MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everdrive | 2025-12-15 14:35:20+00:00
>But given the limitations of our imperfect world, do you really think that we would be net-net better off without even making an attempt to recycle it?

This really depends on the specifics of how much we can move the needle. For instance, there's zero chance we're fully getting rid of plastics. Even in a world where we had perfect political will, you'd need them at a minimum for medical tools.

With regard to microplastic pollution, I think I'd need more information on the major causes. For instance, I've heard that car tires are one of the biggest causes on land, whereas fishing nets are one of the biggest causes in the ocean. To the extent that this is correct, recycling is not going to impact those problems one way or another. If for instance I were to learn that microplastic pollution from recycling was so minimal it can barely be measured, I would be open to changing my position. (my understanding that plastic recycling is a significant cause of microplastic pollution.)

I've rambled a bit here, but ultimately the question needs to be answered whether plastic recycling is doing more harm than good. If it's doing more harm then it makes no sense to "at least try," as "success" would put us in a worse position.
by kokomo31ads | 2025-12-15 14:35:23+00:00
I started reverse engineering lovable in Aug. I recreated their functionality.

It takes a text prompt and generates a full, deployable website in about 30 seconds.

GitHub: https://github.com/BrandeisPatrick/blank-space Live demo: https://www.blankspace.build

Built with OpenCode and Microsoft AutoGen for the agent orchestration.

Still early – would love feedback on the prompt-to-site pipeline or ideas for what to prioritize next.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-15 14:35:44+00:00
The EU is actually 3rd for both imports and exports. Still massive but... 3rd. In 2024 (in trillion USD):

Exports: China 3.8, US 3.2, EU 2.80

Imports: US 4.0, China 3.2, EU 2.6

You can't just add export/import number for each EU countries to find the EU number because EU countries trade a lot among themselves.
by kryllic | 2025-12-15 14:37:03+00:00
If there wasn't an ongoing de facto recession, I would wager that the overvaluation of companies _would_ be at or near dot-com bubble levels. These AI companies have plenty of venture capital, but consumers are probably not as influential as they were back then. I agree we likely won't see a dotcom-like crash, but there will still be fallout that will take months to settle.
by brewtide | 2025-12-15 14:37:27+00:00
> 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.

I've never owned or really used a different brand than roomba (I've joked that I've owned 4 roombas, but never purchased a single one...) but I fully agree that the modular nature of their parts replacement is a super welcome thing. The fact that the electrical contacts are all just sprung into each other, and each component is basically designed for near-minimal replacement overlap (not replacing things that are not broken) is something that I would LOVE to be implemented in more things. I always assumed that it was this 'forward thinking' design that a) Likely added a bit to the cost of the brand b) Likely didn't assist with future sales from breakages, etc.

Out of the 4 I've acquired over the years, one has been stripped of parts and discarded. One is relatively in that process, and the other 2 are happily (?) doing the different areas of my house. A few amazon batteries later (Which I originally only charge when I am home and able to check on them, then place faith in 'not burning down the house') and everything is hunky doory.

Also, they have been around so long, there are a boatload of 3d printed replacement parts floating around that can be quite useful if one has a 3d printer.

I've always held them in pretty high regard for repairable tech.
by graemep | 2025-12-15 14:37:37+00:00
Its economy is a lot smaller than that of the US, and smaller than China in PPP terms, and is growing much slower than either.

Do you have import and export number that adjusts for transhipments? What is the economic impact of the trade?

Even the UK which was an EU member until recently, has a free trade deal with the EU, and is right next to the EU geographically trades more with the rest of the world - and that is including a lot of transhipment trade (look up "Rotterdam Effect"). You can find the same for lots of EU countries.
by benoau | 2025-12-15 14:37:39+00:00
> While it is not prohibited to use AI as a learning aid or a development tool (i.e. code completions), extension developers should be able to justify and explain the code they submit, within reason.

> Submissions with large amounts of unnecessary code, inconsistent code style, imaginary API usage, comments serving as LLM prompts, or other indications of AI-generated output will be rejected.

Sounds like they're only going to catch the painfully-obvious stuff.
by inanutshellus | 2025-12-15 14:38:12+00:00
I'm thankful that GP spoke up.

I come to the comments to find out what these "clickbait title" articles (meaningless words with no context) really are before clicking.

Secondly, the site appears to be "hug of death"'d at the moment. I presume it was still accessible but struggling when OP posted.
by digitalsushi | 2025-12-15 14:38:12+00:00
i got put on a statin 10 years ago and started to have blindness events, a migraine related symptom. the effect showed up within a few weeks of my first time taking the statin, at age 35

for ten years i lived with it

but then i experimented with coq10 and basically the day i started taking those the blindness and migraines disappeared

sharing out of a compulsion that it could help a wayward googler some day

this is not medical advice, this is an anecdote
by wongarsu | 2025-12-15 14:38:12+00:00
> We’d have to end pretty much all those programs to run a minuscule basic income

Isn't ending all those programs one of the core ideas of universal basic income? Instead of having a huge bureaucracy administering targeted social welfare you cut all the overhead and just pay everyone enough to exist, regardless of whether you actually need it. It'd still be more expensive, but giving people something dependable to fall back on would hopefully increase innovation and entrepreneurship, offsetting some of the costs
by cjbgkagh | 2025-12-15 14:38:13+00:00
Gaines in efficiency is probably the number one thing that can’t be effectively taxed long term. Perhaps it could be possible to tax a specific process but even then the incentive to create loopholes would be immense, since the process is already porous those who can effectively avoid the tax make more money to invest back into making more loopholes. If we can’t stop such corruption when it is subsidizing less efficient industries that waste much of their surplus on their inherent inefficiencies how could we expect to stop it when it’s subsidizing more efficient industries.

Additionally the improvements in technology enables vertical integration at much lower scales and this means there is left surface area to tax, cheap raw goods go in, cheap refined goods come out. This already scales down to such an extent I DIY many personal projects with CNCs, and by leveraging services like Send-Cut-Send and PCBWay I can build all sorts of stuff that I otherwise would have spend 10x more on. Instead of having to earn more money that is taxed in order to purchase it I can build it as a hobby. Increasing the tax on the pipeline on purchased goods would just increase the proportion of projects that are more economical for me to make. My hobby would make money if I sold the items, but since they’re for personal use this does not get taxed.

Something unusual about the AI revolution is that the increase in productivity does not appear to be mirrored by an increase in consumption. More of what people consume is entirely digital, many people spend their lives scrolling TikTok and they do appear to be satiated. Sure there is a data center boom but I think that’s more of a mania and is going to end up over built.

The computer and internet revolutions are still slowly propagating throughout the world, there are still many technological gains to be made here and I think one of the limiters to adoption is the lack of available tech talent in the long tail. AI is different as it requires far less tech talent to use and additionally makes it easier to take advantage of the computer and internet revolutions. Not only can it propagate without the same limiting factors but it facilitates the propagation of the other revolutions at the same time.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-15 14:38:20+00:00
Tax is kinda tangential to all of this, but:

> Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago

And what happened around that time? yeah it wasn't a period of smooth calmness was it? Periods of massive changes in productivity (ie lots of people going into unemployment) causes huge societal changes.

The thing that staved off revolution in the US was lots of spending, banking regulations, federal reserve, new deal and the like. Those that didn't do that, fell.

So its less about who pays tax, and more about who is going to give money to the unemployed?
by 9rx | 2025-12-15 14:38:44+00:00
What would the money be used for, though? It does not serve as viable nourishment or shelter.

Money is, after all, just a record of debt to facilitate trade so that transactions do not have to be completed immediately. Consider your job. You work so you can eat, but you might not be hungry at work. So, instead, you offer your employer a loan. The employer issues an IOU (money) to denote the promise to give you food later. Then, you take the IOU to the grocery store later and hand it back in to receive the food promised.

But in a world where a few people own all the core resources (land, minerals, etc.) and have all of their needs met by AI, they won't have any need for trade. They'll summon the AI to deliver anything they need.

It seems the only thing it might be able to serve is a record of who gets what after civil war captures the spoils from those rich few. But said civil war will require significant effort from all, perhaps even against their will; which is quite unlike a UBI system.
by andrepd | 2025-12-15 14:39:36+00:00
> Rust types can be very verbose, RefCell<Optional<Rc<Vec<Node>>>>

Anything in any language can be very verbose and confusing if you one-line it or obfuscate it or otherwise write it in a deliberately confusing manner. That's not a meaningful point imo. What you have to do is compare what idiomatic code looks like between the two languages.

C++ has dozens of pages of dense standardese to specify how to initialise an object, full with such text as

> Only (possibly cv-qualified) non-POD class types (or arrays thereof) with automatic storage duration were considered to be default-initialized when no initializer is used. Each direct non-variant non-static data member M of T has a default member initializer or, if M is of class type X (or array thereof), X is const-default-constructible, if T is a union with at least one non-static data member, exactly one variant member has a default member initializer, if T is not a union, for each anonymous union member with at least one non-static data member (if any), exactly one non-static data member has a default member initializer, and each potentially constructed base class of T is const-default-constructible.

For me, it's all about inherent complexity vs incidental complexity. The having to pay attention to lifetimes is just Rust making explicit the inherent complexity of managing values and pointers thereof while making sure there isn't concurrent mutation, values moving while pointers to them exist, and no data races. This is just tough in itself. The aforementioned C++ example is just the language being byzantine and giving you 10,000 footguns when you just want to initialise a class.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-15 14:39:43+00:00
I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.

I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
by pmarreck | 2025-12-15 14:39:58+00:00
Site isn't loading but I have a neat side project that works with any monospace font that includes Unicode glyphs which converts raw binary to unicode and back while passing through 7-bit ASCII characters, replacing control characters with related symbol representations, and sticking with actually-monospace glyphs (a surprising number of glyphs break the width rule across various "monospace" fonts), while ALSO being denser and more directly legible than hex encoding: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary

Each UTF8 character (1 to 3 bytes) corresponds to 1 byte of input data. The average increase in data size is about 70%, but you gain binary independence in any medium that understands utf8 (email, the terminal, unit tests, etc.)
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-15 14:40:12+00:00
I used to think this kind of stuff until I had to make similar decisions about UX for technical software that wasn't just used by engineers.

"Want to upgrade to 15.7.3 or 26.2?" is just a nonstarter.

Kinda feels like crying wolf and watering down the term to invoke "dark pattern" for platform software upgrades.
by runako | 2025-12-15 14:40:19+00:00
> I'm starting to see is people really questioning renewal quotes from larger "enterprise" SaaS companies

This practice predates even SaaS.

I read this article expecting to see a specific SaaS that was at risk, and the most I saw was "dashboards." (Which: dashboards frequently aggregate data, while the ongoing work of collection/maintenance/etc. is done by more complex applications.)

The thesis seems to be that companies can use coding agents to build one-off internal versions of SaaS apps like e.g. Workday or Salesforce or Slack or Jira or MixPanel or HubSpot. Which, if one could make such a thing for free and maintain it for free, why not?

Fortunately/unfortunately depending on where you sit, magical thinking isn't going to get Claude Code to build Workday, regardless of the quality of your AGENTS.md. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these takes have spent any real time using Claude Code. It's good, but please be realistic.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-15 14:40:54+00:00
I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits. It's not an AI tax, but rather an automation tax. Since salaries are taxed, it seems sensible to divert those losses for the collective elsewhere. After all, robots are ultimately not consuming any goods or services with personal income. The profit has to come from somewhere. Along the distribution of resources, collective infrastructure and social services need to be maintained and payed by taxes. You could alternatively tax the money spent, but this creates wrong incentives, I think, and the burden would be unfairly distributed (e.g. everybody has to eat about the same amount). As long, as we don't have something like universal income/wealth redistribution, "efficiency" in automation is parasitic for the collective and shouldn't be incentivized by essentially tax cuts. As long as the collective's needs are met, it doesn't matter if humans or machines did the work.

Basically if you got a business which creates a certain amount of value, the collectives' total tax income (considering possible employees' income tax) should be the same, independently of people employed and paid. 500M profit from fully automated web hosting should result effectively in the same collective tax income as 500M profit from a factory employing 10K people.

Note: I am throwing all "taxes" in a bucket. E.g. humans need health insurance, therefore the fully automated business tax needs to reflect these costs too.
by adventured | 2025-12-15 14:40:59+00:00
What I'm seeing Ad infinitum on HN in every thread on agentic development: yeah but it really doesn't work perfectly today.

None of these people can apparently see beyond the tip of their nose. It doesn't matter if it takes a year, or three years, or five years, or ten years. Nothing can stop what's about to happen. If it takes ten years, so what, it's all going to get smashed and turned upside down. These agents will get a lot better over just the next three years. Ten years? Ha.

It's the personal interest bias that's tilting the time fog, it's desperation / wilful blindness. Millions of highly paid people with their livelihoods being disrupted rapidly, in full denial about what the world looks like just a few years out, so they shift the time thought markers to months or a year - which reveals just how fast this is all moving.
by ekrapivin | 2025-12-15 14:41:18+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! You are playing version 3 right now. Version 4 will be a massive bugfix – I am intending to release it by this Christmas.

"Seeding/sharable link" idea is bound to daily game feature – and this is a next feature pack going out in Q1 next year.

Card switch is also in the roadmap, it is part of the non-existent (for now) settings system.

Appreciate for the kind words! Stay tuned!
by infogulch | 2025-12-15 14:42:04+00:00
To quote the great Mr Sparrow:

> The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do.

When evaluating security matters, it's better to strip off the moral valence entirely ("rightly") and only consider what is possible given the data available.

Another potential concerning implication besides citizenship status: a person changed their id when put in a witness protection program.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-15 14:42:08+00:00
I was involved in writing a history book of an organization, and we used what was termed "journalistic integrity."

We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).

The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.
by rhines | 2025-12-15 14:42:20+00:00
Or upvotes might be a better example, at least for Reddit/Hackernews. But the idea being that the comments are sorted based on some algorithm, whether than be popularity or something else, and commenters are trying to optimize for that. In traditional forums where comments are sorted linearly and it's more about having a discussion with others, but when comments are surfaced by other metrics then it's less about the discussion and more about gaming those metrics.
by xandrius | 2025-12-15 14:42:27+00:00
The education system is a prime example of Goodhart's Law and I'm so surprised how little it's done to avoid that.

I guess that as long as possessing a piece of paper stating "Mr. White passed all hoops we put in front of them" is a baseline requirement for many jobs nowadays, we will always have this problem.

At least in tech, the piece of paper helps but it's mostly about hobby projects, external contributions, past job experiences and referrals which matter the most.

But in more and more countries even just working at a supermarket requires a high degeee, so the non-academically inclined people will try to keep finding ways to pass with as little effort as possible (and any learning takes effort). So, I can't really blame them.
by stingtao | 2025-12-15 14:42:42+00:00
working on an AI browser: https://github.com/stingtao/ai-browser

I found Comet so useful and I vibe coded my own version to seek AI possibility

Also on an live interactive quiz service: https://live.stingtao.info/?lang=en

This helped me host live event for 1,000 participants
by lm28469 | 2025-12-15 14:42:43+00:00
They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially.

We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.

I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
by mwexler | 2025-12-15 14:42:44+00:00
It's been a few years since the "Expert Mouse" was released, and there's still no "Magic Trackpad" equivalent on the Windows side. Still, the earlier Expert Mouse trackball have been pretty good for folks wanting an HID besides the keyboard. But it's been years since an updated design.

This version improves the scroll ring, but adds many more buttons and knobs, many of which are probably extraneous (imo).

Early users point to an odd "off-axis" placement of the main sensor which results in unexpected cursor movement when rotating at the north end of the ball, so may not fit your working style. But maybe worth the eyeball if you like your trackball.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-15 14:43:02+00:00
Probably the correct answer the LLM should give is "if you have to ask, definitely don't do that". Or... it can start asking diagnostic questions, expert-system style.

But yeah, I can imagine a multi-modal model actually might have more information and common sense than a human in a (for them) novel situation.

If only to say "don't be an idiot", "pick higher ground" . Or even just as a rubber duck!
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 14:43:22+00:00
> Please note that -fno-rtti and -fno-exceptions are non-conformant, c++ standard does not permit either.

I did not know that.

My understanding was that C does not require standard library functions to be present in freestanding. The Linux kernel famously does not build in freestanding mode, since then GCC can't reason about the standard library functions which they want. This means that they need to implement stuff like memcpy and pass -fno-builtin.

Does that mean that freestanding C++ requires the C++ standard library, but not the C standard library? How does that work?
by jmyeet | 2025-12-15 14:43:28+00:00
It's hard to truly comprehend the damage Red Scare did to all of our collective lives. The Post-WW2 era utterly destroyed the labor movement and pretty much any form of collective action. And all but about 10,000 people are worse off for it.

So many commnents here, yours included, make perfect sense when you simply look at them through the lens of the workers' relationship to the means of production.

Automation could be a good thing. It could mean we need to do less work and have more leisure time. Instead it gets concentrated in the hands of very few so they can become even wealthier. And the resultant layoffs are used to extract free labor from the people who remain and suppress their wages, all to eke out more profits.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-15 14:44:00+00:00
> I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...

That's a pretty Matrix "human-battery" level attitude to your fellow brothers and sisters. "They need to work to pay taxes, rent, and insurance". Ie, they only exist and are allowed to live to be serfs - or cattle really.