MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by davnicwil | 2025-06-15 17:05:35+00:00
It might be that the value more software can add is already at its limit in any given business - or at least returns will be diminishing. Meaning in those particular businesses the appetite to hire devs might stay flat (or even shrink!) as AI makes existing devs more efficient.

The more interesting question is whether this is true across the economy as a whole. In my view the answer is clearly no. Are we already operating at the limit of more software to add value at the margin? No.

So though any particular existing business might stop hiring or even cut staff, it won't matter if more businesses are created to do yet more things in the world with software. We might even end up in a place where across the economy, more dev jobs exist as a result of more people doing more with software in a kind of snowball effect.

More conservatively, though, you'd at least expect us to just reach equilibrium with current jobs if indeed there is new demand for software to soak up.
by highd | 2025-06-15 17:05:42+00:00
TFP cites decision transformers. Just using a transformer does not bypass the credit assignment problem. Transformers are an architecture for solving sequence modeling problems, e.g. the credit assignment problem as arises in RL. There have been many other such architectures.

The hardness of the credit assignment problem is a statement about data sparsity. Architecture choices do not "bypass" it.
by josephcsible | 2025-06-15 17:06:06+00:00
> I also don’t see how this solves the “no easy undo” problem. Won’t websites just remove that element once they gain permission? Or worse, they could spoof it and fake the undo.

You're describing the "no easy undo for allow" problem. Google doesn't care about that and doesn't want to fix it, since they want more of your data, not less. This element is just to have a solution to the "no easy undo for block" problem.
by simonw | 2025-06-15 17:06:36+00:00
The situation on macOS is so frustrating. sandbox-exec / seatbelt has been marked as deprecated for nearly a decade now (since macOS Sierra in 2016) but it's still what everyone uses - here's OpenAI using it for their new Codex CLI: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/215

Maybe the new "containers" stuff in macOS 26 is going to be a good replacement for that? It seems like that's a different solution though.

All I want is an easy, documented, supported way to run a binary on my computer and say "it can only access these files, use this much RAM and it's not allowed to make any outbound network requests". It always surprises me how hard this is!
by anon291 | 2025-06-15 17:06:48+00:00
The insinuation here is that Kenya is poor, but Kenya is fairly well off. What we are seeing around the world is a global rise in living standards which is great.

India's GDP Per capita numbers are highly thrown off by how cheap it is and how young it is.

That being said, Indian GDP PPP per capita is 12k, while Kenya is at 7.5k, so about 66% larger than Kenya

People like to mention GDP per capita with India as if it's some kind of flex. Indian GDP per capita by PPP is not the highest in the world, but fairly typical for a developing country and it has a high growth rate.
by convolvatron | 2025-06-15 17:07:11+00:00
so much of programming has been shaped by fads than I don't think you can safely point the finger at 'everything is a dsl' as being a root cause. back when lisp was really being put out to pasture, it seemed like the major complaints were about performance and syntax. and how if it wasn't object oriented then it really belonged in the dustbin (of course ignoring clos and the mop)
by mrinterweb | 2025-06-15 17:07:12+00:00
I had a good background in C++ programming before switching to ruby. At first, I was terrified of the lack of strict typing, but after using it for a while, I realized my concern wasn't that warranted. For me it is about the tradeoff of dealing with types vs productivity. Sure I occasionally get bit by a random "method not defined for nil" error, but it is usually very easy to fix, and I don't run into the issue very often. With ruby, and especially rails, it is about the productivity gains. I can simply accomplish much more in less time and fewer lines of code than I would in other languages/frameworks. Not only am I writing fewer lines of code (usually), the language is very expressive without being overly cryptic. The code is more readable, and to me that results in better maintainability. The strong community and ecosystem emphasis that is put on testing, also leads to more resilient and much more maintainable code.
by bgw254 | 2025-06-15 17:07:34+00:00
I think assuming engineers know about the legality of some of these features is a far fetch. Pixel tracking has been a thing for more than a decade now, Google does it, Meta does it and theyre but the two biggest players but a lot of companies track and read cookies for personalization reasons. It may feel wrong but it is hard to blame an engineer for thinking of it as just another normal feature. The PMs, Managers and leadership should be responsible for this but at Meta, Managers are trackers and slave masters, not thinkers. Features are to be delivered fast, there is no room to think and plan. Metrics rule everything even when they are clearly evil.
by lend000 | 2025-06-15 17:08:22+00:00
Friends and others who have described the details of their non-technical white collar work to me over the last 15 or so years have typically evoked the unspoken response... "Hmm, I could probably automate about 50-80% of your job in a couple weeks." That's pre-AI. And yet years later, they would still have similar jobs with repetitive computer work.

So I'm quite confident the future will be similar with AI. Yes, in theory, it could already replace perhaps 90% of the white collar work in the economy. But in practice? It will be a slow, decades-long transition as old-school / less tech savvy employers adopt the new processes and technologies.

Junior software engineers trying to break into high paying tech jobs will be hit the hardest hit IMO, since employers are tech savvy, the supply of junior developers is as high as ever, and they simply will take too long to add more value than using Claude unless you have a lot of money to burn on training them.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-15 17:08:28+00:00
Turning solar power into something we use to destroy the environment doesn't strike me as very "green" at all. Quite the opposite. I can't imagine it's a very efficient use of money, either.

Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.
by Dwedit | 2025-06-15 17:08:30+00:00
These are 1992-era MIDI files that came bundled with MIDISoft Recording Session. Note that they contain both "Base" and "Extended" tracks in the same file, so there will be piano notes on channel 16 that are supposed to be percussion. A MIDI player such as Falcosoft Soundfont MIDI Player will detect those kinds of songs and automatically mute channel 16. (There is actually a way to mark channel 16 as a percussion channel, but the people who made those midis in 1992 didn't know about it)

https://www.dwedit.org/files/session_midi.zip

https://www.dwedit.org/files/session_midi_2.zip
by anon291 | 2025-06-15 17:08:38+00:00
No serious person blames colonialism for India's slow development (stop listening to loud mouths online).

Honest people know it's because India, while a liberal democracy, was actually more socialist and centrally planned than China, up until the 90s when the first free market reforms were made. This is almost two decades after China opening up.

Honestly people on the internet have warped views of both India and China.

As for what India did... This is an ancient society which still has customs and such dating back God knows how long. It is not easy to change. Simply existing as an independent nation after almost 1000 years of foreign rule is an achievement.

I've not been to India in almost a decade now, but when we visited regularly growing up, the amount of progress every trip was astonishing. I don't see how anyone can deny that
by kulahan | 2025-06-15 17:08:57+00:00
Once you spend time in an actually dangerous neighborhood - one where people can spot your out-of-place-ness before you even get out of the car - one where the good guys are the ones telling you to get the hell out before you find yourself in a real bad situation - ones where the gas station attendants are hard as hell - you’ll understand that your experience of walking through vaguely poor neighborhoods is not akin to dangerous neighborhoods.

Nobody who has ever been in a dangerous neighborhood would have this opinion unless they’re truly callous
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-06-15 17:09:40+00:00
>> The main issue is that Prolog is not truly declarative; how you write the rules has a major impact on how the interpreter behaves. You might end up with repeated answers for a query or it might enter an infinite loop. Prolog also allows IO, so the order in which things get executed is critical. It’s Turing-complete, for better or worse.

Yeah, sounds like a real show-stopper. Prolog is not 100% declarative, which is really what every programmer wants from a programming language.

Better use a language like C# or Java, or Python, which are 0% declarative. Or try to implement datalog (only not really) so that you can't even use lists because that's what real-word programmers are looking for in a real-world programming language: 100% declarative, 0% real-world uses.

Ah well, at least the author has heard of SLD-Resolution which is more than one can say about the authors of SICP. But they haven't heard of SLG Resolution with tabulation (a.k.a. "tabling") which is a way to execute Prolog programs while preserving the Turing-completeness but without getting stuck in left-recursions. Among other things.

https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=tabling

Edit:

>> Prolog also allows IO, so the order in which things get executed is critical.

I paid €7 to make this post because I'm on a boat in the middle of the Adriatic sea and my Vodafone contract is AWOL, so listen closely: no, Prolog's IO is not what makes it Turing Complete. That comes from definite logic, i.e. a fragment of the First Order Predicate Calculus (a.k.a. First Order Logic) restricted to formulae in clausal form with at most one positive literal a.k.a Horn clauses, that nevertheless retains the full expressivity of full FOL. Definite logic is semi-decidable and when evaluated by Resolution, as SLD-Resolution (restricted to definite program clauses and Horn goals), it is refutation-complete (and sound, to boot). Meaning, in summary, that any true sentence can be proved true but if a sentence is false then it cannot always be proved false, by SLD-Resolution. So far, so theoretically good.

What Prolog does which is really dangerous and makes the order of execution "critical" is that it allows the programmer to edit the program database i.e. the database of facts and rules, in other words, the program itself, programmatically, i.e from the program itself. This means that not all your program's state is known before the program runs and database operations are completed. That sucks hairy balls but it is also a very useful mechanism that requires experience and understanding of the language, its core concepts, and programming in general, to use right.

But Prolog's Turing completeness has nothing to do with IO, or database ops. That was not worth €7.
by jlokier | 2025-06-15 17:09:55+00:00
> why should only private actors have that data?

I'm not sure if you consider governments and police to be private actors?

I spoke with a sophisticated ANPR city-wide tracking vendor recently at a conference. From their video showing the system following vehicles in real-time, with detailed movement tracking, speed measurement, lane position, estimating model, age, demographic etc. when they couldn't see the registration plate, from all sorts of vantage points, it looked to me like they would know where basically everyone who drives is at all times as they moved around.

So, as a privacy advocate, I asked them about tracking and knowing where every driver is all the time, and they assured me: "It's ok. We send all this data immediatel;y to the police. The police are responsible for keeping the data safe. They only use it when they decide it's appropriate."

I was there interested in privacy and traffic monitoring, but there was almost nobody to speak with who seemed to think about privacy, except in a checkbox sort of way, e.g. "when you're in public there's no legal right to privacy" and "our systems are fully compliant with data protection".
by olaven | 2025-06-15 17:10:13+00:00
Hey HN!

I built this landing page to validate whether there's demand for automatic time tracking across calendars. I already use calendars to manage my time and life, but I lack the macro perspective on how that time is actually distributed. The idea: connect your existing calendars and other data sources, and get analytics on your time patterns. I realized I have detailed time records already living all over the place, but no way to see insights across all of them.

Before building the full product, I wanted to see if others feel this same gap. If this sounds interesting to you at all, I'd be grateful if you checked it out, possibly signing up for the waitlist.

Is this a problem you actually have? What's missing from existing solutions?

Link: https://makro-poc.vercel.app/

Thanks for reading.

- olaven :)
by find | 2025-06-15 17:11:15+00:00
A typical child knows about one child with cancer. Back-of-the-envelope, the number a child knows would be (incidence rate of childhood cancer) * (typical K-8 size), but doubled since they observe all grades ahead and behind them. Incidence rate is about 20 per 100,000 and we might assume a typical K-8 is about 2000 students, so (20 / 100000 * 2000 * 2) ~ 1.

The first figure shows an order of magnitude decrease in mortality over the last few decades from childhood cancer. The average child growing up in the 70s would know a child that died from cancer, and today they would not!
by fuzzbazz | 2025-06-15 17:11:42+00:00
From a quick web search I can find that there are book review sites that allow users to enter and rate verbatim "quotes" from books. This one [1] contains ~2000 [2] portions of a sentence, a paragraph or several paragraphs of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Could it be plausible that an LLM had ingested parts of the book via scrapping web pages like this and not the full copyrighted book and get results similar to those of the linked study?

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/4640799-harry-potter-a...

[2] ~30 portions x 68 pages
by seadan83 | 2025-06-15 17:12:12+00:00
False dichotomy, we don't have to continue at 3% for the 20% prediction to be wrong.

So far, I've seen jobs lost to tariffs. I've yet to see a job lost to AI. Observations are not evidence, but so far there is no evidence I see that shows AI to be a stronger macro economic force than say recessions, tariffs (trade wars) or actual wars.
by godelski | 2025-06-15 17:12:18+00:00
> That is wishful thinking popularised by Ilya Sutskever

Ilya and Hinton have claimed even crazier things

| to understand next token prediction you must understand the casual reality

This is objectively false. It's a result known in physics to be wrong for centuries. You can probably reason a weaker case yourself, that I'm sure you can make accurate predictions about some things without fully understanding them.

But the stronger version is the entire difficulty of physics and causal modeling. Distinguishing a confounding variable is very very hard. But you can still make accurate predictions without access to the underlying causal graph
by lutusp | 2025-06-15 17:12:33+00:00
Ahh ... retro. The many ways by which the past beckons us.

All right. Apropos the retro theme, here's a Web page dedicated to my Apple II program "Electric Duet": https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/

The gory details: the Apple II had a simple TTL output connected to a speaker -- crude, not meant for music, and certainly not with two voices. Did this stop me? Read on.

I created an assembly-language player that switched the TTL speaker driver's output at 8 kilohertz, then created two musical voices by controlling the pulse width of the 8 KHz clock. So two voices, two notes at once, from a TTL driver.

Here's a sample of the music Electric Duet created, on an Apple II, in 1981: https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/music_tracks/prelude.mp3 -- press the play button.

That's retro defined.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-15 17:14:08+00:00
> ICE kidnaps people without showing documentation on who they are or why they're being kidnapped.

Which is, again, a longstanding problem rather than some novelty introduced just now.

> Also, despite the insane cruelty that seems to be the process, both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump.

And that's kind of my point:

https://law.ucla.edu/news/no-fair-day-damning-new-report-rev...
by dougg3 | 2025-06-15 17:15:40+00:00
I also have a couple of passthroughs -- I probably should have mentioned them in the post as another option. The one I have is fancy -- it can read the EDID from a monitor, save it, and use it as an override for another monitor.

Another awesome thing is it can force the monitor to always be detected. One of my monitors virtually unplugs itself when I shut it off, which causes a bunch of issues for me, and the passthrough completely solved it. The one I use is the HD-EWB by THWT.
by hinkley | 2025-06-15 17:15:41+00:00
Every time people talk about OTel I discover half the people are talking about spans rather that stats. For stats it’s not a ‘fancy logger’ because it’s condensing the data at various steps.

And if you’ve ever tried to trace a call tree using correlationIDs and Splunk queries and still say OTEL is ‘just a fancy’ then you’re in dangerous territory, even if it’s just by way of explanation. Don’t feed the masochists. When masochists derail attempts at pain reduction they become sadists.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-06-15 17:15:57+00:00
It does (naively I'll admit) seem like the problem is one more of approach more than algorithm.

Yes the model may not be able to tackle long horizon tasks from scratch, but learn some shorter horizon skills first then learn a longer horizon by leveraging groupings of those smaller skills. Chunking like we all do.

Nobody learns how to fly a commercial airplane plane cross country as a sequence of micro hand and arm movements. We learn to pick up a ball that way when young, but learning to fly or play a sport consists of a hierarchy of learned skills and plans.
by kulahan | 2025-06-15 17:15:58+00:00
Ok, that’s fine? We still don’t have an easy time accessing the cheap and simple stuff here. I have to keep going in to get a doctor to approve a non-controlled substance I’ve been taking for a decade. It has no habit-forming effects. It has no use as a precursor. It has no use recreationally. It’s a worthless, ongoing expense.

Why are you defending this awful, awful system? Have you had even one good experience? Not “well, that wasn’t awful”, but truly one GOOD experience?

Hospitals here don’t even follow up to see if your medical care was effective.

Hell, I’d even take Australia’s approach, where basic stuff is free and you pay for additional coverage.
by swalsh | 2025-06-15 17:16:15+00:00
Sonnet 4 changed my mind on AI safety. It can do ALOT of work unattended, real work like configuring servers. If you give it a goal, and a set of tools, it will get the job done. But I got freaked out the first time I used it, since I didn't realize just how good it was at pursuing it's goal. I gave it a custom MCP server with limited bash commands. But one of the commands was python (I assumed Anthropic would have trained it not to be so relentless... i was wrong), with that it just gladly used python to build and execute any command I didn't give direct access to. Sonnet 4 is scary smart and efficient. The only hesitation i have is that it's messy. For example, since it does not have a memory (i'm using claude desktop) i've seen it duplicate installations/configurations of containers if it failed to find the origional installation. The solution is to add language to the prompt instructing it to drop documentation, and to read documentation on everything it does.
by maximegarcia | 2025-06-15 17:16:27+00:00
I do. It's a whole thing that get you down to writing your business logic in an expressive way very easily. Framework (Rails) helps, yes, but even pure Ruby can be nice. I've written a second time accuracy simulator for cars and chargers in a EV charging stations in pure Ruby, that was fast to iterate around and pleasant to write.

The ecosystem, toolchain and all do a lot. It is really missed when I do other languages, and I wish to find the same way of developing elsewhere. I currently do C for embedded in an horrible IDE, and I want to bang my head against the table each time I had to click on something on the interface.

(btw Python is a nightmare for me)
by timewizard | 2025-06-15 17:16:57+00:00
> base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history.

We used to just call that lying.

> When AI finally does cause massive disruption to white collar work

It has to exist first. Currently you have a chat bot that requires terabytes of copyrighted data to function and has sublinear increases in performances for exponential increases in costs. These guys genuinely seem to be arguing over a dead end.

> what happens then?

What happened when gasoline engines removed the need to have large pools of farm labor? It turns out people are far more clever than a "chat bot" and entire new economies became invented.

> that we see some form of swift and punitive backlash, politically or otherwise.

Or people just move onto the next thing. It's hilarious how small imaginations become when "AI" is being discussed.
by ai_critic | 2025-06-15 17:17:14+00:00
> While EXIF data works pretty well for most basic stuff, it's not enough for everything one might need for AI specific stuff, especially for things like attention maps and saliency regions.

That's why I mentioned that you put anything, include binary data--which includes images--into the chunks in a PNG. I think Pillow even supports this (there are some PRs, like https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/4292 , that suggest this).

Your problem domain is:

* Have something that looks like a PNG...

* ...that doesn't need supporting files outside itself...

* ...that can also store textual data (e.g., that JSON blob of bounding boxes and whatnot)...

* ...and can also store image data (e.g., attention maps and saliency regions).

What I'm telling you is that the PNG file format already supports all of this stuff, you just need to be smart enough to read the spec and apply the affordances it gives you.

> I'm currently working on redundancy and error correction to deal with the resizing problem. Having a separate file format, even if it's a headache and adds another one to the list (well, another cute-sounding one at least), gives more customization options and makes it easier to associate the properties directly.

In the 90s, we'd already spent vast sums of gold and blood and tears solving the "holy shit, how do we encode multiple things in images so that they can survive an image pipeline, be extensible to end users, and be compressed reliably."

None of this has been new for three decades. Nothing you are going to do is going to be a value add over correctly using the file format you already have.

I promise that you aren't going to see anything particularly new or exciting in this AI goldrush that isn't an isomorphism of something much smarter, much better-paid people solved back when image formats were still a novel problem domain (again, in the 1990s).