MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone else seeing porn images in YouTube previews?
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-07 16:42:36+00:00
I would link to an image on YouTube, but a) I don't want to be posting porn and b) I suspect it's an intermittent image where someone is tricking YouTube to distribute pron-ish images for the LOLZ, maybe just to see if they can get past their filters.

So... a) yes, whoever you were, you were able to get porn past Alphabet censors, b) it's constructed in such a way with gaps and splotches that I could believe it would get past an AI filter, c) does Alphabet care about receiving reports of such things? I suspect their response would just be "thank you for bringing this to our attention. we make every effort to provide a positive environment for our users...", d) it does not, thankfully, appear to be child porn, e) it appeared as a still image attributed to Sv Plumbing.

Aside from the irony of salacious images slipping past a corporate behemoth claiming near infinite machine learning and human moderator powers, I'm vaguely interested in how this happened. If it can happen with porn, it can happen with any type of image. Perhaps nuclear secrets are being exfiltrated to North Korea and Iran by way of AdWords as we speak! (though I can think of easier ways to steal nuclear secrets.) Does this imply Alphabet is less about humans and more about AI these days?

Just curious.
by amluto | 2026-01-07 16:43:10+00:00
I don’t think this fully explains it. In the nineties you could build a whole application using a toolkit like MFC, and you could ship the entire .dll, which bundled a whole bunch of (low-res, remarkably tasteless even for the time) bitmapped UI assets, and the resulting package didn’t hold a candle to modern bloat. Nor could it: you wanted that self-extracting installer (this predated MSI!) to be reasonable to download on a 56k modem, and even if you used a CD, you wanted room for something else on that CD.

Of course, there were multi-hundred-MB software packages in that era, but they were complex, multifunctional, and highly capable. And IIRC all of Microsoft Office (RIP!) except for some rarely used extras still managed to fit in one CD for a long time.
by moralestapia | 2026-01-07 16:43:23+00:00
He stumbles upon a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make money with near zero effort, pretty much "renamed the CSS standard", it somehow gets millions of people to follow.

Operating expenses are close-to-zero (a website?), margins are 99%. How do you not make money off this? You'd have to be either extremely dumb or dishonest.

On top of that he's being rude to the very same community that gifted him what he has. Every. Single. Time.
by logicchains | 2026-01-07 16:43:48+00:00
It's not just a currency issue; inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage, and the issue we're facing is that the purchasing power of people's wages is less. If their wages were denominated in a unit of account that wasn't continuously losing value, they wouldn't be continuously losing purchasing power.

The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current system isn't just a loss of purchasing power, it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money: the banking/financial system. So of course the system invested a lot of money, time and effort in convincing you that it's a good thing to continuously donate a fraction of your purchasing power to the finance industry every year.
by stevoski | 2026-01-07 16:43:59+00:00
As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-07 16:44:00+00:00
> Are we living in the same world?

I live in the western world. In a continent that gave ordoliberal (the German branch of the Mont Pellerin society) principles a quasi-constitutional values. And that continent has fallen behind both the government-debt pumped US and the state-driven China, down from a dominant position when the said principles were raised as supreme laws.

In fact, the very country that invented railways has now been unable to operate first-world level of rail service for three decades, with the collapse happening because of Thatcher's policies.

> All over the place, we see that more neoliberal places are richer than less neoliberal places. For example, Ireland is richer than Germany which is richer than Greece.

Ireland is a tax haven. And half of its GDP is entirely virtual. And again China and the US (which has roughly three time as much public debts as the EU and has had much more relax monetary policies than what the EU can legally due to the Treaty of Rome and its updates) fare better than the EU. But then again I'm sure you'll say that “it's not actual liberalism”…

> The US had and has really asinine and heavy-handed financial regulation.

The regulations out in place in the 30s after the great depression were relaxed by Reagan, and unsurprisingly it lead to the reemergence if financial crisis after half a century of financial stability.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-07 16:44:03+00:00
> I care about the health and happiness of my fellow humans. It's not unusual to seek restrictions for the community if they prevent harm. Seat belts?

The list of things that cause harm to the community is certainly very long. We could talk about smoking, or drinking, or social media, or a hundred other things. I'm not sure the perception that AI is conscious is in the top 100, but it's cool if this is the battle you want to fight.

Of course even the most obvious of harms can be detrimental if banned. Take prohibition for example - banning alcohol didn't really solve any problems, and ended up creating more problems than before. Solving an issue by "banning" is thus not always a good approach.

I'll add that if the perception of consciousness is a harm (and I'm not sure that it is, at least not directly) banning the use of pronouns won't really change anything. Those people who think the AI is conscious will do so regardless of pronouns.

For your own health, which I think one should certainly prioritize for, having a custom prompt telling the AI to exclude pronouns would be a good thing (and I think you're doing that.)
by gh02t | 2026-01-07 16:44:06+00:00
YMMV and a lot of people hate it, but I've run Nextcloud for this for years. It has pretty comprehensive support for WebDAV and CalDAV. Has sharing and lots of different authentication options; I use OIDC with PocketID.

It used to be a constant headache to keep running, but ever since I switched to the TrueNAS/Docker plugin it has worked smoothly. I know a lot of other people also have had good luck with the much lighter Radicale if CalDAV is your primary concern.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-07 16:44:12+00:00
I use CC for so much more than just writing code that I cannot imagine being constrained within an IDE. Why would I want to launch an IDE to have CC update the *arr stack on my NAS to the latest versions for example? Last week I pointed CC at some media files that weren't playing correctly on my Apple TV. It detected what the problem formats were and updated my *arr download rules to prefer other releases and then configured tdarr to re-encode problem files in my existing library.
by candiddevmike | 2026-01-07 16:44:21+00:00
Author here, we wanted a clean room implementation and our own e2e test suite. There are some conformance tooling (like Apples calendar test suite) that we partially used (it's... very comprehensive), but otherwise we wanted to validate our library against existing implementations (manually, for the most part) and then write tests against our own implementation (for the interfaces, mostly to prevent regressions). We created a little CLI tool ("validav") that can spin up a mock server or expose the client interfaces to help with manual testing.

One niceish thing about WebDAV/CalDAV is it's pretty set in stone for now.
by rdcooper | 2026-01-07 16:44:50+00:00
I notice I often have very strong knee-jerk reactions to these kind of comments.

It's usually from some person that has not spent very much time meditating at all or invested much time around the various cultures which treasure and pride themselves in their meditative practices. It usually goes something like:

"[Some kind of reasoning], therefore, there is no need to meditate."

I'd like to provide an analogy which I think fits:

We use our muscles every day. If you just use your muscles well, there's no need for strength training!

And sure, I mean, that KIND of works. But like... There's a LOT of research around the benefits of strength training. And there's a multitude of reasons why someone might want to get involved in strength training. Very few people aspire to become powerlifters, etc.

IMHO, it's a dangerous view to take, as it can lead to dismissal of a lot of fantastic use cases, and it leads to people dismissing meditation outright ("No doctor, my friend said that if I just move correctly, I don't need strength training!").

And yes, similar to strength, there's no upper limit on training for things like focus, concentration, mindfulness.

There's no 'need' for meditation sure, but by that logic there's no 'need' for most things.

What seems to be true to me is that it's absolutely fantastic in terms of technologies available to us for self (and also society)-improvement.
by myk9001 | 2026-01-07 16:44:54+00:00
And GP guesses your comment might be using humor as a coping mechanism.

I'm not American, the question was why Europe can't keep talent ("talent" doesn't really include me).

Well, the compensation is just depressing. And as that person from Ireland pointed out, all the talk about worker protections is barely more than fairy tales (maybe not in the Netherlands, idk).

Were we looking at 120 instead of 80, deciding between Europe's quality of life and pursuing career and money in the US would a real tough dilemma. With 80 just enough to pay rent and for groceries... Saving a thousand a month (a wild sum!) gets you to a 20% downpayment on a 500K home in just 8 years...
by daveguy | 2026-01-07 16:44:57+00:00
Fun fact: kombucha is an excellent source of probiotics and is refrigerated.

I used to turn my nose up at it, but I got some branching out at a beer bar that tasted pretty good (0.5% ABV so you'd puke from too much liquid before getting drunk). It seemed more of a breakfast drink so I had a few ounces every morning. Most regular I've been in my life. That said, the "evidence" presented in the article should not be considered due to the lack of controls (just look at the variance between day -4 and day -1). Both this comment and the article are anecdotal.

But kombucha is a lot cheaper than manufactured probiotics, refrigerated, and the drink is acidic so the bacteria in the drink should already be well suited to the stomach pH (1-3 vs 2.5-3.5 kombucha).
by leopoldj | 2026-01-07 16:44:58+00:00
I just wanted to point out that Boom Aerospace is now mainly focused on delivering a Gas Turbine for power generation [1].

In an interview with CNBC Mr. Scholl talked about this pivot [2].

1. https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-to-...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELl2uUAfGBw
by egypturnash | 2026-01-07 16:45:03+00:00
> The best thing about a good deep conversation is when the other person gets you: you explain a complicated situation you find yourself in, and find some resonance in their replies. That, at least, is what happens when chatting with the recent large models. But when subjecting the limited human mind to the same prompt—a rather long one—again and again the information in the prompt somehow gets lost, their focus drifts away, and you have to repeat crucial facts. In such a case, my gut reaction is to see if there’s a way to pay to upgrade to a bigger model, only to remember that there’s no upgrading of the human brain.

Paying for someone to put some effort into giving a damn about what you have to say has a long history. Hire a therapist. Pay a teacher. Hire a hooker. Buy a round of drinks. Grow the really good weed and bring it to the party.

And maybe remember that other humans have their own needs and desires, and if you want them to put time and energy into giving a damn about your needs, then you need to reciprocate and spend time doing the same for them instead of treating them like a machine that exists only to serve you. This whole post is coming from a place of reducing every relationship to that and it's kind of disgusting.
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-07 16:45:04+00:00
I've seen this over and over - adults assuming that what happens in schools today is the same their childhood experience in the classroom, frozen in time.

Parents of school-age children ranting and raving about how the school needs to stop doing X, when it hasn't been that way forever; and they cannot hear it, cannot absorb it, cannot stop talking about it. Something something childhood trauma.
by layer8 | 2026-01-07 16:45:16+00:00
The span from my thumb to my pinky in a “measuring position” is 20 cm (and is easily repeated by moving the thumb to the pinky and then stretching out the pinky again). The length of my “thumbs up” hand is 16 cm. The width of my fist is 10 cm. The length of my pinky is 6 cm. The width of my thumb is 2 cm. This allows me to estimate distances between ~2 m and 2 cm pretty well. Knowing your foot/shoe length also comes handy sometimes.
by K0nserv | 2026-01-07 16:45:31+00:00
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.

EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
by surplusvalue | 2026-01-07 16:45:33+00:00
i just set up caddy proxy to redirect x.com to xcancel.com

{
local_certs
order reverse_proxy before file_server
}

x.com, www.x.com {
tls internal
reverse_proxy https://xcancel.com {
header_up Host xcancel.com
}
}

I think I installed my caddy cert on my devices so the browser wouldn't throw a fit, but this works on my mobile devices as well with a dns record to point to this caddy instance (and a wireguard tunnel back home).
any improvements to this approach would be appreciated.
by jollyllama | 2026-01-07 16:45:39+00:00
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.

People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.

[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
by reify | 2026-01-07 16:45:40+00:00
Yeah. I saw one yesterday.

a self-amplifying mRNA vaccine construct consists of the replicase of Venezuela equine encephalitis virus.

tooo cool! just a moment, let me get my 1mm syringe, spoon, lighter, tourniquet and inject some directly into my femoral artery and let it course around my body. Then let it multiply until im dead.

yep you read correctly

Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus is a mosquito-borne viral pathogen that causes Venezuelan equine encephalitis or encephalomyelitis (VEE).

VEE can affect all equine species, such as horses, donkeys, and zebras. After infection, equines may suddenly die or show progressive central nervous system disorders.

vampire race on the horizon
by kstrauser | 2026-01-07 16:45:44+00:00
Definitely. And interestingly, that sucked for authors of the old answers, too. I had a few highly ranked answers from around 2010 or so. Every now and then I’d get a new notification about someone telling me I was completely wrong and should be embarrassed. Look, my time traveling friend, that answer was perfectly reasonable when I wrote it 16 years ago. It’s not my fault that the ebbs and currents of SO pushed you to it today. I’d answer differently today, but I’m not going to go back and “fix” all my old suggestions to keep them up to date.

That’s the weird feedback loop from practically forcing new askers back to the old answers, which was bad for everyone involved.
by bmenrigh | 2026-01-07 16:46:27+00:00
A lot of people want to slap licenses on things without really thinking about what the license will do (or prevent), in practice.

I like the author's note about the license: "As we do not believe in imaginary property, this package belongs to the public domain."

I think it's much more common to see a Creative Commons license on this sort of thing.
by fmorel | 2026-01-07 16:46:54+00:00
And dotnet run can now run single files of C# code, with the ability to import other projects and packages if needed.

#!/usr/bin/dotnet run

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...

https://andrewlock.net/exploring-dotnet-10-preview-features-...
by cjs_ac | 2026-01-07 16:46:55+00:00
> You know my favourite bit of that story? I just made it up. Yeah, it's not true. There is no Morgan. Ooh! It's very unsatisfying, isn't it? But I saw him in my head. I saw Morgan in my head.

> Why is it we can feel so robbed when someone tells us a story we just heard isn't true, and yet so satisfied at the end of a fictional novel? I don't know. I don't know.

-- Randy Writes a Novel

If the thing made by a machine is indistinguishable from the thing made by a human, the thing made by a human will be more valuable, simply because being made by a human is an opportunity for a story, and we humans like and value stories.
by xet7 | 2026-01-07 16:46:57+00:00
I can not include anything GPL or AGPLv3 with my MIT license WeKan Open Source kanban, where I have added and removed over 4 million lines of code.

I have discontinued version of WeKan where was GPLv2 licensed Gantt Chart component, because it infected WeKan license to be GPLv2.

There has been some other kanban, that first changed from MIT to GPL, and then from GPL to some source-available license or propietary.
by runjake | 2026-01-07 16:47:01+00:00
At around 1 PM Pacific yesterday, Adam called someone who had just been laid off from Laracasts an idiot. The person was lamenting about being replaced by AI.

I found it odd at the time, but it makes sense now. Not a knock, I bet it's a tough situation for Adam.

https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008646797619864060
by no_wizard | 2026-01-07 16:47:16+00:00
The problem Flutter has is highly highly dependent on Google, from funding to development.

That it is also the only real use case for Dart also doesn’t help matters.

While I agree the technology is very good and in some cases superior it doesn’t have a path to stable funding, seemingly. Google laid off a big chunk of Dart and Flutter teams last year, and there is no Expo to pickup the slack.

While Meta could do the same for React Native, Expo has always been there to pick up the slack and it receives bigger community support from the community too. For example Shopify has a few great well maintained RN libs
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-07 16:48:17+00:00
>many order of magnitude more people would like to just make more money when invest

Blame them (the consumers) then. This is like that silly Reddit/Twitter stat about 10% of companies creating 90% of global emissions… which the companies are doing in the process of making the shiny cell phones and laptops all the consumerists lambasting them are posting from, plus all the plastic crap they buy every day from Amazon.

The consumers are the ones demanding unchecked expansion of their consumption. As long as that demand exists, companies will find a way to fill it, whether they’re doing so in America or other countries. Privately held entities can’t allocate capital fast enough to keep up with the consumerists.
by hu3 | 2026-01-07 16:48:21+00:00
Yep. It sucks. People are delusional. Let's ignore LLMs and carry on...

On a more serious note:

1) Split tasks into smaller tasks just like a human would do

Would bash your keyboard for an hour, adding all video controls at once before even testing if anything works at all? Ofc not. You would start by adding a slider and test it until you are satisfied. Then move to next video control. An so on. LLMs are the same. Sometimes they can one-shot many related changes in a single prompt but the common reality is what you experienced: it works sometimes but the code is suboptimal.

2) Document desireable and undesireable coding patterns in AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md)

If you found over usage of useEffect, document it on AGENTS.md so next time the LLM knows your preference.

I have been using LLMs since Sonet 3.5 for large enterprise projects (1kk+ lines of code, 1k+ database tables). I just don't ask it to "draw the rest of owl" as the saying goes.
by ekianjo | 2026-01-07 16:48:30+00:00
There's tons of things in the air. Dust (and many different types of dust at different levels, both in contents and size), other gases at the trace level - lack of ventilation not only increases CO2 levels but everything else, too. And then there's the people factor. Who says that people who have proper ventilation and CO2 control are the same as the ones who don't?

If they really want to do a robust study they need to do an intervention study with clear levels of CO2 accurately controlled and the rest of the air being identical for everything else, otherwise it's purely meaningless. (it's doable, by the way).
by qsera | 2026-01-07 16:48:46+00:00
Regulations can work if bypassing the regulation in question does not open up a market that is large enough to keep paying off the regulators.

For example, if there is only one regulator for a country, the companies can pay millions to get it eased up for them, because they can make billions from it.

But if there one regulator for each state, they equation will change and it might not be profitable to pay millions to a regulator of the state, because they cannot make enough profit from selling in the state to justify it.

That is the only way to make it work. Rules don't work forever. Incentives do.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-07 16:49:02+00:00
The good old "kilogram of steel" test is something that the children, the mentally infirm and the less capable LLMs all fail in the same way.

Some failures like that are simply human failures reproduced faithfully. Some are rooted deeper than that.

And yes, it's true that children don't get bored in the same way adults do, which often leads to repetitive behavior. Boredom is an important heuristic for behavior, it seems.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-07 16:49:13+00:00
This is what gets me... Even at companies with relatively small engineering teams compared to company size, actually getting coherent requirements and buy-in from every stakeholder on a single direction was enough work that we didn't really struggle with getting things done.

Sure, there was some lead, but not nearly enough to 2x the team's productivity, let alone 10x.

Even when presented with something, there was still lead time turning that into something actually actionable as edge cases were sussed out.