MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by setsewerd | 2025-12-15 20:05:49+00:00
It already bugs me when ChatGPT describes how it is going to answer before answering, but it's 10x more annoying when I'm asking for a concise response without filler etc.

As an aside, I've noticed the self-description happens even more often when extended thinking mode is being used. My unverified intuition is that it references my custom instructions and memory more than once during the thinking process, as it then seems more primed than usual to mimic vocabulary from any saved text like that.
Ask HN: Bloggers, how do you manage your content?
by freemanjiang | 2025-12-15 20:05:49+00:00
I would like to start a personal blog. I think Substack is a good option, but I would like more control over styling (potentially custom components) and want to host the blog on my own website.

I wanted to ask what the writing and hosting process is like for people who have a personal website and blog—do you just write markdown and then use a renderer?

I would like a kind of wysiwyg editor to see exactly how the content will appear once loaded. The issue with writing in a separate editor is that the line breaks, line lengths, font, etc. never appear how they will actually look. Thanks!
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 20:06:01+00:00
> the alcohol was legalized in order to a) reverse the ill effects of prohibition which led to birth of large-scale organized crime

This statement is historically incomplete, and geographically myopic.

Alcohol in the US was initially fully legal, then prohibited for a short period, then legalized again.

Elsewhere, laws differ, but alcohol is largely regulated but legal for adults in most (non-Islamic) countries.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-12-15 20:06:03+00:00
Yes? You also have several cameras and microphones in your pocket, and probably wearing more microphones on your head at various times of the day. And so does everyone around you.

GP is correct. "Roving camera/microphone" -> ??? -> "harm". What is "???" and what is "harm" specifically, and how the former leads to the latter, in specific steps?
by keeda | 2025-12-15 20:07:15+00:00
That's why the ITC is so relevant here: it is relatively quite speedy compared to regular patent trials, and have the power to issue injunctions against imports (which is partly why it was relied on a lot during the smartphone patent wars.) So you may not collect damages from Chinese companies, but you can completely block their infringing imports into the US and deny them US revenue.
by GalaxyNova | 2025-12-15 20:07:18+00:00
> any app on the bus can read all secrets in the store if the store is unlocked

Holy shit. I knew conceptually that this was the case but never really took the time to consider the implications.

Pretty much whenever you unlock your keyring all your secrets are accessible by any software that can connect to the bus... How is this acceptable? Are we just supposed to run everything as Flatpak?
by arjie | 2025-12-15 20:07:31+00:00
The Pimsleur apps are not gamified for the most part and the Mandarin teaching is good enough that my in-laws are happy when I speak with them. I don't think I would get any other tool. The gamified apps are not useful to me, and a new calm app is not interesting.

As someone who has paid for language learning applications many times in the past, let me be categorical: I am not interested in what you are selling. I hope that helps inform your product direction.
by fullstop | 2025-12-15 20:07:42+00:00
We must have different layouts or settings because I can count on one hand the number of times that it's gotten stuck.

Once it ate a piece of paper and jammed the main roller. The other times have been when it's managed to get itself under an area rug.

If I leave a door open it doesn't touch it. On mine there are settings which tell it to avoid bumping into things.
Show HN: Enabling Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) for Shopify Stores
by afrederico | 2025-12-15 20:08:01+00:00
Hey HN!

We got tired of waiting on Shopify, Stripe, and OpenAI to converge on a solution and let the world use it, so we built our own infrastructure to bridge that gap.

For merchants, this is a one-click setup: connect your Shopify store and your catalog becomes programmatically accessible to AI systems via ACP. Agents can query structured product data (inventory, pricing, availability) and initiate purchases using ACP-compatible flows. Full agentic payments via Stripe are on the roadmap.

A few technical details that may interest this crowd:

- Shopify’s APIs were designed for human storefronts and backend services, not autonomous agents. We built an abstraction layer that presents commerce data in a deterministic, agent-friendly way.

- Payments are the hardest part. The challenge isn’t charging a card — it’s safely handing off agent intent to Stripe while preserving authorization, fraud controls, and auditability.

Basically, everything is structured and permissioned. No scraping, no prompt-hacking your storefront HTML.

For developers, we provide clear docs and SDK-style endpoints so integrating an agent is straightforward. The goal is to make “AI can shop this store” as simple as calling an API, not building custom glue code per merchant.

We’re running limited beta signups while we learn where this breaks in real usage. Right now it’s free for smaller stores as we focus on stability and feedback rather than monetization.

The early interest has been strongest from merchants selling technical or niche products, where agent-driven discovery and purchasing actually makes sense.

We’re live at https://actory.ai. If you run a Shopify store, are building agents, or have thought about agent-driven commerce, we’d love blunt feedback.

What are we missing? What breaks if even 5–10% of commerce flows through agents in the next few years?
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-15 20:08:02+00:00
A cheap used mini desktop with a linux install on it is also a good way to go. Throw in a wireless mouse and keyboard and you can do not only what an AppleTV or Android box does but also everything a cheap used mini pc can do.

Even something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/127547167640

Would be a media powerhouse compared to almost any set top box you can buy.

Throw OpenElec or OSMC on it for simple media setup or Bazzite or Ubuntu for a normal linux desktop with downloadable applications for most streaming platforms.
by richwater | 2025-12-15 20:08:51+00:00
The problem is this doesn't really work anymore with Widevine protected content. You are not getting Widevine L1 protected content through Windows or other type of home desktop operating system. Even without L1 content, platforms like Youtube won't serve 5.1 surround unless it's through an app and not the browser.

I'm not saying you need a smart TV, but if you want to get the content you're actually paying for via Netflix, HBO etc in the highest quality they offer, you'll need to fork over money for a device with dedicated hardware
by throwaway_20357 | 2025-12-15 20:08:59+00:00
> I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.

Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:

* is well designed

* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing

* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability

* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit

If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
by tomhow | 2025-12-15 20:09:02+00:00
Not a senator, a member of the federal House of Reps (she was my local member, in fact).

I do think this is all a bit of a conspiracy theory. There was support for the ban from many quarters in politics, media, parent groups etc due to widespread mental health issues among teenagers. And state governments are still doing plenty to try and mitigate problem gambling (whilst also relying heavily on taxes from gambling).
by hdjrudni | 2025-12-15 20:09:24+00:00
I wanted to refute you but you're right. It's not a security benefit. With GQL the server is supposed to null out the fields that the user doesn't have access to, but that's not automagic or an inherent benefit to GQL. You have the same problem with normal REST. Or maybe less so because you just wouldn't design the response with those extra fields; you'd probably build a separate 'admin' or 'privileged' endpoint which is easier to lock down as a whole rather than individual fields.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-15 20:09:26+00:00
> Guess how many Americans support Medicare For All, look up the polled number, and see if it surprises you.

I predict that it's a large majority, >60%, and am unsurprised to see a poll saying 65% (https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al...). As with universal background checks, the challenge is not coming up with a slogan that gets lots of support but refining it into a concrete policy proposal without losing too much.

If you were following politics during the Obama presidency, you'll recall the "you can keep your plan" saga, where a number of voters expected that healthcare reform shouldn't affect which doctors they can see or what coverage they have, a standard which even the ACA couldn't meet and no Medicare For All proposal could even approach. Another big problem is that the American Medical Association opposes Medicare For All, and people generally trust doctors more than politicians about healthcare.

> Yes, but they're obviously not Republicans! They're swing voters. Thus, what I said in your quotation of me does not apply to them. In 2020, Biden won swing voters, whereas in 2024, Trump won swing voters. They swing from one side to the other. They're not partisan, not loyal to a party or a person. This was my point: you can't move Republicans, but you can move independents, and there are actually a lot of independents.

Again, this is something where I'd encourage people to put themselves in Chuck Schumer's shoes. If you applied this attitude in the 1980s, you'd have to conclude that Democrats should simply give up on trying to win the presidency; there aren't enough swing voters, the Republican candidate keeps winning in blowouts, and certainly there's no point trying to compete in solid Republican states like California. If you're behind right now and want to start winning elections, you simply can't start from the premise that anyone who identifies with the other side is unreachable. It's true that the Republican candidate will always win the vast majority of self-identified Republicans, but the size and shape of that set can be greatly influenced by political strategy.
by kragen | 2025-12-15 20:09:28+00:00
Sixel support unfortunately came to terminals in 01988, as that page explains. I saw it myself in 01992. Sending uncompressed color raster data over a 9600-baud serial link again every time you wanted to look at it was a terrible idea, made worse by the stupid Sixel encoding inflating it by an additional 33%.

Today, when we're sending it to terminal emulators running on teraflops supercomputers over gigabit-per-second links, it's only a waste of CPU and software complexity instead of user time and precious bandwidth. But it's still a waste.

Why couldn't we have FTP and Gopher support in web browsers instead?
by nceqs3 | 2025-12-15 20:09:36+00:00
The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily automatable tasks, and forces LE to use their own judgement (which many would argue has bias). The ACLU and EFF are so discredited on tech issues. They simply support criminals. The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.

Thank you, Flock!
by asim | 2025-12-15 20:09:51+00:00
So difficult but look somebody has to try. For us to make any progress we need attempts at this. Package the hardware and software, find a target demographic and go after it. I don't know if there's a mistake in going too broad or not having a tailored OS with a smaller footprint or being the general utility but we only learn through these tests. Good luck Umbrel team!
by erikig | 2025-12-15 20:09:54+00:00
The Indian-born textbook author mentioned (Malkiat Singh [0]) had an inordinate influence on many Kenyan students because his textbooks were the de-facto standard for years. Its interesting how this influence extends as his students get to curate the LLMs on which the world has come to rely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh
by Ajedi32 | 2025-12-15 20:09:59+00:00
You've spent your whole life living in a society where that's already happened. 1000 years ago nearly everyone was employed in agriculture. Now nearly all those jobs are automated.

So you tell me: where are the consumers? Why aren't we all unemployed and unable to afford to buy anything now that those agriculture jobs have been automated away? Or did we find other productive activities to spend our time on?
by alexeestec | 2025-12-15 20:10:18+00:00
The real question isn't whether AI should pay taxes—it's whether we're even asking the right questions about what 'work' means in 20 years. Taxing AI is like taxing electricity after the industrial revolution. We didn't tax the looms, we restructured society around abundance.

The optimistic take nobody wants to hear: if AI genuinely replaces most knowledge work, we're not looking at a tax problem, we're looking at the first real chance to decouple survival from employment. That's either utopia or dystopia depending entirely on whether we're thinking in election cycles or generations.

Will include this link in my next issue of https://hackernewsai.com/
by andy_ppp | 2025-12-15 20:10:31+00:00
Haha - you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says. Donald Trump has also made flag burning a crime. So it's not as if the US is a champion of free speech anymore.

I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was deliberately trying to antagonise and abuse people upset which yes is illegal here. He could have easily made any points he wanted without abusing people. Note that he was given a suspended sentence in the hope that he would stop abusing people and has served no jail time as yet. Seems like a sensible decision.

The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.

Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about abuse online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04vqldn42go

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9v4e0z9r8o
by echelon_musk | 2025-12-15 20:10:39+00:00
Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ.

I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.

This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write.

The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my life.
by slg | 2025-12-15 20:10:49+00:00
I'm very hesitant to make those sorts of accusations, but the writing has multiple hallmarks of LLMs and this is one of three articles posted today by the same author to that blog before noon their local time. I guess this is just what the internet is now, constantly wondering whether you're reading actual thoughts of another human being or whether it is just LLM output generated to stick between ads.
by ben_w | 2025-12-15 20:11:02+00:00
Fair question. That's the kind of "who knows?" which might make it hard to defeat them in litigation, unless Google staff have been silly enough to write it down in easy-to-find-during-discovery emails.

But as a gut-check, even if all the people not complaining about it are getting use out of any given model, does this justify the ongoing cost of training new models?

If you could delete the ongoing training costs of new models from all the model providers, all of them look a lot healthier.

I guess I have a question about your earlier comment:

> Google is always going to be training a new model and are doing so while profitable.

While Google is profitable, or while the training of new models is profitable?
by voidfunc | 2025-12-15 20:11:04+00:00
It really says a lot about our society in general. I believe there's a small portion of bad actors pushing stupid policies for their own agenda, but then I also believe there's a huge number of actual people who have lost any ability to reason critically and learn. What we're seeing is those people learning via trial and error while subjecting us to their live trials because they couldn't be bothered to pick up a book or trust the existing experts.
by haar | 2025-12-15 20:11:07+00:00
https://ardent.pet/

I doubt it'll be of interest to folks here - but my Family recently (in the last couple of years) started to breed ragdoll cats in the U.K.

This has been my personal project to understand where I personally find LLMs useful as coding assistants, and where I don't. One easy to spot example is, front-end + copy. Another area I've enjoyed it is talking through how I'd design and build functionality and features ahead of time.

It's been very interesting, and is helpful to folks I care about, even if no-one else ends up using it!
by richardfeynman | 2025-12-15 20:11:31+00:00
Thanks for finally stating your epistemic standard out loud: “credible hearsay and correlating patterns” is enough for you to accuse Jews of trying to assassinate a U.S. president. That is not “knowing history.” That is how conspiracy theories work. "Quite obvious" and "no reason to think false" don’t count as proof. You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling. That's bad faith discussion and against HN rules. I’m not playing “atrocity analogy” whack-a-mole as you pivot to minimizing the Holodomor to cover for a claim you cannot document. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence.
by hdjrudni | 2025-12-15 20:11:43+00:00
> If a server gets inputs it doesn't recognize

If you just slap in Zod, the server will drop the extra inputs. If you hate Zod, it's not hard to design a similar thing.

> or if client and server disagree that a field is optional or not

Doesn't GQL have the concept of required vs optional fields too? IIUC it's the same problem. You just have to be very diligent about this, not really a way around it. Protobufs went as far as to remove 'required' out of the spec because this was such a common problem. Just don't make things required, ever :-)
by acituan | 2025-12-15 20:12:01+00:00
Employers paid for healthcare in 1970s too, and even for higher percentages of the workforce. If there is a premium inflation surpassed the CPI, that is still inflation, not real growth. If there’s an inflation problem in delivering a temporally comparable service, that is not a “real wage” item for the employee [1]. So what the nominal figure today shouldn’t be relevant.

I agree it shouldn’t be an employer item too, but whatever employers lose on premiums, they get more on an overall stickier and cheaper labor supply.

[1] one could argue the productivity of healthcare increased, and the data indeed supports this with the overall life expectancy increase from 70s to now mid 70s plus quality of life treatments. But again most of the spend is actually on the tail end at this age group, which raises the workers’ premium without delivering the benefit. Therefore not much structural gain for the actual working age employee.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 20:12:26+00:00
OK, I'll bite.

It doesn't correlate with violent behaviors, unlike meth and alcohol. It isn't highly addictive like opioids. Users don't tend to spend their lives sedated beyond cognition, like residents of opium dens and absinthe parlors (without discussing what part of absinthe encouraged it).

I don't personally enjoy it, but ... did banning it include some reasoning beyond "Drugs are immoral!"?
by addaon | 2025-12-15 20:12:28+00:00
An IDE, by name, integrates the development environment. Depending on target, development lifecycle usually includes writing code, generating binaries, pushing those binaries to the target, executing on the target, and debugging on the target; so an IDE includes editing, compiling, linking, device/JTAG drivers, and debugging, in my mind. I suppose for platforms without cross-compilation the device drivers vanish, and for languages without compilers and linkers similar; but at a minimum, development means both authoring and debugging code, and so an IDE must provide an integrated view of the debugging process.
by ksymph | 2025-12-15 20:12:39+00:00
Functionally it makes no difference whether you split near the middle or not -- a truly random selection would sometimes end up with a pile of one, and that's totally fine. As long as you're not trying to game the system by, say, specifically counting out the sticks to get the outcome you want, it makes no difference. (and if you're doing that, then what's the point?)

Splitting closer to the middle does make it easier to avoid unintentionally counting though. If you make the same splits every time, you'll get the same outcome of course.

Philosophically / spiritually speaking, "don't think about it too much and just split wherever feels right" is the simple answer. Keep in mind the question you want to ask when you make the split and let whatever happens happen. Close your eyes if it helps you focus.
by dole | 2025-12-15 20:12:45+00:00
All of the ones I've noticed have been pointed directly towards streets for mostly license recognition but it's notable that they record whatever objects a typical real world AI image model could. In my area, we have Flock, Shotspotter, Stingray devices, free Ring camera programs from law enforcement departments.

Our Lowe's have the mobile parking lot camera/light units, I wasn't aware if these were Flock but either wouldn't be surprised if they were, had access or plans to buy in.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-15 20:12:56+00:00
You're misreading the original comment.

As originally used, the city on a hill comment was about aspirations, not achievements. IOW, the US was aspiring to be the city on the hill, not that it was.

And then JumpCrissCross's comment says that the US has stopped even aspiring to be the city on the hill.

It's a comment saying the US has fallen. How is that absurdly self-congratulatory?
by pedrozieg | 2025-12-15 20:13:07+00:00
A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you really have to over-communicate what happens if Umbrel-the-company disappears or changes direction: how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?

The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with. That’s mostly about boring stuff: automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies, and clear guarantees about what runs locally vs phoning home. If Umbrel leans into being forkable and portable across generic hardware, it has a shot at being trusted infrastructure instead of just another pretty NAS that people regret once the marketing site goes dark.