MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sspiff | 2025-05-31 08:45:50+00:00
I find this phenomenon really frustrating. I understand (or am at least aware of) the probabilistic nature of LLMs and their limitations, but when I point this out to my wife or friends when they are misusing LLMs for tasks they are both unsuited for and unreliable at, they wave their hands and dismiss my concerns as me being an AI cynic.

They continue to use AI for math (asking LLMs to split bills, for example) and treat its responses for factual data lookup as 100% reliable and correct.
by tlb | 2025-05-31 08:46:29+00:00
When a technology has proven business value, it's too late for seed investment. Existing companies are usually better at commercializing tech with proven business value.

The economic purpose of seed investors is to take on technology-market risk. It's a necessary part of the economy, since the only way to find out if a technology has business value is to have companies build things with it. Without investors willing to take on that risk (and lose frequently -- more than half the time) there'd be only incremental technology progress.
by sureglymop | 2025-05-31 08:47:17+00:00
That's really neat! And I fully get what this is for, it would actually be handy for me. Instead of having to open the SBB app I could hang this on my wall and then see when the buses I always take at the station closest to me leave.

Does it support ships, cable cars and trains that leave the country as well?

A neat additional feature could be an NFC tag next to the entries that I could tap my phone on in order to trigger a ticket purchase.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-31 08:49:28+00:00
Well what you're really seeing is the result of failed enshittification. Google (and Meta, and ...) built/bought these apps to start an enshittification cycle, and with communication apps it keeps failing, or at least not live up to search or social. So there's a constant fight about how to improve this, a fight which then turns into reorgs and chair dances. Then they fail again, and we do it again. And again.

There's actual competition.

Competition because, let's be honest, nation states are pushing their own internet apps where they are pushing propaganda (We're winning, Zelensky bad), instead of having "BUY THIS CRAP" every second post. And they often actually put some effort into it ("Zelensky bad, because of complicated historical/economic/... argument that we'll describe in 10 posts, 2 pages each, that you'll probably learn something from" [1][2][3] or "China is a great place to live. Don't mind all the people leaving, even leaving to fight for Putin because that's an actual improvement over China's rural cities' conditions or the many fuckups (how many times have all the fish in the Yantze suddenly died this year? I think we're already at double digits). China is the future!", because, like most governments, both the Russian and Chinese government are full of old, educated people)

Not that the propaganda isn't getting worse too. Just look at rt.com's frontpage today vs 10 years ago.

And they actually sound a lot less cringy than Musk does.

[1] https://www.rt.com/russia/618284-what-russian-generals-are-r... [2] https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/618333-joseph-brodsky-nobel-e... [3] https://www.rt.com/business/616820-uae-ai-company-expanding-...
by delusional | 2025-05-31 08:53:53+00:00
I think this is true on a deeper level. What do we measure progress by? The only thing people ever talk about as a measure of progress is the stock market. How much it's up, how much it's down. Nobody cares about the actual output of the economy at this point. It's all just number go up.

It's not just the CEO's that can't hear anything over the record breaking profit. It's all of society.
Show HN: Hire.inc – AI-sourced, recruiter-vetted candidate shortlists
by ahmedsalah | 2025-05-31 08:53:59+00:00
We pair GPT-based semantic search with human recruiters. AI digs, humans verify and talk to prospects, then candidates record a 60-second intro. Early users cut time-to-hire from ~30 days to ~12. Tech stack: Pinecone, NextJS, OpenAI. AMA: ranking models, video engagement rates, or scaling recruiter bandwidth.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-31 08:54:13+00:00
> Blackpills aren’t hostile or harmful.

If their reasoning boils down to "society owes me something, but since I can't get what I am owed, I will do ______" then I disagree.

> By the way, if a phenomenon is large enough not to be called off as an individual’s quirk, I think society SHOULD care. Something is possibly wrong. And this has large impact on society itself.

Something is always serious wrong with society, because it comprises of humans. 100 years ago 60%+ of humans in this same society couldn't vote or open up bank accounts. Marital rape was legal. Women's role in society changed because of advancements in medicine , transportation and technology in general. These guys don't want to accept that reality. And I agree with what you said, it is a problem, society shouldn't care about them or this problem, no more than it should with other criminally inclined groups. Gangs are a problem, no one is saying we should care about gangsters, law abiding citizens agree hostility against gangs is a good things. that's how I suggest they be treated.

To be clear, I have no hostility against being celibate. the problem is when they add "involuntary" to it, as if they are being coerced. Our default setting is celibate, you have to work to change that condition. Imagine saying I'm "Involuntary non-billionaire" or something like that. That term suggest an implied entitlement, that's why they should be treated with hostility. Plenty of people live their entire lives celibate with devolving into this state.
by pera | 2025-05-31 08:54:15+00:00
Bullshit: Chatbots are not failing to demonstrate a tangible increase in companies' output because of regulations and IP law, they are failing because they are still not good for the job.

LLMs only exist because the companies developing them are so ridiculously powerful that can completely ignore the rule of law, or if necessary even change it (as they are currently trying to do here in Europe).

Remember we are talking about a technology created by torrenting 82 TB of pirated books, and that's just one single example.

"Steal all the users, steal all the music" and then lawyer up, as Eric Schmidt said at Stanford a few months ago.
by sschueller | 2025-05-31 08:54:21+00:00
I did this for my original project [1] but I wanted something simple for the end user. Having to explain a user to visit a specific IP on their device which may not work because of what ever routing issue is not something I wanted to have to deal with. The app does add a dependacy but all Bluetooth characteristics are public and documented [2] so you can use any Bluetooth app to configure the device.

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/

[2] https://github.com/TechdroidInc/stationdisplay/blob/main/BLE...
by HPsquared | 2025-05-31 08:54:28+00:00
Democratic systems already have the problem of not accounting for how strongly each voter feels about something. Is it really fair for 51 people weakly in favour of something to overrule 49 who are very strongly against and consider the issue extremely important? That's surely a net negative decision.

Forcing people to vote who aren't interested only makes this effect even worse.
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-31 08:55:00+00:00
> United States and it is not allowed to by our laws.

Yeah. Because at one point unions got so powerful they formed their own union towns.

They even got infiltrated by the mob.

Plus Europe union laws and US union laws are separate things. For example in France, whatever concessions union gets, are applied to all employees. Which isn't the case in US and is iirc considered anti-union. However then you remember that US union depends on participation for union healthcare.

The biggest problem for unions today isn't the laws. It's ironically the free trade (lack of laws). Don't want to do this job for peanuts? We'll ship it overseas for someone willing to work for half a peanut.
by jatora | 2025-05-31 08:56:11+00:00
While I agree that the current 'bloodbath' narrative is all hype, I'm honestly confused by a lot of the sentiment i see on here towards AI. Namely the dismissal of continual improvement and the rampant whistling past the graveyard attitude of what is coming.

It is confusing because many of the dismissals come from programmers, who are unequivocally the prime beneficiaries of genAI capability as it stands.

I work as a marketing engineer at a ~1B company and the amount of gains I have been able to provide as an individual are absolutely multiplied by genAI.

One theory I have is that maybe it is a failing of prompt ability that is causing the doubt. Prompting, fundamentally, is querying vector space for a result - and there is a skill to it. There is a gross lack of tooling to assist in this which I attribute to a lack of awareness of this fact. The vast majority of genAI users dont have any sort of prompt library or methodology to speak of beyond a set of usual habits that work well for them.

Regardless, the common notion that AI has only marginally improved since GPT-4 is criminally naive. The notion that we have hit a wall has merit, of course, but you cannot ignore the fact that we just got accurate 1M context in a SOTA model with gemini 2.5pro. For free. Mere months ago. This is a leap. If you have not experienced that as a leap then you are using LLM's incorrectly.

You cannot sleep on context. Context (and proper utilization of it) is literally what shores up 90% of the deficiencies I see complained about.

AI forgets libraries and syntax? Load in the current syntax. Deep research it. AI keeps making mistakes? Inform it of those mistakes and keep those stored in your project for use in every prompt.

I consistently make 200k+ token queries of code and context and receive highly accurate results.

I build 10-20k loc tools in hours for fun. Are they production ready? No. Do they accomplish highly complex tasks for niche use cases? Yes.

The empowerment of the single developer who is good at manipulating AI AND an experienced dev/engineer is absolutely incredible.

Deep research alone has netted my company tens of millions in pipeline, and I just pretend it's me. Because that's the other part that maybe many aren't realizing - its right under your nose - constantly.

The efficiency gains in marketing are hilariously large. There are countless ways to avoid 'AI slop', and it involves, again, leveraging context and good research, and a good eye to steer things.

I post this mostly because I'm sad for all of the developers who have not experienced this. I see it as a failure of effort (based on some variant of emotional bias or arrogance), not a lack of skill or intellect. The writing on the wall is so crystal clear.
by orlp | 2025-05-31 08:59:11+00:00
I helped design an API for "algebraic operations" in Rust: <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/136469>, which are coming along nicely.

These operations are

1. Localized, not a function-wide or program-wide flag.

2. Completely safe, -ffast-math includes assumptions such that there are no NaNs, and violating that is undefined behavior.

So what do these algebraic operations do? Well, one by itself doesn't do much of anything compared to a regular operation. But a sequence of them is allowed to be transformed using optimizations which are algebraically justified, as-if all operations are done using real arithmetic.
Bandwidth, Feedback Loops, and the Cellular Roots of Consciousness
by inshard | 2025-05-31 09:01:22+00:00
1.WHY INNER EXPERIENCE NEEDS FEEDBACK

An “inner life” is only possible if a system can keep complex informational states alive against noise and decay. That calls for heavy-duty feedback loops that move a lot of information quickly. Architecture is the key variable here, not what the parts are made of.

2.EUKARYOTES VS PROKARYOTES

Prokaryotic cells are simple: almost no internal compartments, minimal cytoskeleton, few parallel channels for signalling.

Eukaryotic cells are different: they have membrane-bound organelles, a dense microtubule lattice, fast calcium signalling, and molecular motors hauling cargo at nanometre-scale “LAN speeds.” Those features create far broader internal bandwidth and far more room for nested feedback loops. In other words, eukaryotes supply the minimum wiring diagram for “proto-conscious” dynamics; prokaryotes don’t.

3.ONE NEURON’S INTERNAL BANDWIDTH VS BETWEEN-NEURON LINKS

Inside a single neuron, microtubule transport, dendritic electrical spread and calcium waves give you gigabit-class complexity (figuratively).

Between neurons, chemical synapses dribble info at millisecond time-steps. Electrical gap junctions are faster but rare. The upshot: a neuron’s private world is rich, yet knitting thousands of such private worlds together is bottlenecked at the synapse.

4.POSSIBLE WAYS CELLS OVERCOME THE BOTTLENECK

– Gap junctions: direct electrical bridges between neighbouring neurons.

– Glia–neuron signalling: astrocytes coordinate local rhythms and plasticity.

– Extracellular electric fields: weak but widespread fields that let groups of neurons phase-lock.

– Speculative microtubule or other quantum-scale effects: controversial but testable.

5.A FALSIFIABLE EXPERIMENT SET

Select each mechanism, perturb it, and watch consciousness-linked read-outs.

• Block gap junctions with carbenoxolone and track EEG gamma power plus behaviour.

• Silence astrocyte calcium with optogenetics and measure the same markers.

• Scramble local field potentials with focused AC stimulation and test cognition.

• Destabilise microtubules with colchicine (or stabilise with taxol) while monitoring anaesthetic dose needed to knock the subject out.

Sham and known anaesthetic controls let you gauge real effect sizes.

6.TAKE-AWAYS FOR BUILDERS AND THEORISTS

• Conscious integration scales with bandwidth and nested feedback, not with carbon vs silicon.

• Eukaryotic complexity seems like the floor for any system hoping to sustain proto-conscious loops.

• Synapses are only part of the story; ignoring non-synaptic channels may leave a lot of integration power on the table.

If even one non-synaptic pathway proves essential, we’ll need to expand our models of how consciousness really works—and rethink how we design brain-inspired hardware. Comments, critiques, and replication ideas are welcome.
by sfn42 | 2025-05-31 09:02:10+00:00
On a normal keyboard? I would recommend an ergonomic keyboard. I started off using one from Microsoft then got a Logitech K860 and have been using that at home and at work for over half a decade now. I'm never going back, in my opinion normal keyboards are strictly inferior.

It's worth a try if you're having trouble with pain, worked for me. And it isn't just good for health reasons, it's just better suited to human use. It feels more natural and comfortable.
by networked | 2025-05-31 09:03:23+00:00
> It's simple: supporting a business without getting paid sucks ass. The second a project excludes commercial work they get 100x my attention.

This stance is interesting to me because it reminds me of psychological experiments about utility versus fairness. I'd like to ask you a question in that spirit.

If you could choose one of the following, which would you choose?

1. Noncommercial users gain 3× on some comprehensive metric of useful software with the source available (imagine the metric includes code quality, features, hardware support, choice, etc.), but businesses gain 10×

2. Noncommercial users gain 2×, and businesses gain 2×

3. Noncommercial users gain 1.1×, and businesses gain nothing

4. Noncommercial users gain nothing, and businesses gain nothing

5. Noncommercial users lose 3×, but businesses lose 10×

Edit: Added option 3 and renumbered the options after.
by SunlitCat | 2025-05-31 09:03:35+00:00
It's already in the title. Saying "Windows computers" feels off. For many people, it's not "Windows", it's just the computer.

The real issue began in the 90s, when computers became ubiquitous. It’s hard to tell someone they need to update their operating system, buy a new machine, and replace accompanying hardware (like specialized equipment in businesses), just because the OS is outdated and no longer gets updates.

To many users, the operating system is merely the thing that makes their trusted tools work, whether it's a version of Word from 1997 or some software that’s been running an expensive machine reliably for 30 years.

If you really want people to update their operating systems, you’ll need to make them want to update their hardware too, just like that big fruity company does.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-31 09:04:34+00:00
I think you have a point, but I like how contemporary arranged marriages are done in Indian culture in the west at least. The children consent into it. Historically, children had no choice in arranged marriage, I don't think that has any place in a society that rejects marital rape.

I'm no psychoanalyst, but I suspect how children are raised in their developmental years (<13yo) is the bedrock that is causing adults like this. If a person doesn't learn to have healthy platonic relations with the opposite sex in those years, it leads to complications and problems in personality like this.

A lot of people were raised to have societal expectation from a time society was vastly different or they were raised by families that are holding on to those historical times. But modern society no longer requires Women to play their historical role, men simply need to adapt to this reality.

I for one am happy for Women, as one would be for their sisters or mothers being liberated and empowered. A person who finds their romantic success to be a higher importance than other people's ability to live a more fair and just life to be sociopathic.

That said, society does have it's own issues in that every aspect of it penalizes not having friends, family or romantic partners. Even if someone adapts to celibacy, society won't let them be. But then again, society has a lot of issues that are more important.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-31 09:05:00+00:00
If you have this issue, I can highly recommend working in another country where all your colleagues are using a different keyboard layout to you entirely. This is particularly bad for programming, because while standard layouts are mostly _fairly_ consistent with the letters, the symbols can end up anywhere. Sure, this means you still won't be able to find anything and look like an idiot, but now you can blame their keyboards for being weird rather than your own muscle memory!
by gambiting | 2025-05-31 09:05:23+00:00
>>You won't go to a doctor expecting 100% accuracy.

The way LLMs work at the moment is equivalent to going to a doctor with a set of symptoms, and the doctor telling you "ah yes, of course, it's illness X and you need to take medicine Y to cure it" and then you check and neither X nor Y exists. That's not "accuracy" that's just straight up fraud?

I wouldn't have any problem with Google's AI saying "I don't know" or "I don't have enough sources to provide a good answer, but my best approximation is this". But I literally battle misinformation produced by Google's AI search every single day, because it's telling people actual made up facts that don't exist.
by dcminter | 2025-05-31 09:05:52+00:00
Well, these should get me in trouble here fairly quickly...

• Modern Java is a good language.

• It's ok not to be polyglot.

• Debugging should not start with the debugger.

• If you can't express yourself clearly you probably can't think clearly.

• HN should support Markdown :)

Some exceptions for all of these, of course.
by hermitcrab | 2025-05-31 09:07:27+00:00
"Try It On seems to change a shopper’s body to match the model wearing the clothing instead of showing how the clothing would fit on the shopper’s own body. The effect is potentially dysmorphic, asking users to change their bodies for clothes rather than the other way around."

This doesn't seem much better than just pasting the customer's face onto an image of a model wearing the clothes. "Hey I would look great in this blouse (if I also has the body of a model)".
by gary17the | 2025-05-31 09:09:16+00:00
I imagine it is hard to keep feeling inspired when you keep programming sample code "bundles" that are purely "theoretical", i.e., carry no complexity or LOC-size required for the commercial or open-source product directions. Remember that developing and maintaining real-world projects requires much deeper technological and social skills than hacking on private projects. Consider either working on a commercial project (e.g., an app with a paid monthly subscription) that will require product-market-fit education and commercial-grade quality execution from you, or joining an open source project (e.g., the Linux kernel or satellite projects) that will require cooperation and accountability from you, as well as much deeper knowledge of only one or two programming languages (e.g., Rust and C).
by youngtaff | 2025-05-31 09:09:21+00:00
M&S’ online store is outsourced to someone like Tata, Publicis Sapient etc and last time I looked was built on one of the commercially available platforms (DemandWare and the like)

Warehousing and delivery is probably contracted out to another third-party

My guess is it’s one of these that’s been hacked
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-05-31 09:10:01+00:00
It's also worth noting that it's almost entirely native born Americans that are pushing back against nepotism. Extreme nepotism is still the norm (an expectation even) in most South and East Asian cultures. And it's quite readily acknowledged if you speak to newer hires who haven't realized yet that it is best kept quiet.

It's a hard truth for many Americans to swallow, but it is the truth nonetheless.

Not to say there isn't an incredible amount of merit... but the historical impact of rampant nepotism in the US is widely acknowledged, and this newer manifestation should be acknowledged just the same.
by DanHulton | 2025-05-31 09:10:05+00:00
It's the unfounded promises that this will be solved because the tech will only get better that really upset me. Because sure, it will get better, I'm pretty certain of that. They'll have additional capabilities, they'll have access to more-recent data, etc. But "better" does not necessarily equate to "will fix the lying problem." That's a problem that is BAKED INTO the technology, and requires some kind of different approach to solve -- you can't just keep making a hammer bigger and bigger in the hopes that one day it'll turn into a screwdriver.

Before LLMs really took off, we were in the middle of an "AI winter", where there just weren't any promising techs, at least none with sufficient funding attached to them. And it's WORSE now. LLMs have sucked all the air out of the room, and all of the funding out of other avenues of research. Technologies that were "10-20" years away now might be 30-40, because there's fewer people researching them, with less money, and they might even be completely different people trying to restart the research after the old ones got recruited away to work on LLMs!
by selkin | 2025-05-31 09:10:37+00:00
There were many more than four in total. Right now they have more then four (there are completely separate messaging apps hidden inside Docs and Maps).

It is easy to confuse them all, considering those apps got renamed often. By my count, there were four different apps called Hangouts (!), some existing at the same time:

(1) The original Google Hangouts, which replaced Google Talk.

(2) Google+ Hangouts, which was video only. Google+ also had a text messaging app called Huddle.

(3) Google Hangouts Meet, a video chat aimed mostly at the workplace. By the time it was launched Google+ was dead and buried. The “hangouts” was later dropped, making it just “Google Meet”.

(4) Google Hangouts Chat, the equivalent text chat device. They also dropped the word “hangout” from the name, but it was launched as “Hangouts”.