MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beedeebeedee | 2025-05-15 17:37:04+00:00
> Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".

Yes, the workers' demands were reasonable, but they were met with warfare by the upper class who did not want to accept reasonable demands. The most extreme example is the Battle of Blair Mountain, but there are countless records of strike breakers beating and killing workers for striking and unionizing.
by wuschel | 2025-05-15 17:37:32+00:00
> Kids (…) are unnecessary for a fulfilling life, so this outcome should not be surprising.

Unnecessary in a material existential sense, perhaps, when one exludes a systemic need to take care of the elderly. One could argue, however, that the responsibility when taking care of kids are one of the few means to live and grow as a human being.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-15 17:38:09+00:00
I mean, the Shield is basically still a smart TV, and a 10 year old platform at that. Complaining about it lacking games is like lambasting the AppleTV for not playing Red Dead Redemption. Nvidia was pretty clear that the Shield was a glorified game streaming client that circumstantially ran Borderlands 2.

We have dedicated Tegra-powered gaming platforms that prove the hardware and driver quality is good enough for 99% of consumers.
by 10000truths | 2025-05-15 17:38:26+00:00
A giga load balancer is no less viable than a giga Redis cache or a giga database. Rate limiting is inherently stateful - you can't rate limit a request without knowledge of prior requests, and that knowledge has to be stored somewhere. You can shift the state around, but you can't eliminate it.

Sure, some solutions tend to be more efficient than others, but those typically boil down to implementation details rather than fundamental limitations in system design.
by munificent | 2025-05-15 17:38:35+00:00
Games typically precomputed much of the pathfinding information and assumed a non-destructible world. The whole thing in the article about recomputing the blocked/non-blocked state is a thing many games with pathfinding simply didn't do at runtime at all.

They usually pathfinding on a larger granularity with more of the world aligned to a larger grid. Since asteroids are so organically shaped and freely movable in this case, it necessitates a finer pathfinding grid. It looks like they're roughly 6-8 pixels here. In an older game, it could easily be 16 or more. Pathfinding cost scales quadratically as the grid gets finer.

Also, while CPU speeds have increased, RAM access rates have not kept up. It's quite hard to actually keep the CPU busy and not have it stalled waiting for memory very often. "Data-oriented design" is a whole little subfield dedicated to dealing with this problem.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-15 17:38:37+00:00
It's been a long time since I read them, but I recall the sequels being less focused plot-wise and also having a lot more of the human + alien/furry relations. I think I read 5 or 6 of them and mostly enjoyed them, but eventually moved on to other authors. Might be time to revisit them now that I've mostly forgotten them enough that it'll feel fresh again.
by udev4096 | 2025-05-15 17:38:47+00:00
Which is such a lame and flawed mechanism to avoid letting them access anyone's data. I mean what are you even trying to prove here? That banks care about customer's security when they can't even implement a secure 2FA which is not just an unencrypted text message

“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, but give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.”
by Bender | 2025-05-15 17:39:12+00:00
I think combining LLM's with big-data was the most genius way to extract highly secret and sensitive information from individuals, intellectual property from companies, secrets from governments and military operations, pillow talk from executives and politicians. I could not have come up with a better way to burn it all down given all of these secrets will "leak" at some point. I fully expect it to become a master of manipulation especially for those that think their LLM is their significant other. Social media manipulation algorithms will be supplanted by AI.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-15 17:39:42+00:00
> The argument about power usage for developers, as opposed to consumers,

Except with MCP, essentially most consumers will become "programmers". See my other comment for the rationale (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43997227).

(TLDR: MCP lets non-programmers convert their prompts into programs, for all practical purposes. Currently there is a barrier to entry to automate simple tasks: The need to learn programming. That barrier will go away)
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-15 17:39:45+00:00
> US foreign policy has always been a shit-show

Yes, that's why I said as usual and typical.

> what we're seeing today is an extra thick layer of daily bshit on top of the usual layer

No, as far as foreign politics it's really same shit different day, we're siding with dictators and meddling with other countries' affairs, economically bullying other countries... Just more out in the open now, and with a somewhat different set of dictators. The only material difference is that Trump's mission is to weaken our global supremacy, which is a mixed bag, as some of that supremacy should indeed go away, but tariffs etc are not the fucking answer.

> which turned out to be even more true than anyone thought was possible

I thought it was going to be even worse. We still have 4 years to find out how bad it gets.
by gilbetron | 2025-05-15 17:40:07+00:00
As a grizzled genX dev myself, we are in a different situation now - "nosql" (hate the term) has tremendous use cases, it's just that most people aren't creating something that requires it. It was a natural exploration of the tools, something that should be encouraged. "I knew it all along" isn't an attitude I find helpful or effective. My "grizzled genX dev" attitude is that nearly all people think they know what is going to happen or what is the best route, and they are almost always entirely wrong. We only find out by trying a bunch of things.

In other words, there are many companies currently worth $Billion+ that wouldn't have succeeded had they followed your advice. Today, with incredibly powerful infra of all types available, starting with Postgres is almost always the right step unless you know, know, better. That wasn't the case 10+ years ago.
by beAbU | 2025-05-15 17:40:19+00:00
Netlifx with their analytics data is perfectly positioned to dynamically generate content based on user behaviour and preferences. When AI content becomes good enough (and it will), then I predict this will become the end game.

Imagine being able to tweak an episode post production after analytics show a particular scene results in a dip in engagement.

Imagine being able to AB test movies, because it's dirt cheap now to shit them out.

Imagine being able to dynamically change the brand of a drink in a character's hand based on what you know of the user's preference, and which brand is currently paying the most (e.g. coke gets 80%, pepsi gets 20% views)

Imagine being able to change the sex/race of a character based on what you know of the viewer's biases!

I probably shouldn't be saying these things out loud.
by _QrE | 2025-05-15 17:40:32+00:00
This. Normal AirTags are just fine for tracking your stuff.

> "(thiefs use apps to locate AirTags around, and AirTags will warn the thief if an unknown AirTag is travelling with them, for example if they steal your car)"

The reason this was introduced is exactly because people used AirTags to stalk others. Advertising that your product turns that off is basically targeting that specific demographic.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-15 17:40:44+00:00
The thing I ran into today was jsdom not seeming to work at all in Deno.

My use case was trying to run Playwright to scrape a site, copy the resultant HTML into jsdom, then run Mozilla's `readability` module on that to get a summary of the page. I found a replacement for Playwright (astral), and `readability` seems to be runtime agnostic as long as it has access to DOM APIs, but jsdom doesn't work with Deno yet.

I'd love to hear if there's an alternative to jsdom that I could use, because I unfortunately can't switch entirely over to NodeJS in this particular project, so either I find a replacement server-side DOM library, or I need to juggle two runtimes for different parts of the project. :/
by bpev | 2025-05-15 17:41:14+00:00
huh, I mean idk experiences differ. My main project's service is written in Rust/Axum, and I enjoy it a lot. But I thought it was actually kind of frustrating to find that combination; Axum was the 3rd http client I tried, after the first two failed me in different ways. If I had started with the https client first and hadn't already felt good about building the codebase in Rust, I might have just gotten annoyed and moved on. First impressions can sometimes skew the perspective a little.

fwiw, re finding up-to-date packages, you can also pull in npm dependencies. idk what you found confusing about the deno.json, but it's definitely optional; you can just write imports directly in the .js file if you want. I often make single-file scripts to run some npm package over a local file.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-15 17:41:22+00:00
Fine tuning should be combined with inference in some way. However this requires keeping the model loaded at high enough precision for backprop to work.

Instead of hundreds of thousands of us downloading the latest and greatest model that won't fundamentally update one bit until we're graced with the next one, I would think we should all be able to fine-tune the weights so that it can naturally memorize new additional info and preferences without using up context length.
by kemayo | 2025-05-15 17:41:33+00:00
I don't mind if a meeting is an hour, but I'm genuinely a bit peeved every time I'm in a 50 minute meeting that just automatically rolls over. If you want to do an hour, book an hour.

(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
by techpineapple | 2025-05-15 17:41:35+00:00
It's interesting navigating the relationship between sort of investors who drive up the value of Tesla because they think Musk can do amazing things, and also, no one thinking a pay package like this might be fair because Musk can't do said amazing things.

Like Tesla seems valued partially from the anticipation that potentially he _could_ rocket it to a 10 trillion dollar valuation.
by ravenstine | 2025-05-15 17:41:38+00:00
This kind of thing smells like the next dotcom bubble. I personally use so-called "AI" tech every day, but I suspect these companies are wildly overestimating how much retention they'll be bringing in through these inevitably customer-hostile agents or whatever buzzword du jour will bring in. Even when it comes to very simple things like AI reviews summaries on sites like Amazon, I already pass right over them because they ignore more useful information like how closely the overall score predicts whether a customer will be satisfied with a product.
by jdonaldson | 2025-05-15 17:42:19+00:00
That is a pretty badly overloaded word for it, and I didn't even pay much attention to the notion of "rank" anyways. I'm mainly interested in how the text is represented with bit vectors. It's very reminiscent of how vector math plays out in other ML domains, but I would bet that many people working with text have never heard of it.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-15 17:42:50+00:00
Lua can help if you're handing this over to someone else not just devs who know Elixir.

Also, as the sibling post mentioned, in this case Lua is completely interpreted in an Erlang process. That allows a good amount of sandboxing, they have isolated heaps already and you can control memory limits and other resource usages, and all that in a relatively tiny footprint of a few KBs.
by neltnerb | 2025-05-15 17:43:13+00:00
So essentially that buses need to have higher fares in low density areas? I'm sure Uber fixed-route shuttles will cost many times more. It's hard to imagine a fixed-route shuttle making much more sense in a low density area than buses logistically.

Unfortunately that means low income folks who can't afford 5-10x higher daily fare (and I think that's a decent guess) are excluded from living there. But sure, if we assume a public transit system should be profitable (and I personally disagree with that) you'd end up unable to service expensive to reach areas.

I concede that's a rock and hard place situation though.

What I can see as an upside is that if Uber's brand lets them short circuit the classism and normalize not using a car all the time. That's also a prerequisite for a healthy bus system, generally you have to build the transit and make it reliable before expecting people to stop driving cars, people have to be able to reliably get around. So if it makes people feel secure in not owning one, when public bus routes are added they'll actually have riders and not get discontinued after a month trial.
by loeg | 2025-05-15 17:43:23+00:00
You can get around it, of course, but password managers are aware of the correct domain for a password and will only auto fill it into a form on the right domain. This is phishing-resistant. I'm not saying it's perfect, and I'm a big passkeys advocate. But "randomly generated password auto-filled by 1password" already meets many of the same benefits as passkeys, kinda, so long as auto-fill works on that particular website. Passkeys, in addition to stronger versions of those properties, also provide (1) ergonomics/standardization ("fill" works everywhere) and (2) sites can trust them to be strong.
by breuleux | 2025-05-15 17:43:39+00:00
You have to start the accounting immediately, because once a technology becomes entrenched, it's very difficult to backtrack. If it spins out of control and half of all energy is sunk into AI because half of services depend on it and workforces have been laid off, you won't be able to do anything about it without disrupting half of services. The window of opportunity to keep a technology in check, unfortunately, often occurs before the problems it causes become obvious.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-15 17:44:06+00:00
I used to live in a place where there are a lot of data centers now. There were only a few just a few years ago. Now there are tens and more under construction.

I returned to that place to visit family and friends last year. It was an eye opening experience. The people who live there have taken a keen interest on curtailing further development of any new data centers. One of the chief complaints is the constant power issues that didn’t exist before 2021-2022.

The locals argue that this is the result of the dramatic infusion of AI into every technology product. They’re likely not wrong. The communities in the area became quite politically active over the issue and have retained all manner of analysts and scientists, journalists and investigators, and so on, to aide them in making a political case against future data center development.

The thing that got me was the complaints about the noise. Over the past few years the locals and those in their employ have been monitoring noise levels near the data centers and they’ve tracked sustained increases in noise pollution with the timeline over which the use of AI has exploded. There it has become sort of a trope to measure the working day by how much noise pollution is produced by any data center nearby. Mostly belonging to a hyperscaler known by an acronym.

The data centers have reportedly not been the boon that was promised, which seems to be seen as insult to injury. The area already has a vibrant tech scene independent of data center operations. So the locals don’t really see value in allowing more data centers to be built, and they’re starting to organize politically around the idea of preventing future data center construction and implementing heavy usage based taxation on utilities used by the existing ones.
by claar | 2025-05-15 17:44:14+00:00
This project creates a "compact, machine-optimized format designed for efficient AI parsing rather than human readability" called "Structured Knowledge Format (SKF)".

It's not obvious to me that this is a good idea. LLMs are trained on human-readable text.

The author notes that non-reasoning LLMs struggle with these SKFs. Maybe that's a hint that human readable summaries would perform better? Just a guess.

Or perhaps a vector store?
by robinsonb5 | 2025-05-15 17:44:34+00:00
Ultimately we're trying to persuade people to reduce their quality of life in order to reduce their energy footprint. That's already a difficult sell. It becomes an impossible sell when any reductions that might be achieved are immediately offset by a new energy-hungry technology coming online - especially when the long-term effect (goal, even) is to reduce yet further the quality of life of everyday people.
by Macuyiko | 2025-05-15 17:44:41+00:00
Weirdly it has gotten so far that I have embedded this into my workflow and will often prompt:

> "Good work so far, now I want to take it to another step (somewhat related but feeling it too hard): <short description>. Do you think we can do it in this conversation or is it better to start fresh? If so, prepare an initial prompt for your next fresh instantiation."

Sometimes the model says that it might be better to start fresh, and prepares a good summary prompt (including a final 'see you later'), whereas in other cases it assures me it can continue.

I have a lot of notebooks with "initial prompts to explore forward". But given the sycophancy going on as well as one-step RL (sigh) post-training [1], it indeed seems AI platforms would like to keep the conversation going.

[1] RL in post-training has little to do with real RL and just uses one shot preference mechanisms with an RL inspired training loop. There is very little work in terms of long-term preferences slash conversations, as that would increase requirements exponentially.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-15 17:45:52+00:00
They were. I think it was 1995 they started charging? I had dozens of domains. There was a simple text file form you had to type over. Then they started charging $200/2yr for .com/.net/.org and a lot of us let our domains go which ended up being worth tens of millions a few years later during the boom.

(the story at the time of what killed the "free" is that Unilever mailed in 19,000 forms; one for each of their registered trademarks)
by MrJohz | 2025-05-15 17:46:12+00:00
I think Deno has done a good job pushing the ecosystem forwards, but I think it has the problem that anything it can do, NodeJS can also implement. Since Deno, NodeJS now follows most browser standards, also allows running Typescript natively, has a built-in test runner, and even has a similar permissions system to Deno (albeit behind an additional flag). I believe it can even import JSR modules if configured correctly.

So NodeJS can do pretty much everything Deno can, but it also can do all the stuff it could already do.
by poizan42 | 2025-05-15 17:46:24+00:00
You said

> A related example is the word 'none' (= 'not one'). Technically it should govern a singular verb

And I'm questioning why you think "none" should technically govern a singular verb when "none" is normally a non-singular subject.

I'm sure both are being used, and at the end of the day what is correct is determined by how a significant amount of people are using the language. But I just don't understand why you think a singular verb would be more "technically correct"

Did you mean that because you could replace none with "not one" then it should be singular? But that only works because the 'not' applies to the whole sentence, so the remainder is about 'one', i.e. "not (one of the team was prepared)". But that doesn't work for the word none because you can't read it as the 'not' applying to a singular part-sentence.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-15 17:47:28+00:00
It depends on what you mean by convenient. A sign has low set up cost, so is convenient to implement. But it has an extremely high operating cost, that adds two extra steps to every meeting, which could add up to 40 or more per week. Small things you have to do often add up, and a quick task is still a task you have to remember every single time.

An automated solution has a high start up cost and is much less convenient to set up or to “fix” if it goes down. But it has an almost zero operating cost, in that you don’t have to remember or perform any additional tasks for a meeting.

For me, automating small tasks I have to remember to do over and over and over is very valuable to me, as those are the things that take up valuable space in my “stay on track” mind and distract from bigger more important tasks.
by Borg3 | 2025-05-15 17:47:46+00:00
Im not really sure what are you talking about ;) HW become much much much faster. Mostly in speed of computing, but latency also dropped nicely. The letency bloat you see its 99% of software (OS). I still run Win2003 on modern desktop, and it flies! Really, booting/shutdown is quick. Im on spinning rust, so first start of webbrowser is slowish a bit, but once cached, its like 200ms-500ms depending on version (more modern = slower).
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-15 17:47:48+00:00
> Except with MCP, essentially most consumers will become "programmers"

You are more optimistic than I am. Most people I have seen are using LLMs are at best as an alternative to Grammarly or a document/web summary, or at worst making decision based on outdated LLM advice or as an inaccurate fact-engine.

The average person could code using Excel, but most don't even if they know how to use IF() and VLOOKUP().
by Macuyiko | 2025-05-15 17:48:25+00:00
All of the above is true, but between solving quicker, and admitting we gave context:

I do agree with you that an LLM should not always start from scratch.

In a way it is like an animal which we have given the ultimate human instinct.

What has nature given us? Homo Erectus is 2 million years ago.

A weird world we live in.

What is context.
by anujkanojia29 | 2025-05-15 17:48:58+00:00
We are seeing a wave of AI video startups — tools that generate product videos, reels, explainers, and more using generative models. But many of them hit a wall. Why? Because after the AI generates content, users want to fine-tune it — but the tools lack the video editing capabilities. We’ve been working on a React-based video editing SDK - Twick that solves this. It lets you: - Auto-generate styled captions - Add effects (fade, zoom, typewriter, etc.) - Build timelines and live-edit canvases - Export videos to the cloud via Lambda All of this can be easily embedded into your app. If you're interested in trying it out or want to collaborate, feel free to reach out. I'm also planning to open-source it soon for the wider dev community.
by elif | 2025-05-15 17:50:02+00:00
So this is probably why the phishing calls have increased from ~1 per month to ~3 per week.. good to know... Wish coinbase would let me DO something about it... Maybe fresh accounts for everyone? Maybe KYC data not directly linked to accounts? There should be SOMETHING they can do because the sheer volume of people constantly harassing CB customers is nuts.
by lolinder | 2025-05-15 17:50:39+00:00
Whataboutism is bad, but there's a distinction between whataboutism and making comparisons to get a sense of the true scale of the problem. If you're not allowed to ever compare relative scales of things without being accused of whataboutism then we're paving the way to making every molehill a mountain.

Two average American's beef consumption for training GPT-3 would place the cost in water of training GPT-3 at 1/150000000 of the US beef industry's average water consumption. That means it's a rounding error relative to all the other uses we place on water, and pointing that out is not whataboutism, it's putting the problem in its proper scale.