MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgwalter | 2025-06-05 13:42:06+00:00
I've criticized the NYT and paywalls many times myself, but first of all OpenAI itself has all your data and we know how "delete" functions work in other places.

The Twitter users quoted by Ars Technica, who cite "boomer copyright concerns" are pretty short sighted. The NYT and other mainstream sources, with all their flaws, provide the historical record that pundits can use to discuss issues.

Glenn Greenwald can only point out inconsistencies of the NYT because the NYT exists. It is often the starting point for discussions.

Some YouTube channels like the Grayzone and Breaking Points send reporters directly to press conferences etc. But that is still not the norm and important information should not be stored in a disorganized YouTube soup.

So papers like the NYT need to survive for democracy to function.
by b112 | 2025-06-05 13:42:52+00:00
It could easily go away, if there are claims of people abusing the API, or using "unlicensed software to use the API" causing errors. By licensed, I mean "approved to use the API".

There could also be pushes to monetize the API, "Why is this service free!?". Meaning they'd likely require a need to be incorporated, setup a commercial account with them, and have payment method on file, and on and on.

My point is, I can think of dozens of sneaky ways to make that pesky API go away, and I'm not even trying.
Show HN: PromptLab: Run LLM prompts directly inside Google Sheets
by aidopper | 2025-06-05 13:42:58+00:00
I built PromptLab: a simple Google Sheets add-on that lets you use LLMs like GPT4o, Gemini or DeepSeek directly inside a spreadsheet.

I kept running into the same problem: Getting a huge dataset (like keywords, leads, reviews, etc.) and having to copy-paste it row by row into ChatGPT to filter or categorize it. So I built a lightweight function inside Sheets: =TESTPROMPT(input, model)

You can:

Clean up keyword dumps from Google Ads

Classify leads or responses

Rewrite content at scale

Compare different model outputs side by side

Process 1000+ rows in one go (just drag the formula down)

No API keys needed, no Zapier, no browser extensions.

Would love feedback or ideas on other use cases. Happy to answer any technical/product questions too.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-05 13:43:56+00:00
Human sports remain interesting when the humans are notably worse at whatever they do than a machine purpose built for it, or indeed wildlife that specialised for this.

Usain Bolt was the fastest human sprinter in the world, but compared to a good motorcycle over paved road he's obviously not very fast, and likewise compared to an emu. Nevertheless, Bolt's 100m performance drew big crowds, even though people also watch Motorcycle racing and (I think?) Emu racing.

It's like speed running, the categories are arbitrary and self-selecting. Why the Modern Pentathlon? Why not. Why Super Mario Warpless? Why not. If everybody wanted to do Super Mario, only the odd numbered levels and also you must kill all the enemies, that's what the run is, our choices are arbitrary and we value whatever we like.
by drbommel | 2025-06-05 13:43:57+00:00
Hey HN,

Excited to announce the launch of Surion GmbH! We're a new [German-based, if you want to specify, otherwise omit] company focused on helping businesses, especially SMEs (KMUs), navigate and leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence.

The Problem We're Tackling: Many of us see the AI wave – LLMs, computer vision, predictive analytics – but there's often a huge gap between the hype and practical, value-driving implementation, particularly for companies without dedicated AI research departments. Information overload is real, and figuring out where and how to start with AI can be daunting.

What We Do - Two Core Pillars:

Hands-on AI Consulting: We're not about just writing strategy papers. Our goal is to work with businesses to: Identify high-impact, realistic AI use cases (e.g., process automation, customer service enhancement with LLMs, data-driven insights). Help select the right tools and technologies (open-source, commercial, custom). Support a_ctual_ implementation and integration into existing workflows. Focus on ROI and tangible business outcomes. Practical AI Academy: We believe in empowerment through knowledge. Our academy aims to: Demystify AI concepts for technical and non-technical teams. Offer workshops and courses on AI fundamentals, specific tools (e.g., working with popular LLM APIs, data preparation for ML), and AI project management. Enable companies to build internal AI capabilities over time.

Why We Built This: After [mention your background briefly, e.g., "years working in software development and seeing the AI adoption challenges firsthand" or "consulting various businesses on digitalization"], we saw a clear need for pragmatic, results-oriented AI support. Too many companies are either sitting on the sidelines or making missteps due to a lack of clear guidance.

Our Approach: We're focused on being transparent, practical, and avoiding buzzword bingo. We want to cut through the noise and deliver actionable strategies and skills.

We're Just Getting Started: Our website is live at [DeineWebseite.de/com - z.B. surion.gmbh (fiktiv)].

We'd love to get the HN community's feedback:

What are the biggest AI hurdles you see businesses (especially SMEs) facing? What kind of AI training or consulting do you think is most needed right now? Any initial thoughts on our approach?
by Taikonerd | 2025-06-05 13:43:59+00:00
I feel like HN really wants me to knit ;-) I was already considering taking knitting lessons because of this comment thread[0] from a week ago.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44128576

p.s. Oh, I just realized that "munificent", who posted the top-level comment in that thread, is also the author of this article.
by nilirl | 2025-06-05 13:44:14+00:00
Conflicted. Useful post, nice bits of insight.

But I feel emotionally conflicted because of how different it is from how I write.

And I have a suspicion that I need to get over it.

This is faster, produces something of value, and has a small chance of catching errors/bias in thinking. It's the same flow I use while writing code.

Writing from scratch now feels like those cooking videos where people make all the ingredients from scratch: rewarding but also maybe a tiny bit self-indulgent.

This feels like the 21st century: You bring the skills, the model brings the words.
by lawik | 2025-06-05 13:44:29+00:00
I think it is very accurate and should be uncontroversial to say that Elixir/Erlang/OTP are very angled towards building services. I'd say service rather than server because I don't think it is necessarily about client/server as much as doing a long-running job. Which very often is a server but I've done bots, workers and whatnots that I wouldn't necessarily think of as servers.

I think the language and ecosystem are fairly general-purpose but there are definitely a lot more general ecosystems. I think some of the big wins both Erlang and Rails have achieved (that Elixir build off of) have been about constraining the problem to be "a service" or "a web app with a database".

So you are spot on there.

One of the things I've found Elixir to be surprisingly nice for is as a replacement to my Python and Bash scripting. Shelling out is occasionally awkward but Mix.install is glorious and Task.async_stream is hilarious.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-05 13:44:49+00:00
I'm not sure any of that is necessary for what we're talking about: locally-installed software that intends to be used by one or more public websites.

For instance, my interaction with local LLMs involves 0 web browsers, and there's no reason facebook.com needs to make calls to my locally-running LLM.

Running HTML/XML files in the browser should be easier, but at the moment it already has the issues you speak of. It might make sense, IMO, for browsers to allow requests to localhost from websites also running on localhost.
by asoneth | 2025-06-05 13:45:46+00:00
> too much risk to make back on users who actually sign up to your store and buy books vs ones that put the gift in the closet, clearance models, losing to a more popular store

I definitely agree that selling hardware at cost (or at a loss) in the hopes of turning a profit off of content sales is an extremely risky strategy. Many companies try that approach, few succeed.

But if you price it like a typical consumer product and sell it for ~1.5 * BOM (i.e. ~$50 retail price on $35 BOM) then you don't need anyone to buy books because you can survive off the profit from the hardware alone. And because I believe that a $50 ereader would sell well, I don't know why they are not more common if it really is possible to build and assemble a mass-market ereader with a $35 BOM as the prior poster claimed.
by vanschelven | 2025-06-05 13:45:53+00:00
For some definition of "where" :-)

it's my experience that a full stacktrace is needed (or at least super-helpful) when debugging, since the innermost (triggering) level is not always the level where the problem was introduced. Getting full context (including the values of local variables) all the way up the stack makes that puzzle a whole lot easier.
by ColinWright | 2025-06-05 13:46:06+00:00
Just some context ...

The original submission was a link to a post on Mastodon. The post itself was too long to fit in the title, so I trimmed it, and put the full post here in a comment.

But with the URL in the submission being changed, this doesn't really make sense any more! In the future I'll make sure I include in the comment the original link with the original text so it makes sense even if (when?) the submission URL gets changed.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-05 13:46:25+00:00
"Thanks to" was never meant to be a dig! It's certainly not their fault that their forests are drying out, probably from climate change. Wildfires are a tough ecological management problem.

But yes, the upper midwest and east coast essentially never have had to deal with wildfire smoke like we have now. It's as bad as when I lived in LA, but there we expected it. People in Minnesota, for example, are totally unaccustomed to woodsmog for days on end. The current air quality is very unhealthy - also unheard of. Particle counts in the 100s ppm!
by rhgraysonii | 2025-06-05 13:47:16+00:00
I have been using LLMs to write Elixir full time at work for months now. AMA, if anyone is interested.

I sometimes have different thoughts of approach than Zach, but this post really resonates with me. I've been in Elixir full time for over 10 years and would love to see an evolution in its adoption fueled by this.
by sQL_inject | 2025-06-05 13:47:31+00:00
I think if you're against these cuts you also have to be open to finding out which of these historical investments have a good rate of return. I.e. which is more important, tax dollars spent finding out the composition of Mars rocks or spent on fusion energy?

In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.
by rendang | 2025-06-05 13:47:50+00:00
I've read only perhaps 1% of Siskind's work and don't have a particularly close familiarity with him or opinion on his work, and from that position I'm pointing out that the blog post is not particularly persuasive. It just states that Siskind does not hold to the same presuppositions as the author without making an argument for those presuppositions
by squidbeak | 2025-06-05 13:49:02+00:00
I agree. As far as copyrighted and artistic works go, I've never fully understood what the objection is. If the work is being remixed not copied then it surely falls under fair use? Meanwhile, if it creates something new in an artist's style, it's only doing what talented imitators routinely do. There's the economic argument. But if that's accepted, then for fairness it would have to be extended to every other profession which stands to be wiped out by AI, which would be daft.

New works in familiar styles are something I can't wait for. The idea that the best Beethoven symphony hasn't been composed yet, or that the best Basquiat hasn't been painted yet, or that if the tech ever gets far enough, Game of Thrones might actually be done properly with the same actors, is a pretty mouthwatering prospect. Also styles we haven't discovered, that AI can anticipate. How's it to do that without a full understanding of culture? Hobbling the delight it could bring generally for the sake of protected classes will just make the tech less human and a lot less exciting.
by dbunskoek | 2025-06-05 13:49:42+00:00
We're currently moving multiple projects from Sentry to Bugsink, and so far it's looking great, thanks for making this @vanschelven :)

No hate on Sentry by the way, but we (and some of our clients in the Netherlands) also like to have a European alternative, and it's a big bonus that this has a very low switching cost.
by itkovian_ | 2025-06-05 13:50:35+00:00
Saying we should tokenize different modalities the same would be analogous to saying that in order to be really smart, a human has to listen with its eyes. At some point there has to be SOME modality specific preprocessing. The thing is in all current sota arch.’s this modality specific preprocessing is very very shallow, almost trivially shallow. I feel this is the peice of information that may be missing for people with this view. In the multimodal models everything is moving to a shared representation very rapidly - that’s clearly already happening.

On the ‘we need to do rl loop rather than a generative model’ point - I’d say this is the consensus position today!
by smallnix | 2025-06-05 13:51:10+00:00
Thanks for all the work that goes into this crucial service!

3% and "3,200 people manually unpaused issuance" does seem much higher than expected to me and no cause for celebration, especially at this scale.

Are there no better patterns to be exploited to identify 'zombies'? Running experiments with blocking and then unblocking to validate should work here.

I guess this falls into the bucket of: sure we can do that, given sufficient time and resources
by hummusisdata | 2025-06-05 13:51:50+00:00
I just published a comprehensive guide on implementing Success Metrics for data teams - the missing piece most organizations struggle with.

Covers practical frameworks including: - How to calculate actual Data ROI (with real implementation examples) - The 5 W's method for designing actionable KPIs - Data Utilization measurement (we found one company using only 48% of their 32TB) - Change management strategies that ensure adoption

Includes real implementation lessons from helping a company transition from measuring everything to measuring what matters. The Data ROI calculation methodology alone could save teams months of trial and error.

No fluff - just frameworks you can implement immediately.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-06-05 13:51:58+00:00
Or a second language later in life while trying to achieve a native sounding accent. Yeah, you can sound fluent just fine. My complaint with brain plasticity with age and language learning is that… well… when you’re younger you have more _time_ to learn something and are less burdened by chores, work, obligations, kids, and so on.

Turns out that if you use the language as much as a native person, with special attention to accent development, you can achieve high proficiency just fine.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-05 13:52:13+00:00
Folks are missing the point, so let me offer some clarification.

The silly example I provided in this thread is poking fun at the notion that LLMs can't be sentient because they aren't processing data all the time. Just because an agent isn't sentient for some period of time it doesn't mean it can't be sentient the rest of the time. Picture somebody who wakes up from a deep coma, rather than sleeping, if that works better for you.

I am not saying that LLMs are sentient, either. I am only showing that an argument based on the intermittency of their data processing is weak.
by Daemon404 | 2025-06-05 13:52:31+00:00
There's quite some time until the next release, I believe, so it should be.

The biggest thing missing right now is NACK support, and one of the authors has said they intend to do this (along with fixing old OpenSSL version support, and supporting other libraries). Until that is done, it isn't really "prod ready", so to speak.

For some context, there has been a history of half-supported things being pushed to FFmpeg by companies or people who just need some subset of $thing, in the past, and vendors using that to sell their products with "FFmpeg isn't good enough" marketing, while the feature is either brought up to standard, or in some cases, removed, as the original authors vanish, so it's perhaps a touchy subject for us :) (and why my post was perhaps unnecessarily grumpy).

As for the git / premature push stuff, I strongly believe it is a knock-on effect of mailing list based development - the team working on this support did it elsewhere, and had a designated person send it to the list, meaning every bit of communication is garbled. But that is a whole different can of worms :D.
by fsflover | 2025-06-05 13:52:58+00:00
> JOSS uses the github issue tracker and pull request system to write all reviews for the submitted paper describing the software that was developed

Github is not a good choice for the free and open-source software. It's owned by Microsoft known for its outrageous privacy practices [0]. Github also prevents people from anonymously reading and contributing [1] and so on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40592789; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598; https://noyb.eu/en/microsofts-xandr-grants-gdpr-rights-rate-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971550
by strken | 2025-06-05 13:54:29+00:00
Looking at the article, I'm not convinced logs and errors are different enough to change the taxonomy. I agree that a stack trace linked to source code is a useful tool, but don't understand why e.g. a warning can't have a stack trace too, or why your logging system is the wrong place to put this tool.

I've found logs of successes, rather than errors, to be useful for understanding attacks or gnarly performance issues. Seeing that you have a lot of long-running requests for a particular user or tenancy when you're running out of database connections is an example that springs to mind.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-05 13:55:02+00:00
A person being deeply sedated during surgery does not mean the person can't be sentient while it is not sedated. Therefore, arguing that LLMs can't be sentient because they are not always processing data is very poor.

I am not arguing that LLMs are sentient while they process tokens, either. I am saying that intermittent data processing is not a good argument against sentience.
by bmacho | 2025-06-05 13:55:04+00:00
> (Here's an anchoring point: the projected cost for the propulsion to "just" deorbit the International Space Station, at the end of its operating life, is $1.5 billion [0]).

That's under 2% of the total cost, that's not too much, if you compare it to the rest of the TCO, and not how beneficial would it be.
by homefree | 2025-06-05 13:55:12+00:00
In the schism the other person replying to you is talking about, Scott didn’t go fully into the far left progressive ideology when it happened so therefore he’s a traitor since he should “know better”.

One tenant of the progressive thinking is if you know their argument then you must agree with them because they’re “right”. So you’re either ignorant or evil - there’s no room for smart people that just think they’re wrong. They know Scott isn’t ignorant so therefore he must be evil.

My other comment got flag killed because I mentioned the core group I think is responsible for this kind of thinking within that community.
by Terretta | 2025-06-05 13:56:03+00:00
This is a great suggestion.

Although, I'm not sure you should start writing software by debugging code that doesn't work, or electronics by fixing something broken.

I think assembling some parts to make a basic thing that works is better.

So first, this book, and then find an equivalent of the 70s and 80s Radio Shack (US) or Tandy (EU) electronic breadboard and parts "build anything electronic" kits.

Then build stuff. Not Arduino stuff, more basic. The things those kits suggest making. Understand why they are the parts they are, in the wiring circuits they are.

Then tweak those to "make your own" to see if you know what the parts are and do and how they combine.

THEN start seeing if you can debug what's broken (and maybe tap into the nothing-but-YouTube suggestions here when it gets to specific things to fix, where seeing can be helpful).

RadioShack/Tandy used to have a series of handbooks like the "Getting Started in Electronics" book but focused more narrowly on classes of things you'd want to repair with both theory (how it works) and practice (therefore what to debug). They were blue covers and quite plain, if I recall.

You don't need courses, but readable/absorbable references to theory and practice for beginner tradespersons are actually great.
by 1718627440 | 2025-06-05 13:56:04+00:00
> I don't care. The site is doing something unusual. It's evident, it's enough to take a second look and think about it.

Is it enough to do an informed decision?

> Again, as a layman, I don't care.

You do care, whether you mistyped or the network is down. I agree that you probably don't care to distinguish between "network unreachable" and "no route to host" though.

> As a sysadmin

True, but that information was already there and was thrown away.
by Caelus9 | 2025-06-05 13:56:10+00:00
Early flight simulators were a real leap forward in technology, even though the frame rate and graphics processing were very primitive at the time, and 2 frames per second was only part of the "brilliance". But just like the first flight simulation game I played as a child, although the graphics were simple, the sense of immersion and freedom is still exciting when I think back now. I think the work of people like Foley and Van Dam is really underestimated. Their technology paved the way for today's 3D game graphics. They are really heroes ignored by the times!
by fastball | 2025-06-05 13:56:21+00:00
Roads were not built for LIDAR. Building a system that only requires the same sensing that humans use is a system that will work anywhere (if it works).

As soon as you buy into LIDAR (or any other non-human sensing mechanism) you introduce the possibility that your solution could have strict upper bounds on scale.

Which is indeed what we have seen so far with Waymo – it may have fewer issues per mile than Tesla FSD, but every one of those miles is expensively pre-mapped and requires $30k of extra hardware on every vehicle.

And for the use-case of "driverless taxi service in a well-established metro area", the Waymo solution does currently seem to be the better one. But that is also clearly not the ambition Tesla is pursuing.