MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arch485 | 2025-04-12 13:49:37+00:00
> any task that has any sort of safety or security critical risks should never be left to a “magic black box”. > human input/review/verification/validation is always required.

but, are humans not also a magic black box? We don't know what's going on in other people's heads, and while you can communicate with a human and tell them to do something, they are prone to misunderstanding, not listening, or lying. (which is quite similar to how LLMs behave!)
by delichon | 2025-04-12 13:49:53+00:00
> Delusions — fixed, false beliefs that cannot be changed by evidence — are a key symptom of many psychotic disorders

Interesting that "psychotic disorders" can be replaced with "tribalism" and still be true. We can easily identify such false beliefs in other tribes but often have a blind spot for them in our own.

But in terms of tribes or politics it is not clear that this is a disorder. Believing the same false things as our neighbors is often rewarded with status, wealth and mating opportunities, while failing to do so can be deadly. What converts the same tendency into psychosis can be merely the context: it's psychotic to believe false things when there is no social advantage to it and it therefore becomes unfit. But the same is true of believing true things when they conflict with a tribe's deeply held false beliefs.

Like a propensity to violence, believing false things can be a deadly strategy. Or it can be the only strategy that allows a chance for survival. And you may not know which until it is too late. It would be nice to live in a world where violence and false beliefs are consistently maladaptive, but that isn't this one.
by basch | 2025-04-12 13:50:14+00:00
We can look and check. (The 70s throw it off a bit.) These are all 11 or 31 year periods.

1995-2005 $2.10

1965-1995 $4.84

1935-1965 $2.30

1985-2015 $2.20

1980-1990 $1.59

1970-1980 $2.12

1960-1970 $1.31
by palmy | 2025-04-12 13:50:20+00:00
The reality is also that not everyone isn't technical enough to deal with `ffmpeg` directly. At some point I basically hosted hacked-together website which simply used `ffmpeg` under the hood so that my dad, who's not as technically literate, could easily convert his files. Now I don't have to do this anymore because I can just host a vert.sh instance:)
by numpad0 | 2025-04-12 13:50:32+00:00
I haven't seen a single AI image that were good let alone great.

To be completely honest, I can't always tell, but when I come across images that give me inexplicable gastric discomfort that I can't explain why, and then it was revealed that it had been AI generated, that explains it all(doesn't remove the discomfort, just explains it).

I don't have reasons to believe that I have above-average eyes on art among HNers, but it'll be funny and painful if so. I mean, I'm no Hayao "I sense insult to life itself" Miyazaki...
by epsilonaurigae | 2025-04-12 13:51:02+00:00
Hello,

long time Ubuntu user here, had been bulletproof on an i5 Panasonic toughbook until 24.04 and now it’s not so stable. Sleep also stopped working correctly on an i5 Lenovo yoga and I downgraded that one back to 22.04.

However that same distro runs smoothly (and the UI isn’t constantly glitching out) on an i7 thinkpad that I don’t enjoy using because it runs red hot and the fan is always going…. FWIW that’s also the only system I have that’s even capable of running win11 smoothly… but up until now, Linux was great on castaways that windows had forgotten.

I have acpi and charging issues on the stock 24.04 kernel tree with the Panasonic , which is a laptop that supports two batteries. If either battery gets pulled on that platform it stops charging on AC.

This issue isn’t present after putting Ubuntu packages for kernel 6.14 on it , which only came out two weeks ago.

It still wanders all over the place as far as whether I can get 8 hours on a charge (or two hours), swapping the batteries confuses the system still and I haven’t had the free time recently to nail down whether this is acpi, kernel, or Ubuntu specifically. I’ve mumbled a little bit about that one on launchpad and ordered a second battery for a different laptop that has that capability but don’t have answers yet.

Would need to know your Bluetooth chipset to speculate too much because some bleeding combo cards with wifi6 are also better supported by recent kernels. For example my Intel BE200 worked fine for WiFi but the Bluetooth didn’t work at all until either 24.04 or applying 6.14 to it. Not sure which, I just noticed it was there in the menu about a week ago.

with that said my laptop still has a resource conflict I haven’t pinned down where, when WiFi and wwan card are both powered on and active my WiFi speed is clipped down to about 2mb/s. I’m just powering the wwan off when I don’t need it and I’m inclined to think it’s still a driver issue or the two cards don’t get along or are conflicting for resources somehow… I don’t have a solid enough theory to report it as a “bug” or know for sure whether it’s just my hardware yet.

Ubuntu and Wayland were the first distro where I went “hey, using Linux on the desktop finally isn’t *ss” so I’ll give them that. But 24.04 has been the one that had me wondering if it’s time to get acquainted with another. Many are mentioned ITT, I just haven’t “distro hopped” and “tried them all” in almost two decades and it may be time again.
by carlwgeorge | 2025-04-12 13:51:18+00:00
DNF didn't start as a competitive fork of Yum, it started as the Python 3 rewrite of Yum from the same developers. It was really just Yum version 4, using a different name so it could be installed in parallel with Yum for an extended period of time. Yum changing algorithms was never on the table, as that Python 2 code had to get phased out. Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL switching to it was always the plan.
by wslh | 2025-04-12 13:51:38+00:00
I get your perspective, but what we're seeing looks more like complex systems theory, emergent behavior, optimization, new winners. If models become commoditized, the real value shifts to last-mile delivery: mobile, desktop, and server integration across regions like China, Korea, the U.S., and Europe.

This is where differentiated UX and speed matter. It's also a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation like Google are slower to move, while new players can take risks and redefine the game. It's not just about burning money or model size, it's about who delivers value where it actually gets used.

I also think the influx of new scientists and engineers into AI raises the odds of shifting its economics: whether through new hardware (TPUs/GPUs) and/or more efficient methods.
by delfugal | 2025-04-12 13:51:49+00:00
Adobe has perfected digital blackmail.

After using and promoting their products for years to create our work, the switch off access to view or print any of it unless we keep paying blackmail monthly fees.

I don't want to edit my old work, but to lock me out of viewing it is nothing short of BLACKMAIL. As people change jobs or retire, they lose all access to their work. Sick.
by datavirtue | 2025-04-12 13:51:58+00:00
My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.
by silexia | 2025-04-12 13:52:22+00:00
Unions crippled themselves. Government employees unions destroyed the US government by getting the politicians in their pocket so much that no union member can be fired or held accountable in any way, and that led directly to Doge. Corporate unions were so abusive that companies were forced to move overseas, losing American jobs.

Each worker can negotiate easily on their own behalf or simply work elsewhere. Unions are unnecessary and always end up corrupt and wasteful.
by microtherion | 2025-04-12 13:52:35+00:00
> No, because the achievement, the mastery behind it is not obliterated in the next few years, by the upcoming iterations of newer smartwatches.

That's just another way of saying that there is no real innovation in end user benefits in mechanical watches. The marketing is all about how difficult they were to make.

Look at the functionality that the watch described in the article has to offer:

* It can show the time — to an accuracy of 8.5 seconds a day, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/VacheronConstantin/comments/1aiyjeb... Technological marvel, innit?

* It can show the date (with squiggly hands, for some unfathomable reason). It probably can even account for different lengths of months, and leap years (I was flabbergasted when I learned that there are watches being sold today for hundreds or thousands who require a manual adjustment at the end of every month that doesn't have 31 days).

* It can show the phase of the moon. Awesome if you're a werewolf running a hedge fund, I guess. It has a ton of other astrological indicators (Zodiac signs, etc.)

* It can chime every hour (presumably to remind the people around you that you exist and wear an overpriced watch).

* It works as a chronograph.

That's it, as far as I can tell. Nothing a $10 watch on Aliexpress could not do. It does not even seem to have an alarm, apparently. You get three actually useful functions (time — inaccurately, date, chrono) in a package that is 15mm thick.

No payment functionality, step counter, agenda, calculator.

But yes, you have a $100K or whatever watch that you can leave to your great-grandchildren so they can be assured that prior generations overpaid for gimmicky crap as well.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-04-12 13:54:12+00:00
That's a lot of words to justify what I presume to be the author's pre-existing viewpoint.

Given that "training" on someone else's IP will lead to a regurgitation of some slight permutation of that IP (e.g., all the Studio Ghibli style AI images), I think the author is pushing shit up hill with the word "can't".
by dinfinity | 2025-04-12 13:54:28+00:00
> I have yet to understand this obsession with agents.

1. People who can afford personal assistants and staff in general gladly pay those people to do stuff for them. AI assistants promise to make this way of living accessible to the plebs.

2. People love being "the idea guy", but never having to do any of the (hard) work. And honestly, just the speedup to actually convert the myriad of ideas floating around in various heads to prototypes/MVPs is causing/will cause somewhat of a Cambrian explosion of such things.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-12 13:54:37+00:00
> They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it.

I keep hearing this online, but every time I’ve used an Uber recently it’s driven by someone who says they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Seems clear to me that it is worth it for some, but not worth it if you have other better job options or don’t need the marginal income.
by protimewaster | 2025-04-12 13:54:55+00:00
> If I've "learned" Harry Potter to the level where I can reproduce it verbatim, the reproduction would be a copyright violation. If I can paraphrase it, ditto.

Yeah, that's something that I've not seen a good answer to from the "everything AI does is legal" people. Even if the training is completely legal, how do you verify that the generated output is not illegally similar to a copyrighted work that was ingested? Humans get in legal trouble if they produce a work that's too similar. Does AI not? If AI doesn't, can I just write an AI whose job is to reproduce copyrighted content and now I have a loophole to reproduce copyrighted content?
by tpmoney | 2025-04-12 13:55:12+00:00
Sorry, I lack a lot of context for Haskell and its terms (my experience with FP is limited largely to forays into Lisp / Clojure), but if I'm understanding right, you're saying because the collection is being lazily evaluated, the whole process up to the point of re-combining the items back into their final collection will be happening in a parallel manner, so as long as the IO is ordered to occur before that final collection, it will occur while other items are still being processed? So if the program were running and the system crashed half way through, we'd still have logs for everything that was processed up to the point it crashed (modulo anything that was inflight at the time of the crash)?

What happens if there are multiple steps with logging at each point? Say perhaps a program where we want to:

1) Read records from a file

2) Apply some transformations and log

3) Use the resulting transformations as keys to look up data from a database and log that interaction

4) Use the result from the database to transform the data further if the lookup returned a result, or drop the result otherwise (and log)

5) Write the result of the final transform to a different file

and do all of the above while reporting progress information to the user.

And to be very clear, I'm genuinely curious and looking to learn so if I'm asking too much from your personal time, or your own understanding, or the answer is "that's a task that FP just isn't well suited for" those answers are acceptable to me.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-04-12 13:55:22+00:00
The assumption that human learning and “machine learning” are somehow equivalent (in a physical, ethical, or legal sense—the domain shifts throughout the essay) is not supported with evidence here. They spend a long time describing how machine learning is different from human learning on a computational level, but that doesn’t seem to impact the rest of the argument.

I wish AI proponents would use the plain meaning of words in their persuasive arguments, instead of muddying the waters with anthropomorphic metaphors that smuggle in the conclusion.
by luckylion | 2025-04-12 13:56:22+00:00
> With AI prompters, the output is part function of the (very small) prompt, part function of the (huuuuuuuge) training set, part randomness.

With photographers, the output is part function of the (very small) orientation of the camera and pressing the button, part function of the (huuuuuuuge) technical marvel that are modern cameras, part randomness.

Let's be realistic here. Without the manufactured cameras, 99.9% of photographers wouldn't be photographers, only the 10 people who'd want it enough to build their own cameras, and they wouldn't have much appeal beyond a curiosity because their cameras would suck.
by thebigspacefuck | 2025-04-12 13:56:25+00:00
If you’re not using something like Cline or Cursor you should give them a try.

I haven’t found any OpenAI models good for agentic coding. o3-mini and 4o were both worse than 3.5 Sonnet. 3.7 and Gemini 2.5 Pro both seem be better than 3.5. I still use 4o with search as my primary reference model though.
by djoldman | 2025-04-12 13:56:27+00:00
There are a few stages involved in delivering the output of a LLM or text-to-image model:

1. acquire training data

2. train on training data

3. run inference on trained model

4. deliver outputs of inference

One can subdivide the above however one likes.

My understanding is that most lawsuits are targeting 4. deliver outputs of inference.

This is presumably because it has the best chance of resulting in a verdict favorable to the plaintiff.

The issue of whether or not it's legal to train on training data to which one does not hold copyright is probably moot - businesses don't care too much about what you do unless you're making money off it.
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-12 13:57:31+00:00
Vacheron is part of Richemont, a watchmaking conglomerate/holding company.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richemont

It works like any other luxury company, charge an arm and a leg, control the supply so you don’t overproduce, spend a ton on marketing.

Almost all Swiss watch brands (by volume) are owned by either Richemont, Swatch Group, or LVMH. Rolex, Patek, Audemars Piguet, Breitling, and Chopard are the last of the big Swiss independents, but there are smaller ones like Czapek and Cie, H Moser & Cie, Gruebel Forsey, Richard Mille.
by Ray20 | 2025-04-12 13:57:35+00:00
I think it's disgusting hypocrisy. We're talking about the USA, aren't we? A country that has started many, many wars, a country that massacred innocent Vietnamese, Afghans, Iraqis. Even at this very moment, the US is participating in the killing of honest, decent, innocent Palestinians and Russians. But that's okay, not worth mentioning.

But deporting lawful residents? How dare you, America? This is definitely the beginning of the end.
by Latty | 2025-04-12 13:57:39+00:00
I agree you can't just say it's learning and be done with it, but I think there is a discussion to be had about what training a model is.

When they made the MP3 format, for example, they took a lot of music and used that to create algorithms that are effective for reproducing real-world music using less data. Is that a copyright violation? I think the answer is obviously no, so there is a way to use copyrighted material to produce something new based on it, that isn't reproduction.

The obvious answer is that MP3 doesn't replace the music itself commercially, it doesn't damage the market, while the things produced by an AI model can, but by that logic, is it a copyright violation for an instrument manufacturer to go and use a bunch of music to tailor an instrument to be better, if that instrument could be used to create music that competes with it? Again, no, but clearly there is a difference in how much that instrument would have drawn from the works. AI Models have the potential to spit out very similar works which makes them much more harmful to the original works' value.

I think looking at it through the lens of copyright just isn't useful: it's not exactly the same thing, and the rules around copyright aren't good for managing it. Rather, we should be asking what we want from models and what they provide to society. As I see it, we should be asking how we can address the artists having their work fed into something that may reduce the value of their work, it's clearly a problem, and I don't think pushing the onus onto the person using the model not to create anything that infringes is a strategy that will actually work.

I do think the author correctly calls out gatekeeping as a huge potential issue. I think a reasonable route is that models shouldn't be copyrightable/patentable themselves, companies should not be allowed to rent-seek on something largely based on other people's work, they should be inherently in the public domain like recipes. Of course, legislating something like that is hard at the best of times, and the current environment is hostile to passing anything, let alone something pro-consumer.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-12 13:57:55+00:00
In my opinion, the year of the Linux desktop happened more than 2 decades ago, when the last kinds of applications that were previously available only on Windows became also available on Linux, e.g. movie players and device drivers for some less common hardware, e.g. TV tuners.

That is when I have converted all my computers, desktops and laptops, from dual-booting Windows and Linux, to Linux-only. For some servers I have continued to use FreeBSD and I have continued to use Microsoft Office Professional, but on Linux with CrossOver, where it worked much better than on Windows XP (!).

I agree that installing and configuring in the right way Linux remains a job for someone with decent computer management skills.

However, I have also installed Windows professionally, and on less common hardware, like embedded computers, I have encountered far more problems and far more difficult to solve than when installing Linux on the same hardware. Moreover, the solution for most Windows installation problems was not using some menu in a graphic tool, but using some obscure Windows command in a CLI window, with some very cryptic and undocumented command-line options, which I typically found by searching Internet forums where Windows users complained about the same problem.

Therefore the only real reason why Windows is more user-friendly is because it comes pre-installed on most computers, after professionals have solved any compatibility problems.

For whomever has a friend or relative that is knowledgeable about Linux, Linux can be more "user-friendly" than Windows.

My parents, older than 80 years, have been using Linux (Gentoo!) on their desktops for many years, without any problems, for reading/writing documents, Internet browsing, movie watching, music listening, TV watching, e-mail using, and so on, despite the fact that they do not even know what is "Linux".
by biimugan | 2025-04-12 13:58:46+00:00
I don't think you have the facts of the matter or the context right here. The government absolutely does not have the right to expel legal permanent residents without due process. And 'keeping their mouths shut' and pretending otherwise is not even remotely, feasibly "reasonable". The Supreme Court literally just ruled that residents with much less legal status than this person must be given due process -- an entirely obvious statement. But one which apparently needs to be reaffirmed by the highest court in the land because of how casually this administration seems to discard basic tenets of U.S. law. So you're just outright wrong.

The government absolutely did prevent this person from 'saying whatever he wants' -- he was essentially abducted from New Jersey and sent to detention in Louisiana without the ability to contact his family or his lawyer, or get any sort of hearing. It's only after the fact, due to the work of his lawyers and the public outcry, that he was able to submit a habeas petition. You seem to be downplaying how violent and seemingly corrupt the government's actions were in this case (I guess because you ultimately disagree with whatever you imagine this person did). Just because one Louisiana DoJ immigration judge sided with their own branch of government doesn't really lend plausibility to the government's case.
by cynical_german | 2025-04-12 13:59:24+00:00
Oh my... Are you serious? I'm almost triggered by this. A book about algorithms or data structures from 20 years ago has nothing more to teach? 3D game engine design from 20 years ago has nothing more to teach? No point in looking at the source code of Quake, reading k&r, and Knuth's TAOCP Volume 1 was published in 1968 so it's obviously irrelevant garbage!

I could spurr into an essay of what kind of lack of understanding you just portrayed about the world, but I won't.... I won't...
by dep_b | 2025-04-12 13:59:34+00:00
It's true, hallucinations in LLM's can be so consistent that I warn the LLM up front about stuff like "do not use NSCacheDefault, it does not exist, and there is no default value" and then keeping my fingers crossed it doesn't find a roundabout way to introduce it anyway.

Can't really remember what is was exactly anymore, something in Apple's Vision libraries that just kept popping up if I didn't explicitly say to not use it.
by haswell | 2025-04-12 13:59:53+00:00
With the recent findings [0] that some of the “free file converter” websites in the wild were actually injecting malware into the results as the first stage of various attacks, I’ve wanted to stand something like this up on a server for my family.

This looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for.

- [0] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/denver/news/fbi...