsilon by clearing a scintilla.

Probably the risk involved in cutting down trees is more than for breathing in wood smoke. I'm no better at predicting which way a tree will fall than which horse will win.
by ben_w | 2025-12-16 16:28:00+00:00
Rent increasing by the same percentage as income per capita is what I'd expect by default.

Inequality in rent-to-earnings is also a problem, though without knowing what it used to be I can't say if that has gotten worse or if it was always that unequal. Vimes Boots etc.

The Guardian article links to https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/h... which shows the % of people in overcrowded homes has gone down, and the % in under-occupied homes has gone up, and that 25% of the EU population's housing has had its insulation improved in the last 5 years.

So, quality has gone up despite the same *average* fraction of income being spent. But I still don't know the distribution, the poorest may indeed be worse off, averages (even when combined with standard deviations) hide a lot, as anyone who has seen the Datasaurus dozen will know.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-16 16:28:13+00:00
So you believe this number is a material amount of undocumented children and not US citizens? Can you prove this assertion? Numbers I was able to find indicate 1-1.1 million undocumented children in the US under 18. Let us assume they are a part of this 4 million stat for the sake of argument. What about the other 3 million children? Is 3 million children not a "massive child uninsured problem"? I believe its an emergency, but I am curious what the other side of that argument is.

To be frank, through policy, we can see that the federal government hates children through Medicaid cuts and states not expanding Medicaid and making it easy to get coverage for children. This is objective fact, based on the data. Otherwise, there would be zero uninsured US citizen children. The message is clear: don't have children in the US, or get out of the US if you intend to have children and can. If you are stuck in the US by having the misfortune to have been born on the wrong soil and without means to leave, my condolences for bad luck.
by ivape | 2025-12-16 16:28:21+00:00
It feels like the only aspect of Game Theory at work here is opportunity cost. For example, why shouldn't you make AI porn generation software? There's moral reasons for it, but usually, most put it aside because someone else is going to get the bag first. That exhaustive list the author enumerated are all in some way byproducts of break-things-move-fast-say-sorry-later philosophy. You need ID for the websites because you did not give a shit and wanted to get the porn out there first and foremost. Now you need IDs.

You need to track everyone and everything on the internet because you did not want to cap your wealth at a reasonable price for the service. You are willing to live with accumulated sins because "its not as bad as murder". The world we have today has way more to do with these things than anything else. We do not operate as a collective, and naturally, we don't get good outcomes for the collective.
by baggachipz | 2025-12-16 16:28:29+00:00
The problem is that LLMs are just parrots who swoop into your house and steal everything, then claim it as theirs. That's not art, that's thievery and regurgitation. To resign oneself that this behavior is ok and inevitable is sad and cowardly.

To conflate LLMs with a printing press or the internet is dishonest; yes, it's a tool, but one which degrades society in its use.
by wccrawford | 2025-12-16 16:28:51+00:00
That's pretty much what they said about photographs at first. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who argue that there's no art in photography now.

Asking a machine to draw a picture and then making no changes? It's still art. There was a human designing the original input. There was human intention.

And that's before they continue to use the AI tools to modify the art to better match their intention and vision.
by dj_gitmo | 2025-12-16 16:29:08+00:00
> what is definitely not inevitable is the monetization of human attention. It's only a matter of policy. Without it the incentives to make Tiktok would have been greatly reduced, if even economically possible at all.

This is not a new thing. TV monetizes human attention. Tiktok is just an evolution of TV. And Tiktok comes from China which has a very different society. If short-form algo slop video can thrive in both liberal democracies and a heavily censored society like China, than it's probably somewhat inevitable.
by stvltvs | 2025-12-16 16:30:40+00:00
I go to a cashier lane whenever possible because shakes fist at cloud no one's paying me to ring up and bag my groceries.

Also, unless job automation is tied to some kind of UBI or Freedom Dividend or whatever, we're facing a dystopian future with a starving underclass. Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-12-16 16:30:53+00:00
> hideous

That's just, like, your opinion, man. I disagree. Don't imagine yourself as the universal subject.

> inaccessible

I have no trouble whatsoever navigating and understanding the page with VoiceOver, and it obviously passes contrast and color rules for readability.

> and borderline unusable

Completely disagree. It's literally arranged text on a page. There's nothing to "use".
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-12-16 16:31:13+00:00
> if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives

Selective information dissemination, persuasion, and even disinformation are for sure the easiest ways to change the behaviors of actors in the system. However, the most effective and durable way to "spread those lies" are for them to be true!

If you can build a technology which makes the real facts about those incentives different than what it was before, then that information will eventually spread itself.

For me, the canonical example is the story of the electric car:

All kinds of persuasive messaging, emotional appeals, moral arguments, and so on have been employed to convince people that it's better for the environment if they drive an electric car than a polluting, noisy, smelly, internal-combustion gas guzzling SUV. Through the 90s and early 2000s, this saw a small number of early adopters and environmentalists adopting niche products and hybrids for the reasons that were persuasive to them, while another slice of society decided to delete their catalytic converters and "roll coal" in their diesels for their own reasons, while the average consumer was still driving an ICE vehicle somewhere in the middle of the status quo.

Then lithium battery technology and solid-state inverter technology arrived in the 2010s and the Tesla Model S was just a better car - cheaper to drive, more torque, more responsive, quieter, simpler, lower maintenance - than anything the internal combustion engine legacy manufacturers could build. For the subset of people who can charge in their garage at home with cheap electricity, the shape of the game had changed, and it's been just a matter of time (admittedly a slow process, with a lot of resistance from various interests) before EVs were simply the better option.

Similarly, with modern semiconductor technology, solar and wind energy no longer require desperate pleas from the limited political capital of environmental efforts, it's like hydro - they're just superior to fossil fuel power plants in a lot of regions now. There are other negative changes caused by technology, too, aided by the fact that capitalist corporations will seek out profitable (not necessarily morally desirable) projects - in particular, LLMs are reshaping the world just because the technology exists.

Once you pull a new set of rules and incentives out of Pandora's box, game theory results in inevitable societal change.
by javier123454321 | 2025-12-16 16:31:16+00:00
Sure, but in the case of AI it resembles the relationship of a patron to an art director. We generally don't assign artistry to the person hiring an art director to create artistic output, even if it requires heavy prompting and back and forth. I am not bold enough to try to encompass something as large and fundamental as art into a definition, though I suppose that art does cary something about the craft of using the medium.

At any rate, though there is some aversion to AI art for arts sake, the real aversion to AI art is that it squeezes one of the last viable options for people to become 'working artists' and funnels that extremely hard earned profit to the hands of the conglomerates that have enough compute to train generative models. Is making a living through your art something that we would like to value and maintain as a society? I'd say so.
Show HN: Kafkatop 2.0 – top for Kafka – rewritten in Go with partition analytics
by sivann | 2025-12-16 16:31:25+00:00
Kafkatop is a handy real-time monitoring CLI tool for Apache Kafka, that displays consumer lag and event rates in a clean, top-like interface. It can assess when consumers will catch up, and provides indicators for partition distribution health

v2 is a go rewrite from the original Python PEX. The main reason was the python version dependency on confluent's librdkafka which was not maintained any more for older systems. The new implementation is pure GO (franz-go, no CGO deps) meaning it's very safe to distribute.

The new features include:

* drill into partition details: config, lag, offsets, rates, replicas, ISR status, and leaders, with Cell colors indicating hotness

* partition health with two new metrics:

- PAR (Peak-to-Average Ratio): shows if one partition is 5x, 10x, or 200x busier than average - Cv (Coefficient of Variation): measures overall topic skew from 0 (perfect) to >1 (critical)

* improved catch-up ETA calculation: accounts also for arrival rate

* better performance: parallel API calls with configurable concurrency (default 10 concurrent)

* custom DNS mappings: override DNS resolution for broker-provided kafka nodes allowing to work via port-forwarding.

The tool is here: https://github.com/sivann/kafkatop

Would love feedback, especially on the partition metrics - are PAR and Cv intuitive enough, or should I add different indicators? What other feature would you like to see?
by jdross | 2025-12-16 16:31:28+00:00
The US job market is way more dynamic than people realize. Roughly 1/5 of jobs are changed every year in roles permanently lost to roles newly created.

Gross job creation & destruction annually is roughly 10–12 percent of all jobs (new positions added and permanently lost across all employers).

This is down from the past, when it was 15-18 percent.

Source: US Census Bureau Data https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_job_destruction_rate
by bombcar | 2025-12-16 16:31:40+00:00
This is the reality (and the system actually handles this "relatively" well, all things considered).

There's a reason that if you dip your toe into ANY of the various support things, they ALL immediately apply for you.

(Kids in general and for the large part are pretty healthy, the numbers of "major health issues" that aren't broken bones/scrapes/flu are pretty small overall. So if you're poor/don't care, you just roll the dice. 999/1000 it's going to come out ahead for you.)
by thiht | 2025-12-16 16:31:42+00:00
ITT: gross overreaction, as usual. IntelliCode is NOT IntelliSense. They're obviously not removing traditional autocomplete.

They're replacing an EXTENSION, so it has basically nothing to do with VSCode itself. If they developed an "IntelliCode for Vim" plugin, they would also replace "IntelliCode for Vim" with Copilot.
by romanfll | 2025-12-16 16:31:49+00:00
The shift from Explicit Reduction to GNNs/Embeddings is where the high-end is going in my view… We hit this exact fork in the road with our forecasting/anomaly detection engine (DriftMind). We considered heavy embedding models but realised that for edge streams, we couldn't afford the inference cost or the latency of round-tripping to a GPU server. It feels like the domain is splitting into 'Massive Server-Side Intelligence' (I am a big fan of Graphistry) and 'Hyper-Optimized Edge Intelligence' (where we are focused).
by polshaw | 2025-12-16 16:31:51+00:00
Your introductory paragraph comes across very much like "people who want to change the status quo are political and people who want to maintain it are not"; which is clearly nonsense. "how things are is how they should be" is as much of an ideology, just a less conspicuous one given the existing norms.

>Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political?

I am much closer to agreeing with your take here, but as you recognise, there are lots of political aspects to your actions, even if they are not conscious. Not intentionally being political doesn't mean you are not making political choices; there are many more that your AI choice touches upon; privacy issues, wealth distribution, centralisation, etc etc. Of course these choices become limited by practicalities but they still exist.
Show HN: Zenflow – orchestrate coding agents without "you're right" loops
by andrewsthoughts | 2025-12-16 16:32:16+00:00
Hi HN, I’m Andrew, Founder of Zencoder.

While building our IDE extensions and cloud agents, we ran into the same issue many of you likely face when using coding agents in complex repos: agents getting stuck in loops, apologizing, and wasting time.

We tried to manage this with scripts, but juggling terminal windows and copy-paste prompting was painful. So we built Zenflow, a free desktop tool to orchestrate AI coding workflows.

It handles the things we were missing in standard chat interfaces:

Cross-Model Verification: You can have Codex review Claude’s code, or run them in parallel to see which model handles the specific context better.

Parallel Execution: Run five different approaches on a backlog item simultaneously—mix "Human-in-the-Loop" for hard problems with "YOLO" runs for simple tasks.

Dynamic Workflows: Configured via simple .md files. Agents can actually "rewire" the next steps of the workflow dynamically based on the problem at hand.

Project list/kanban views across all workload

What we learned building this

To tune Zenflow, we ran 100+ experiments across public benchmarks (SWE-Bench-*, T-Bench) and private datasets. Two major takeaways that might interest this community:

Benchmark Saturation: Models are becoming progressively overtrained on all versions of SWE-Bench (even Pro). We found public results are diverging significantly from performance on private datasets. If you are building workflows, you can't rely on public benches.

The "Goldilocks" Workflow: In autonomous mode, heavy multi-step processes often multiply errors rather than fix them. Massive, complex prompt templates look good on paper but fail in practice. The most reliable setups landed in a narrow “Goldilocks” zone of just enough structure without over-orchestration.

The app is free to use and supports Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and Zencoder.

We’ve been dogfooding this heavily, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the default workflows and if they fit your mental model for agentic coding.

Download: https://zencoder.ai/zenflow YT flyby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Ai-klT-B8
by krebsonsecurity | 2025-12-16 16:32:16+00:00
Sometimes just a little bit DNS research can yield a lot of useful results.

Looking at the passive DNS records for the domain chanceletikva.org shows it references the email address davidm@yeahdim.co.il.That email address is tied to multiple website registrations for a person by the name of David Margaliot, and also Shoshana Margaliot.

A search on this name in Domaintools finds the name David Margaliot tied to at least 25 domains, including ezri.org.il, which is a very odd site that features a huge image of a young child who is apparently in the hospital holding a gift wrapped box with a teddy bear. The site asks for donations but has a strange mission statement: Ezri Association promotes life-saving innovation through a surveillance drone project for emergency response teams, the establishment of an international medical knowledge database, along with other technological initiatives".

I'll probably continue the rest of this in a follow-up story.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-16 16:32:45+00:00
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram collection point ? The wikileak scandals ? 100k+ civilians dead in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that never existed. 15%+ of drone strike victims being civilian over the last 20 years

These are all accidents too I assume ? Idk what to expect from people who are currently blowing up random boats in international waters and who just declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction lmao
Open Source AI tool that sets up cloud infra from code
by jvcor13 | 2025-12-16 16:32:55+00:00
Hi HN. The team behind Shuttle have been working on Neptune, an open source AI Platform Engineer that reads your code and automatically wires up the cloud infrastructure.

Neptune is released under the Apache License 2.0.

We built this after seeing more teams rely on AI to write code, yet still needing to manually create and maintain cloud config. The AI could write a service, but it could not understand the system around it.

Neptune tries to solve that, it sits in your IDE (via an MCP server). It analyzes your code's intent (using AST and inference) and automatically updates a deterministic infrastructure specIt analyzes the structure of your project, detects the services and dependencies, and generates the infra configuration needed to run it on the cloud. The goal is not to hide everything behind magic. We do this by generating a transparent `neptune.json` spec. You see exactly what is being built. It's a 'Glass Box,' not a Black Box. Our goal is to make infra work understandable, predictable, and automatable.

Right now it can infer things like databases, queues, API services, and background workers. It proposes a change to your schema. You approve it. Then it applies it. The AI doesn't have root access to your cloud; it has access to the spec. It is early and still rough. There are missing pieces and edge cases. We would love to hear where it breaks for you.

We would love any feedback, issues, ideas, and failures. You can test the beta (5mins) here: https://www.neptune.dev/try-it-now

Why we built this:

- Context Switching: Writing application code + Terraform + YAML breaks flow state.

- The 'Day 2' Wall: Most AI-generated apps are black boxes you can't scale. We wanted a transparent spec.

- IaC Fatigue: Managing state files for simple micro services feels like overkill.

If you want more context, we wrote a longer post here:

https://www.neptune.dev/blog/introducing-ai-platform-engineer
by mat_b | 2025-12-16 16:33:25+00:00
Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of water and complaining that the water particles are moving in a direction that the levees pushed them. The levees are actually the bigger problem.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-16 16:33:48+00:00
> At least a deer is on the lookout for something real.

That is pretty much my point. Humans have the luxury of being anxious about stuff that’s not really a threat. Animals mostly don’t.

The ones who do are the ones who have come closest to achieving human luxury. My cats are often calm. They also get upset when they want to go outside but it’s cold.

Maybe I’m just projecting and my perception of animals as constantly worried about eating or being eaten is not real. Or maybe you’re projecting and your perception of calm is not real. Judging the mental state of animals is very difficult.
by throwmeaway820 | 2025-12-16 16:33:57+00:00
> Does it matter? Like how does it matter?

To me, it matters because most serious art requires time and effort to study, ponder, and analyze.

The more stuff that exists in the world that superficially looks like art but is actually meaningless slop, the more likely it is that your time and effort is wasted on such empty nonsense.
by shayway | 2025-12-16 16:33:58+00:00
I see what you're getting at, but I think a better framing would be: there's an implicit understand amongst humans that, in the case of things ostensibly human-created, a human found it worth creating. If someone put in the effort to write something, it's because they believed it worth reading. It's part of the social contract that makes it seem worth reading a book or listening to a lecture even if you don't receive any value from the first word.

LLMs and AI art flip this around because potentially very little effort went into making things that potentially take lots of effort to experience and digest. That doesn't inherently mean they're not valuable, but it does mean there's no guarantee that at least one other person out there found it valuable. Even pre-AI it wasn't an iron-clad guarantee of course -- copy-writing, blogspam, and astroturfing existed long before LLMs. But everyone hates those because they prey on the same social contract that LLMs do, except in a smaller scale, and with a lower effort-in:effort-out ratio.

IMO though, while AI enables malicious / selfish / otherwise anti-social behavior at an unprecedented scale, it also enables some pretty cool stuff and new creative potential. Focusing on the tech rather than those using it to harm others is barking up the wrong tree. It's looking for a technical solution to a social problem.