MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jorl17 | 2025-07-08 16:21:58+00:00
I mostly agree with all your points being issues, I just don't see them as roadblocks to the future I mentioned, nor do I find them issues without solutions or workarounds.

Unreliability and difficulty reasoning about potential failure scenarios is tough. I've been going through the rather painful process of taming LLMs to do the things we want them to, and I feel that. However, for each feature, we have been finding what we consider to be rather robust ways of dealing with this issue. The product that exists today would not be possible without LLMs and it is adding immense value. It would not be possible because of (i) a subset of the features themselves, which simply would not be possible; (ii) time to market. We are now offloading the parts of the LLM which would be possible with code to code — after we've reached the market (which we have).

> Then there's the question whether a highly advanced AI is better at hiding unwanted "features" in your products than you are at finding them.

I don't see how this would necessarily happen? I mean, of course I can see problems with prompt injection, or with AIs being lead to do things they shouldn't (I find this to be a huge problem we need to work on). From a coding perspective, I can see the problem with AI producing code that looks right, but isn't exactly. I see all of these, but don't see them as roadblocks — not more than I see human error as roadblocks in many cases where these systems I'm thinking about will be going.

With regards to customers' IP, this seems again more to do with the fact some junior dev is being allowed to do this? Local LLMs exist, and are getting better. And I'm sure we will reach a point where data is at least "theoretically private". Junior devs were sharing around code using pastebin years ago. This is not an LLM problem (though certainly it is exacerbated by the perceived usefulness of LLMs and how tempting it may be to go around company policy and use them).

I'll put this another way: Just the scenario I described, of a system to which I upload a video and ask it to comment on it from multiple angles is unbelievable. Just on the back of that, nothing else, we can create rather amazing products or utilities. How is this not revolutionary?
by johnisgood | 2025-07-08 16:22:07+00:00
Are we talking about cryptocurrencies? Because they are not based on e-mail.

In fact, I have no idea how your comment is relevant to losing money.

You accidentally got someone else's document. How is that relevant to losing money?

As a reminder, you said: "I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.". How can you lose ~$1,000 because of someone else's typo in which an e-mail landed in your inbox?
by crossroadsguy | 2025-07-08 16:22:28+00:00
I miss my early days of CS college and tinkering with distro installs and installs and so on. In fact it was so fulfilling that it felt like “cooking your own meal”. I never used Windows. So in last two decades my experience has been Linux distros to osx/macos. If it was not for the internet cafe computer+internet usage before college (had no other exposure to either, otherwise) my experience of Windows would have been absolutely ZERO which is what it is now.

I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers and I wish these distros also imagined “regular people” using their OS/software. I guess both never happening kinda kept nullifying each other. Maybes it’s too late now?

In fact there was a time (around a decade ago?) when the Linux based laptops had started becoming kinda “normal” — I remember buying a Linux Dell Vistro with Linux pre-installed from Dell, had helped a friend buy an XPS with linux pre-installed. We both haven’t touched anything other than a Mac in a really long time and last two times I had to buy a laptop I found zero Linux options (in India) — let alone “good” options.

PS. Oh, my favourite was always Elementary OS even though it was clearly in beta when I migrated to the macs. There was just something about that distro.
by conartist6 | 2025-07-08 16:22:34+00:00
I agree that sorting something that messy can't easily be done with a heuristic expert system, but I'm registering my concern that the whole approach is predicated on first making a huge mess with one LLM then cleaning up the mess with another.

The classical approach is more like "change the definition of the problem until you don't need to make a big mess in the first place"
by epidemian | 2025-07-08 16:22:52+00:00
> If you define a hallucination as something that wasn't in the training data, directly or indirectly (indirectly being something like an "obvious" abstract concept), then [...]

Ok, sure. But why would you choose to define hallucinations in a way that is contrary to common sense and the normal understanding of what an AI hallucination is?

The common definition of hallucinations is basically: when AI makes shit up and presents it as fact. (And the more technical definition also basically aligns with that.)

No one would say that if the AI takes the data you provide in the prompt and can deduce a correct answer for that specific data —something that is not directly or indirectly present in its training data— it would be hallucinating. In fact that would be an expected thing for an intelligent system to do.

It seems to me you're trying to discuss with something nobody said. You're making it seem that saying "it's bad that LLMs can invent wrong/misleading information like this and present it as fact, and that the companies that deploy them don't seem to care" is equivalent to "i want LLMs to be perfect and have no bugs whatsoever", and then discuss about how ridiculous is to state the latter.
by michaelsshaw | 2025-07-08 16:22:56+00:00
I hate to be this guy, but: I am smugly enjoying the crumbling of the Muskiverse. I hate to be the "I told you so" guy, but we (as in, the small group of people critical of him for over a decade) were right, and everyone else was wrong. It's a bittersweet feeling.

The honestly sad part is that it took Donald fucking Trump (to a lesser extent, Twitter) to initiate this. The amount of measurable damage he's done will take decades to repair, and rehabilitating the public on the politics will likely take even longer.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-08 16:23:00+00:00
A simple rule of thumb suffices most of the time, and native speakers will still understand you when you get it wrong.

But yeah, I wish Spanish omitted genders most of the time like Japanese does. It complicates things and adds very little in exchange.

The real kick in the gonads is verb conjugations. Nearly every common verb is irregular and there are something like 18 tenses, times six subjects. Even many native speakers struggle to get them right.
by dmitrygr | 2025-07-08 16:24:31+00:00
Ran into this at Google. Qualcomm compiler for their DSP was an expensive branch of GCC. I asked my manager if we could just ask them for source instead of paying per-seat license. He said that “ our contract with Qualcomm specifically prohibits us from asking them for the source of this compiler”. They found the workaround tor GPL I guess.
by kvdveer | 2025-07-08 16:24:45+00:00
No compression. In the olden days, storage was scarce. While you could compres the bitset, the worst case compression of that bitset would be larger than the uncompressed size. You likely have no way to guarantee the worst case is impossible, so you'd have to reserve extra space. In the end you'd store more data, in a slower to use format.

These days storage bandwidth is the main limiter, so now compression makes sense. When storage size is the main limiter, compression is ironically not very helpful.
by mxfh | 2025-07-08 16:25:00+00:00
The historical part completely misses the first boom of EV from 1890s to 1910s besides mentioning that they existed.

The history of those is the big untold story here.

It doesn't help if you're betting on the right tech too early.

Clearly superior in theory, but lacking significant breakthroughs in battery reasearch and general spottyness of electrification in that era.

Tons of Electric Vehicle companies existed to promote that comparably tech.

Instead the handful of combustion engine companies drove everyone else out of the market eventually, not last gasoline was marketed as more manly.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/03/lost-hist...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-08 16:25:03+00:00
Cautionary tales in the historical record are of value from a historical and anthropological perspective, but I am unsure if it would change how the brains of these people work unfortunately. Paperclip maximizer gonna maximize, whether for power, wealth, or some combination.

All my hope for climate change mitigation and clean energy/mobility is on China now, and fortunately, they've proven they can execute at scale.
by jchw | 2025-07-08 16:25:15+00:00
Well, I didn't do a detailed survey into the ecosystem, but I think you might be underestimating the prevalence of setjmp/longjmp a little bit. For one thing, tons of stuff hard depends on libpng, and libpng only has limited support for environments without it, so that alone is a pretty hard limiting factor.

But also, I already ran into two different very common libraries that need it. FreeType also needs setjmp/longjmp!
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-07-08 16:25:33+00:00
Good god. I literally just uninstalled MPLAB IDE for a project that we cancelled. It freed up something like 30Gb on my system. I built the existing project once!

I also really like ST. At a previous job our go-to processors were Nordic for wearables or anything that needed BLE, and STM32 for pretty much everything else. Wasn't unusual to have an STM32 for all the peripheral I/O and an nRF52 hanging off an I2C port just to talk to an app.

Nordic is OK. Starting up a new project is nowhere near as easy as STMCubeMX and they do tend to update their SDKs frequently which can be annoying if you have to support legacy projects, but we used them for years with no problems.
by bombcar | 2025-07-08 16:26:49+00:00
Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.

Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.
by dathinab | 2025-07-08 16:27:12+00:00
which again comes back to

this is a problem which needs regulatory action, not one which should be solved by a quasi monopoly forcing it onto anyone but another quasi monopoly which can use their monopoly power to avoid it

require

- respecting robots.txt and similar

- require purpose binding/separation (of the crawler agent, but also the retrieved data) similar to what GDPR does

- require public agent purpose documentation and stable agent identities

- disallow obfuscation of who is crawling what

- do enforce it

and sure making something illegal doesn't prevent anyone from being technically able to do it

but now at lest large companies like Google have to decide weather they want to commit a crime, and the more they obfuscate that they are doing it the more there is prove it was done with a lot of bad faith, i.e. the higher judges can push punitive damages

combine it with internet gateways like CF trying to provide technical enforcement and you might have a good solution

but one quasi monopoly trying to force another to "comply" with their money making scheme (even if it's in the interest of the end user) smells a lot like you can have a winnable case against CF wrt. unfair market practices, monopoly power abuse etc...
by ben_w | 2025-07-08 16:28:24+00:00
While they will agree with you that they don't, it's also the case that this is via training.

Consider that we have recordings of Brent Spiner covered in white paint and wearing yellow contact lenses claiming to have no emotions, not because he didn't, but because he was playing a role, which is also something we know LLMs can do.

So we don't know for sure if LLMs do or don't have qualia, irregardless of what they say, and won't until we have a more concrete idea of what the mechanism is behind that sense of the phrase "mental state" so we can test for their presence or absence.
by imilk | 2025-07-08 16:28:40+00:00
There are about a dozen Google crawlers that can hit your website for different reasons:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Google-Extended is what is associated with AI crawling, but GoogleBot also crawls to produce AI overviews in addition to indexing your website in Google search.

While the number of crawlers and their overlapping responsibilities makes it difficult to know which ones you can safely block, I should also say that pure AI company bots behave 1000x worse than Google crawlers when it comes to not flooding your site with scraping requests.
by benhamner | 2025-07-08 16:29:08+00:00
Thanks! Our current coverage is focused on companies with a significant online presence (e.g. they've made job posts, people say they at the company, and/or they have a functional website).

Our goal is to have complete coverage for active companies and organizations in the world, and an understanding for companies that previously existed but are no longer active as well (these appear extensively in CRM's and add noise).

We prioritize expanding data coverage in areas that we hear are most useful from our current users and customers.
by bumby | 2025-07-08 16:29:12+00:00
You’re right of course, but even this comparison gives an incomplete picture. An example is that many other countries can institute drug price caps because the US does not. It’s not unlike how NATO countries can historically pay less into defense because the US pays so much. There’s an argument those are essentially subsidizing lower costs abroad.

That’s not to say the US healthcare system isn’t in need of massive reform, just that it’s a much more complicated problem than many realize.
by abirch | 2025-07-08 16:29:40+00:00
Yes

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

<svg viewBox="0 0 10 10" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> <rect width="10" height="10"> <animate attributeName="rx" values="0;5;0" dur="10s" repeatCount="indefinite" /> </rect> </svg>
by bigyabai | 2025-07-08 16:30:07+00:00
> it is highly unethical to resell open source software produced by volunteers intending to make their work free.

Why? ZorinOS users can still download Blender for free if they don't pay for the mega-pack. You have to imagine that it's not very hard for Zorin to follow GPL guidelines ("here are your 13,000 source tarballs, good sir") with this business.

You also can't prove that any of these volunteers are against downstream repackaging of their work. If they were really ideologically against the idea of people being able to sell Free Software, then they probably wouldn't be putting time into a GPL project. Commercial redistribution of GPL software has been a thing since the 90s, with much larger pricetags than $48.
by csomar | 2025-07-08 16:30:11+00:00
This is incredibly useful and I can see myself using it and paying a subscription. That being said:

1. I couldn't find some key persons that I know works in an organization. How accurate is the data?

2. I don't know if this is happening because you are getting lots of traffic now, but each query takes 20-30 seconds which is unusable.

> - Is the web app intuitive?

Yes

> - What queries do you want us to prioritize supporting in an API?

Maybe specific but I want to filter by head count in job function (ie: find organizations that have 50-200 software engineers regardless of their total head count).

> - What additional external data sources would you like us to prioritize? - What workflow improvements/integrations would you find most helpful?

I don't really care as long as the data is as accurate as possible. The process of lead generation/research is a slow one that I don't think workflows matter.
by vectorcamp | 2025-07-08 16:30:13+00:00
Getting an LLM to translate code is very tricky, we haven't included AVX2 and AVX512 yet in our SIMD.ai because it requires a lot more work. However, translating code between similarly sized vector engines is doable when we finetuned our own data to the LLM. We tested both ChatGPT and Claude -and more- but none could do even the simplest translations between eg SSE4.2 and Neon or VSX. So trying something harder like AVX512 felt like a bit of a stretch. But we're working on it.
by michaelsshaw | 2025-07-08 16:30:15+00:00
The ultra-patriotic education in the USA, coupled with the absolute demand that you adhere to and essentially worship the hyper-capitalist economic system, damages minds and leads them into being swindled by this type of charlatan.

We should be teaching not just literal historical fact, but also interpretations and patterns of behavior that lead to bad material circumstances. Critical thinking is seriously lacking in American education. That is, if we wanted this to stop. I'm not sure my fellow citizens actually want that.
by os2warpman | 2025-07-08 16:30:17+00:00
>Edit: whoa, groupthink.

Every time an article about airport security is posted the comments are the same.

To prove that I'm sane and my memory has not been corrupted by time or cosmic rays I google "airline hijackings by year", I look at the graphs in google images, and I briefly wonder what happened in early 1970s and 2000s before remembering what happened in early 1970s and 2000s.

Then I murmur "that's some fantastically effective theater".
by ryanrasti | 2025-07-08 16:30:31+00:00
> Q: Can I monitor a phone without them knowing?

> A: Yes, you can monitor a phone without them knowing with mobile phone monitoring software. The app is invisible and undetectable on the phone. It works in a hidden and stealth mode.

How is that even possible on a modern Android? I'd think one of the explicit goals of the security model would be to prevent this.
by thebruce87m | 2025-07-08 16:30:57+00:00
The terms are fuzzier these days, but if something claims microcontroller support I expect bare metal or RTOS support and if it says microprocessor I expect a bigger OS - embedded Linux support (yocto, buildroot), standard Linux (install + package manager) or maybe one of industrial RTOS.

I’ve had a (quick) look through the docs and I can only find a REPL example running on a standard OS.

I’m sure some will argue, but I was merely quoting what I immediately saw in the docs compared to what the hn headline said.
by imilk | 2025-07-08 16:32:21+00:00
I find it wild that you focus on CF being a monopoly here when they are providing tools that help publishers not have all of their content stolen and repurposed. AI companies have been notorious over the last few years for not respecting any directives and spamming sites with requests to scrape all of their data.

There is also nothing stopping other CDN/DNS providers spinning up a similar marketplace to what CF is looking to do now.
by thisislife2 | 2025-07-08 16:32:24+00:00
They aren't selling a product (open-source software). They are selling a service - the effort to customise the distro and package it with free, useful softwares. Hopefully, they also donate some time and money back to those free, open-source softwares. Note also that GPL has never been hostile towards commercial software. In fact, with MySQL (before it was owned by Oracle), the FSF even endorsed MySQL's dual-license open-source business model.
by ridgewell | 2025-07-08 16:32:35+00:00
I'm not familiar with this app but based on the read, it sounds like they're essentially relying on someone to sneak into the target's phone, install an apk with a 'Settings' logo, where you grant it all permissions (I assume the installer facilitates the process of manually granting full permissions for each permissions type and disabling battery optimization). Android does allow you to effectively delegate full permissions to an app like that, albeit in a manual way.
by bpt3 | 2025-07-08 16:34:05+00:00
Linux won on cost once it was "good enough". AI isn't free (by any definition of free) and is a long way away from "good enough" to be a general replacement for the status quo in a lot of domains.

The areas where it does make sense to use, it's been in use for years, if not longer, without anyone screaming from the rooftops about it.
by chimeracoder | 2025-07-08 16:34:11+00:00
> Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few times, although in my experience it was never from a statistician and they didn't give me as much data, but I'm pretty sure the story is mostly accurate.

Yeah, the original retelling even states up-front:

> The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

It's pretty common to alter minor details of stories in order to make them easier to follow, not to mention that the entire account is also written several years after it happened, when details are presumably less likely to be completely accurate. Obviously the dialogue is reconstructive for narrative ease; no reader would look at that and assume it's intended to be a verbatim transcript.

Unless the author here can cite specific things that make it truly impossible for anything of that shape to have occurred, I'm not seeing anything that justifies the conclusion "there's a lot to the story that's obviously made up".
by alanpearce | 2025-07-08 16:34:28+00:00
Funny, this sounds like a good idea, but I'm quite happy with the exact opposite: I use rcmd[1]. I hold down the right command key and press the first letter of the window name to switch to it. I can override this dynamic mapping by pressing right command + option + <other key>, so I have an IM client on I, for example. It means I never have to remember/guess how command+tab works (although I had fewer issues with alt+tab on Windows)

[1]: https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd/
by unleaded | 2025-07-08 16:34:41+00:00
You can do a lot of impressive things with SVGs. Some examples from Wikipedia (no JS in any)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/SMIL_mis... missile command clone

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U... tube map

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Rolling_... rolling shutter animation
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-08 16:34:50+00:00
Who pays the megacorps to use AI? The peasants. Business only succeeds if the peasantry want it. So if businesses are fucking over the peasantry what’s really going on is that the businesses are just middlemen for peasantry fucking themselves. In the end the megacorps are just a feedback loop to the peasantry. That’s the irony. You like to blame corporations but it’s just a mirror to yourself.

Still doesn’t hurt to lower taxes for peasants and heighten taxes for corps. That’s how you prevent wealth inequality. And also middlemen are by nature just a bit corrupt as they siphon resources just by being in the middle.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-07-08 16:35:19+00:00
Is Hacker News only for experienced coders who are already familiar with the inner workings of the ‘cloud’?

I’d like to think that this forum is also a place for the proverbial high school kid, who’s just learned JavaScript and deployed their first site to Vercel using their school Chromebook, to learn a thing or two from the greybeards.