MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jakeydus | 2026-01-13 21:40:41+00:00
First of all, OP declined to elaborate and resorted to seizing the apparent moral high ground instead of defending their claims. I felt that was an invitation for conjecture.

Secondly, I noted that my comment was made in less than good faith in the edit I left. I stand by the underlying concepts though. It is my impression that OP is a conservative who is afraid to come out as such in a public forum. This bias (I do not use the word pejoratively here) influences their opinion they shared.

Third, I invited OP to illustrate where I am wrong. When someone makes strong statements about the morality of a group and refuses to share their own beliefs on the subject, I believe it’s appropriate to assume they are biased in some way. If I say “all devs are brain dead keyboard monkeys” and I’m a dev, that context is important to understand my statement. Based on Capt’s comment, I made the above assumptions and shared them as I was feeling snarky and felt that they (if true) would be relevant to the larger discussion.

Finally, I'm sure I disagree with you on many things but we can disagree without being rude.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by dang | 2026-01-13 21:40:46+00:00
(I'm a moderator here. You and your colleagues are welcome on Hacker News. Anyone making a new programming language is a good addition to our community!)

HN readers are very interested in new programming languages, but the way this post is written is not the best way to present your work. Your best bet would be to add some pages to your website that give more of an intellectual (not commercial or promotional) exposition of your project: how/why you came to work on this, describing the design choices involved, and giving a nice set of real examples for people to look over. Make sure to put a few code samples on whatever page you submit as the link to HN, because that's the first thing people will look for.

On your github it says: "The Lax programming language is used to create programs for Linux, operating systems, and kernels, and Lax is used for direct execution by the processor.". I don't understand all of that, but if you went into detail about what you mean by this, that could be interesting to people.

Emphasizing what's different about this language, i.e. what design tradeoffs you've made, and how they make certain kinds of programs easier to write, is always of interest.

You definitely want to avoid making any dramatic claims or trying to 'sell' your work too hard on HN. Our audience is pretty cynical about being sold to. Rather, what you want to try to do is interest them intellectually (and then leave them to do the selling part to themselves!) You won't get far asking for help to promote your language, but if you interest the community, you might awaken a wish to participate in some of the audience.

If you use HN Search to go through past threads on "The $LANG programming language" (with $LANG as whatever language name), you'll get a sense of which types of posts do well and generate the best discussions.
by gerdemb | 2026-01-13 21:41:06+00:00
Yes — that’s exactly what Photos Backup Anywhere is designed to do.

The app creates file-system-level backups of each individual photo and video from your Photos library. Every asset is exported as a real file on disk (HEIC, JPEG, MOV, etc.), not a database blob or package, so you can browse, copy, verify, and back them up with standard tools.

In addition, the app keeps a small SQLite database alongside the files to track metadata (including edits, albums, and relationships like Live Photos), which allows accurate restores and verification while still giving you transparent, plain-files access to your media.
by einr | 2026-01-13 21:41:22+00:00
As a macOS sysadmin I feel this in my bones, and of course I don't know what apps are essential for you, but FWIW Sequoia has been basically identical to Sonoma for me. In fact I had to double check what I was running on this computer before writing this because there's just no functional or aesthetic difference that I know of off the top of my head.

(And yes, I'm holding off on Sonoma for as long as possible because... yuck)
by alexandre_m | 2026-01-13 21:41:31+00:00
On [2] he said that natural immunity from getting covid-19 is better than getting the vaccine alone, which is factually correct, as many studies demonstrated (note: may vary by strains, but was particularly the case in 2021/2022). There's nothing crazy about this, and it's very reasonable to say you prefer to evaluate the risk/benefit and take the vaccine accordingly, instead of mandating this for every demographic.

People tend to fall back on tribalism and slap labels on others instead of engaging with nuance or complexity.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-13 21:41:50+00:00
> I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't

So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.

Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.
by neutronicus | 2026-01-13 21:42:25+00:00
Yes, anyone with an art-adjacent hobby like tabletop gaming is militantly anti-AI.

Shelling out to support artists is seen as virtuous, and AI is seen as the opposite of that - not merely replacing artists but stealing from them. There's also a general perception that every cost-saving measure is killing the quality of the product.

So you've got a PR double-whammy there.
by chiengineer | 2026-01-13 21:43:07+00:00
gotta love a killer on the loose - with help from the fbi, help from DHS, help from other agents ALL ON TAXPAYER DIME - helping jonathan ross run hide and go into witness protection

WHILE GETTING OVER 500K IN DONATIONS ONLINE WHICH IS ILLEGAL! DUDE SHOT AND KILLED RENEE GOOD IN COLD BLOOD IN BROAD DAYLIGHT AND IS ACCEPTING OVER 500K IN DONATIONS!!!!!

RIP RENEE GOOD FUCK ICE LEAK THEM ALL

HACK THE PLANET
by fweimer | 2026-01-13 21:43:18+00:00
I think GCC calls the IPA (inter-procedural analysis) clones.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/IPA-passes.html
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Regular-IPA-passes.htm...
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Late-IPA-passes.html
by StrLght | 2026-01-13 21:43:39+00:00
> Indeed, companies will always start using something if it makes financial sense for them.

I agree that this is often the case. I still see Games Workshop as an exception. They could have moved plastic production to a cheaper region (e.g. China), but they haven't done so. Financials are obviously important to them, but they're being very careful and thoughtful about their actions. This AI ban is just another showcase of that.
by pentaphobe | 2026-01-13 21:43:45+00:00
All the GitHub links on your extension page are borked (including issues)

From the look of the associated domain it looks like you're going full product, best of luck

I'm a huge proponent of graph & visual analysis of complex systems - would have loved to try this out, but will always skip closed source editor extensions (especially in the age of widespread npm supply chain attacks & vibe coding)
by kant2002 | 2026-01-13 21:43:46+00:00
As person who was in blackout in Jan 2022 in Kazakhstan, I’ll say it’s very unpleasant situation when you known that some people go into protests. Some security service building was looted of arms. Police nowhere to be seen. No communications and you don’t know if should you do some limited self protection available in form of running or not. So even if government control what they say, it does not control your ability to find out what’s going on via other people. That’s big deal for your physical security and wellbeing
by astrange | 2026-01-13 21:44:09+00:00
> they're trained a on a fixed set can only reproduce noise from here and there

This anti-AI argument doesn't make sense, it's like saying it's impossible to reinvent multiplication based on reading a times table. You can create new things via generalization or in-context learning (references).

In practice many image generation models aren't that powerful, but Gemini's is.

If someone created one that output multi-layer images/PSDs, which is certainly doable, it could be much more usable.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-13 21:44:24+00:00
Black person here, and I too am finding this thread confusing.

Adams here was doing one of two things, either being blatantly racist or (perhaps the more generous, and perhaps more likely) being extremely bad at comedy?

It is of course "possible" to comedically play around with "what team am I on," but you have to be good at it or you look like -- if not racist -- a completely oblivious weirdo, and he was obviously one of the two here?
by parpfish | 2026-01-13 21:44:24+00:00
I think we need to start distinguishing between art-music and utilitarian-music.

Art-music is made by humans as a way of expressing yourself and making human connections.

Utilitarian-music can be made by humans or machines and is there to serve a purpose. Background music for the elevator or while you’re on hold. An ambient soundscape that you play in an airport terminal. It’s not meant to move people, it’s just there to fill silence.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-13 21:44:26+00:00
Private data, untrusted data, communication: an LLM can safely have two of these, but never all three.

Browsing the web is both communication and untrusted data, so it must never have access to any trusted data if it has the ability to browse the web.

The problem is, so much of what people want from these things involves having all three.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-13 21:44:28+00:00
> The most interesting observation is that regardless of how "anti-AI" most people seem to be, it isn't that deep of an opinion. ... Most products produced with AI, however, are still crap.

how can you go and generalize about these people, calling them idiots (that's what "deep of an opinion" means, even if you don't say that), and then breathlessly engage in the exact same rhetoric?
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2026-01-13 21:44:30+00:00
>Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions

Or may be he did know that there would be consequences? Many people who are financially secure do make provocative statements. I think he did many of us a favor, because many of us still have to earn a living and cannot speak out.
by ddq | 2026-01-13 21:44:58+00:00
Then why did you say 80-year old women were "the type to sledgehammer police officers though apparently" and then immediate shift the goalposts? Further, the statement "The only people being arrested in the Uk are for supporting a proscribed group" is patently false; the UK government has not limited its arrests for social media posts to those expressing support for Hamas. You are not engaging in good faith discussion.
by throwaway2027 | 2026-01-13 21:45:01+00:00
Most of the code that was publicly available to be trained on is written by people in their spare time, not directly making any money off of it though. Personally I think if you are fine with AI used to generate code you should also be fine with it being used to generate art. That doesn't mean that I think that big companies just scraping the entire internet and training on large amount of portfolio pieces from ArtStation or people making open source projects is good either.
by miiiiiike | 2026-01-13 21:45:11+00:00
That’s the thing. One day everyone is going to just stop caring about being anti-AI. Already I’ve noticed that most people are only against other people’s use of AI. Their use is justified.

I actively don’t use AI because the results are unreliable or ugly. I’m just not against AI in principle. It’s funny that my position is considered contemptible by people who regularly use AI but are hard hardliners against it on moral grounds.

Remember when everything wasn’t a religious war? Actually, I don’t. It was always like this and it’s always going to be like this. Just one forever crusade after another.
by queenkjuul | 2026-01-13 21:45:23+00:00
No fuckin way, i don't like my job, and in fact i rather dislike the entire programming career.

I'm about an inch away from quitting my job today with no backup. The impossibility of finding a new way to pay rent is the only thing stopping me.

If i knew any way on earth for me to make as much as i do programming doing something else, i would.
by lawejrj | 2026-01-13 21:45:38+00:00
Maybe you're over-estimating how much universities actually care about ethics and IRB.

I reported my advisor to university admin for gross safety violations, attempting to collect data on human subjects without any IRB oversight at all, falsifying data, and falsifying financial records. He brought his undergrad class into the lab one day and said we should collect data on them, (low hanging fruit!) with machinery that had just started working a few days prior, we hadn't even begun developing basic safety features for it, we hadn't even discussed design of experiments or requesting IRB approval for experiments. We (grad students) cornered the professor as a group and told him that was wildly unacceptable, and he tried it multiple more times before we reported him to university admin. Admin ignored it completely. In the next year, we also reported him for falsifying data in journal papers and falsifying financial records related to research grants. And, oh yeah, assigning Chinese nationals to work on DoD-funded work that explicitly required US citizens and lying to the DoD about it. University completely ignored that too. And then he got tenure. I was in a Top-10-US grad program. So in my experience, as long as the endowment is growing, university admin doesn't care about much else.
by sedatk | 2026-01-13 21:45:45+00:00
I remember using Lynx as a daily driver 30 years ago. It was fast, and barely had any compatibility issues because HTML that time was simpler. I remember using it as a daily driver. A GUI browser would be handy with image-heavy web sites, but those would take ages to load anyway.

It seems like Lynx failed to guide new standards, and that hindered the development of web in a text-compatible way. So, we ended up with this where Lynx is probably not usable at all today.

It would have been a net win for accessibility too if we always had Lynx et al in our sights.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-13 21:46:04+00:00
if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation.

it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
by nilshauk | 2026-01-13 21:46:45+00:00
I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.

However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.

Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.
We built the "Excel of Finance Apps," but the growth isn't there. Next move?
by caoxhua | 2026-01-13 21:46:52+00:00
Our platform is arguably the most flexible finance tracker on the market. It allows users to build complex models and insights purely through data points and formulas. From a product standpoint, we’ve hit our vision.

But the business reality is a different story. Three years later, the MRR isn't even enough to cover a single developer's cost of living. I’m constantly caught in a loop between "this is too good to give up" and "this isn't a viable business."

I’m torn between pushing forward and calling it quits. If you had a technically superior product that wasn't converting into a sustainable business after 3 years, what would your "red line" be?
by glenstein | 2026-01-13 21:47:19+00:00
>And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

Wish I read this before posting my comment, I wholeheartedly agree at every level. The criticisms are a mile wide, an inch deep, and sometimes legitimate, but often deeply contradictory, and there's no attitude of accountability or self awareness when someone jumps in for the millionth time saying "don't get distracted" but also "offer something new to generate revenue".

And the factual literacy is, frankly, sometimes brutal and veering into conspiratorial. Some unfortunate threads appear to be young adults reading a Mozilla 990 filing for the first time and misreading a conspiracy into every single line, very casual attitudes about accusing them of falsifying financial statements or accusations of controlled opposition, or ridiculous suggestions that they spend down their endowment on "engineering" to no particular end, and sometimes completely misrepresenting how much of a time suck and energy suck certain projects were (e.g. blockchain is sometimes on the Rap Sheet of Bad Things, but they basically wrote a white paper or two).

Which, as you note, isn't to say there's no legitimate concerns: "privacy preserving ads" is a contradiction in terms, the strategic reliance on Google is precarious, and side bets like Pocket were left to languish. In normal times I might consider myself a critic. But unfortunately too often the comment section is an out of control orgy of completely uninformed cheap shots, with an ounce of truth to every pound of confidently incorrect accusation. And that phenomenon, to my mind, is as big as any misstep Mozilla is or isn't making.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-13 21:47:29+00:00
> 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.

It is about scarcity: art is a passion; there is a perpetual oversupply of talented game designers, visual graphic artists, sculptors, magna artists, music composers, guitarists, etc...you can hire one and you usually can hire talent for cheap because...there is a lot of talent.

Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are rare enough.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-13 21:47:43+00:00
Yeah it is a nuanced topic. Maybe the response should be "think about..." rather than prescriptive.

I have worked places where the sacred test suite slows people down to a grinding halt but it is hard politically (as in convincing 20 people with different concerns) to get that changed without being CTO yourself.

But also I am thinking if tests feel "throwaway" and cheap to make then adding them is no big deal. If CI becomes too long just prune it up again.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-01-13 21:47:49+00:00
I am going to sound cynical, but I strongly believe that everyone's view on AI is contaminated by ulterior motives, and a lot of people are not truthful with themselves about their positions on AI. For instance, I feel as though topics such as copyright, environmentalism, water use, etc., that have been thrust into the limelight are being pushed by people who didn't care about these issues 5-10 years ago, but decided to start clutching their pearls about it now. Particularly copyright; everyone was so okay with pirating movies, apps, music when it benefited them, but now they are the vanguard in enforcing other people's copyright on data they don’t even own.
by furyofantares | 2026-01-13 21:48:04+00:00
It never was "just predicting the next word", in that that was always a reductive argument about artifacts that are plainly more than what the phrase implies.

And also, they are still "just predicting the next word", literally in terms of how they function and are trained. And there are still cases where it's useful to remember this.

I'm thinking specifically of chat psychosis, where people go down a rabbit hole with these things, thinking they're gaining deep insights because they don't understand the nature of the thing they're interacting with.

They're interacting with something that does really good - but fallible - autocomplete based on 3 major inputs.

1) They are predicting the next word based on the pre-training data, internet data, which makes them fairly useful on general knowledge.

2) They are predicting the next word based on RL training data, which causes them to be able to perform conversational responses rather than autocomplete style responses, because they are autocompleting conversational data. This also causes them to be extremely obsequious and agreeable, to try to go along with what you give them and to try to mimic it.

3) They are autocompleting the conversation based on your own inputs and the entire history of the conversation. This, combined with 2), means you are, to a large extent, talking yourself, or rather something that is very adept at mimicing and going along with your inputs.

Who, or what, are you talking to when you interact with these? Something that predicts the next word, with varying accuracy, based on a corpus of general knowledge plus a corpus of agreeable question/answer format plus yourself. The general knowledge is great as long as it's fairly accurate, the sycophantic mirror of yourself sucks.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-13 21:48:14+00:00
Hoss I am sorry to hear that- I have literally no idea what electrical costs, as I've been doing it myself. If you're living close enough to other humans that the can observe and complain, then we're not really in the same situation.

But that doesn't really change my point, does it? Like, if they are installing $6k worth of equipment and materials, then that's what the up-thread points was about paying 10K more for tesla-branded equipment, right? I get that at a certain point the labor makes the cost of materials less of a deal, but my point was that my battery+inverter+panels+material is still less than the equipment they are describing.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-13 21:48:18+00:00
> As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history

Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.

So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.