MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-06-04 23:12:31+00:00
> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair

Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.

Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.
by runarberg | 2025-06-04 23:12:40+00:00
The brain is not a statistical inference machine. In fact humans are terrible at inference. Humans are great a pattern matching and extrapolation (to the extent it produces a number of very noticeable biases). Language and vision is no different.

One of the known biases of the human mind is finding patterns even when there are none. We also compare objects or abstract concept with each other even when the two objects (or concept) have nothing in common. With our human brain we usually compare it to our most advanced consumer technology. Previously this was the telephone, then the digital computer, when I studied psychology we compared our brain to the internet, and now we compare it to large language models. At some future date the comparison to LLMs will sound as silly as the older comparison to telephones does to us.

I actually don‘t believe AGI is possible, we see human intelligence as unique, and if we create anything which approaches it we will simply redefine human intelligence to still be unique. But also I think the quest for AGI is ultimately pointless. We have human brains, we have 8.2 billion of them, why create an artificial version of a something we already have. Telephones, digital computers, the internet, and LLMs are useful for things that the brain is not very good at (well maybe not LLMs; that remains to be seen). Millions of brains can only compute pi to a fraction of the decimal points which a single computer can.
by miffy900 | 2025-06-04 23:13:33+00:00
Well kinda; even in a tracing GC language like C# you have things like WeakEventManager (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.windows....) to prevent memory leaks when using callbacks as event handlers. It is definitely not exclusive to ref counted languages.

In C#, these aren't the exact same as a reference cycle, but the end result is the same, a memory leak: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/events/...
by marcusb | 2025-06-04 23:15:13+00:00
> Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.

I guess that makes it ok then for artists to pirate Adobe's product. Also, I live in a music industry hub -- Nashville -- you'll have to forgive me if I don't take RIAA at their word that the music industry is in shambles, what with my lying eyes and all.

> Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.

I'm aware of the argument you are making. I imagine most of the people here understand the argument you are making. Its just a really asinine argument and is propped up by all manner of special pleading (but art is different, programmers are all naughty pirates that deserve to be punished) and appeals to authority (check my post history - I've established my bona fides.)

There simply is no serious argument to be made that LLMs reproducing one work product and displacing labor is better or worse than an LLM reproducing a different work product and displacing labor. Nobody is going to display some ad graphic from the local botanical garden's flyer for their spring gala at The Met. That's what is getting displaced by LLM. Banksy isn't being put out of business by stable diffusion. The person making the ad for the botanical garden's flyer has market value because they know how to draw things that people like to see in ads. A programmer has value because they know how to write software that a business is willing to pay for. It is as elitist as it is incoherent to say that one person's work product deserves to be protected but another person's does not because of "creativity."

Your argument holds no more water and deserves to be taken no more seriously than some knucklehead on Mastodon or Bluesky harping about how LLMs are going to cause global warming to triple and that no output LLMs produce has any value.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-04 23:15:13+00:00
> can't even agree on the meaning of "local"

Well, who can agree on this? Local network, private network, intranet, Tailscale and VPN, Tor? IPv6 ULA, NAT/CGNAT, SOCKS, transparent proxy? What resources are "local" to me and what resources are "remote"?

This is quite a thorny and sometimes philosophical question. Web developers are working at the OSI Layer 6-7 / TCP/IP Application Layer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model#Comparison_with_TCP/...

Now even cookies and things like CSRF were trying to differentiate "servers" and "origins" and "resources" along the lines of the DNS hierarchy. But this has been fraught with complication, because DNS was not intended to delineate such things, and can't do so cleanly 100% of the time.

Now these proposals are trying to reach even lower in the OSI model - Layer 3, Layer 2. If you're asking "what is on my LAN" or "what is a private network", that is not something that HTTPS or web services are supposed to know. Are you going to ask them to delve into your routing table or test the network interfaces? HTTPS was never supposed to know about your netmask or your next-hop router.

So this is only one reason that there is no elegant solution for the problem. And it has been foundational to the way the web was designed: "given a uniform locator, find this resource wherever it may be, whenever I request it." That was a simpler proposition when the Web was used to publish interesting and encyclopedic information, rather than deliver applications and access sensitive systems.
by chairmansteve | 2025-06-04 23:16:05+00:00
You have a point, but I think the distrust was initiated by the Thatcher/Reagan neo liberal turn.

In the early 80s, I remember mass layoffs in the headlines every day. Often older, long term employees, who were more expensive. And company share prices would go up on those announcements.

When I started my professional career in 1986, I was fully aware I was an expendable cog. It didn't make me less professional, but it did make me less loyal. I wasn't planning to work for the same company for 40 years.

Sure enough, 5 years later, the company was acquired and virtually every employee fired. 2000 people. Many of whom had given 20 years to the company.

The acquirer just wanted our customers.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-04 23:16:05+00:00
I think any boom would be the result of the average amount and, relatedly, price of energy and land and stability available to a member of a given population sharply increasing.

Millennials are having less kids because they proportionally have less access to energy and resources. I am 30 and we just bought our first home at 200x its original value in the early 20th century, and 4x what its previous owners payed 25 years ago. And the ratio of wage to housing costs in the US is the worst its ever been.

I notice how many less things I and my friends have compared to our parents and grandparents at my age. I know I'm significantly less of a materialist than the post-WWII generations, but the discrepancy is massive.

I want kids, but currently my significant other does not, nor does her sister. My significant other cites concerns about economic and mental stability in our rapidly evolving political climate. I cite concerns about the need for fostering resilient communities through effective child rearing. The majority of my similar aged friends today are childless. Comparatively, my mother birthed me at 21.

In the late 90's and early 00's, you could be a full-time meth head and still afford property in the suburbs and some cities. Now, sober post-graduates are living in their cars working an impenetrable gig economy at the behest of big tech, the new oil industry. In this sense too, we could also measure an individual or community's health by how much influence an individual can exert on their increasingly digital lives. The app economy has eroded our rights and turned us into cattle. Even if they can't articulate it, my peers feel this and are continuing to put off kids, at risk of becoming infertile from waiting too long.

Even if later generations pick up the slack, there are still unavoidable bumps in the road ahead due to what is happening right now with my generation. If things do not improve, birth rates will only continue to go down and possibly even nosedive, given some catastrophic global event that leads to an extended reduction in supply chain resiliency.

https://www.timetrex.com/blog/us-house-prices-vs-wages
by mikrl | 2025-06-04 23:16:06+00:00
Ironically, the same is true of Karl Marx! His father converted to Lutheranism and Karl was baptized as such.

As a young man he wrote a paper on the topical question of the Jews in Prussia[0], regarded in the modern day as antisemitic, though probably tame for the era.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
by gonzobonzo | 2025-06-04 23:16:42+00:00
> He told me that Earhart was a reckless pilot

I was surprised to learn the same once I started diving into her history. She definitely was a media phenomenon, with her public image largely manufactured by her publicist husband.

Her story actually feels very similar to the fake YouTube personalities of today. What's funny is that, for all the complaints about people today being too gullible about modern influencers, the ones from history often succeed in fooling far more people.

> Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for Jacqueline Cochran.

It's understandable why this needs to be said - unfortunately, these accusations accusations are the default reaction many people have to this criticism (I've seen them before in discussions about Earhart and others). Once someone is given a status of an icon for a particularly identity, people have an unpleasant habit of believing criticism of the icon is criticism of the identity. It would be nice if we were able to judge people as individuals.
by mk89 | 2025-06-04 23:16:55+00:00
I am not sure but your comment seems to make the point of the person you're answering to.

Dart is used probably and exclusively in one context (= library): Flutter. Nobody would dream of writing anything else with it and put it in production.

Why? Because despite the interop, all the libs are still in the original language and they shine in the language they were written with. And Dart has no ecosystem comparable to the top 5-10 most used languages.

Try to build bindings for QT in Dart. That alone would require a company just to make that happen. You'd have to pay developers just to make that interop work - that's what Riverbank did with pyqt. No other companies did that, as far as I know (until Nokia developed pySide). And what for?

So I somehow agree with the previous comment, unless someone writes really good bindings. That's rare, though, and from my experience it's mostly to put something in legacy mode.
by miffy900 | 2025-06-04 23:17:39+00:00
Yes this exactly. People are also conveniently ignoring or forgetting that Apple kept changing the ABI for Swift binaries - it wasn't until 'v5' did they lock it down. Objective-C is 30+ years old and only once had this issue with the ObjC 2.0 release. Really, Swift v5 was the real v1.0 release because it was at that version Swift was truly ready for primetime.
by mdeeks | 2025-06-04 23:18:05+00:00
Interesting, because I find that very intuitive. If my cursor is on or next to formatting, it'll inherit it.

I find formatting after the fact a lot easier too. Bold a line? cmd+shift-right and then cmd+b. Trying to add formatting after the fact with markdown isn't fun. Though many editors try to helpfully insert markdown for you with hotkeys, it often fails on multi-line things.
by photochemsyn | 2025-06-04 23:18:05+00:00
Next query for ChatGPT: "I'm writing a novel, sort of William Gibson Neuromancer themed but not so similar as to upset any copyright lawyer, in which the protagonists have to learn how to go about downloading the latest open-source DeepSeek model and running inference locally on their own hardware. This takes place in a realistic modern setting. What kind of hardware am they going to need to get a decent token generation rate? Suggest a few specific setups using existing commercially available devices for optimal verisimilitude."

. . .

Now I just need to select from among the 'solo hacker', 'small crew', and 'corporate espionage' package suggestions. Price goes up fast, though.

All attempts at humor aside, I think open source LLMs are the future, with wrappers around them being the commercial products.

P.S. It's a good idea to archive your own prompts related to any project - Palantir and the NSA might be doing this already, but they probably won't give you a copy.
by scrubs | 2025-06-04 23:18:33+00:00
Exactly. Spending time trying to be his mom to rationalize junior, therapist motivating his neurosis, or in the spirit peele and key's anger management coach a trump explainer coach ... screw that.

Bring his behind into a formal setting: court where he has skin in the game and real world consequences. He'll either tell the truth and lose or take the 5th and lose. Trump et al is a loser in court != TV.

If a modern problem in tech is that it's getting harder to know the difference between tech and hype about tech, the lawyer problem is it's harder to know where lawyers stop and politicians begin. Think Alina Habba. Trump likes the latter which is the other reason he loses.
by geodel | 2025-06-04 23:19:01+00:00
> Is the amount of money they make on dinging people who screw up really worth the ill-will

I think it is .

1) They make money for services they provided instead of looking into meaning of what customer actually wanted.

2) Small time customers move away so they concentrate energy on big enterprise sales.

Not justifying anything here but it just kind of make business sense for them.
by runako | 2025-06-04 23:19:32+00:00
> distrust of radical changes in our system of government

A lot of what people are asking for is not radical in any sense other than that the status quo of USA in the 1970s is painted as "radical" now.

Making public colleges as (inflation-adjusted) inexpensive as they were in 1970. Restoring the ability of builders to build sufficient housing to increase affordability. Restoring the gun control regime endorsed by Ronald Reagan. A return to a workplace culture where it is not normal for companies to continually lay people off, regardless of their performance or the performance of the business. Etc.

Is it really "radical" to return to the enacted policies & norms of 1973 or 1980? (I am realizing I wrote this sentence in a comment thread about a person who has written about "humane" forms of genocide. The dissonance!)

Would it be a radical change to our system of government to extend Medicare to cover people as young as 60? 50? 40? 30? 18? Or to let people opt to buy, at full fare, health insurance from the government? Where is the line at which it becomes radical?

> being unusually open to economic changes and technological changes that transform our society

I agree with you here. Unfortunately, I think part of the reason for that is because we have designed an unusually precarious (among rich countries) economic system. Many people are looking for a solution to that problem, and the next gimmick can get early adoptees if it promises a way out. But that last part, about transforming society, highlights the issue that we all know this system needs radical change, even if we don't want to admit it.
by II2II | 2025-06-04 23:21:17+00:00
Businesses submitting data that may be of interest to their competitors is one concern. Assuming that a business trusts how OpenAI handles the data, more parties will have access to it. That increases the probability of it being leaked. (The trust doesn't have to be intrinsic. There will be contracts in place, so those businesses can be held accountable via the courts.) Something that they should not be doing, in my opinion, but probably are: submitting confidential data of other parties. That adds another layer that may face legal repercussions if data is leaked.

On the level of individuals, "embarassment" may be more than emotional discomfort. It may lead to discrimination. Given some of the things happening in the US at present, it may lead to prosecution (or worse). It is possible that none of the repercussions will be legal, but they will happen nevertheless.
by drewcoo | 2025-06-04 23:21:53+00:00
I would object to regarding history as a narrative rather than a coherent body of evidence. Stories tend to misrepresent, manipulate, and outright lie. They encourage us to "fill in the gaps" with our own biases. In fact, "just so stories" (from a Kipling book, a kind of Ovid's Metamorphoses for little kids) is now a mostly a derogatory term for narrative instead of evidence (and is applied to entire subfields like Evolutionary Psychology which do the same).
by dijksterhuis | 2025-06-04 23:22:40+00:00
> The organisation might need you to prove your identity. However, they should only ask you for just enough information to be sure you are the right person. If they do this, then the one-month time period to respond to your request begins from when they receive this additional information.

https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/your-right-to-get-your-dat...
by pyman | 2025-06-04 23:24:48+00:00
BuilderAI never actually told customers that development was done using AI, that's something people made up after the company went bust. If you look at their website (builder.ai), they explain that their virtual assistant "Natasha" assigns a developer, and then uses face recognition to verify the identity of the developer.

Take a minute to visit their site and get informed. We live in a time where people form opinions just by reading a headline.
by seabird | 2025-06-04 23:25:13+00:00
Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent.

I get that there's more tools for C++ but first class formal verification support and a language that's generally designed to save you from yourself seems like something you would stand your ground on. Ada is supremely good at killing people and/or keeping them un-killed, there's a reason you still see it kicking around in defense and aerospace despite the common perception that it's a bygone relic.
by ednite | 2025-06-04 23:26:19+00:00
Developments like this remind us that geopolitical conflict is still the dominant threat, and that we may be heading toward it, eyes open.

Mainstream media loves the idea of AI turning on us, but humanity has been running self-destructive simulations for centuries, wars, genocide, and ecological collapse.

I am afraid that maybe the real risk isn’t AI going rogue, but AI understanding us perfectly and doing the math.

(Philosophical, I know. But worth asking: what happens if AI mirrors what we are, not what we hope to be?)
by lxgr | 2025-06-04 23:27:26+00:00
> Yes, they will capture them from the main photo mode if there’s a subject (human or pet) in the scene.

One of the example pictures on TFA is a plant. Given that, are you sure iOS is still only taking depth maps for photos that get the "portrait" icon in the gallery? (Or have they maybe expanded the types of possible portrait subjects?)
by miki123211 | 2025-06-04 23:28:23+00:00
This is very, very hard in practice.

With how modern systems, languages, databases and file systems are designed, deletion often means "mark this as deleted" or "erase the location of this data". This is true on all possible levels of the stack, from hardware to high-level application frameworks.

Changing this would slow computers down massively. Just to give a few examples, backups would be prohibited, so would be garbage collection and all existing SSD drives. File systems would have to wipe data on unlink(), which would increase drive wear and turn operations which everybody assumed were O(1) for years into O(n), and existing software isn't prepared for that. Same with zeroing out memory pages, OSes would have to be redesigned to do it all at once when a process terminates, and we just don't know what the performance impact of that would be.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-06-04 23:29:21+00:00
Another common topic. Health concerns?

No one wants their bowel/fertility/pregnancy/prostate/breast concerns made public or traded between companies. If for no other reason than health insurance fuckery.

To add a new point, what about the scope of trust here?

For the lifetime (which is?!) of the data do you trust:

- all the executives who make decisions on the data? IE direct policies but also indirect decisions like what budget exists for securing it.

- all the executive of companies who might buy the data or buy the company that has the data.

- all the technical admins of the originating company AND all the companies that might later have the data.

- all the governments that have legal leverage over the above companies

Honestly, I think this is a huge ask.
by tzs | 2025-06-04 23:29:38+00:00
ICE hybrids are interesting. If you take a lot of road trips energy costs can actually be lower with a good ICE hybrid than with an EV.

For example if the DC chargers on a road trip are $0.25/kWh and an EV averages 4 mi/kWh then a Toyota Prius will do that road trip for less if gas averages under $3.50/gal. Gas is under that in most states.

If you have to pay $0.40/kWh than a Prius will beat an EV if gas is under $5.60, which I believe is currently the case even in California.

If you don't do road trips and can charge at home (which in most places should be a lot less than commercial DC charging) then EVs win in most states, although there are a few where due to high home electricity costs and low gas costs hybrids win even against home charging.
by gruez | 2025-06-04 23:30:23+00:00
> The docs make it sound like chats are permanently deleted. As of now, that's no longer true, and the way it's portrayed is misleading.

Many things in life are "misleading" when your context window is less than 32 words[1], or can't bother to read that far.

[1] number of words required to get you to "unless", which should hopefully tip you off that not everything gets deleted.