MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlphaAndOmega0 | 2025-06-12 15:20:15+00:00
Do you have any actual concrete reasons for thinking that our understanding of consciousness will change?

If not, then this is a pointless comment. We need to work with what we know.

For example, we know that the Standard Model of physics is incomplete. That doesn't mean that if someone says that it they drop a ball in a vacuum, it'll fall, we should hold out in studied agnosticism because it might go upwards or off to the side.

In other words, an isolated demand for rigor.
by furyofantares | 2025-06-12 15:20:20+00:00
> Does this mean that eventually in a world where we all use this stuff, no new language/framework/library will ever be able to emerge?

I highly doubt it. These things excel at translation.

Even without training data, if you have an idiosyncratic-but-straightforward API or framework, they pick it up no problem just looking at the codebase. I know this from experience with my own idiosyncratic C# framework that no training data has ever seen, that the LLM is excellent at writing code against.

I think something like Rust lifetimes would have a harder time getting off the ground in a world where everyone expects LLM coding to work off the bat. But something like Go would have an easy time.

Even with the Rust example though, maybe the developers of something that new would have to take LLMs into consideration, in design choices, tooling choices, or documentation choices, and it would be fine.
by okanat | 2025-06-12 15:20:50+00:00
It is not as open. Try building the desktop editors yourself. Some parts of the build system are not documented / not included in the repo.

Moreover it is a rebranding of Russian P7 Office. The company didn't cut ties with Russia and they still sell to the military. The owner created multiple shell companies in Latvia and Singapore to obscure this. I don't think this is something that EU governments trust, unless a deep inspection of the entire source is done and the repo is forked under an EU entity.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai...
Show HN: Open sourcing my developer portfolio
by itsk3nny | 2025-06-12 15:20:50+00:00
When I first set out to build my own developer portfolio, I struggled with knowing where to begin. Everyone’s journey and needs are different, so I wanted to create something flexible and comprehensive. This project includes a variety of pages and features that might be useful in a portfolio, and I’m making it publicly available for anyone who wants a solid starting point. I hope it helps others get started more easily and inspires new ideas for showcasing your work!
by tasuki | 2025-06-12 15:21:07+00:00
This is possibly the least insightful article I have read on HN. My comment is just a rant against the many misguided points it attempts to make...

> Welfare is defined as "the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group".

What about animals? Isn't their welfare worthy of consideration?

> Saying that there is no scientific consensus on the consciousness of current or future AI systems is a stretch. In fact, there is nothing that qualifies as scientific evidence.

There's no scientific evidence for the author of the article being conscious.

> The issue is, if we push moral considerations for algorithms, we will not end up with a higher regard to human welfare.

Same with animals. Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.

> However, the implication is clear: LLMs are basically the same as humans.

No: there's no such implication.

> Already now, it is a common idea among the tech elite is that humans as just a bunch of calculations, just an LLM running on "wetware". It is clear that this undermines the belief that every person has inalienable dignity.

It is not clear to me how this affects inalienable (?) dignity. If we aren't just a bunch of calculations, then what are we?

> And if a human being is not much more than an algorithm running on meat, one that can be jailbroken and exploited, then it follows that humans themselves will increasingly be treated like the AI algorithms they create: systems to be nudged, optimized for efficiency, or debugged for non-compliance. Our inner lives, thoughts, and emotions risk being devalued as mere outputs of our "biological programming," easily manipulated or dismissed if they don't align with some external goal. Nobody will say that out loud, but this is already happening

Everyone knows this is already happening. It is not a secret, nor is anyone trying to keep it a secret. I agree it is unfortunate - what can we do about it?

> I've been working in AI and machine learning for a while now.

Honestly, I'm surprised. Well done.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-12 15:21:22+00:00
> If you use context.Context for this you give up a lot of type safety and generally make your data passing opaque.

The data passing maybe, not sure how you lose type safety. The value comes from the context with the right type just fine. The stuff that I'm attaching to the context are effectively globals just that this way you can enable proper isolation in tests and else.

From my limited experience with echo, the context there is not at all the same thing.
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:21:40+00:00
> AI discourse would be more effective if we could all see the actual work one another is doing with it

Yes, this is a frequent problem both here and everywhere else. The discussions need to include things like exact model version, inference parameters, what system prompt you used, what user prompt, what code you gave it, what exactly it replied and so much more details, as currently almost every comment is "Well, I used Sonnet last week and it worked great" without any details. Not to mention discussions around local models missing basic stuff like what quantization (if any) and what hardware you're running it on. People just write out "Wow fast model" or stuff like that, and call it a day.

Although I understand why, every comment be huge if everyone always add sufficient context. I don't know the solution to this, but it does frustrate me.
by bluehatbrit | 2025-06-12 15:22:38+00:00
Just yesterday I gave Claude (via Zed) a project brief and a fresh elixir phoenix project. It had 0 problems. It did opt for tailwind for the css, but phoenix already sets it up when using `mix phx.new` so that's probably why.

I don't buy that it pushes you into using Go at all. If anything I'd say they push you towards Python a lot of the time when asking it random questions with no additional context.

The elixir community is probably only a fraction of the size of Go or Python, but I've never had any issues with getting it to use it.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-12 15:22:40+00:00
This sort of thing is why I seriously wonder if maybe some people have consciousness and some don't, rather than it being universal.

My experience of consciousness is undeniable. There's no question of the concept just being made up. It's like if you said that hands are a folk concept with no bearing on actual truth. Even if I can't directly detect anyone else's hands, my own are unquestionably real to me. The only way someone could deny the existence of hands in general is if they didn't have any, but I definitely do.
by uncircle | 2025-06-12 15:22:50+00:00
Yes, that's true, but chronic procrastinators also get older which means they know what works best for them, and also accept that some stuff might fall through the cracks, and that's perfectly fine.

Wanting to have a perfectly organised life is unrealistic. We're not machines, but we're bombarded by the message that we can do better at organising our lives, often by those that want to sell us their product.
by 9rx | 2025-06-12 15:22:50+00:00
The problem isn't so much an issue of cost of labor, but the ever-present situation that the abled bodies, who by and large live in cities, have this idea that there isn't any work in rural areas. There aren't usually strong social ties between regions to make introductions and when one is searching for a job, nobody is trawling the jobs sites with "Find me a job in the middle of nowhere" over "Find me a job in <insert city name>". Meaning that connecting with someone to do the work is a huge challenge.

Of course, there is a strong case to be made that if you can't find enough people to help, you've simply bit off more than you can chew and that it is time to scale back your operation.
by kube-system | 2025-06-12 15:22:53+00:00
Deploying a free tool that doesn't solve an organizations problems isn't a valid choice. I'm tired of open source advocates hand-waving away the reasons people choose other software. For most organizations, software is not a big cost, labor is. It often makes sense to throw a million dollars at a piece of software to make people's job easier, because that can translate to tens of millions in labor.
by clan | 2025-06-12 15:23:19+00:00
The Nimbus even came with a 3,5" floppy! Do you happen to know if they shared any design? Was there a reference Intel board which most designs are based on?

Reading up on the RC Piccoline I realise I misremembered. Each 4 computers shared one drive unit. So not quite terminals as I remembered. Did the UK variants have some of the same quirkiness? I see they have a "network server" (XN20) listed.

I was stuck on the rare 3" size. But lived in a fishing town so I could get them a little cheaper - they where commonly used for plotters on the boats.

Thanks for that hint. That was interesting.

Impressed by writing a website on a CPC. You have been a true die-hard. I first saw "the web" with Mosaic on a SUN Sparcstation in 1993.
by Jelthi | 2025-06-12 15:23:42+00:00
I pay more:

- To support cool technology

- To ride in a high end car of known quality

- To listen to my music and at any volume

- To not feel weird about the little things like talking or rolling down my windows or setting an AC Temperature

- To know exactly when and where my driver will pick me up down to the exact curb.

- To not have to make small talk with a person. Even when requesting quiet preferred you’ll get an uber driver who wants to share their life story or trauma dump on you.

- To not die. I’ve been in some terrifying Ubers with either bad drivers or just exhausted ones.
by nartho | 2025-06-12 15:24:34+00:00
Most people who are working in tech or who are tech literate want a UI that's readable and easy to use, with minimal fluff because they use it extensively

Most people who don't really care about tech that much don't like UI changes like you said because it means relearning what they know

The ones who love flashy new UIs are the tech enthusiast, the ones who love tech but use them on a surface level only, they are also the ones who will buy new, unproven tech and care little about privacy issues or open source. My guess is it makes a lot of sense for big tech groups to target them instead of the grey beards who won't be convinced anyway, right as they may be.
by furyofantares | 2025-06-12 15:24:58+00:00
I get a ton of value out of Claude Code but you just listed a lot of things I've found LLMs/agents not very good at.

- Rust

- Big refactors

- Performance improvements

- Yolo-mode, especially if you aren't skilled yet at prompting and knowing which things the LLM will do well and which will need supervision
by wcoenen | 2025-06-12 15:25:00+00:00
I have an electricity contract with dynamic pricing that changes every hour based on the day-ahead electricity market for Belgium. I know what the prices for the next day will be around 13h10. I charge the car whenever the prices are lowest: around noon in the sunny months, at night during winter, preferably weekends. I save around 25% of my electricity bill like this. (More in summer, less in winter.)

So it's already possible to incentivize people correctly with price signals, at least in some regions of the world. But people are not yet familiar with this. I guess that will change as the pricing between dynamic and traditional contracts keeps diverging. With a traditional contract, you are essentially paying the average evening peak price all the time. With a dynamic contract, you get access to the cheaper and even negative rates.
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:25:12+00:00
> OpenAI has an specification for their API endpoints that most vendors are compatible with or have adopted wholesale

Worth clarifying that what the ecosystem/vendors have adopted is the "ChatCompletion" endpoint, which most models are under. But newer models (like codex) are only available under the Responses API, which the ecosystem/vendors haven't adopted as widely, AFAIK.
by kazinator | 2025-06-12 15:25:47+00:00
Feedback is a response to an input. Okay, sure, clicking the remote to turn on a TV and selecting a channel is input. So, by a stretch, we can call the four hour binge a kind of feedback generated by two button clicks.

Sometimes people get glued by a screen that they did not turn on; is that still feedback? E.g. kids watching a screen in some waiting room at a children's dentist.
by jnwatson | 2025-06-12 15:26:06+00:00
Literally less than an hour ago, I reviewed a bunch of LLM-generated boilerplate. I then told the agent to show me a plan to refactor it. I suggested some tweaks, and then it implemented the plan and then tested that it didn't break anything.

It isn't much different than dealing with an extremely precocious junior engineer.

Given how easy it is to refactor now, it certainly makes economic sense to delay it.
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:26:19+00:00
> The only thing missing for full agentic behavior is built in self prompting behavior.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Aider still doesn't do proper tool calling? Last time I tried it, they did it the "old school" way of parsing out unix shell commands from the output text and ran it once the response finished streaming, instead of the sort of tool call/response stuff we have today.
by heipei | 2025-06-12 15:27:04+00:00
In my experience this affects techie users just as much. Especially when there is a UI that has been crafted and slowly perfected over the years, and where any remaining idiosyncrasy has long been learned by the user, changing that UI has profound negative impact on the productivity of anyone using the platform.

I have rarely seen UI changes where users were genuinely excited to have a new UI with the understanding that they'd have to learn new paradigms. Most web apps should still be Bootstrap apps, but of course then you can't put that on a giant dashboard wall at a conference ;)
by joshkotrous | 2025-06-12 15:27:15+00:00
In my time as a developer I have a love hate relationship with SQL. It's incredibly powerful, but writing queries for anything non-trivial was always a headache. I've always wanted to be able to just ask questions about my data, and have a tool do the work for me. So I built Tome. A 100% free and open source database client that turns natural language into perfect queries so you never have to write SQL again. Shipping for now with limited database support and expanding in the future. Would love any feedback and a star on Github is appreciated! Take a look and download: https://tomedb.dev
by akavel | 2025-06-12 15:27:33+00:00
Even though bisphenol-A is banned in EU, I believe bisphenol-B is still allowed. I suspect - though I don't know how to research whether it's true or false - that everyone just switched to bisphenol-B, which is said to be either similarly, or more toxic than BPA... :(

Even assuming that "BPA-free" paper I'd buy is really so, and not just BPA-covered one imported from China and said/labeled to be "BPA-free" by someone somewhere in the pipeline...
by cout | 2025-06-12 15:27:51+00:00
I learned how to gamify work tasks from my mom.

She worked as a librarian in the seventies. Tasks like restacking books was not fun, so she turned it into a game. Her coworkers, on the other hand, drew out the boring tasks as long as possible. When it came time to pick someone for advancement, they chose my mom, because she was more productive at the menial tasks.

I also use post-it notes, but if I used them for everything, I don't think it would work for me. The reward is in pulling down the note and setting the wall cleaner. But if I were to add notes every day, I have a feeling the effect would be disheartening. Similarly, I love getting the living are clean, but when kids/family make a mess again within hours, I'm less incentivized.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-12 15:27:54+00:00
> Which is what Trump seems to want. A Europe not totally dependent on the American taxpayers for their own self defense and their own global power projection agendas.

If so, good because that's what I want. I want to have "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none" as Jefferson said. I consider it a great betrayal of the American people that past governments put us in a position where other nations are depending on us for security. Untangling us from that should be done as gently as possible, but IMO it should be done.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-06-12 15:27:56+00:00
Fossil fuels contain energy that are not in the form of heat, so electricity from fossil fuels would heat the planet even ignoring greenhouse effect. If from renewables, however, the energy has been previously extracted from the environment, thus being neutral in terms of heating the planet.

Not that it matters, because the effect would be miniscule in any case.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-06-12 15:29:01+00:00
Fantastic insight. Without doing the easy work, we cannot recognize when it is appropriate, which is more often than not, in my experience. There's also a certain humility to doing things as simply as possible. LLMs lack the self-reflective capability to see that maybe an incremental change to use batching for a write-heavy op shouldn't be 200 lines of code.

Tools can't replace human understanding of a problem, and that understanding is the foundation for effective growth and maintenance of code.
Show HN: Tooka – A rule-based CLI tool to organize files with YAML
by Benji377 | 2025-06-12 15:29:25+00:00
Tooka is a command-line tool that lets you organize files using declarative YAML rules. You can move, rename, copy, or delete files based on conditions like name patterns, extensions, dates, size, or even EXIF metadata. It’s cross-platform, written in Rust, and includes a --dry-run mode for safety. There’s also a simple web-based rule builder to help generate YAML configs without needing to write them manually.

I built Tooka to replace messy file-sorting scripts with something reusable, portable, and clear. Feedback welcome—especially around rule design and real-world use cases.
by jononor | 2025-06-12 15:30:02+00:00
I do not think that those researchers are fungible. We could however allocate a few hundred million less to AI research, and more to fighting human exploitation. We could pass stronger worker protection and have the big corporations pay for it - which then they have less money to spent on investments (in AI). Heck we could tax AI investments or usage directly, and spend it on worker rights or other cases of human abuse.
by exceptione | 2025-06-12 15:30:07+00:00
Step in the shoes of an average user. You have to create a good looking document. As usual, there is time pressure. You would have no idea where to look online for templates, let alone create it from scratch (master page, huh, what?). In powerpoint or word, just pick one template or theme and it looks slick.

Even when you import a template in Impress, you will find some weird bugs, like a slide insisting that it won't show the slide number. I found such random weird behavior that I wouldn't even know how to file a bug report for it, because they are impossible to reproduce.

----------------------------------------------

I know the stuff is built on top of some very ancient code. Sometimes I wish they would throw it all away and start from scratch in a modern managed, type safe language. It would be feasible if you forego backwards compatibility as I suppose a lot of the bugs have to do with trying to support the MS Office bugs. A consistent finding is that LO supports older office documents better than MS office itself.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-06-12 15:30:38+00:00
One of many platitudes that kept me in working conditions and religion which were detrimental to my career and mental health.

Maybe it's useful to some who are in objectively good circumstances which they haven't learned to appreciate. I'd still advocate for getting other perspectives from trustworthy folks about ones specific situation.

And not taking advice from billionaires who think their fruity diet will cure their cancer.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-12 15:30:49+00:00
> "Lack of another person in the vehicle" is a feature.

I remember this came up for self-checkout at grocery stores. Personally I mildly prefer not interacting, for one friend this is a huge psychological difference, they are much more able to shop when it doesn't involve trying to talk to a human. It's not impossible anyway but you can see it's a real burden.

If I want to interact with a human there's no reason that should be a financial transaction. I can believe you would get a Waymo to a bar, hang out with friends (or even strangers) and then get a Waymo home, because you wanted the social interactions to be entirely separate from the financial transaction.
by andnand | 2025-06-12 15:31:40+00:00
I'd say for me, it depends on the task and the language. I find asking ChatGPT to generate some code that I copy and paste lines up with your experience. Same with using an agent in a new project. I find the error rate much higher though once I start asking it to write code using specific libraries. Or when using an agent in an established code base. It's also terrible with DSLs that probably don't have as much training data. Trying to get it to do anything with Azures KQL is borderline pointless.
by elpocko | 2025-06-12 15:31:42+00:00
I wish LLMs were generally viewed as Eliza on steroids, a thing to generate plausible sounding text with, in places where we used primitive generators based on Markov models before. To implement smarter NPCs in games, and virtual chat partners to talk to, just for fun. They are, after all, really fun to play with. They should be used as smart autocomplete in your IDE, not to generate whole projects from scratch. As an idea generator when you're stuck.

This requirement to be commercially useful and valuable, and to aid all kinds of businesses everywhere, gave a bad reputation to what is otherwise an amazing technological achievement. I am an outspoken AI enthusiast, because it is fun and interesting, but I hate how it is only seen as useful when it can do actual work like a human.
by code_biologist | 2025-06-12 15:32:04+00:00
They'll improve, but current LLMs (o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, lesser ones) are also terrible at suggesting non-obvious alternative solutions on their own. You can sometimes squeeze them, adding each obvious but poor approach to a list of "here are things I don't want you to propose" in turn, but often even then they won't get to the answer they should be able to find. The part that is wildly irritating is that once you tell them about the non-obvious simple solution, they act like it's the most natural thing in the world and they knew it the entire time.

Assuming of course that the LLM can come up with a solution similar to yours.

I have idle speculations as to why these things happen, but I think in many cases they can't actually. They also can't tell the junior devs that such a solution might exist if they just dig further. Both of these seem solvable, but it seems like "more, bigger models, probed more deeply" is the solution, and that's an expensive solution that dings the margins of LLM providers. I think LLM providers will keep their margins, providing models with notable gaps and flaws, and let software companies and junior devs sort it out on their own.