MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 18:29:18+00:00
> I do see a lot of people very emotionally and psychologically committed to pointing out how deeply magical humans are, and how impossible we are to replicate in silicon.

This a straw man, the question isn't if this is possible or not (this is an open question), it's about whether or not we are already here, and the answer is pretty straightforward: no we aren't. (And the current technology isn't going to bring us anywhere near that)
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-12-08 18:29:29+00:00
Rand broadly attracts 2 types of people:

- The rebellious teenager. The often 'outgrow' it.

- The self made man (who in a certain way also rebels against society). These are generally the entrepreneurial types. Their understand the essence of views put forth by AR. Their views do not change over time.

Most people fall into the first category.
by potsandpans | 2025-12-08 18:29:47+00:00
I don't believe that this is going to happen, but the primary arguments revolving around a "super intelligent" ai involve removing the need for us to listen to it.

A super intelligent ai would have agency, and when incentives are not aligned would be adversarial.

In the caricature scenario, we'd ask, "super ai, how to achieve world peace?" It would answer the same way, but then solve it in a non-human centric approach: reducing humanities autonomy over the world.

Fixed: anthropogenic climate change resolved, inequality and discrimination reduced (by reducing population by 90%, and putting the rest in virtual reality)
by tuhgdetzhh | 2025-12-08 18:30:11+00:00
It would raise the same kind of alert for me if someone used wget to download a binary executable instead of a shell script.

The issue is not the specific form in which code is executed on your machine, but rather who is allowed by you to run code on your computer.

I don't trust arbitrary websites from the Internet, especially when they are not cryptographically protected against malicious tampering.

However, I do trust, for instance, the Debian maintainers, as I believe they have thoroughly vetted and tested the executables they distribute, with a cryptographic signature, to millions of users worldwide.
by nosefurhairdo | 2025-12-08 18:30:40+00:00
I'm with a company that was acquired by IBM ~2.5 years ago. The internal systems are definitely rough, but for the most part it's business as usual.

I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far.

I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.

FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-08 18:30:46+00:00
Alright, well in the interest of a conclusion, I'll say that you made really good points, I've changed my opinion on some but not all of the topics.

> "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is"

They don't care about random people doing those things, but if someone with a known terrorist cell association is in the US talking over signal. Or if someone is visiting extremist sites using tails, they'd want to know (and they can using metadata available today). They're not interested in home-grown terrorism or law enforcement, but all other matters of national security don't neatly fall into "foreign vs domestic" buckets. Even if it is all happening outside of the US, the servers Signal uses might be in the US for example.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-08 18:31:03+00:00
That qualifier only makes the anthropormorphization more sound. Have you actually thought it through? Give an untrained and unspecialized human the power to cause significant loss of life in a medical context in the same exact capacity, and it's all but guaranteed that's the outcome you'll end up with.

I think it's important to be skeptical and push back against a lot of the ridiculous mass-adoption of LLMs, but not if you can't actually make a well-reasoned point. I don't think you realize the damage you do when the people gunning for mass proliferation of LLMs in places they don't belong can only find examples of incoherent critique.
by jascha_eng | 2025-12-08 18:31:39+00:00
Verification is key, and the issue is that almost all AI generated code looks plausible so just reading the code is usually not enough. You need to build extremely good testing systems and actually run through the scenarios that you want to ensure work to be confident in the results. This can be preview deployments or other AI generated end to end tests that produce video output that you can watch or just a very good test suite with guard rails.

Without such automation and guard rails, AI generated code eventually becomes a burden on your team because you simply can't manually verify every scenario.
by blacksharkAI | 2025-12-08 18:31:59+00:00
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by finalarbiter | 2025-12-08 18:32:01+00:00
I agree with your sentiment that the Kobo is better than the Kindle from an... ethical standpoint, if you have the money for one. However, it is worth noting that Kindles will always be cheaper than Kobo devices [0] due to economies of scale and lockscreen advertisements (removable with jailbreaking). From a pure cost perspective, and assuming the user is technically-minded enough to accomplish the jailbreak, the Kindle is likely always [1] a better deal.

[0] as of today, 12/8/25, the "base model" Kindle 11th Generation is priced at $109.99 USD, and the respective Kobo Clara BW is $139.99 USD.

[1] I say "likely always" to cover my bases. To my knowledge Calibre supports Kindle, just not as well as Kobo. That said I have found that the KOreader app is more than powerful enough for my use case (reading my own epubs, using dictionaries, etc.)
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-08 18:32:19+00:00
Nope. As far as the client is concerned, payment is delayed until the requirements are met that were laid out in the statement of work. They could care less how many hours were put in.

I personally have put in extra hours to complete a project for a client that I did the proposal for as the SME in the technology because I underestimated. I’m a salaried employee for my consulting company and didn’t get paid extra.

Our consultants in Brazil and Mexico though while they also don’t have to track their hours for our benefit. They have to get approved to work over 8 hours a day because of labor laws in those countries. I can imagine that if they might do more granular tracking so they can justify the need to work (and get paid) for more hours.

As a team lead, I’m just going to track Jira stories being done on time if I need to be on the approval chain.

I have heard about projects at my current company where we have to give the client free work because the requirements weren’t met within the time allotted. I’m sure there were internal retrospectives where we had to go through our Jira board and see why stories were mis estimated or whether sales underestimated.

But even that falls on the implementation side because one of the staff consultants or engineering manager has to sign off on an SoW before it goes to the client.

Even during the retrospective, no one is trawling through Salesforce for details. We are looking at Jira.

I’m not saying we don’t track work output. I am saying we aren’t tracking granularly in our time tracking system that is only for billing clients. No one is expecting us to track every hour.
by rectang | 2025-12-08 18:32:23+00:00
> Copycat Pirouette Skorts have been sold on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, TikTok Shop, DHGate, Temu, Shein, and countless other fly-by-night storefronts that will seemingly disappear as quickly as they popped up.

Are there any moves afoot to adjust laws to make "marketplace" websites liable for the actions of sellers?

Illegitimate knockoffs would be less of an issue if you had to go to independent websites to find them.
by graemep | 2025-12-08 18:32:26+00:00
That is a bad definition and I cannot find it on investopedia. it is essentially an extreme libertarian spin on the definition.

There are better definitions on both wikipedia and Britannica:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_capitalism

https://www.britannica.com/money/free-market

Especially this hit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_capitalism#Concept...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-08 18:32:45+00:00
Name a major U.S. public company in recent years that has consistently prioritized improving its product over boosting short term stock price or extracting maximum profits. If capitalism were truly a healthy system about building strong products to create healthy markets, this should be the norm (and enshitification shunned), not the exception.

What we actually see is a system of chartered extraction. Corporate executives are like Norman lords, granted their 'title' (CEO of instead of Earl of) by shareholders (rather than a king) in return for which both are/were expected to extract maximum value by any means necessary. Extractive tactics often at the expense of long-term product strength are behaviors shareholders expect if the CEO is to keep their bestowed 'title'.

Don't forget the progenitor joint stock company The East India Company, Capitalism in it's purest form without government restriction. Profit-maximizing, absentee extraction, with company executives serving as quasi-feudal lords over assets and people. Modern corporate capitalism is hard to distinguish, in its structure,history, behavior, and incentives, from the Norman extraction system, it's just dressed in a more politically palatable wrapper and forced to mellow out from it's desired East India Company style final form.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-08 18:32:45+00:00
I think usefulcat interpreted "std::vector<int> allocated and freed on the stack" as creating a default std::vector<int> and then destroying it without pushing elements to it. That's what their godbolt link shows, at least, though to be fair MSVC seems to match the described GCC/Clang behavior these days.
by thfuran | 2025-12-08 18:32:47+00:00
Yes, spending less money is better than spending more money (though there can be potential tax treatment differences or other complexities depending on exactly how money is spent), but that doesn't mean the person in charge of approving an employee's expense is authorized to approve expenses however they please. If they're given a budget that says they get X money in one category and Y money in another, they can't spend (X-2Z, Y+Z) and can only choose to spend (X,Y) or deny the request. Big organizations often have a lot of inefficiencies due to process.
by jeberle | 2025-12-08 18:32:52+00:00
I would look to the UCSD p-System as a precedent to the JVM. Both are byte-code interpreted VMs. Gosling used the p-system earlier in his career, prior to joining Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling#Career_and_contr...

The Objective-C runtime is very small: just enough to do late-bound fn calls to a tree of class defs. All on top of C.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 18:32:56+00:00
FBI would be the primary agency investigating TSB leaks, so no need for a coordinated messaging campaign.

If the FBI believed that TSB was Russian intelligence, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that it's not mentioned in the Mueller report.

We also still don't know how Hal Martin was related to TSB, the timing of the messages sent from his twitter account to Kaspersky (who apparently reported him to the NSA!) does pretty directly tie him to the TSB.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-08 18:33:02+00:00
I’m actually somewhat stoked about generative AI from a “good enough” perspective, because at this inflection point where a lot of countries and organizations are looking for Microsoft alternatives (digital sovereignty, etc), this is the best time to be able to build and deploy alternatives with the productivity advantages (if any) AI might provide.

Big Tech thinks they have a moat, when it’s really diffuse power being made available via genAI to build software good enough to replace them.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-12-08 18:33:05+00:00
I have seen several aspects of entertainment in my life get squeezed for money (Magic The Gathering, movies, TV streaming, video games) and I have decided to basically quit any form of entertainment which is solely controlled by large corporations.

People get extremely angry when Magic The Gathering charges more money, for more exclusive products, in more frequently occurring releases. Rage, grief, and sorrow over an aspect of your life that you allow a singular company to control. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control.

This is what the kids call “touching grass”.

At this point I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch movies, I don’t play Magic The Gathering, I only play video games over 10 years old.

As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life. Humans now more than ever have the opportunity to learn and do anything, but instead they spend it squandered on a shadow of real life.
by perihelions | 2025-12-08 18:33:06+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000977 ("Larry Ellison discussed axing CNN hosts with White House in takeover bid talks (theguardian.com)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048351 ("Larry Ellison Met with Trump to Discuss Which CNN Reporters They Plan to Fire (techdirt.com)")

Viewing this acquisition in terms of simple revenue alone is like positing Musk bought Twitter for its ad revenue. Total information control is priceless.

(In case anyone hasn't kept up with the plutocratic oligarchy in the US: Oracle's Larry Ellison currently owns Paramount (since July 2024), and Warner Bros. Entertainment owns CNN. This isn't explained in the CNBC OP: David Ellison is Larry's son and the token CEO).
by joshstrange | 2025-12-08 18:33:09+00:00
> He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond.

I remember reading that when it first came out and all I can think is: No, he doesn't like podcasts, if you like podcasts you listen to them.

That's like saying "He loves food, but instead of eating it he feeds it to an analyzer that tells him what elements were detected in it".

I have to assume it's all BS/lies because if that's a truthful statement (about podcasts and the other things) then I really question wtf they are doing over there. None of that sounds like "the future", it sounds like hell. I cannot imagine how shitty it would be to have all my emails/messages to the CEO being filtered through an AI and getting AI slop back in return.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-08 18:33:33+00:00
It's worse than that. LLMs are slightly addictive because of intermittent reinforcement.

If they give you nonsense most of the time and an amazing answer occasionally you'll bond with them far more strongly than if they're perfectly correct all time.

Selective reinforcement means you get hooked more quickly if the slot machine pays out once every five times than if it pays out on each spin.

That includes "That didn't work because..." debugging loops.
by 0018akhil | 2025-12-08 18:33:45+00:00
I've been building Loopi, an Electron-based desktop application for visual browser automation workflows. Think of it as a low-code tool to automate repetitive browser tasks.

What's new (and what makes it different):

Auto-Typed Variable System Instead of treating everything as strings, Loopi now automatically detects and preserves variable types: - `"42"` becomes a number, not a string - API responses are stored as objects you can access directly - Full support for array indexing: `{{users[0]}}`, `{{users[0].email}}` - Deep nesting works: `{{response.data[0].user.profile.email}}`

This sounds small, but it changes how you build automations—numeric comparisons actually work as numbers, not string comparisons.

Visual Workflow Editor - Drag-and-drop node graph (using ReactFlow) - Interactive element picker (click to select elements instead of writing CSS selectors) - Conditional branching with if/else logic - Real-time browser preview

API Integration - Make HTTP requests (GET/POST) - Store responses as typed objects - Access nested data directly: `{{apiResponse.user.followers}}`

Developer-Friendly - Written in TypeScript with discriminated unions for type safety - React + Electron architecture - Comprehensive documentation (12 guides, 3,600+ lines) - Templates for adding new step types

Open Source Available on GitHub with MIT license. Contributions welcome!

Current limitations: single automation execution at a time, no persistent logs yet. Planning to add headless mode and cloud sync in the future.

Would appreciate feedback from the HN community on what features would be most useful.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-08 18:33:50+00:00
If that were the only evidence I might agree that alternative explanations are as likely, but I cited only one of many studies that show similar outcomes. There are loads of other studies done with entirely different methodologies that indicate most human introspection is mostly better described as post hoc confabulism. That is to say, we don't use reason to make decisions so much as we make decisions, and then justify them with reasons. Nisbet and Wilson were showing it experimentally as far back as the late 70's. [0] It's been confirmed in different forms hundreds of times since.

Certainly we can come up with some alternative theories (like "free will") to explain it all away, but the simplest (therefore most likely correct) answer is just that we're basically statistical state machines and are as deterministic as a similar computational system.

To be clear, I'm not saying that metacognition doesn't exist. Just that I've never seen any reason to believe it's very different from current thinking models that just feed an output back in as another input.

[0] - https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...
by ASalazarMX | 2025-12-08 18:34:02+00:00
> I don't know what the point of "super intelligent" AI is if we aren't going to even listen to it

Because you asked the wrong question. The most likely question would be "How do I make a quadrillion dollars and humiliate my super rich peers?".

But realistically, it gave you an answer according to its capacity. A real super intelligent AI, and I mean oh-god-we-are-but-insects-in-its-shadow super intelligence, would give you a roadmap and blueprint, and it would take account for our deep-rooted human flaws, so no one reading it seriously could dismiss it as superficial. in fact, anyone world elite reading it would see it as a chance to humiliate their world elite peers and get all the glory for themselves.

You know how adults can fool little children to do what they don't want to? We would be the toddlers in that scenario. I hope this hypothetical AI has humans in high regard, because that would be the only thing saving us from ourselves.
by lokar | 2025-12-08 18:34:22+00:00
The government has never been able to enforce all laws even close to 100% of the time. Internet copyright violations never went to zero, and never can. But there is a ceiling on how far any large, organized profit-seeking group can go with it.

In the case crypto, there are lots of things they could do to limit the impact. They can forbid government regulated banks (or any corporation) from engaging with it. They can limit all the points where could you, in volume, convert in and out of the normal currency system.

So, obviously, the use of crypto can't be forced to zero, but that's not really an interesting point.

The question is, does crypto have, on balance, a legitimate use in developed liberal democracies? Or should these states suppress it?
by makepostai | 2025-12-08 18:35:16+00:00
We’ve been building MakePostAI for one goal: Fight the consistency issue of brands/creators. Get unlimited social content that’s always on-brand.

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Once the brand engine worked, the workflow became simple. You get on-brand ideas instantly. You can change anything through AI chat - tone, length, angle, style - and it stays consistent. The entire creation flow collapsed into: idea → tweak → publish. → Want it shorter? Done. → More playful? Done. → Rewrite in your brand tone? Done. → Turn one idea into multiple formats? Also done.

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by Rebelgecko | 2025-12-08 18:35:16+00:00
Kind of a niche use case, but BRK.B is nice if you want a single stock that is relatively diversified, kinda mirrors the greater market, and doesn't pay dividends.

My employer uses a shitty HSA provider (Healthequity) who doesn't provide any sort of tax reporting, and I live in a state that taxes HSAs. Investing in BRK.B instead of a broad fund is a bit riskier, but it saves me from spending an hour tabulating individual transactions when I do my taxes
by Draiken | 2025-12-08 18:35:38+00:00
> a great tool to allocate resources efficiently

Sorry but... WTF are you talking about?

It rewards self-destructive behavior in favor of short-term gains. Shareholders have *zero* commitment to the companies they buy shares from and will happily switch their entire portfolios on a whim. It's essentially people chasing the new shiny thing every single day.

Let's not forget it's a known fact that people with insider knowledge will profit over everyone else.

How is that efficient in any shape or form?

> If they undercut the US companies and are willing to accept low returns on their investments, then the respective USA competition will be driven out of business by their investors, because there will be other sectors to invest in, with higher RoI.

You're basically explaining one of the reasons stocks are a horrible idea for distributing resources.

It has nothing to do with whether or not it's central or distributed, it's merely the incentives they create. It's essentially Goodhart's law on steroids.