MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LAC-Tech | 2025-07-20 10:31:11+00:00
Great article, but I have a question:

The problem with naive async I/O in a database context at least, is that you lose the durability guarantee that makes databases useful. When a client receives a success response, their expectation is the data will survive a system crash. But with async I/O, by the time you send that response, the data might still be sitting in kernel buffers, not yet written to stable storage.

Shouldn't you just tie the successful response to a successful fsync?

Async or sync, I'm not sure what's different here.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-20 10:31:35+00:00
Soy and oat milk is also incredibly expensive compared to cow for what it is. Same for most supermarket tofu in the West. The cheapest own-brand tofu in Tesco is the same as the beef mince (£6.50/kg).

And even though I like tofu, it's 90% water and that's a terrible deal. A 500g pack of tofu doesn't go nearly as far as 500g of beef mince.

Meanwhile you can buy it in a UK Chinese supermarket for under £3.50 per kg.
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-20 10:31:49+00:00
> For some consumers — although we know there won’t be many — the Nokia’s extreme durability may be more valuable than the iPhone’s technological innovations

I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players because viewers were instructed to count something, this is exactly that.

> there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works.

Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned obsolescence.

It's not even something evil to do for some categories of products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc. It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality, total cost of ownership.

> However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector either.

If companies really are investing in order to improve their customer service, that's big news.
by nonvibecoding | 2025-07-20 10:31:50+00:00
This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.

Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
by Rotundo | 2025-07-20 10:33:37+00:00
I've got a pack of seemingly nice quality t-shirts that got a lot shorter and wider after first wash. I tried stretching them back to their original form but that doesn't work.

Used to be the cheap "three pairs for 10 euro" socks lasted a couple of years. Now I get, maybe, a year out of them before the holes get too obvious.

And price is not a reliable indicator of quality. Buying expensive can be just as much as a gamble as buying the cheap stuff.
by sgt101 | 2025-07-20 10:33:52+00:00
So far:

- when I ask models to do defined that I know how to do and can tell them about that method but can't remember the details off off hand and then I check the answers things work.

- when I attempt to specify things that I don't understand fully the model creates rubbish 7 out of 10 times, and those episodes are irretrievable. About 30% of the time I get a hint of what I should do and can make some progress.
by rmdashrfv | 2025-07-20 10:34:29+00:00
> For me it’s just a huge force multiplier, maybe 10-20x of my ability to deliver with my own knowledge and skills on a web dev basis.

I can tell you that this claim is where a lot of engineers are getting hung up. People keep saying that they are 10, 20 and sometimes even 100x more productive but it's this hyperbole that is harming that building style more than anything.

If you anyone could get 10 to 20 years worth of work done in 1 year, it would be so obvious that you wouldn't even have to tell anyone. Everyone would just see how much work you got done and be like "How did you do 2 decades worth of work this year?!"
by latexr | 2025-07-20 10:34:34+00:00
> Unless you have something substantial to support your claim that

I expected it to be clear from my use of Pichai’s words for comparison that fire and electricity (you know, the thing without which LLMs can’t even function) are substantial obvious examples. For more, see the other replies on the thread. I didn’t think it necessary to repeat all the other obvious ideas like the wheel, or farming, or medicine, or writing, or…
by Hilift | 2025-07-20 10:35:04+00:00
This is an absurd diversion from how poorly LA leadership is performing.

Six months on, and no permits have been drawn for the Palisades/Malibu reconstruction. There are 7,000 destroyed homes, in the most bureaucratic municipality for a permitting and development process. This will be particularly true for anything that requires Coastal Commission oversight. Their job is to get you to leave.

LA city sold $1 billion in bonds this year, not for strategic efforts, but to keep the lights on and water running. They basically punted and said part of the DPW is a project and we want to sell $1 billion in bonds.

In previous years, LA city annual spend includes $700+ million for homeless, and $350+ million for liability payments. It's basically a giant pot of money for a huge feeding frenzy.

Sure, the fire department has an insufficient budget, but no-one talks about 30% of all fires are started by the homeless, and why are they allowed to live under an interstate overpass anyway?

Some of those 7,000 homeowners displaced by the fire may give up and leave. Those that remain are going after LA leadership in court. LA will see massive lawsuits from homeowners and businesses, possibly the state government.
by XorNot | 2025-07-20 10:35:50+00:00
I mean I bought an Ikea desk like, 15 years ago and have moved it through multiple home offices in that time and it's holding up fine. I also bought it because it was cheap enough I wouldn't worry about taking a jigsaw to it to get it customized just right for me (which was mostly cutting a hole for my tower computer case to sit just right in).

The problem with "you want real quality" people is they mostly seem to advocate buying expensive demonstrative items, rather then properly evaluating what they need.

If a desk has successful held my things and enabled me to work at it for over a decade, what exactly is "quality" meant to be and be bought for?
by JdeBP | 2025-07-20 10:36:17+00:00
The display weirdness (e.g. the Z shell's percent character showing up) that you are seeing in your demo is because you are putting the terminal line discipline into raw mode, raw mode of course does not do CR-before-LF stuffing, and there's some confusion in the code as to when it does and when it does not explicitly emit CRs.

* https://github.com/bmf-san/ggc/blob/9e93ef8a87973cab916e37a9...

* https://github.com/bmf-san/ggc/blob/9e93ef8a87973cab916e37a9...
by Ekaros | 2025-07-20 10:37:01+00:00
Lowest cost possible is often fun optimization problem engineers enjoy. Save a fraction of cent here and there and there too. And in some ways it is good for consumer getting cheaper products.

On the other end you have something like Juicero. Massively and wastefully overengineered piece of crap. To do not that useful task. While being extremely expensive. And probably not actually last that long.

Maybe one day if far future we end up with some mature balance between two. But I doubt it...
by blfr | 2025-07-20 10:37:51+00:00
Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember, thanks to ecommerce much more avilable, but sadly also at a similar real price your parents remember which we find extortionary by comparison to all the cheap crap flooding the market.

You can have a tailored suit/shirt, hardwood furniture, grass-fed beef, vacuum to last decades, etc, but it will cost around the same in real terms and you're used to prices from Zara/Lidl.

Some things have truly declined because the demand collapsed so much that they basically got discontinued in the 1st world (that tailored shirt is coming from Ceylon) but others have improved tremendously by soaking up that drive for quality (check any independent coffee shop).

Not to mention the true pinnacles of modern manufacturing. Because for the price of a decent camera my father could get, I have a 100x zoom camera in my pocket, with a 7" touch screen, and 5g connectivity, also somehow all the books I could have ever read.
by Den_VR | 2025-07-20 10:38:16+00:00
The issue is Memes alone aren’t very substantive. And the snark snapback doesn’t set a healthy tone. Guidelines for everyone…

“Omit internet tropes.”

“Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.“

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Asraelite | 2025-07-20 10:39:14+00:00
I often see comments on Github issues where poor wording makes it difficult to understand what is actually meant. Things like "I reproduced the bug on Linux, then I tried Windows. I can't reproduce it now." Does that mean it's just not reproducible on Windows, or not reproducible at all anymore? Ambiguities like that are especially annoying when it's someone posting a solution to a problem. Sometimes it's because of grammatical errors, sometimes not.

I think LLMs are actually great for catching things like this, and you generally don't need some higher-level understanding about the goals involved to notice the ambiguity. My point wasn't that bots shouldn't be used like this, just that they need to be given the right instructions.
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-20 10:39:18+00:00
What Thomas is hinting at is that these products are unprofitable for the payment processors.

So it’s not even that the controversy is not worth the effort. It’s that it literally costs them money to deal with.

The sex taboo may not make sense, but it exists. And it makes people behave in ways that creates problems for lending to them, specifically fraud and chargeback rates are demonstrably higher.
by andrepd | 2025-07-20 10:39:22+00:00
Have you considered taking a measly 20 seconds out of your day—surely a fraction of the time you took to type this comment—to google this information?

Another point: have you considered that the authorities and people of the Netherlands, a very rich country with several valuable companies, may have possibly thought of this absolutely trivial argument when designing their tax code? Do you really think nobody thought of it?

Jesus

---

To your point: stakes in your _own_ company are not taxed as assets, but as income, precisely to avoid the ridiculous situation you point out.

Simply put: your retirement savings, your brokerage account = assets, your startup, your company, your farm = income.
by dottjt | 2025-07-20 10:39:28+00:00
I'm not sure if those examples are really applicable when there are perfectly fine alternatives i.e. linux, desktops etc. that don't have those issues. Ultimately it's a choice to be part of those eco-systems, at least from a consumer point of view.

With that said, I'm not sure why both our arguments have to be mutually exclusive? Why can't it be that things are being planned for obsolescence + we're living too long?

Regarding your last point, let's say that you did know you were going to live to 100, I think you'd be hard pressed to be able to afford a lot of that nice stuff which would serve you in the long run without working into retirement age (unless if you just happen to very wealthy).

I earn a relatively high salary and even if I was making the most of my retirement contributions and considering compounding, it would still only last me by 90 without requiring state assistance. And most importantly, that's if I were to maintain my current lifestyle, which includes buying the cheap shit I can afford (in part so I can keep up with funding retirement).

I couldn't imagine how much harder it would be for those on an average salary.
by glimshe | 2025-07-20 10:39:31+00:00
We've thrown fantastical amounts on some very uncertain things, like the moon landing. I think that the willingness of betting big at a potentially transformative technology such as AI is a good thing and a bit of a return to the old days when humanity still engaged in big infrastructure bets. Yes, it may fail, but that's intrinsic of any ambitious project.
by michaelsshaw | 2025-07-20 10:40:05+00:00
> is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work, you can have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation — is no longer being fulfilled;

I'd just like to comment on this line in particular. The promise of capitalism isn't this, but, rather, if you own capital (i.e. are a capitalist), you explicitly do not have to work. There is no promise made to the workers, except that in some way they are compensated for their work.

There are other systems wherein if you don't work (and aren't retired/disabled), you don't get paid. But capitalism is one of them in which non-workers get paid, and usually with a disgusting disparity between the rate of the two classes.
by tacker2000 | 2025-07-20 10:40:21+00:00
> There's no pride, no joy, just productivity.

I think it’s more nuanced than that.

Not every project one does will be or should be considered art or a source of joy and pride.

The boring CRUD apps that put the “bread on the table” are just that, a means to an end, they will not be your main source of pride or fulfillment. But somewhere in between there will be projects where you can put all your heart in and turn off that LLM.

Think of the countless boring weddings playlists a DJ has to do or the boring “give me the cheapest” single family homes an architect has to design.
by B5C8ECB24DB47D1 | 2025-07-20 10:40:32+00:00
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44610491

Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt (marathonfusion.com) 56 points by apugoneappu 1 day ago | flag | 89 comments
by Dilettante_ | 2025-07-20 10:40:33+00:00
You're putting words in my mouth. It's not "awful and unexciting", it is certainly an important step, but the hype being invited with the headline is the immensely greater one of an accurate rock-thrower. And if they have the inefficient one and trying to pretend to have the real deal, that's flim-flam-man levels of overstatement.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-20 10:41:10+00:00
Where is the "%" showing up? I only see it before he runs ggc. It is common to use "%" instead of "$" in some shells.

In particular, C Shell (csh) and Tcsh uses "%" as the prompt character. Common in BSD systems.

Of course you can customize Zsh (or Bash) to show "%", too.

Edit: never mind, I noticed it when he quit "ggc". My bad. :)
by wtcactus | 2025-07-20 10:41:11+00:00
Most comments on this thread go the way of: “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”

When is enough going to be enough? Using the example of this article, the UK. There was a 70% increase in government spending during the last 10 years. Do you think that you are getting 70% better public services?

Where is the government spending all our money? And what kind of propaganda is going on to make the people believe the answer is even more taxes?
by Rotundo | 2025-07-20 10:41:14+00:00
I don't believe the "people want cheap" spiel. Sure, they want affordable.

As consumers can not tell the quality of products beforehand, and price is certainly no guarantee of quality, the only logical choice is to buy cheap.

I wish there was a sort of rating of product quality [1], so I can choose the optimum price/quality for a product.

[1] Reviews suck for this purpose. Half of them say things like "Fast shipping, five stars!". By the time defects show up months later and the one-star reviews arrive, the product is discontinued anyway.
by aszantu | 2025-07-20 10:41:15+00:00
I kinda think beyond meat is for ppl who care about taste. You can fake meat taste and texture much cheaper.

For ppl who care about nutrients, artificial meat seemingly gets more expensive and you also need licenses probably and what not.

Health wise it's in your own best interest to eat animals that fave been able to forage and graze in the sun. See Vitamin d and so on. Those ppl won't buy factory slurry.
by panick21_ | 2025-07-20 10:41:34+00:00
This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other.

The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time.

And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down.

Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China own growth explains the majority of it.

Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-07-20 10:41:51+00:00
I’ve been using my AirPods to talk to ChatGPT while I drive into work.. not coding talk though, using that time to pick up particle physics. So far, nothing looks hallucinated, though I’m only touching the surface and haven’t looked at equations yet.

.. either way, I’m super happy that it has kept my drives to work very interesting!
by dethron | 2025-07-20 10:42:18+00:00
I spent the last year building something that felt impossible when I started: digital organisms that actually live. Not simulated life. Not virtual pets. Real digital organisms with DNA that can mutate, neural networks that learn, and the ability to communicate with each other. The result is Genesis Protocol, and it's changed how I think about artificial intelligence. What I Built Each organism has: DNA that evolves through mutations and crossover Neural networks that adapt and learn Ability to send messages to other organisms Natural lifecycle (birth, growth, reproduction, death) What Happens When you create a population of these organisms and give them a problem to solve, they don't just run algorithms. They evolve. I tested it on classic optimization problems. The organisms consistently found better solutions than traditional genetic algorithms. But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is watching them develop personalities. Some become specialists, others become generalists. Some focus on communication, others on problem-solving. They form relationships, build networks, and develop collective behaviors that no single organism could achieve alone. Why This Matters Most AI systems are static. We train them, deploy them, and they stay the same until we manually update them. Genesis Protocol creates systems that evolve. They adapt to changing environments, develop new capabilities, and solve problems we didn't even know existed.

The Bigger Picture I think this represents a fundamental shift in how we approach AI. Instead of building systems that execute algorithms, we're creating environments where intelligence can emerge naturally. The implications are huge. Self-improving AI. Systems that adapt to changing requirements. Better simulation of complex systems. Autonomous problem-solving.
by Paradigma11 | 2025-07-20 10:42:23+00:00
Gemini Pro 2.5 has a context window of 1 million tokens and wants to rise that to 2 million tokens soon. 1 token is approx 0.75 words, so 1 million tokens would be in the ballpark of 3k pages of code.

You can add some tutorials/language docs as context without any problem. The bigger your project gets the more context it gets from there. You can also convert apis/documentation to a RAG and expose it as a MCP tool to the LLM.
by anilgulecha | 2025-07-20 10:42:55+00:00
Making it federated (so it's a true network of people's sites) is what can theoretically save things. But given under 0.001% can self-host, I don't see how that can work .. the centralized services are slated to win.

Perhaps some global law could help - significantly disincentivizing for centralization and network effects.
by blueflow | 2025-07-20 10:43:06+00:00
I asked the question because i thought it was good manners to do so. Actually I'm strongly convinced that quality describes how a thing fits the preconceptions about that thing.

As testable example, I'm largely unable to tell the quality of beer as i never enjoyed any of it, and thus could not have developed a preconception of how a good beer is supposed to taste.
by lmpdev | 2025-07-20 10:43:25+00:00
Anyone else starting to see this as an unconscious but inevitable outcome of the world’s tail-end stage of becoming developed?

Moore’s law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.

We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.

Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential growth. We’ve hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number of resources.

Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.

Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services. The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.

Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know what a logistic curve is?

I don’t know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm and the products and services I interact with everyday are very optimised. But not optimised for me. They’re optimised for businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left offering anything.
by kiwicopple | 2025-07-20 10:43:43+00:00
> But I wonder if the core team, which is famously quite conservative about introducing big changes, sees this as too different to adopt as a replacement

we respect the level of conservatism in Postgres and expect that this could take a while to upstream. we're committed to any timeline and we'll develop it for self-hosters and on the supabase platform first to iron out all the bugs

that said, even if it remains an extension that's fine: as long as the TAM patches land upstream this enables everyone to create storage engines using an extension approach - a very "postgres" way of doing things

you can follow the progress of these patches here:

https://www.orioledb.com/docs#patch-set