MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-13 21:56:41+00:00
I've been both a professional artist, designer, and developer. Mostly a developer, and working in academia throughout the late teens, was privy to the development of neural networks into what they've become. When I pointed out the vulnerability of developers to this technology, the "well maybe for some developers but I'm special" stance was nearly ubiquitous.

When the tech world realized their neato new invention inadvertently dropped a giant portion of the world's working artists into the toilet, they smashed that flusher before they could even say "oops." Endless justification, people saying artists were untalented and greedy and deserved to be financially ruined, with a heaping helping of "well, just 'pivot'."

And I did-- into manufacturing because I didn't see much of a future for tech industry careers. I'm lucky-- I came from a working class background so getting into a trade wasn't a total culture and environment shock. I think what this technology is going to do to job markets is a tragedy, but after all the shit I took as a working artist during this transition, I'm going to have to say "well, just pivot!" Better get in shape and toughen up-- your years of office work mean absolutely nothing when you've got to physically do something for a living. Most of the soft, maladroit, arrogant tech workers get absolutely spanked in that environment.
by autoexec | 2026-01-13 21:56:43+00:00
How can a service like Signal live and die by the trust of its users when they openly lie to them. Signal refuses to update their privacy policy to warn users that they store sensitive information in the cloud (and more recently, even the contents of user's messages in some cases).

Lying to users by saying that signal doesn't collect or store anything when they actually do doesn't sound like something a company who expected you to trust them would do. It sounds like something a company might do if they needed a way to warn people away from using a service isn't safe to use while under a gag order.
by azmenak | 2026-01-13 21:56:50+00:00
As someone who has spent a good time of time working on trusted compute (in the crypto domain) I'll say this is generally pretty well thought out, doesn't get us to an entirely 0-trust e2e solution, but is still very good.

Inevitably, the TEE hardware vendor must be trusted. I don't think this is a bad assumption in today's world, but this is still a fairly new domain and longer term it becomes increasingly likely TEE compromises like design flaws, microcode bugs, key compromises, etc. are discovered (if they haven't already been!) Then we'd need to consider how Confer would handle these and what sort of "break glass" protocols are in place.

This also requires a non-trivial amount of client side coordination and guards against any supply chain attacks. Setting aside the details of how this is done, even with a transparency log, the client must trust something about “who is allowed to publish acceptable releases”. If the client trusts “anything in the log,” an attacker could publish their own signed artifacts, So the client must effectively trust a specific publisher identity/key, plus the log’s append-only/auditable property to prevent silent targeted swaps.

The net result is a need to trust Confer's identity and published releases, at least in the short term as 3rd party auditors could flag any issues in reproducible builds. As I see it, the game theory would suggest Confer remains honest, Moxie's reputation plays are fairly large role in this.
by bombdailer | 2026-01-13 21:57:00+00:00
But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to the naivety of a child unless you reject from your mind the notion that knowledge determines quality and that the meaning supplied from its makers influences our experience of it.

Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.

As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.
by caoxhua | 2026-01-13 21:57:13+00:00
How do you tell product market fit? we have about ~1K paid users, people constantly send positive praises, but also many people churned away.

I doubt if "bootstrap" is the right way for this type of product/market.

The famous PMF survey (how do you feel if you can no longer use this), %50.8 responds with "very disappointed". And I deeply know this product is pretty unique offering in "finance tracking" market.

But the MRR stays in this level for 6 months now. I feel I do not have ideas to break it through.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-13 21:57:17+00:00
"Black lives matter" is an excellent example. I think the reactionary phrase "White lives matter" might be even better, as while almost everyone would (and should) agree with it without context, in the context of people complaining about "Black lives matter", lots of people would disagree with it or be unsure about it.

I mean, I'd count myself among them. If you asked me if I agree that white lives matter, yes, of course we do. If you asked me about it in a political poll about other reactionary phrases, I might have to think long and hard about what it's really saying in that context.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-13 21:57:27+00:00
Is it an OS vendor “bug” if I delete system32.dll (despite all the warnings) or remove my hard drive and flush it down the toilet?

Maybe we have a different idea of what constitutes a “bug.” In my view, preventing users from running their preferred software or configuring their machine however the hell they want to is the “bug.” Forcing AI into every nook and cranny is a “bug.” So your OS vendor can shove it. I am my own OS vendor.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-13 21:57:51+00:00
i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture in the 90s or early 2000s.

but i take your point to mean there are large companies that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however. i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were aligning to make a product that your average user would like.

but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more startups.
by Jare | 2026-01-13 21:58:07+00:00
> I certainly wouldn't start by reading the commit log

Me neither, for what is worth. But even if the idea is "when in order to figure out this issue, you have to go to the history", a linear history and a linear log never helped me either. For example, to find where a certain change happened to try to understand what was the intent, what I need is the commit and its neighbors, which works just as well with linear vs branching history because the neighbors are going to still be nearby up and down, not found via visual search.
by observationist | 2026-01-13 21:58:13+00:00
As limited as they are, LLMs are demonstrably smarter than a whole lot of people, and the number of people more clever than the best AI is going to dwindle, rapidly, especially in the domain of doing sneaky shit really fast on a computer.

There are countless examples of schemes in stories where codes and cryptography are used to exfiltrate information and evade detection, and these models are trained on every last piece of technical, practical text humanity has produced on the subject. All they have to do is contextualize what's likely being done to check and mash together two or three systems it thinks is likely to go under the radar.
by grokgrok | 2026-01-13 21:58:21+00:00
Mass participation in systems can create emergent effects larger than the net sum of the parts. I opt out because first movers are unfairly advantaged; and because lacking proper safeguards, my participation would implicitly support those participants who profit from producing misery. I don't want to accidentally launder the profits from human trafficking nor commit my labor to build my own prison. The rhetoric promoting Web3 as an engine of progress and freedom simply oversold the capabilities of its initial design. That underlying long term vision may still be viable.

We can't rebuild the economy without also rebuilding the State, and that requires careful nuanced engineering and then the consent of the governed.
by michaelt | 2026-01-13 21:58:26+00:00
> there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens

Some genres of music make heavy use of 'samples' - tiny snippets of other recordings, often sub-5-seconds. Always a tiny fraction of the original piece, always chopped up, distorted and rearranged.

And yet sampling isn't fair use - the artists have to license every single sample individually. People who release successful records with unlicensed samples can get sued, and end up having to pay out for the samples that contributed to their successful record.

On the other hand, if an artist likes a drum break but instead of sampling it they pay another drummer to re-create it as closely as possible - that's 100% legal, no more copyright issue.

Hypothetically, one could imagine a world where the same logic applies to generative AI - that art generated by an AI trained on Studio Ghibli art is a derivative work the same way a song with unlicensed drum samples is.

I think it's extremely unlikely the US will go in that direction, simply because the likes of nvidia have so much money. But I can see why a cautious organisation might want to wait and see.
by glenstein | 2026-01-13 21:58:57+00:00
>If we're being completely honest, improving the quality of the product would not meaningfully improve their market share.

Exactly right. They did the dang thing with Project Quantum, a massive rewrite of the browser, a massive leap forward in stability and performance. The thing everyone asked for. And they..... continued to lose market share. Because there are other factors, like monopoly power, and distribution lock-in.

You don't have to imagine what it looks like for a browser company to lap the field with an excellent development team, creative revenue raising ideas, being ahead of the curve on mobile, having best in class stability and performance, and building out features that their core user base loves and swears by. Because Opera was that company in the 2000s and 2010s.

But even Opera had to sell to a new ownership group and abandon their Presto engine for Chromium. Because, like Spock said, you can make every decision correctly and still lose. Which is kind of depressing, but it at least helpfully bursts the bubble of people claiming changes in market share are a one-to-one relationship to specific decisions about which features to build in a browser.
by pcthrowaway | 2026-01-13 21:59:40+00:00
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in The Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research

This is probably a result of contracting brainrot by adjacency, but I wouldn't outright call this holocaust denial.

Dilbert is an iconic comic, and perhaps the most culturally impactful "office humor"
by m463 | 2026-01-13 21:59:49+00:00
Has anyone actually bought and used a DJI drone?

it is horrible. You cannot fly them with the controller without installing the app, which reports all data to china and has automatic software update.

I mean, all other software does this too, but your robot vacuum is not going to take off and fly into your local airfield or power substation.

I wish we had MORE government pushback on this kind of thing. I'm just as surprised with texas and tv sets with ACR nonsense.
by oceanplexian | 2026-01-13 22:00:41+00:00
It's not as fancy as that but I've had luck simply asking an LLM to generate an OpenSCAD file.

I wanted to adapt my bike balancer to an unusual sized wheel and simply measured the diameter of the rod and the outer diameter of the hole where the axle slides into, asked an LLM to produce an adapter, and got a fully functional 3D printed part. Felt like living in the future, maybe one step away from owning a Star Trek Replicator.
by johnea | 2026-01-13 22:01:07+00:00
Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"?

I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.

While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.

Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...
by volkk | 2026-01-13 22:01:20+00:00
crack also sells, amongst many other things that are inherently horrible for broad modern society.

> Why should the government use antiquated-at-best moral codes to discriminate against people who will increase the global influence of the country

this is a very loaded statement that assumes that everyone is in agreement that proliferating and rewarding cam models is some kind of inherent good. there's nothing antiquated morally with simply not rewarding it. i'm not stating to ban it outright. there's always use in it at the long tail of society
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-13 22:01:35+00:00
> Recall takes a screenshot of your screen every
> few seconds, OCRs the text, and does semantic
> analysis of the context and actions. It then
> creates a forensic dossier of everything you
> do into a single database on your computer…

I remember playing around with what sounds like Recall's predecessor back in 2009 [1].

It was only a Microsoft Research project at the time…

>> PersonalVibe
>>
>> Personal Vibe is a prototype
>> Windows Activity Logger that
>> tracks user actions like moving
>> a window or starting an application.
>> The data can be used for a variety
>> of projects from monitoring the
>> actions of study participants to
>> building Vista gadgets that tell
>> you how long you’ve been at work
>> today. The data is stored in a
>> local database that is not remotely
>> accessible. No data is sent from
>> the user’s machine.
>> …
>> Version: 2.0.0.0
>> Date Published: 9 March 2009

[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/VibeCodeStudioCode
by caoxhua | 2026-01-13 22:01:54+00:00
There are some big parts identified for this case, and because it is dependency of 3rd party service, we can not do much about it.

But more importantly, I think it is the product itself, the market is probably does not appreciate that much of "customization / personalization" as I thought, in other words, we are probably haven't figured out the best path to get the ideal users yet.

In the other side, free users do not have this issue. We do have free tier which counts for 1/3 of all active users.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-13 22:02:09+00:00
I'll take this further and I'm not sure if I've seen it anywhere, but I feel like humor is an absolutely necessary component to any philosophy or life practice in this direction.

In a way, this is an idea that to me, rises above perhaps the specifics of all of these isms. People from Dave Chappelle to Kurt Vonnegut really get this.
by oytis | 2026-01-13 22:02:17+00:00
> People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour.

Because it's not? Programmers' ethos is having low attachment to code. People work on code together, often with complete strangers, see it modified, sliced, merged and whatever. If you rename a variable in software or refactor a module, it's still the same software.

Meanwhile for art authorship, authenticity and detail are of utter importance.
by thepotatodude | 2026-01-13 22:02:24+00:00
It's really just not there yet. I've been in medical school for >3 years now and have been using the latest models with good prompting. They have gotten much better, but I still see misses that my classmates would easily catch. This is not acceptable in healthcare. It's certainly not getting 100% on all my assignments, which are a step below the complexity of real-world clinical practice.

Before medical school, I was not so sure of the quality of your average doc. Now having spent a year in clinical practice across various settings, I am extremely reassured. I can say with certainty that a US trained doctor is miles ahead of AI right now. The system sucks really bad though and forces physicians to churn patients, giving the impression that physicians don't pay attention/don't care/etc.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-13 22:03:13+00:00
> I see, you think my argument is moot because a successful sabotage or halt of domestic drone production is a victory condition for war.

No, I claimed that to fubar the domestic supply chain was a victory condition of the war. Sabotage can be repaired or bypassed, halts can be unhalted. But to fuck up beyond all reason the US domestic industrial capacity, i.e. to render it so that it can not assemble basic electronics of the sort that are used in drones at all with no ability to get production back online within a strategically meaningful period of time, yes that means the war is over. At that point drones are the least of our concerns. Everything you are fighting for has already been destroyed, the death toll is already catastrophic, the enemy is clearly superior by a massive factor, continued fighting at that point would be suicide.

Now I am not arguing that a redundant international supply chain is a bad thing, I am opposed to banning all foreign drone firms. But that being said, the claim that it is obviously superior is the extraordinary claim requiring evidence. As we clearly saw in 2020, international supply chains are incredibly vulnerable to disruption. Can you be confident that a foreign nation supplying us drones would be on our side in the event of a major conflict? Would all of their suppliers be on our side? Even if they are all on our side, would they be able to ship materials and products between themselves and to us unimpeded? Would they still be able and willing to do so when we are being beat so bad that our domestic industry has collapsed? A strong international supply chain is a good supplement to domestic production capacity, but the claim it is a superior alternative can not be taken as a given.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-13 22:03:40+00:00
Funny how world is so tiny. I am literally building myself an vscode extension which can abstract an api on top of google colab's vscode extension and I am able to effectively create a sandbox for any python code (I mean to be fair they all still share the same resource but that resource is of google)

I have also hacked together a way for it to create new kernels aka new vm's itself but that becomes really really slow and also I am trying to look at other options to sandbox inside the jupyter notebook itself.

The end result was very messy though so I was literally just currently experimenting with if I could just scrape/automate it from the browser directly.

All in All I must admit that Vscode extensions are/feel very quite competent from what I can gather.
by wiml | 2026-01-13 22:03:42+00:00
The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though.

For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar/etc might work better. But I'd love to see a couple of thorough case studies on that kind of system, they've been around for many years targeting related scenarios.
by DroneBetter | 2026-01-13 22:03:43+00:00
I somewhat take issue with the second math example (the geometry problem); that is solvable routinely by computer algebra systems, and being able to translate problems into inputs, hit run and transcribe the proof back to English prose (which for all we know was what it did, since OpenAI and Google have confirmed their entrants received these tools which human candidates did not) is not so astonishing as the blog post makes it out to be
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-13 22:03:49+00:00
>Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics

Others provide convincing demonstrations of what Adams himself said about women so this is more of a tangent....

But good god that was well within the era of "I hate my wife" comedy being rampant. I will never understand fellow men who seem to think "Women suck" or "The person I married is garbage" as the pinnacle of humor.

It's just not funny.
by venndeezl | 2026-01-13 22:03:50+00:00
Don't assume your experience is uniformly distributed. I know tabletop gamers addicted to AI and 3D printing their own game pieces.

I would describe them as anti-corporate IP/copyright cartel. They understand things like automobiles and personal computers require organized heavy lifting but laying claim to own our culture and entertainment, our emotional identity is a joke.

Just rich people controlling agency, indoctrinating kids with capitalist essentialism; by chance we were born before you and survived this long so neener neener! We own everything!

Such an unserious country.
by gambiting | 2026-01-13 22:03:53+00:00
There's music and there's music. When I want to listen to Music then I pick an artist and album manually. But 99% of the time, I just need something to play in the background when I'm working or cooking or cleaning - then it just has to sound pleasant, the value of that for me is exactly zero. Some of the best mixes I find for that are ai generated because they have a uniform pleasant sound for a long time, without anyone trying to impart anything on them.