MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techblueberry | 2026-01-05 20:29:15+00:00
I actually think this is a profoundly interesting question and one that I'm interested in thinking about further.

I think it's a problem for society when bad behavior is not transgressive. And moreover I'm less certain about this one, but I sort of think theoretically that society should be more liberal than it's institutions, and it creates really weird feedback loops when the institutions are more "liberal" than the population naturally. (I'm using the term generically, not directly aligned with the political meaning)

I think the theory I would present is that people should not be encouraged to transgress further than they are impulsed to, but simultaneously people need an outlet to actually transgress in a way that is not acceptable! People shouldn't post edge memes because the algorithm encourages it. People should post edgy memes because it's transgressive! But when the institutions actually encourage it? How broken is it that you can't be an edgy teenager because edgy is the culture and not the counter-culture.

In 2025, I think the truly transgressive activity is to not be online. Is to be straight-edge. And I sort of wonder if this is a small part of the young male mental-health crisis. They're not telling edgy jokes to be closer to their friends, they're telling edgy jokes to get fake internet points so people click on more advertising. How fucked is that?

But it's like weird that kids are probably having less sex, drinking, smoking etc. then the institutions would have it.

So to kind of answer your question,

"In the 1990's, popular youth culture generally rebelled against this type of worry from adults but now even the youth are part of the moral witch-hunt for some reason."

This might explain how I, a formerly "edgy" gen-x 90's kid am heartily against institutions supporting this kind of behavior, while simultaneously supporting people engaging in it. The adults; X, parents, etc. SHOULD be worrying about this kind of stuff SO THAT popular youth culture can continue to rebel against it.
by wildzzz | 2026-01-05 20:29:25+00:00
I rarely play Powerball Mega millions but when I do, it's fun thinking about how you'd spend (and protect) your winnings. "First I'll pay off that old debt, then I'll buy a new car, then I'll buy that cute house I've been driving past everyday. Then I'll call my boss and tell him to suck a fat one".
by mrtksn | 2026-01-05 20:29:25+00:00
Of course it’s not the same thing but still doesn’t make sense to use companies as police. I’m sure it’s much easier than with Nikon but the wast majority of its users aren’t doing it, just go after those who do instead of demanding that the companies do the police work.

If it was a case where CSAM production becomes mainstream use case I would have agreed but it is not.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-05 20:29:31+00:00
I'm not sure if I'm off base here, but at this point google is a 20yo company with a massive existing revenue, I don't think the company is growing itself as much as it is maintaining its revenue and moat, in a similar fashion, you will be a promotion not for doing stuff, but just by dedicating years of your life in exchange for stability.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-05 20:29:39+00:00
>would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?

That's not what GP said. They said that using a model removes creativity. That's a ridiculous leap from their premise, especially considering that it's misleading at best.

>The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt.

Like most people who never actually played with it, you seem to assume that prompting is all you can do, and repeat the tiresome and formulaic opinions. That's not worth discussing in the 1000th time honestly. Instead, I encourage you to actually study it in depth.
by mapmeld | 2026-01-05 20:29:53+00:00
I'm seeing a much less sophisticated campaign for this on my city's subreddits recently... Someone will ask a weird or generic question, and either poster or the top comment is a throwaway account with a spiel about checking $site_name.

It's exhausting, especially since people will write out real advice and corrections about how to deal with rats, bedbugs, neighborhoods, etc. and it all goes into the ether in hopes someone will get scammed. Or maybe it's an SEO thing because the site name is so generic it's un-googleable. I hope it doesn't work.
by pixelready | 2026-01-05 20:29:57+00:00
It’s almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on the labor marketplace as the primary “prosperity” distribution mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between labor and capital will determine the average person’s level of prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor: collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. The following increase leverage of capital: monopoly, monopsony, cartel action, high unemployment rate, weak labor laws.

Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in.

So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible.

We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus.
by zmmmmm | 2026-01-05 20:30:09+00:00
For me the "responsibility first" part is the most important. I care more that you are willing to take responsibility at a higher level than your absolute performance at what you do. Because if you take responsibility you might make mistakes but you will fix them. But if you make mistakes and don't fix them, then giving you more autonomy is a liability. Fixing mistakes often involves demonstrating many aspects of operating at a higher level as well - you take the lead on communicating with other teams about the mistake, addressing the impact, apologising for any harm caused.

For me, taking responsibility is one of those necessary (but not sufficient) things I have to see before I will consider a promotion (at least, a genuine one where someone actually operates at a higher level with more autonomy).
by _mrinalwadhwa_ | 2026-01-05 20:30:15+00:00
This part of the post deeply resonates:

> .. The result will be that publishers will lose distribution sovereignty, and readers will lose one of the last tools that puts them, not algorithms, in control.
If we want an internet where publishers retain autonomy and readers retain agency, we need to treat RSS not as legacy plumbing but as strategic infrastructure.
by HillRat | 2026-01-05 20:30:19+00:00
Should go without saying, but since the media is doing a terrible job of reporting this, it's not at all clear what authority OSD/SecNav has to do this, given that even if there were something objectionable under the UCMJ about his statements he made those statements after retiring, and they aren't recalling him to active status (probably because a court martial would go very badly for the Navy and OSD).

It's exceedingly unlikely that this survives any administrative or legal scrutiny (and if it does, there's a whole lot of former active-status Trump allies, including GOFOs, who are more than vulnerable under these same standards); the main result, I think, is to elevate Kelly's political profile while turning most of the Pentagon even more against Hegseth and Phelan (the former being an over-promoted PAO, and the latter not even having that experience, having spent his career managing Michael Dell's money).
by ChiNutri20 | 2026-01-05 20:30:59+00:00
This is a fantastic breakdown of the modern 'static' mapping stack. Moving the heavy lifting (OpenStreetMap processing) to GitHub Actions and using PMTiles to serve data without a backend really lowers the cost of entry for small projects. It's impressive to see how far the tooling has come from needing expensive, dedicated tile servers to this 'virtually free' approach.
by tasty_freeze | 2026-01-05 20:30:59+00:00
I am?

Am I saying they should be disenfranchised from the country? Have I said they I have no empathy for their concerns and hope the worst for them? No.

What I said was it was infuriating when they are doing those things to the ~40% of Texans who are liberal. I didn't say it happens on all liberal forums, I'm complaining about the cases where it does happen. And please don't shift things because I said "everyone cheers" because it should be obvious it is a common phrase and doesn't literally mean I checked and every person on the forum commented.
by ebbi | 2026-01-05 20:31:18+00:00
Again, I'm not the most technical, but I think we need to step back and look at this holistically. Given Grok's integration with X, there could be other methods of limiting the production and dissemination of CSAM.

For arguments sake, let's assume Grok can't reliably have guardrails in place to stop CSAM. There could be second and third order review points where before an image is posted by Grok, another system could scan the image to verify whether it's CSAM or not, and if the confidence is low, then human intervention could come into play.

I think the end goal here is prevention of CSAM production and dissemination, not just guardrails in an LLM and calling it a day.
by lovich | 2026-01-05 20:31:24+00:00
Under previous US admins and the relationship the EU had, yeah.

The asshole puckering is from how Trump has completely flipped the table, everything is hyper transactional now, and as we’ve seen military action against leaders personally is also on the table.

I’m saying I could see the EU let this slide now because it’s not worth it politically to regulate US companies for shit like this anymore. Whether that would be out of fear or out of trying to buy time to reorganize would probably end up in future getting the same kind of historical analysis that Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement to Germany gets nowadays
by epistasis | 2026-01-05 20:31:33+00:00
How curious that your comment was downvoted! It seems completely appropriate and in line with the discussion.

I think it's time to revisit these discussions and in fact remove Section 230. X is claiming that the Grok CSAM is "user generated content" but why should X have any protection to begin with, be it a human user directly uploading it or using Grok to do this distribution publicly?

The section 230 discussion must return, IMHO. These platforms are out of control.
by kobieps | 2026-01-05 20:31:44+00:00
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Culture: We're agile and devops purists (before those terms got coopted)
by lukan | 2026-01-05 20:31:51+00:00
"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale"

I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is creqted by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.
by scotty79 | 2026-01-05 20:31:52+00:00
I guess I can see how someone might be enjoying this. Especially folks who are into excercise of any kind. But it's not for me. I think there's value in forgetting and re-learning as needed.

I learned A* at least 5 times already. And each time I learn it, I feel like I'm having better appreciation and understanding of how it works. Each time I'm falling in different traps, make different mistakes, that teach me more. I wouldn't have that insight if I just memorized how to correctly implement it the first time and recalled it whenever I needed a new implementation. Also I'm perfectly happy not knowing how to implement A* in between times that I need it.

I would like to be reminded that things exist, after I forgot them, so 20% sounds way more fun for me.

Anyways, thanks for sharing your fun. Don't let me be a buzzkill. ;-)
Ask HN: Should HN Be More Transparent About Shadow Bans?
by tonymet | 2026-01-05 20:33:06+00:00
Disclaimer: I’ve been shadow banned before (I believe twice) and the mods were very responsive and courteous in clarifying why and the terms to remove the ban.

I’m a big fan of this community, and its mods, as it’s one of the last places where I find stimulating and mostly on-topic dialogue.

My proposal is that Hackernews should improve transparency & control over shadow bans. Presently, shadow bans are only implicitly revealed to the user, e.g. by hitting a comment throttle.

In case you aren’t aware of shadow bans, they are applied by the mods to reduce your reach and throttle comments when you have violated HN TOS aka guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I’ve run integrity services for social media and understand that transparency for ban violations does allow for gaming of the system. So I understand why a community would not inform the violator of their ban status.

That said, I believe there is a happy medium that could be reached for good intentioned participants (like me) who may stumble with spicy / controversial comments from time to time.

It’s also timely, since AI content has been polluting HN, and we need to support real people (like me), especially controversial ones who care about the community (also me).

I’m a big fan of this community, and the mods, and hope that opening up conversation around shadow bans policy will help develop a good solution.

What do you think? Should T&C be improved with Shadow Bans?
by zeruch | 2026-01-05 20:33:26+00:00
Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).

I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.
by subhadipmitra | 2026-01-05 20:33:33+00:00
I built this for testing payment integrations. ISO 8583 is the binary protocol behind most card transactions (ATMs, POS terminals, payment switches) - notoriously painful to debug.

Features:
- Parse/build/validate messages (1987, 1993, 2003 versions)
- VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover, JCB, UnionPay
- 180k+ msg/sec with optional Cython
- CLI + Python SDK + Jupyter notebooks

The LLM integration lets you explain raw messages in plain English or generate messages from natural language ("$50 refund to Mastercard at ACME Store"). Works with OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or Ollama (fully offline).

Docs: https://iso8583.subhadipmitra.com

PyPI: pip install iso8583sim

Happy to answer questions about ISO 8583 or the implementation.
by almosthere | 2026-01-05 20:33:35+00:00
The higher education system is largely a scam. I have a degree in CS but I didn't really need to get it. I was already coding in C++ and other languages before I even went. I used to argue the opposite and that I would never have learned O notation (and its purpose), or red-black trees, etc... But the internet since the time I graduated (2003) has massively filled out what you can learn. Yes a college "forces" you to learn this stuff - but there HAS to be another way to FORCE someone to look at YT without taking on 100k of debt.

The one thing I would say that I agree about however is there is a difference in a person that went to college vs one that didn't. It's not exactly what they learned, but the filter they had to punish themselves through to say "I finished college". And yes, there is no other filter that does that. You can find people like that who didn't go to college too, but the "filter" is a convenient thing for employers.

We need to go back to a system where there are apprentices and masters and get rid of this entire college thing. The filter works just as well in those scenarios without putting people in 100k of debt.
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-05 20:33:38+00:00
Even a year ago, when Trump was posting claims that he was a king, etc. these things got removed, even though there were obvious implications on the tech industry. (Cybersecurity alone makes more political assumptions than it does on the hardness of the discrete logarithm, for example.)

I (and others) were arguing that the Trump administration is probably, and unfortunately, the most relevant topic to the tech industry on most any given day. This is because computer is mostly made out of people. The message that these political stories intersect deeply with technology (as is seen here) seems to have successfully gotten through.

I wish the most relevant tech story of every day were, say, some cool new operating system, or something cool and curiosity-inspiring like "you can sort in linear time" or "python is an operating system" or "i made X rewritten in Y" or whatever.

I think in most things, creation is much harder than destruction, but software and software systems are an exception where one individual can generally do more creation than destruction. So, it's particularly interesting (and jarring) when a few individuals are able to make decisions that cause widespread destruction.

We should collectively be proud that we have a culture where creation is easier than destruction. But it's also why the top stories of any given day will be "Trump did X" or "us-east-1 / cloudflare / crowdstrike is down" or "software widely used in {phones / servers} has a big scary backdoor".
by quantummagic | 2026-01-05 20:33:40+00:00
Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.

Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.
by jandrese | 2026-01-05 20:33:44+00:00
Before Elon bought it out it was mostly possible to contain the hate with a carefully curated feed. Afterward the first reply on any post is some blue check Nazi and/or bot. Elon amplifying the racism by reposting white supremacist content, no matter how fabricated/false/misleading, is quite a signal to send to the rest of the userbase.
by TheUnhinged | 2026-01-05 20:33:47+00:00
All of them? The author points at some particular issues they have had and concludes that all Apple services are garbage?! Well, except for iMessage and FaceTime.

I’ve been using Apple Music, iCloud Drive, bookmark sync, etc. for many years with zero issues. I even host my email at iCloud (since Google pulled the rug on the free Google Apps tier)—no issues whatsoever.

My family has also had zero issues.

Google Maps has a disgusting UX and I hate it every time I need to use it (for the reviews). Apple Maps has been great for the past few years.
And don’t get me started on Dropbox with their monstrosity Electron client. F*ck that.
Or the silly Spotify client that can’t do smart playlists and has no concept of genres.

IME, while not perfect, Apple’s services’ quality is far above the competition’s.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-01-05 20:33:56+00:00
My experience at several large companies I worked for, the promotion comes because the activities are already at the new, higher level. i.e., working at SVP/level 7 when officially at VP/level 6 for a period when the promotion is offered.

Good or bad, this is how the industry I work in promotes.

I think the best approach is to take on extra, above position responsibilities, accountabilities after discussion with superior, after agreeing in writing that this is part of a path to promotion.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-05 20:34:01+00:00
> This is why I pro­pose uni­lat­eral dec­la­ra­tion as a strategic countermove [... tearing] away the veil of any-minute-now mil­lenar­i­anism to reveal deployed tech­nology

I think that in an ideal world, this would thoroughly embarrass the over-promisers by forcing them to put-up-or-shut-up, and it's fun to imagine... however I worry that it won't work out that way. Instead of deflating the nonsense in its tracks, it'll just give it more momentum and worsen the eventual mess.

> What do I mean by AGI ?

Can we fight it with a better term? Something like... Oh, I dunno, maybe "Artificial Narrative Intelligence", in the same sense that we could say A* is a kind of pathfinding intelligence.

I say "narrative" because we've got these machines that grow "fitting" documents, and are often used with stories to "decide" what happens next. For example, the story setting is a Support Page, the Customer Character says X, and the Very Helpful Robot Character then does Y and says Z in response, etc.

However just because these stories fit surprisingly well doesn't mean it's doing the kind of "thinking" we really dreamed of.

> You some­times read about employees of AI com­pa­nies absorbed by their own products. Nobody on Earth has spent more hours talking to YakGPT than Katie Echo! Nobody can pump more code out of Shan­non­Soft than Johnny Narcissus! Recalling my Twitter expe­ri­ence, I think boasts (and posts) of this kind should inspire caution.

To me a lot of that feels like just the thing-of-the-day LinkedIn Lunacy, albeit running at an unusual intensity.
by dirtbag__dad | 2026-01-05 20:34:15+00:00
This advice has worked very well for me.

But but but, in some scenarios it has been at the expense of my well being. It’s not good to take on more work and not let go of some of the things you’re currently doing. Moreover, finding “permission” from your boss to let those things go can be challenging.

I’ve found this works best when you and your boss agree on the problem you’re stepping into (not necessarily your solution). It may be that you need to stick your neck out and suffer for awhile for them to see your perspective.

When you’re on the same page about what you’re solving, a good manager will clear room for you.