MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cheevly | 2025-05-26 15:55:50+00:00
I’ve also gone down this rabbit hole of thinking. Here is the main roadblock I encounter when imagining it in practice:

It might prevent users from having a common ‘language’ for describing their interactions with the product. If everyone perceives the product from a different lens, then everyone’s experience will drastically differ and there isn’t an objective common ground for users to discuss their experience with one another.

This problem seems to be rampant across the user experience with ChatGPT, wherein countless users claim that it offers profound value, and others claim that it is hallucinatory rubbage.

It’s possible that none of this is an actual ‘problem’ though, and just the very nature of probabilistic software. Users and product owners just need to adapt to the mindset that their experience may vary. But this presents a whole new breed of A/B testing considerations.
by the_af | 2025-05-26 15:56:34+00:00
It's the second to last paragraph, when someone reading the essay may have already formed a hard to dislodge opinion on the kind of writing PG means. And indeed, many people here on HN did so.

The order of paragraphs, how early in the text ideas or clarifications are introduced, etc, all make for clear writing.

I'd say this is an example of an essay that lacks clarity, i.e. one that is not "good writing".
by dakiol | 2025-05-26 15:57:18+00:00
Didn't one of the major ISPs in Spain go down like a weeek ago (movistar) and that caused some emergency numbers to not function properly for some time? I wouldn't be surprised if critical (digital) infrastructure would rely on Cloudflare. If Liga is banning blocks of IP addresses without distinction, then anyone is at the mercy of being shutted down in Spain.
by meego | 2025-05-26 15:57:19+00:00
Our company has been using Intercom for customer support for the last 7 years.

We went through several pricing changes but the bottom line always remained that pricing was usage-based.

Over the weekend, we received an email noticing us that: - we would be forcibly migrated to seat-based pricing - the change would happen automatically in 30 days

With our current usage of their product, this will result in us paying 3 to 4 times our current expenditure.

I'm old enough to have been through several rug pulls like this, but the magnitude of the change imposed on us and the very short notice definitely stand out.

Since these forced migrations are being rolled out quietly without any public announcement, it seems worth giving this a little due publicity. If your company hasn't yet received such an email, and you're on an old plan, this is likely coming at you fast.

I would welcome recommendations for alternative usage-based customer support solutions. We are considering moving to AWS Connect. It has usage-based pricing, and my experience with AWS gives me some confidence they will not be turning their pricing over its head any time soon.
by randallsquared | 2025-05-26 15:57:30+00:00
I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted (right?). The data isn't actually available to Microsoft employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos, issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed and scrubbed from history, implying that they don't trust even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.
by mcv | 2025-05-26 15:57:39+00:00
> it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying)

These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.

The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).
by Vicarium | 2025-05-26 15:57:48+00:00
Yeah, split payments across multiple streaming services can get tedious. Though I agree with you for the most part, piracy comes with more hurdles even with a fancy automatic setup.

But really the most important benefit of piracy is the one you're already taking advantage of. The cost would be significantly higher if they had a true content monopoly, instead they have to price with the idea that should the cost be too high, the inconvenience of piracy becomes increasingly worthwhile.
by mk_stjames | 2025-05-26 15:58:03+00:00
Make tram cars that sit on giant plates that straddle giant cuboids of ice, and rail beds that are like luge lanes, pulled along by overhead ropes. Have the water in the lanes flow at the ends into waterwheels that help drive the ropes as a primitive form of energy recovery, all driven by a power-take-off from a giant coal power steam engine on the surface that also serves to power a massive reverse-rankine cycle refrigerator that makes the ice blocks and slides them down into the tunnels - the gravity also helping pull the ropes that drive the trams. Of course, the massive coal plants are going to accelerate global warming, so you're gonna need to build more of these ice-cooled underground transit systems and even water chilled underground housing for people as the surface temperatures rise and rise....

And now you've got this wild 19th century Jules Verne-esque icepunk world in thermal runaway all built up for a hell of a novel-to-be.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-05-26 15:58:20+00:00
> You see USA? This is how it's done.

You mean like Oliver Schmidt, the VW exec that the USA sentenced to 7 years in federal prison all the way back in 2017 for his part in this scandal? Who was then sent back to Germany in the middle of his sentence and pretty much immediately released on parole by German authorities?

But sure, USA bad or whatever.
by vel0city | 2025-05-26 15:58:30+00:00
But in your example the OS should be smart enough to realize "hey these pages related to the image viewer application aren't being messed with much in the last 12 hours, those should be high priority to swap out". So when they switch back to the image viewer app with the 100 gigapixel or whatever image they'll get that slowness hit but otherwise not experience it. Then the machine isn't constantly swapping, it just quietly hides those apps nobody is really touching.

The OS shouldn't be swapping hot pages when there's lots of things sitting around not doing much.
by ajnin | 2025-05-26 15:59:01+00:00
Yeah I understand the need for an university to make the news once in a while, and the fact that this made the front page here proves the effectiveness of the method, but the terms "Passively Harvest" and "Defies Physics" should be used very carefully in the context of a scientific publication, even though it's only a blog post so we don't expect peer-reviewed journal levels of rigor.

I feel that it disserves science in the end, the belief that some magic material is going to break the second law of thermodynamics is closer to alchemy than chemistry.
by weinzierl | 2025-05-26 15:59:59+00:00
"probably a couple of kb"

Pointers are everywhere. In real world applications we see an increase between a quarter to a third. For example in 2016 Mozilla reported 25% increase from 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit [1]. Google deemed it necessary to implement pointer compression in Chrome to counter the effect. Java also has pointer compression.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2016/07/22/firefox-64-b...
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-26 16:00:53+00:00
Actually, this is a Cloudflare problem - simply take extra steps to ensure your clients paying for your services aren’t harmed by natural market forces.

If you read between the lines, he’s claiming people will die because Cloudflare doesn’t want to take the time, effort, or money to fix the problem that they easily could by creating a separate system for critical services.

This type of “tech hypochondria” should be absolutely dragged at every opportunity. This guy runs a business and whines that his clients don’t deserve what his business agrees to provide? FOH with that ish mang I ain’t buying it.
by vessenes | 2025-05-26 16:01:15+00:00
I was unaware of this controversy so in brief:

1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable

2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.

3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court)

4. Based on this, they tell ISPs to block pretty much all of Cloudflare in Spain.

5. Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world, and that many Spanish utilities and civil resources use Cloudflare.

Interesting. My gut is that it’s hard to beat La Liga on their home turf, as evidenced by not even being invited to the court hearings which shut you down across all of Spain.

Long term, I’d guess CF wins this one? Probably they will have to escalate in some way to Eurozone courts, although I have no idea how this might work. No cloud business could meet the standard put forward by La Liga; but also there are only so many CDN companies. Meantime I guess illegal streamers can move to Google and see which legal group wins that battle.
by rrgok | 2025-05-26 16:01:21+00:00
What if we changed how retirement works with just two clear options:

Option A: Take your well-earned pension and enjoy traditional retirement.

Option B: Choose a dignified exit when life no longer feels fulfilling.

I've been thinking about this because retirement scares me. What's the point of reaching old age if your body and mind won't let you enjoy the freedom you've worked decades for? Between health problems, limited mobility, and sometimes poverty, many seniors seem to just... exist.

Not saying everyone feels this way! Plenty of people have amazing retirements. But shouldn't we have more control over our final chapter? Other countries already have compassionate end-of-life options.

What do you all think? Is having this choice reasonable, or am I missing something important about the value of those later years?
by globie | 2025-05-26 16:01:52+00:00
Of course it could claim lives. Hopefully Prince has considered people have also likely died as a result of Cloudflare's repeating captcha which holds the next page in front of you like a carrot on a stick, never letting you know that you will be clicking that box forever.

I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contact your doctor ASAP. Okay, but did you neighbor have a virus last week? Is your neighborhood in your city more "problematic" than average? You may have forgot to check these details before you fell ill.

Cloudflare sites should come with a big banner warning all users their connection will be arbitrarily approved by an algorithm with chilling effects built in as dark patterns.

Last I checked, Cloudflare does basically no educating of customers how badly their website will be broken for users arbitrarily when they don't use the ISP or browser Cloudflare likes. No explanation for how many customers you will lose when your website can't be visited by someone who doesn't know how to change their IP, no explanation that if you're offering a critical service then Cloudflare will give that service thousands of tiny downtimes left unknown, the screams too quiet to carry the weight of a tech CEO worried about something similar.
by Flemlo | 2025-05-26 16:02:33+00:00
I tried it too and I know this test for a while.

Not only did Claude respond correctly, I also wrote it in German.

And I often switch between English and German for single words just because ai is already that good.

This wasn't even imaginable a few years back. We had 0 technology for that.

I created single page html Javascript pages for small prototypes withhin 10 minutes with very little repromting.

I can literally generate an image of whatever I want with just text or voice.

I can have a discussion with my smartphone with voice.

Jules detected my programming language, how to build and running it by me writing 'generaten GitHub action for my project and add a basic test to it's

I don't get how people can't be amazed by these results.

What are you normally do when you try it out?
by harundu | 2025-05-26 16:02:43+00:00
A toolkit for SaaS startups, especially solo founders and small teams, that combines web & product analytics, session replays, error reporting, chat support and knowledge base in one place.

Instead of integrating, maintaining and paying for multiple tools, everything is available in one simple to use dashboard.

For those familiar with PostHog, you can think of it a simple version of that.

I've been developing it and testing with few startups and plan to start promoting it more soon once the MVP is bit more polished. Also more tools are on the roadmap.

https://overcentric.com/
by cariaso | 2025-05-26 16:02:56+00:00
If the GENIUS Act becomes the law, we're in for a FUBAR situation when a stablecoin issuer ends up insolvent. Even more concerning, if a bank custodian for a stablecoin issuer's reserves ends up insolvent, the claims of the stablecoin investors will come ahead of the bank depositors. That's right. Crypto comes ahead of ma-and-pa.

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/05/the-genius-a...
by Bender | 2025-05-26 16:03:14+00:00
The vast majority of people will not see EDE errors. Even when they are set there is no guarantee that downstream resolvers have it enabled. The default in Unbound is disabled and people rarely check logs. Even if someone is using DoH their browser would have to translate the specific text to the user if it received such an error. Here [1] are some notes on the support of EDE around the internet.

As a side note I do not see that error for that domain. I get an A record which belongs to Cloudflare. Cloudflare could just as easily drop that domain into an account that displays the censored error message as text/plain to the user and close the connection.

streameast.app. 282 IN A 172.64.80.1

[1] - https://blog.apnic.net/2023/09/28/extended-dns-errors-unlock...
by irrational | 2025-05-26 16:04:41+00:00
At my current job, I need to write quite a bit of python. I been programming for enough decades that I can look at Python code and tell what it is doing, but creating it from scratch? No. But copilot “knows” Python and can write the code that I can then read and tweak. Maybe someone who actually learned Python would write the code differently, but so far it works very well.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-26 16:04:50+00:00
It’s worse than that. Rich-people crimes are often codified as much less severe than regular-people crimes, or are just outright legal.

This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.

Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit.

Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-26 16:04:55+00:00
Great timing! I’m sure they’ll really enjoy being targeted to be the next hop in the cat-and-mouse game of illicit substances and money laundering enterprises /s. LEOs are getting a lot more up to speed with these systems from what I’ve seen in the past couple years. Highly regulated industries like banking should have a really, really, really strong “use case” to get in other than FOMO in my opinion.
by bigtex | 2025-05-26 16:05:00+00:00
You shared my sentiments exactly. What none of these "all junior developers will be out of a job by 2026" proclamations never deal with is the non coding stuff. Sure it can generate a boiler plate app in 1.5 seconds, but can in communicate with a stakeholder about the requirements and ask the right questions to determine the scope and importance of features.? I just imagine my Sales President spending more 90 seconds trying to write the proper prompt before he gives up and calls and talks to a human. There is just no way a C-suite executive is sitting in front of a computer typing in prompts.
by jorvi | 2025-05-26 16:05:08+00:00
I see so many people in these threads always complain about Cloudflare or Google CAPTCHA loops.. but even when using Private Internet Access (one of the most abused VPNs), I rarely if ever got on a full-on loop. Maybe Google CAPTCHA made me solve 3 things instead of one. Cloudflare is always just a checkbox. And I have my Brave and Firefox profiles hardened.

I'm not saying you aren't experiencing this, but I am curious: what is your setup that Cloudflare and Google treat you with such suspicion / hostility?
by anovikov | 2025-05-26 16:05:10+00:00
When it comes to criminal offences, they are pretty much within the law, well except they can afford better lawyers so usually get away with minimum legally possible punishment.

Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
by emp17344 | 2025-05-26 16:05:16+00:00
People would’ve said the same thing about ELIZA. Turns out, people are inclined to anthropomorphize non-conscious objects or systems. This is especially true for chatbots, which are able to mimic language.

Again, why should we believe that LLMs are capable of thought, other than the fact that they vaguely “seem” to communicate with conscious intent?
Launch HN: Nomi (YC X25) – Copilot for Sales
by ethansafar | 2025-05-26 16:05:21+00:00
Hey HN, we’re Swan and Ethan, and we’re building https://heynomi.com, a real-time AI that helps you sell better while you're actually in the call. Demo: https://youtu.be/XFxDCP8jdY8?si=CGnPM1zT4wxAvadJ

Most of us aren’t trained in sales. We weren’t either. But in the early days, it’s the founders who have to sell, and learning that on live calls is brutal. After one particularly painful deal we lost, we joked that we needed an AI cofounder who could talk in our ear and save us from ourselves. That joke turned into a prototype, then a product.

Nomi joins your video calls and gives you phrase suggestions when it matters most: – when someone pushes back, – when there’s a hidden signal worth digging into, – when it’s time to close (and how to do it without sounding pushy).

Then after the call, it auto-generates clean CRM notes, action items, and sends you a short email breaking down what went well, what didn’t, and how to improve next time—based on your actual conversation.

We’re also rolling out some features to make every call a learning opportunity and unlock revenue potential: – A/B testing different sets of objections during calls and comparing results in real time – Auto-update of your company’s sales playbook based on what’s actually working – Upsell opportunity spotting and predictive revenue estimates driven by what people say on calls

The real-time part was the hardest. If advice shows up 2 seconds late, or it's off-topic, it's worse than useless. So we built a system with: - a Thinking Model to track the call’s momentum; - a tactic selector trained with reinforcement learning; - a lightweight LLM (boosted with RAG) that delivers custom phrase suggestions under 500 ms.

Each user gets a private copilot trained on their own calls (with permission), plus simulated data and sales best practices. It gets sharper with every interaction, no manual tuning needed.

Right now, we’re live with 30 teams. One company went from $200K to $360K in just a few weeks. Another brought on a new rep who closed their first deal with Nomi on week one.

We also offer a free AI note-taker and free sales-coaching post-call emails. Just shoot us an email if you want to try it: founders@heynomi.com

We’re launching on HN to meet other folks who’ve felt this pain, founders doing sales, builders figuring things out on the fly. If that’s you, we’d love your feedback. Or if you just want to geek out about fast-inference LLMs, streaming RAG, or real-time UX, happy to go deep.

Let us know what you think!
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-26 16:05:31+00:00
The problem is, if you're using them for capabilities, it wouldn't just be an 'Await' effect: it would be an 'AwaitDatabase' effect and an 'AwaitFilesystem' effect and an 'AwaitNetwork' effect and an 'AwaitSubprocess' effect and....

And everything working with generic function objects would have to lug around all these effects, unless the language has a very solid 'effect polymorphism' story.
by evanjrowley | 2025-05-26 16:06:07+00:00
I must be in the minority of CPAP users who would use it even if I stopped having OSA. Why? A few reasons:

1. Sometimes I hardly notice it. Newer models are very quiet and portable. I'd even go as far as saying the mask is comfortable to wear, like a security blanket for the face.

2. Practically nothing filters out dust and cat hair better than my CPAP. An N95 mask might do better, but would be ridiculously uncomfortable by comparison.

3. It's a humidifier strapped to my face. No more discomfort trying to sleep through dry weather seasons.
by K0balt | 2025-05-26 16:06:24+00:00
“Consciousness” is most likely one of those “emergent” things that really are just a continuum. Like an airplane taking off, most “emergent” behaviors are actually continuous processes that eventually become pronounced enough to recognize.

Even though through the entire takeoff roll, the plane is just getting lighter and lighter - even after it’s airborne - until the wheels leave the ground it seems to be just a really awkward, noisy bus.

Animals, down to insects, exhibit signs of self awareness and “conscious” behavior. It’s easy to remain incredulous for a variety of reasons, many of which I personally agree with… but I’d say that there appears to be progress towards something we would recognize as consciousness, and the process appears to be ongoing.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-05-26 16:06:51+00:00
Anthropic’s own study on Claude use showed that people are using it to skip homework by synthesizing answers, although that admission is phrased more diplomatically.

As for this issue, I feel that this will resolve itself in one of two ways: either homework will be eliminated completely in favor of completing teacher assigned tasks in a device free classroom, or the easier but slightly more intrusive solution whereby homework is done on a digital device where a camera recording and typing speed are considered as a proof-of-work mechanism. Proctoring software already exists and it’d be relatively easy to extend them with such a feature.
by Flemlo | 2025-05-26 16:06:55+00:00
These are two issues independent of each other.

One argument doesn't make the other in any way worse or better

I'm a German, I was not aware that VW was doing this until it came out and it was a huge blow out.

Do you think people just test their cars fume output?! You do understand that the software was build to detect being on a test stand right?

Who reverse engineers software like this...