MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by christiangenco | 2025-07-15 17:29:47+00:00
> I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI.

Personally, my life has significantly improved in meaningful ways with AI. Apart from the obvious work benefits (I'm shipping code ~10x faster than pre-AI), LLMs act as my personal nutritionist, trainer, therapist, research assistant, executive assistant (triaging email, doing SEO-related work, researching purchases, etc.), and a much better/faster way to search for and synthesize information than my old method of using Google.

The benefits I've gotten are much more than conveniences and the only argument I can find that anyone else is worse off because of these benefits is that I don't hire junior developers anymore (at max I was working with 3 for a contracting job). At the same time, though, all of them are also using LLMs in similar ways for similar benefits (and working on their own projects) so I'd argue they're net much better off.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-07-15 17:29:55+00:00
Most rich civilization, to show off how great they are, have built monuments. Basically saying, look we are so rich we can redirect a big part of our society's productivity to building a magnificent piece of art. Notice, how the ancient Egyptians are remembered thousands of years later.

You should think of some research in similar ways. This is us saying, look how rich and powerful we are, we can devote a significant part of our society's productivity on discovering the very essence of this universe with no practical benefit to us. Detecting blackhole mergers is an intellectual monument.
by th0ma5 | 2025-07-15 17:29:58+00:00
You mean to say that there is a lot of hype for uv because it is nice and quick but also gives an easy rhetorical win for junior people in any discussion about packaging in Python currently, so obviously that's going to be very popular even if it doesn't work for everyone.

The difference is to try to decouple the environment from the runtime essentially.
by Aloisius | 2025-07-15 17:30:12+00:00
First, while there's research on the math for things like ZNP, there is a shocking lack of research on security vulnerabilities for the actual implementations of such age verification systems which should make anyone using them extremely nervous.

Second, if a porn website, social media, video game or whatever other thing regulators want to discourage people visiting kicks you off into an age verification takes requires you to some system/site, even an independent one, that requires you upload your ID, a fair number of people will simply refuse simply due to lack of understanding in how it works and trust that it actually is anonymous.

Third, every implementation I've seen doesn't work for some/all non-citizens/tourists.

And finally and more importantly, the ease at bypassing those systems means it's unlikely to stop anyone underage and ultimately is no better than existing parental control software, so all one is doing is restricting speech for adults.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-15 17:31:40+00:00
The closest Polestar dealership (er, "retail location") is still a long drive or plane ride away for me. The Polestar 2 does seem the closest to what I want in the current market, though 2" wider isn't ideal and the Polestar 2 has a boxy Volvo thing about it that I don't quite like aesthetically (and that 2" wider does give it a bit of a land yacht feel to me), so it doesn't seem worth that sort of distance trip just for a test drive.

(Also, and this is a silly complaint/wishlist item, but I had friends describe an old Volvo buying experience where you could pay a premium on top of the car purchase to include a factory tour and week's stay in the Swedish Alps; they said it was one of the best vacations they ever had. If Polestar offered that I'd be very much more inclined towards Polestar.)

The Mach E strikes me as way too big for just me. Those inches add up, it seems way bigger than Volt I have. More than half a foot taller is a huge difference. Maybe I'm just a bad American because I use my car so rarely and mostly alone, and everything about the SUV form factor seems absolutely ridiculous to me for a solo driver mostly out to get groceries or visit family for a few hours. I'm not just making fun of the Hummer-sized monstrosities, I'm absolutely confused by the American love affair with the SUV entirely. It's way too much.

(Not to mention I have almost been wishing I could downsize to a nice coupe or compact and that is entirely off the US market to even consider getting my hopes up. I've had love affairs from a distance with the Honda e and BYD Dolphin. Those are cute looking cars. Not really possible to put on a US road, and one company wouldn't sell me one even if I tried because their US arm is a Truck company now, and the other isn't allowed to sell cars in the US at all through trade tariffs and embargoes.)
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:32:03+00:00
Nobody decides, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss and figure out if there is an optimal point.

Edit: And I think you might dislike automobiles if you were one of the people living right next to a tyre factory in Brazil, which outputs an extremely disgusting rubber smell on an almost daily basis. Especially if you bought your house before the factory was built, and you don't drive much.

But you probably live in North America and don't give a darn about that.
by KPGv2 | 2025-07-15 17:32:12+00:00
Honestly I really don't care if countries want to ban sites that obviously exist to facilitate breaking the law. Yeah yeah but muh linux isos. If they call themselves PIRATE BAY, EZTV, SPORTSCULT or whatever, and everyone who uses it talks only about pirating movies and stuff with a wink wink "linux ISOs" it's pretty clear why it exists.

Visit others like ext.to and literally the entire front page is stuff like the new Superman movie, etc. You sound like a fool if you try to argue it's mainly for legitimate purposes. (Contrast with freenet and stuff, where if you've ever used it, you'll find most of the stuff there is people's boring ass personal webpages and stuff
by signatoremo | 2025-07-15 17:32:14+00:00
It won’t be ads. Social media target consumers, so advertising is dominant. We all love free services and don’t mind some attraction.

AI on the other hand target businesses and consumers alike. A bank using LLM won’t get ads. Using LLM will be cost of doing business. Do you know what they means to consumers? Price for ChatGPT will go down.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-15 17:32:23+00:00
"ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other question.

the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.

also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
by Alupis | 2025-07-15 17:32:35+00:00
It should never matter, unless you have something specific you need from one of the various proprietary JVM's. The free JVM's are usually vanilla pre-compiled OpenJDK.

Frankly, imho, you should be deploying within a container even for simple/basic apps these days - so you bring your own JVM and environment rather than use something the platform provides.

The folks paying for Oracle JDK are likely big corps that want to pass the support-buck when it's 3am and something went down...
by RiverCrochet | 2025-07-15 17:32:44+00:00
Given these three things:

- There really isn't anything like a united "popular culture" anymore except in the very ephemeral sense of the latest memes on social networks. The cycle here is faster than anything before. Strong meme fads can coalesce and dissipate within weeks or days.

- Media production of all types continues to become cheaper, as far as the actual process of production. Visual effects, photography, and editing are all easier with modern tech and I would say cheaper as well.

- Economic factors: The disposable income of average people continues to become less over time, and property rents where theaters and such exist continue to increase over time.

it's not surprising that new movies and other corporate entertainment have to follow a quicker cycle, including making things easier to consume. Entertainment media is more disposable than it has ever been at any point.

It will be interesting to see if social media bans for minors will have an impact on this and maybe slow it down a bit, but I don't think it'll alter the underlying economic factors mentioned above, so it'll be interesting.

I don't know if theaters still receive hard drives of the movies they are playing, but it seems like something that could probably be replaced by a local storage solution and an Internet connection by now, so maybe in the next 10 years we'll see theaters show movies produced and released on quicker but lower-quality schedules. Something like TV shows - a new one each week for a low price. But at that point why even leave your house?
by belter | 2025-07-15 17:32:58+00:00
Uhhmm… it seems both you and @frenchtoast8 are misrepresenting the code flow. The author doesn’t return early, the handler is async and explicitly awaits an https.request() Promise. The return only happens after the request resolves or fails. Lambda is terminating mid-await, not post-return.

That’s the whole point and it’s not the behavior your comments describe.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-15 17:33:12+00:00
To be fair the other Thinking Machines has been defunct over 30 years.

That said, what was left of the old one was bought by Sun, which is now owned by Oracle.

I wonder if they still own rights to the name? Not the wisest move to name your new company after something owned by the most famously litigious tech corporation.
by duxup | 2025-07-15 17:33:20+00:00
>We firmly believe that removing fully functional artistic works simply due to infrequent updates undermines the value and sustainability of games as cultural and artistic products. Like books, films, and music albums, video games represent complete creative works that do not inherently require continual updates beyond maintaining basic functionality

Is the Apple app store there to provide that kind of perpetual access?

A book's perpetual existence is mostly because a physical copy exists, that's not really the same, nor is anyone assuring it still exists.

I do sympathize with the issue about requiring updates and etc, I ran into that with Google recently, but I'm not sure I buy into this idea that requiring updates shouldn't happen ever because "my game is like art and art doesn't require updates".
by scotty79 | 2025-07-15 17:33:27+00:00
I don't think that those objections are sufficient to draw a conclusion that quickly doubling the amount of waste product of our respiration in the air we are breathing in has no effect. Especially since people are not just briefly exposed to it but almost always suffer it from the first breath they take on this planet to the last. Without very strong evidence I wouldn't dare to assume that levels of this waste product that our species never experienced have no detrimental effect on our most vulnerable systems.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:33:36+00:00
True, but it is meaningful to understand whether the "quantity" advantages - drawbacks decreases over time, which I believe it does.

And we should indeed apply the logic to other inventions: some are more worth using than others, whereas in today's society, we just use all of them due to the mechanisms of the prisoner's dilemma. The Amish, on the other hand, apply deliberation on whether to use certain technologies, which is a far better approach.
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-15 17:33:39+00:00
> Tor is great but the bandwidth/latency kinda sucks for casual browsing activity

It is reasonably decent these days. Generally there are periods where Tor network is slow.

> A VPN is a more realistic workaround to this kind of geofencing

Generally I tend to use a combination of Tor / VPN depending on what I am doing. Some gossip sites have onion urls and I will use Tor if visiting those. Other sites that are geo-fenced (sites like Odysee) are easier to get to via VPN.

> I almost said "solution" instead of workaround, but of course the only actual solution is to fix the legislation.

That isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. In fact I expect it to get worse over time.
by caffeinated_me | 2025-07-15 17:33:43+00:00
Good find! I've seen similar behavior before and was wondering why it wasn't easy to stop.

This isn't the only place Postgres can act like this, though. I've seen similar behavior when a foreign data wrapper times out or loses connection, and had to resort to either using kill -9 or attaching to the process using a debugger and closing the socket, which oddly enough also worked.

Might be worth generalizing this approach to also handle that kind of failure
by int_19h | 2025-07-15 17:34:11+00:00
It's the same essential problem as with e.g. Wine - if you're trying to reimplement someone else's constantly evolving API with a closed-source implementation, it takes a lot of effort just to barely keep up.

As far as portability, people who care about that already have the option of using higher-level APIs that have CUDA backend among several others. The main reason why you'd want to do CUDA directly is to squeeze that last bit of performance out of the hardware, but that is also precisely the area where deviation in small details starts to matter a lot.
by saratogacx | 2025-07-15 17:34:14+00:00
We actually aren't too far off from that reality. There are several models you can run fully offline on your phone (phi-3, Gemma-3n-E2b-it, Qwen2.5-1.5b-instruct all run quite well on my Samsung S24 ultra). There are a few offline apps that also have tool calling (mostly for web search but I suspect this is extendable).

If you want to play around a bit and are on android there is PocketPal,ChatterUI, MyDeviceAI, SmolChat are good multi-model apps and Google's Edge gallery won't keep your chats but is a fun tech demo.

All are on github and can be installed using Obtainium if you don't want to
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-15 17:35:05+00:00
> You can also hire a nanny.

Yes, or just have your servants watch them.

Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.

> It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.

Mostly women, and that helps keep the gender pay gap going.
by feoren | 2025-07-15 17:35:12+00:00
Can I take a guess and say that you and your colleagues are all pretty inexperienced? I'll wager less than 4 years experience max, working in a regimented structure, mostly closing tickets for well-understood features? Because I do not know anyone with >10 years experience working in a well-understood language but a relatively unexplored domain that uses LLMs to create any code. I only see LLMs being widely used by inexperienced programmers (or just new to the language) -- which sucks, because we need inexperienced programmers writing code by hand in order to get more experienced programmers.
by motorest | 2025-07-15 17:35:56+00:00
> They argued the exact opposite, they wanted proper training on how to use the "damn machines" as people were literally dying because of being untrained in their usage.

That's very interesting to hear, and also very unfortunate due to the loneliness your personal belief reflects. For example, your personal belief contrasts with what's clearly stated and supported in Wikipedia's article on Luddites. Is that because the whole world around you is wrong and you are the only lonely chap who is burdened by the truth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The interesting detail you are either unaware or chose to omit is that "training" only registered as a concern as industrialization completely eliminated the competitiveness and consequently need to what at the time represented high-skilled albeit manual labor. Luddite's arguments regarding training was not that industrial mills didn't had training, buy that "produced textiles faster and cheaper because they could be operated by less-skilled, low-wage labourers." This is a direct citation, not something that "magic little boxes" spit out. That's what motivated uprisings against these "magic little boxes": the threat that automaton posed to their livelihood for their once irreplaceable skillet being suddenly rendered useless overnight.

So, people like you who are uninformed and ignorant of history should spend some time trying to gather insights onto the problem to have a chance if understanding what's right in front of your nose. As Mark Twain said , history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. Luddites represent those who failed to understand the impact that automation had on humanity, refused to understand what changes were placed upon them, and misplaced their energy and ultimate frustration and anger onto futile targets. The key factor is ignorance and unpreparedness. Fooling yourself with creative exercised covering up militant levels of ignorance does not change this one bit.

But you do you. The universe has this tendency to self correct.
by azath92 | 2025-07-15 17:36:10+00:00
Not sure what a local solution would look like when what you see is on websites, maybe a browser extension? we just made a similar reskin as a website, and it works great, but is ultimately another site you have to go to. Its another narrow solution with some variation (we do use AI to do the ranking rather than keyword filtering), but im interested in the form factors that might give maximal control to a user.
by lazide | 2025-07-15 17:36:15+00:00
Difficulty - AI makes it a lot easier to generate mountains of hype articles and drown out other content, self-reinforcing the hype.

Different than prior hype cycles.

Frankly, this one seems to be dying out more from everyone just flat out refusing to pay attention to online stuff or things on their phone long enough to starve the beast. If that is even possible.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-15 17:36:38+00:00
I can't speak for others, but I have a pretty limited tolerance for very explicit, heavy depictions of violence, for bad things happening to animals, or for downer endings.

I fully recognize that these don't make for bad cinema. I also recognize that they're often more effective as surprises. But they are going to dramatically cut into how much I enjoy a movie. And movies aren't like books, where if the tone isn't quite what you're in the mood for you just stop reading, they're more immediately confrontational, and backing out is a bigger deal (and almost a faux pas, walking out of a movie is seen as commentary on its quality). Previews are also going to avoid spoiling twists or dramatic moments, which, again, makes sense, but makes them poor tools for assessing tone. This means I'm often tempted to read the plot summary before watching, which feels silly, but if I want to challenge myself and watch things not quite to my taste and things that aren't just kid's movies without just sometimes paying for the pleasure of having a bad time, I'm not sure how else to approach it.

It also feels like other people have almost the opposite perspective, where of a movie doesn't have something really emotionally heavy or challenging to watch they can't take it seriously. I'm not sure what makes sense here, and maybe my tastes are just the problem, but it feels bad to spend fifteen dollars and two hours of my time to be in a space that's too loud, has only very expensive food, and leave depressed by what feels to be to be an overly cynical or myopic message or an artistic vision obsessively depicting the many ways human beings can be physically harmed, in as much detail as possible. Again, I don't think it's bad or wrong, I certainly don't want it to be banned or require disclosure, I just struggle to decide where I fit in the market, and I worry that my purchasing patterns support a narrative that leads to less of what I want.
by arrosenberg | 2025-07-15 17:36:38+00:00
This is a hopelessly naïve viewpoint. A strong, liberal federal government is the only guarantor of civil rights nationally. If you get rid of it, it won't be replaced by enlightened anarchism, it will be replaced by oligarchs like Peter Thiel and fundamentalist Christians who have no qualms about using violence to impose their morals on the rest of us.
by bloppe | 2025-07-15 17:36:56+00:00
This inevitabilist framing rests on an often unspoken assumption: that LLM's will decisively outperform human capabilities in myriad domains. If that assumption holds true, then the inevitabilist quotes featured in the article are convincing to me. If LLM's turn out to be less worthwhile at scale than many people assume, the inevitabilist interpretation is another dream of AI summer.

Burying the core assumption and focusing on its implication is indeed a fantastic way of framing the argument to win some sort of debate.
by gojomo | 2025-07-15 17:37:12+00:00
~simonw's demo of a quickie customized HN front-end is great.

But ultimately, your browser should have a local, open-source, user-loyal LLM that's able to accept human-language descriptions of how you'd like your view of some or all sites to change, and just like old Greasemonkey scripts or special-purpose extensions, it'd just do it, in the DOM.

Then instead of needing to raise this issue via an "Ask HN", you'd just tell your browser: "when I visit HN, hide all the AI/LLM posts".
by simonw | 2025-07-15 17:37:17+00:00
"I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all."

OK, if you're going to say things like this I'm going to insist you clarify which subset of "AI" you mean.

Presumably you're OK with the last few decades of machine learning algorithms for things like spam detection, search relevance etc.

I'll assume your problem is with the last few years of "generative AI" - a loose term for models that output text and images instead of purely being used for classification.

Are predictive text keyboards on a phone OK (tiny LLMs)? How about translation engines like Google Translate?

Vision LLMs to help with wildlife camera trap analysis? How about to help with visual impairments navigate the world?

I suspect your problem isn't with "AI", it's with the way specific AI systems are being built and applied. I think we can have much more constructive conversations if we move beyond blanket labeling "AI" as the problem.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-15 17:37:39+00:00
The point of standard libraries is to provide sane default behaviours. Go’s regexp package is a sensible default.

For instances where you need something more sophisticated than what’s in the standard library, you reach for 3rd party modules. And there are regex libraries for Go which support backtracking et al.

There’s definitely some irksome defaults in Go, but the choose of regex engine in the regexp library isn’t one of them
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-15 17:38:13+00:00
Population stability and economic/societal stability don't have to be the same thing.

If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers.

It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.