MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoOn3 | 2025-06-04 15:21:28+00:00
When cars were invented, someone might have thought that there would be other jobs for horses. Quote from Wikipedia: "There were an estimated 20 million horses in March 1915 in the United States.[36] But as increased mechanization reduced the need for horses as working animals, populations declined. A USDA census in 1959 showed the horse population had dropped to 4.5 million"...
by mistrial9 | 2025-06-04 15:21:29+00:00
and, the money to pay those new devs will just pour out like a waterfall? Some players in the ecosystem exist solely to stop payments as a cost center. Paying for work is a liability, capital expenditure and long term deals for automation are a tax writeoff. Let's be even more blunt -- slavery for labor is very profitable and makes a great economy on a large scale; taxes are healthy, production goes up, some people get very rich. Slavery for labor is a desirable economic stable point.

What does slavery for labor look like in high-skill urban setting? Rent, login credentials that are monitored, computer use is monitored, electricity is metered centrally, access to new model updates is monitored, required security updates are controlled via certificates and individual profiles, communication is by phone which is individually monitored for access patterns and location.. all very sci-fi eh?
by hosh | 2025-06-04 15:21:32+00:00
From my reading of Frankopan's The Silk Roads:

1. The Romans did not collapse and disappear. They had became obsessed with the Silk Roads, established a second political capital at Constantinople. When the steppe nomads pushed into the European provinces and Roman rule collapsed in Europe, there wasn't a strong political will from Constantinople to recapture it because the Silk Roads had a lot more wealth to offer.

2. During this period, the former Roman provinces had very little in the way to offer for trade. Groups that were stronger, such as the Viking Rus' or groups that had founded the city-states of the Italian peninsula, raided for people for slaves and traded them down into the Middle East.

3. At some point, the raiding groups figured out that it was more productive to force the people on the land to harvest and work the land than to trade them as slaves. The deal became, "we won't take slaves, but in return, you will give us a portion of what you harvest in the land as tribute". Thus, serfdom, taxes, and the idea of rent was born from this.

In other words, the basis for this form of decentralization was between the lords and the king, on the backs of slavery or serfdom.
by wavemode | 2025-06-04 15:21:39+00:00
> extremely tedious, error prone, and sensitive to details

I've taught people Python as their first language, and this was their exact opinion of it.

When you're an experienced programmer you tend to have a poor gauge of how newcomers internalize things. For people who are brand new it is basically all noise. We're just trying to gradually get them used to the noise. Getting used to the noise while also trying to figure out the difference between strings, numbers, booleans, lists, etc. is more difficult for newcomers than many people realize. Even the concept of scoping can sometimes be too high-level for a beginner, IME.

I like asm from the perspective that, its semantics are extremely simple to explain. And JMP (GOTO) maps cleanly from the flowchart model of programming that most people intuit first.
by kgilpin | 2025-06-04 15:21:52+00:00
In the US, “Junior” pilots typically work as flight instructors until they have built up enough time to no longer be junior. 1500 flight hours is the essential requirement to be an airline pilot, and every hour spent giving instruction counts as a flight hour. It’s not the only way, but it’s the most common way. Airlines don’t fund this; pilots have to work their way up to this level themselves.

In Europe it’s different.
by daxfohl | 2025-06-04 15:21:58+00:00
I went through the same phase a couple decades ago and also came out with Middlemarch on top. Oddly I'd never heard of it prior, and only grabbed it because it was in some classics list at B&N. It didn't seem like anything I expected to like, but I was astounded.

The one book I couldn't understand all the hoopla about was Faust. Even after reading it twice, it just seemed like a banal overplayed moral tale. Maybe it only works in German?
by footlose_3815 | 2025-06-04 15:22:05+00:00
"Calling back" is a term I heard after getting into birding. I don't think they warn the user in the app enough about "Please don't use this to call to birds, only listen for your own reference".

If I were a bird, and another mysterious bird sound came that was speaking a certain feeling or phrase I could understand, and I come to see it's a giant monkey man playing the sounds from himself, I would probably move my family, too.

Yes, Cardinals are pretty territorial and chase each other out. Esp during nesting.

Whether it's whistling close to their tones, "Pishing" to get their attention, or playing sounds from phones, all of it interrupts their normal behavior. Cars, trucks, lawnmowers, motorcycles all mess with them too.

https://www.sibleyguides.com/2011/04/the-proper-use-of-playb...

>When song is played in a bird’s territory, that bird’s response to the “intruder” is watched attentively by neighboring males and by females. In one study (Mennill et al 2002) high-ranking male Black-capped Chickadees exposed to aggressive playback lost status as their mates and neighbors apparently perceived them as losers, unable to drive away the phantom intruder.

It's clear we're capable of mimicking their language with our devices and playing it back to them has potential consequences to breaking up a family of birds.
by KaoruAoiShiho | 2025-06-04 15:22:16+00:00
The conflicts in his plays just aren't that profound, you know? Compared to modern "psychological turmoil" it's relatively simplistic, something like Macbeth's "ambition vs morality".

Modern writers pull in more layers of depth, explain the ebbs and flows of motivations and identities through social forces and work more with complex ideas like self-deception and rationalization. Shakespeare's characters are generally reliable narrators in a way that later lit tends not to be.
by bookofjoe | 2025-06-04 15:22:19+00:00
"bubbler" OMG the only place in the U.S. that calls a drinking fountain a bubbler is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I grew up.

>By the early 1960s, news reports highlighted the fact that calling a bubbler a bubbler was the sure sign of being a Milwaukeean.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/green-sheet/2020/02/25/w...
by rigrassm | 2025-06-04 15:23:08+00:00
I love this app! Just started using it a month or so ago to figure out who the loud ass bird in the woods behind my house was which ended up being a Tufted Titmouse (who are now one of my favorites, so awesome looking) and a Carolina Wren (not as pretty but makes up for it with its songs).

For the last month, my morning routine has completely changed and instead of sitting inside. I now spend my mornings out back refilling and cleaning feeders, putting out some peanuts to appease the squirrels, and then plopping down on the deck with some coffee/breakfast and MerlinID running on my phone.

I'm no good at learning a new human language but after a month of using this app regularly, I can consistently ID not just the different species, but also some individual birds by their distinct calls and voices.

The only thing I wish it had is a way to catalog individual birds and have recordings of their calls and pictures of them saved together.

Hats off to the devs of this app, hands down the best app I've used in a long time!
by cj | 2025-06-04 15:23:20+00:00
I wanted to say maybe the 2nd pilot could double as a flight attendent if they're not needed full time in the cockpit. Still retains redundancy while saving the airline money.

The problem with that is most skills need to be practiced. When you only need to use your skills unexpectedly in an emergency, that may not end well. Same applies to other fields where AI can do something 95% of the time, with human intervention required in the 5% case. Is it realistic to expect humans to continue to fill that 5% gap if we allow our skills to wane by outsourcing the easiest 95% of a job and only keep the hardest 5% for ourselves.
by vunderba | 2025-06-04 15:23:27+00:00
I'm not. I'm referencing the paper - not some hypothetical abstract word problem. Imagine walking into a room, where the pieces are slowly morphing from staid Staunton structures into amorphous blobs of lava lamp Cthulhu nightmares. If a locomotive steam train from Denver passes within 15 meters of the room, how many passengers paid for the tickets using a cashier's check?

Nobody's arguing that humans never take logical shortcuts or that those shortcuts can cause us to make errors.

Some of the rebuttals in this thread are ridiculous. Like what if I forced you to stare at the surface of the sun followed by waterboarding for several hours, and then asked you to look at a 1000 different chess boards. Are you sure you wouldn't make a mistake?

In the paper the various VLLMs are asked to double-check which still didn't make a difference. The argument is more along the lines that VLLMs (and multimodal LLMs) aren't really thinking in the same way that humans do.

And if you REALLY need an example albeit a bit tangential - try this one out. Ask any SOTA (multimodal or otherwise) model such as gpt-image-1, Kontext, Imagen4, etc. for a five-leaf cover. It'll get it about 50% of the time.

Now go and ask any kindergartener for the same thing.
by achierius | 2025-06-04 15:23:28+00:00
> They're much, much better at that now.

Because that specific failure case was widely reported on, and subsequent retraining specifically included examples to ensure that the model didn't "overfit" when learning how to answer variants of that question. That doesn't address the underlying issue though -- while it's obvious that these models do "learn" and "generalize" by any reasonable and non-anthrocentric definition of the terms, it really does seem like the 'radiu's of generalization is smaller than we would like, and that these models are very subject to getting stuck in 'ruts' around things they've seen in their training data. Solving this by bandaid-patching every such rut that comes up in the news is just not a viable long-term solution: the whole world is a minefield of niche problems that look kinda like other problems but have different results.
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-04 15:23:29+00:00
I feel like Twain was a sort of Banksy of his day... except that in regard to personal fame, he was more akin to Andy Warhol.

But his writings are incessantly, subtly, pointedly critical and yet playfully mocking of society's sins. Its real sins - not casinos and The Devil Rum - but slavery, celebrating greed, ignoring the small and the impoverished.

All the while pretending to be "just a humorist"/"just a spraypaint vandal".
by chisleu | 2025-06-04 15:23:31+00:00
About 6 months ago I became incredibly interested in game theory, especially as it relates to playing poker. Myself, a mediocre poker player, have only been playing for about a year.

When I discovered that most online poker sites allow you to export your hand history, I was shook! Over the weekend, I built this site and got it online. It's massively scalable and HA. All the infra is in terraform. Everything is in Alembic. All the code is fairly high performance. And, all of it was vibed coded.

Most important is that all the infra to the best of my knowledge follows all the AWS cloud best practices.

Following a blog from earlier in the year, I discovered the workflow of having GenAI to help me craft my prompts for GenAI. At first, it served as a recommendation engine for options for features I hadn't imagined. (https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/)

It transformed into a process where I used the prompts and further iteration in Cline's plan mode to build really useful features, testing first, and with all the Markdown documentation I care to generate. (https://cline.bot/)

This meant I was able to move at incredible speed relative to my normal development cycle, and built a reasonably attractive, actually useful site in about 2 days.

Anyways. I don't have friends IRL so I'm sharing with HN

Create an account if you want to try the AI agent. There is no spam and no email confirmation. Here is an example "phh" datafile if you don't have one yourself: https://github.com/uoftcprg/phh-dataset/blob/main/data/pluri...
by rep_lodsb | 2025-06-04 15:23:44+00:00
The old D86 debugger[1][2] comes close to being a REPL for assembly language, helped me a lot with learning it when I found it on a shareware collection CD as a kid.

Load registers, call DOS or BIOS with 'int', etc. all interactively and with a nice full screen display of registers, flags and memory. Of course entering single instructions to run immediately only gets you so far, but you can also enter short programs into memory and single step through them.

It's too bad nothing like this seems to exist for modern systems! With the CPU virtualization features now available, you could even experiment with ring 0 code without fear of crashing your machine.

[1] http://eji.com/a86

[2] to run it under DOSBox, you may need to add the '+b4' command line switch in order to bypass some machine detection code
by jerf | 2025-06-04 15:23:57+00:00
"I understand how you could see it that way."

It is less that "I see it that way" then that "I encounter plenty of people who speak that way.", and that the Erlang community still definitely indoctrinates people to think that way.

See my other post on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44181668 Which echos some of your points.
by rmah | 2025-06-04 15:24:06+00:00
The primary problems with tag-based organization are that 1) tags are difficult to organize hierarchically and 2) discoverability of existing tags tends to be poor.

However, if you have multiple overlapping hierarchical organization, common operations such as "moving" and "deleting" become overly complicated.

IMO, there's no best way, only different pros/cons and compromises.
by jstummbillig | 2025-06-04 15:24:31+00:00
Your solution seems to include asking for a lot more money, to recruit outside leadership to work on what looks very much like an ambitious passion project right now, and coming up with a solution to turn it all around before funding runs dry while honoring the core idea behind the project (because that is what people will be donating/funding towards) — instead of betting on the current, apparently intrinsically motivated staff to maybe learn from their mistakes and do what they can to turn this around.

That strikes me, by far, as the more unrealistic solution.
by elevatortrim | 2025-06-04 15:24:46+00:00
In this instance, it may not lead to massive unemployment as it could be simply that we do more white collar work than we currently do. White collar work, for the large part, is not born out of necessity, as white-collars, we do not produce things, we oversee the process, we market, we sell, we do accounting, we support, and so on. The more of these we do, the better our companies can compete. But there is no inherent reason that a mature company could not reduce its white-collar jobs to a halt if there was not competition. White-collars work because the competition also hires and gets them to work. Hence we say "productivity is increasing but we have to work more". So even if AI leads to massive improvements in white-collar work productivity, as long as it is not entirely replacing people, it may not lead to job losses at all.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-06-04 15:24:58+00:00
The positive side seems to be that relinquishing our position[1] as the medical research country should lower healthcare prices. For decades we've been told that our healthcare prices were due to medical research - drug discovery, device innovation, &etc. By destroying our ability to do research, we should expect to see healthcare prices equalize at a price where those costs are no longer factored in, right?

1. By way of self-inflicted damage
by gchamonlive | 2025-06-04 15:25:03+00:00
I agree but I'd add that there is nothing to fix. Life is just tough and sometimes you cry because it hurts, and sometimes it fills you with joy and you rejoice. Rinse and repeat until you time has passed and it's now our descendants turn in this world.

Maybe it's clearer in the form of a question: how are you completely sure you are NOT enlightened if you don't know what it is to be enlightened?
by theSherwood | 2025-06-04 15:25:03+00:00
The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technology.

The more apt analogy is to other species. When was the last time there was something other than homo sapiens that could carry on an interesting conversation with homo sapiens. 40,000 years? And this new thing has been in development for what? 70 years? The rise in its capabilities has been absolutely meteoric and we don't know where the ceiling is. Analogies to industrial agriculture (a very big deal, historically) and other technologies completely miss the scope of what's happening.
Show HN: Bonvago.com – Shows hidden hotel discounts and bonus rewards
by kxter | 2025-06-04 15:25:39+00:00
I built https://www.Bonvago.com in my spare time as a friendlier alternative to other hotel booking engines.

Slow dev server, no VC cash, no hype—just me + caffeine, so thanks for your patience. Every “painfully’ slow search helps improve speed.

What it does:

- Unlocks hidden rates (AAA, Costco, double points, etc.)

- Summarizes hotel reviews using AI so you don’t have to doomscroll.

- Gives you BONV points (aka tokens you can spend on hotel bookings).

- Travel agents get 10% commissions (most OTAs give you like... 6%)

Up Next (maybe): Flights, rental cars, tours, cruises—and an AI agent to help you plan and book entire trips.

Heads up: It’s live. If you’re just testing it out, pick refundable rates or risk paying real money. You’ve been warned.

Would love any feedback—design, bugs, broken links, wish list features, whatever.

Appreciate you. Much love to HN!
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-04 15:25:41+00:00
My biggest recommendation is to just get familiar with the caching constructs that are available. I understand folks think CDNs are complicated and expensive, but they're honestly incredibly cheap and relatively easy to use.

99.9% of the time, just showing static content with a good cache-control header will solve the issue. If you have a restrictive IP provider, use a CDN to do it for you for cheap.

The more involved recommendation is trimming out features of hosted apps that aren't all that useful and are causing problems. A simple example of what I mean...

---

The author here is noting that his Gitea instance is seeing huge load from 20r/s, which just isn't reasonable (I actually host a Gitea instance myself and I know it can handle 10 times this traffic, even when running on a raspberry pi). So why is his failing?

Well - it sounds like he's letting bots hit every url of a public instance. Not the choice I'd make, but also not unreasonable, hosting public things is fine.

Buuut - it also sounds like he's left the "Download archive" button enabled on the instance.

That's not a good call. It's a feature that's used very rarely by real humans, but is tripmine for any bot scanning the site to trigger high load and network traffic.

Want a 5 second solution to the problem? Set `DISABLE_DOWNLOAD_SOURCE_ARCHIVES` in the Gitea config (see https://docs.gitea.com/administration/config-cheat-sheet). Problem solved. Bots are no longer an issue. They are welcome to scan and not cause problems anymore.

What if your app doesn't have an easy config option? Nginx will happily help, with far less complexity and frustrations than trying to blindly play whack-a-mole with IP addresses (this is terrible and does not work... period).

Configure nginx with a specific path rule that either blocks requests to that path entirely, or places it behind basic auth (it doesn't need to be clever, and you don't even need to make it secret - hell, put the basic auth user/pass directly in the repo's readme, or show it on your site.) The bots won't hit it anymore.

---

So I guess what I'm saying is really - if you're finding that bots on your sites are causing a problem, consider just treating them like users and solving the problem, instead of going mad and trying to remove the bots.

Be constructive instead of destructive.

Ultimately, a lot of those bots are scanning that content to show to users, many are even doing it directly at the request of the user currently interacting with them.

Falling into the trap of the "fuck the bots" mindset is a sure way to lose (although it can feel good emotionally). It's not understanding the problem, it's not solving the problem, and it's limiting access to a thing you intentionally made public. Users are on the other end of those bots.

He's choosing to play the "everyone loses" square of the prisoner's dilemma.
by mjr00 | 2025-06-04 15:26:09+00:00
Only if you assume the current amount of knowledge work being done, or the amount of output from knowledge work, is the maximum amount possible or desired. Which is incorrect.

Every software company has a backlog of 1000 features they want to add, everywhere has a shortage of healthcare workers. If AI makes developers on a successful product 20% more efficient, they won't fire 20% of developers, they'll build 20% more features.

The problem is the "successful product" part; for a decade or more unsuccessful products were artificially propped up by ZIRP. Now that money isn't free these products are being culled, and the associated jobs along with them. AI is just an excuse.
by moepstar | 2025-06-04 15:26:22+00:00
What _i'm_ missing from those videos is - while they do go through the steps finding the fault - usually don't really explain their reasoning why they suspect component a, b, c to be faulty and how exactly a good (or bad) component would behave...

Might not be the case for all the vids of course, but for those i watched i never had that "ah, that's how it works" gotcha moment...
by TSiege | 2025-06-04 15:26:25+00:00
The author makes vague claims and provides no evidence for them. And the sources he does site are questionable at best and purposefully dishonest at worst. No where does the author say what freedoms people actually had or how we know they were followed and enforced. There is no first hand source for ANY of his claims except the Magna Carta, which undercuts his own, that is that the past had some glorious freedoms that were around and freely followed. From the Magna Carta

> THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, and all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs.

Just from a superficial reading this implies that "Liberties and Customs" were afforded to London but then revoked and now formally reapplied.

The Magna Carta, and other historical documents like the Assize of Clarendon, are important because they formalized unwritten codes into laws, expanded rights, and set up a legal system that allows for non violent means of dealing with conflict. Without them we wouldn't have things like Habeas Corpus and instead be defending against arbitrary decision making by people like kings