MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tudorg | 2025-07-06 12:27:11+00:00
On the Xata platform we actually do CoW snapshots and branching at the block device level, which works great.

However we are developing pgstream in order to bring in data and sync it from other Postgres providers. pgstream can also do anonymisation and in the future subsetting. Basically this means that no matter which Postgres service you are using (RDS, CloudSQL, etc) you can get still use Xata for staging and dev branches.
by dtagames | 2025-07-06 12:28:30+00:00
No comparison. The previous theory of AI was that we would accumulate and structure expert knowledge so that it could be repeated deterministically -- to train computers on things like medical diagnosis.

The current theory of AI is best described by The Bitter Lesson[0] essay and it's the exact opposite -- don't store any knowledge but make predictions from weighted models.

This new version is much more exciting to the public and to investors because it isn't constrained by expertise, knowledge, or anything else! Without "training" anything on Shakespeare or science, we can ask for a science paper in The Bard's voice. This seemingly miraculous parlor trick is what gets all the attention and makes people think that, with a enough of a Big Black Box, we could get anything and everything to come out the other side.

More succinctly, the ability of LLMs to posit on any topic and gleefully make up convincing and fake answers has lit a fire under the hype machine where before AI was only thought of or needed for "expert" use cases.

[0] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

[1] Source: I worked on an expert system at IBM and now make RAG apps.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-06 12:28:42+00:00
AGI by itself being achieved doesn’t really do anything. You already live on a planet with 8 billion other AGIs.

In order for an AGI to be truly disruptive it would have to scale and be as good or better than a reasonably intelligent human. Two things we are also having big problems with due to energy issues and hallucination issues with the models.
by xg15 | 2025-07-06 12:29:00+00:00
I think an indicator that something is going wrong in UI design is what I'd call the "the food is in the fridge" anti pattern that seems to pop up lately.

Essentially it's UI text in random places telling you what steps you should take to activate some other feature, instead of - you know - just providing a button to activate that feature.

A variant of this is buttons or menu items that don't do anything else than move focus onto another button, or open a menu in a different location, so you can then click on that one.

Increasingly seeing this in Microsoft products, especially in VS Code.
by reality_inspctr | 2025-07-06 12:29:04+00:00
[yawn] at the meta narrative comments. let's just have fun:

1) Canada and Mexico. The inevitable rise of the US will erode borders where languages are shared. Mexican-American tech workers will pass advantage to Spanish-speaking friends and relatives. Canadians will host maple syrup breakfast meetings with American innovators from Toronto.

2) The Bahamas for obvious reasons

3) Extremely cold and extremely hot countries where it's miserable to be outside part of the year; Matrix-style AI+VR headsets will offer relief. Aka the sun lamp holodeck theory.
by m11a | 2025-07-06 12:29:28+00:00
Barring breakthroughs in robotics, it seems AGI will mainly act through a computer interface, which would primarily benefit countries with a large services economy via productivity improvements. Industrialised Western countries stand out in this regard.

The products and services they develop, and global problems companies in these countries solve, would likely be exported to the rest of the world (probably at some premium).
by brookst | 2025-07-06 12:29:45+00:00
Pricing for commodities does not allow for “recouping costs”. All it takes is one company seeing models as a complementary good to their core product, worth losing money on, and nobody else can charge more.

I’d support an Apache for ML but I suspect it’s unnecessary. Look at all of the money companies spend developing Linux; it will likely be the same story.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-06 12:30:43+00:00
This would sound like a good solution.

The main difference from then, however, is that it is difficult to give each man a showel to dig and each woman a kid to care for this time.

People need qualifications to operate heavy machinery, know regulations, etc. - we are not in 1934 anymore.

As such we also don't need 30% og the population in the farming sector.
by DrNosferatu | 2025-07-06 12:32:44+00:00
Furthermore, Valve can spend one of its many billion USD in closing the hardware compatibility gaps via a compatibility layer to use official driver binary blobs.

(for the time-being, in order to initially open the flood gates for non-AMD hardware users)

Additionally, create a “Steam Store Apps” that’s compatible with, say - Flatpak, and curates free MSOffice and other popular productivity alternatives.
by mmastrac | 2025-07-06 12:32:48+00:00
I'm a little behind on my CSS, but apparently you can now evaluate styles in the container and act on them, at least in Chrome:

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-chrome-137

The example uses a newer `style(..)` condition I haven't seen yet:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@container#...

I'm curious if you can accidentally make loops using some of these, and if there's some sort of settling/recursion limit.

EDIT: Apparently `style(..)` can only evaluate vars in this `if()`? It looks like `@container` is a way to manage generic style queries and that supports the full gamut of CSS queries.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/if

A @container query does have some advantages — you can only set single property values at a time with if() style queries, whereas @container queries can be used to conditionally apply whole sets of rules. The two approaches are complementary, and have different uses. Note that container style queries currently don't support regular CSS properties, just CSS custom properties. For example, the following won't work: [..]

EDIT 2: OK, this required digging out the spec. They cannot cause recursion because of the substitution context rules:

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values-5/#if-notation

For example, in --foo: if(style(--foo: bar): baz); the style() query is automatically false, since property replacement has already established a «"property", "--foo"» substitution context. "

... and there are rules around cyclic evaluation in CSS:

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values-5/#cyclic-substitution-c...

When a cycle is detected, all participants in the cycle become invalid. For example, all of the following declarations become invalid at computed-value time."

Phew.
by cmitsakis | 2025-07-06 12:33:07+00:00
Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-06 12:33:11+00:00
That's true. It's almost like the prisoners dillema.

I think that in a world with no priority queueing, I would still not care about the only queue and show up at the gate at the last possible time.

Problems would arise if everyone behaved like me. You would have everyone showing last minute and chaos would be the result.

I wonder how the system would adapt to that.
by meheleventyone | 2025-07-06 12:33:16+00:00
The framing was your own so it’s not the gotcha you feel it is. I also don’t know what you think I’m exposing because I’m broadly in agreement that games at their EOL, particularly single player should continue to work. I am interested in discussing where that breaks down but I think that’s probably where we differ. You seem more interested in being combative and making up gotchas.
by brookst | 2025-07-06 12:33:18+00:00
I was there. There was massive skepticism, endless jokes about internet-enabled toasters and the uselessness and undesirability of connecting everything to the internet, people bemoaning the loss of critical skills like using library card catalogs, all the same stuff we see today.

In 20 years AI will be pervasive and nobody will remember being one of the luddites.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-06 12:33:59+00:00
PDFs in .zip files is in itself a huge smell to begin with.

I don't think I've actually ever received a zipped up .pdf, so it's clearly not legitimately necessary for anyone to do so and should you ever see it you should treat it highly suspiciously.

I get admin@ emails for our company domain and there is a somewhat steady stream of run of the mill fraud attempts.

A trick I've seen happen quite a lot recently is emails with .svg attachments, which have some lightly obfuscated JavaScript in them and which ultimately redirects you to some dodgy looking URL (which I never visited).

I simply made a rule to outright reject all .svg files from external sources and I get a report any time it's attempted. In about the last 12 months this has been running, it's probably blocked about 20 incoming emails and only one of those was a false positive and even the false positive was a weird case as we were sending a .svg file to a creative company who for some reason had our .svg attachment in their reply back to us.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-06 12:34:35+00:00
> You provided no evidence to back up this very strong statement; should we just take your word for it?

Where is your evidence? You were the one making grand claims entirely unsupported by reality. Should we just take your word for it? It seems to have been your expectation given you backed it with literally nothing.

My evidence would be literally any benchmark in existence and the fact I actually owned the 2080ti and now own modern a modern high end GPU. They are not even remotely in the same class of performance in anything other than your head. But hey if that isn’t enough:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5080-f...

Now go on, I eagerly await any evidence that supports your claim. Take all the time you need.
by prisenco | 2025-07-06 12:35:20+00:00
My first remote position was in 2006 or so and I've been mostly remote since as I'm primarily a contractor.

I wouldn't agree that most people aren't built to work remotely, but I have always maintained that it is a skill that takes time to build. Which is why it's unfortunate that RTO happened so quickly.

Of course I always prefer remote work for companies in the same city. Being able to come in easily when necessary helps a lot.
by ysofunny | 2025-07-06 12:35:33+00:00
the only artificial part of my general intelligence is the linguistics and the knowledge that came in through reading

everything else is very much natural. most people today are not able to sufficiently quiet-down (ignore) the linguistic signs, they're loud, shinny, and designed to call our attention. it takes too much practice to learn to ignore them and this skill makes people harder to manipulate/rule-over/control so it's subtly dissuaded.
by dijit | 2025-07-06 12:36:10+00:00
For some things.

For others you may not be able to license it.

Example: have you seen a street racing game with Toyota’s in it?

There’s a reason that Need For Speed games fell off after Most Wanted (original) and it’s because they themselves don’t get total artistic license on their works.

And part of the agreements is a reasonable expectation that you will not assist anyone else to violate the agreement - and, the agreements are not perpetual either.

So, depends on context. There are examples where licensing opportunities dry up.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-06 12:36:47+00:00
At an average 14K miles per year and a guessed 25 mpg, that’s 560 gallons/year. At $4/gallon (guessed and well over the US average), that’s $2240/yr.

If you exclusively charged with completely free electricity and still managed to drive that 14K miles in a year, you’d save $187/mo.

If it moved you from 25mpg to 40mpge, it’d save you a little over $70/mo.

Our two cars are a BEV and a hybrid, so I’m no battery-hater, but neither is cheaper than a reasonable gas-only equivalent would be.
by user142 | 2025-07-06 12:37:12+00:00
Stablecoins are just tokenized versions of exisiting currencies. Instead of settling through the current financial system which takes days for a global transaction you settle on a blockchain within seconds or minutes. These stablecoins will probably be issued on existing global blockchains like Ethereum so they might all be interoperable within a single system just like SWIFT currently supports multiple currencies.
by tomhow | 2025-07-06 12:37:43+00:00
I don’t know what kind of game is going on when you quote my whole comment like this. That’s not a norm on HN.

We don’t treat them the same because they don’t have the same effects and aren’t the same thing. They’d be the same thing if someone made a bot to write whole articles and post them as submissions. Of course we’d ban that, and indeed we have banned bots like that, or at least banned sites whose contents are mostly LLM-generated, along with the accounts that submitted them.

If a user’s script finds and submits good articles that attract many upvotes and stimulate good discussions, it would be a net loss for HN to ban them.
by amai | 2025-07-06 12:37:57+00:00
The life expectency in the US goes down. It seems the money spent on healthcare is not enough. Also in a democracy the government is as smart as the average person. Given that we need much more education.

What gets an insane amount of money in the US is the military. Half of silicon valley is financed by the military. All those IT billionaires wouldn‘t exist if not for money from the Pentagon.
by danaris | 2025-07-06 12:38:16+00:00
> With desktop monitor sizes since 20+ years ago, the distance you have to travel, together with the visual disconnect between application and the menu bar, negates the easier targetability.

Try it on a Mac; the way its mouse acceleration works makes it really, really easy to just flick either a mouse or a finger on a trackpad and get all the way across the screen.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-06 12:38:29+00:00
Most places that focus on treatment rather than punishment see drops in all the relevant stats for deaths, crime, health issues, etc. related to drugs usage. And even drops in drug abuse itself. The one thing that has never really worked and continues to create endless amounts of misery is the war on drugs and all the collateral damage it causes.

It never worked. Not even a little bit.
by krisoft | 2025-07-06 12:38:35+00:00
The most “sane” explanation is that revealing his identity would compromise ongoing operations.

Something like someone who did know him as his secret identity would see his face, hear his association with MI5 and go “Wow Dude! Turns out ‘Niegel from Birmingham’ wasn’t really ‘Niegel’ at all! Didn’t he introduce us to Tommy as his old childhood friend? Maybe we shouldn’t trust Tommy anymore either. In fact why don’t we dangle Tommy from his ankles until he confesses?” So revealing that this miscreant is MI5 could put the life of other agents in danger too.

Or alternatively it can be about protecting some method. Like this terrible person introduced a bunch of criminals to a “secure chat” application, and you don’t want them to think it is not as secure as they think. (Obviously the names and particulars are wild guesses with no basis in reality.)

Not saying it is a great argument, but that is how these kind of agencies think sometimes.
by fpoling | 2025-07-06 12:38:38+00:00
> Animals tend towards whatever size lets them maximise survival.

Evolution is a filter that removes unfit, it does not select the best fit. So a lot of mutations that slightly decreases fitness for the environment stay as they do not make an organism too unfit. This results in a gen pool diversity in a population that helps to survive if the environment changes as previously somewhat harmful mutations can be essential for survival in the new situation.
by Tomte | 2025-07-06 12:38:40+00:00
I disagree with aspenmeyer violently on all those fairness issues that came up a few weeks ago in the similar discussion, but I think he‘s right with pushing back on this in general.

I am a very active HN user and was totally surprised by the declaration that submission bots are fine with you. It goes against pretty much all earlier communication (which, in fairness, was usually about comment bots), but I think in the past my submission behavior was repeatedly ruled okay when challenged by other users, because I‘m submitting manually.

I do feel I‘m losing interest a bit when we‘re all just firing scripts. Manual submission at least makes you care enough to spend those seconds, bot submissions mean nobody cares anymore because you can just fling shit and see what sticks. And maybe we high-volume submitters should even be reigned in more.

(Also it feels unfriendly towards lobste.rs, when HN is effectively just bulk copying their submissions.)
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-06 12:39:26+00:00
I actually use the AI books that litter kindle unlimited to teach my daughter how to differentiate and be more sophisticated. I think a feature of all this is it inculcates a lot of people to AI spew. If it were isolated to the elite and the unscrupulous alone people would be a lot more vulnerable. By saturating the world with it, people get a true choice by being able to recognize it when they see it and avoid the output. It’s not like all our surfaces are not covered in enshittification as it is, another dose of it won’t make it meaningfully worse. And I know a lot of non English speakers that really appreciate the AI writing assistants built into email, the ai summaries built into search. Assuming no one finds them beneficial because it litters an already littered experience is a bit close minded. Many people otherwise challenged in some way. Summaries help dyslexics get through otherwise intractable walls of text, multi modal glasses help the vision impaired, witting assistants help bilingual workers level the playing field. Just because these don’t apply to you doesn’t mean it’s bothersome. (Now should you be able to disable it? Maybe, but as the author points out that’s a product choice made for financial reasons and there’s a market of products that make a different choice - don’t like google? Don’t feel so entitled that every service be free and pay for kagi)

Probably no one enjoys AI books though. I did my best at devils advocate on that above.
by gchamonlive | 2025-07-06 12:39:27+00:00
But that's exactly the problem with proprietary software. It's not force-feeding you anything, it's working exactly as intended.

Software is loyal to the owner. If you don't own your software, software won't be loyal to you. It can be convenient for you, but as time passes and interest changes, if you don't own software it can turn against you. And you shouldn't blame Microsoft or it's utilities. It doesn't owe you anything just because you put effort in it and invested time in it. It'll work according to who it's loyal to, who owns it.

If it bothers you, choose software you can own. If you can't choose software you own now, change your life so you can in the future. And if you just can't, you have to accept the consequences.
by vanderZwan | 2025-07-06 12:40:27+00:00
Ehm.. I'm afraid I don't remember, although I doubt it would be of use to you if I did :). I'm Dutch and this was in the '90s. It was a course organized by the local community center using some Dutch book made for Dutch typewriters (so I actually had to unlearn where the dedicated IJ digraph was when I switched to computers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)
by Flundstrom2 | 2025-07-06 12:41:05+00:00
C is 50 years old, and deliberately kept smalm as a KISS language (unlike the almost-as-old nowadays-bloated C++).

There's simply not a lot happening to it - apart from being part of the root causes to 50% of all security vulnerabilities.

Although Gcc and the Linux kernel do have some 50 MLoC, noone would nowadays embark on writing such a large system using C from scratch.

Today, Java, C# or Rust would be much better choices for any large system. Heck, even C++ (with proper use of a selected sub-set of its features) would be a step up.

Dont get me wrong; I've been doing embedded development using C and C++ for a living for the last 25+ years. But, I'm learning Rust, and I love it, hoping it will take C's place and being a serious contender to Java, C# and even python for the use-cases where it would make sense.

Surely, getting a program through the compiler is much harder, but afterwards, it just works. I would suggest all seasoned C developers to give Rust a serious shot.
by HSO | 2025-07-06 12:41:23+00:00
well, you said "minimal", so not strictly empty right? ;)

"""

But Bezos was dissatisfied with that simplistic conclusion and applied his usual analytical sensibility to parse out why some companies were loved and others feared.

Rudeness is not cool. Defeating tiny guys is not cool. Close-following is not cool. Young is cool. Risk taking is cool. Winning is cool. Polite is cool. Defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool. Inventing is cool. Explorers are cool. Conquerors are not cool. Obsessing over competitors is not cool. Empowering others is cool. Capturing all the value only for the company is not cool. Leadership is cool. Conviction is cool. Straightforwardness is cool. Pandering to the crowd is not cool. Hypocrisy is not cool. Authenticity is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool. Missionaries are cool. Mercenaries are not cool.

On an attached spreadsheet, Bezos listed seventeen attributes, including polite, reliable, risk taking, and thinks big, and he ranked a dozen companies on each particular characteristic. His methodology was highly subjective, he conceded, but his conclusions, laid out at the end of the Amazon.love memo were aimed at increasing Amazon's odds of standing out among the loved companies. Being polite and reliable or customer-obsessed was not sufficient. Being perceived as inventive, as an explorer rather than a conqueror, was critically important. "I actually believe the four 'unloved' companies are inventive as a matter of substance. But they are not perceived as inventors and pioneers. It is not enough to be inventive-that pioneering spirit must also come across and be perceivable by the customer base," he wrote.

"I propose that one outcome from this offsite could be to assign a more thorough analysis of this topic to a thoughtful VP," Bezos concluded. "We may be able to find actionable tasks that will increase our odds of being a stand out in that first group of companies. Sounds worthy to me!"

"""

from B. Stone. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown & Co., 2013.
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-06 12:41:30+00:00
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium

That's simply discovering the true price of a product. We're living in a mega-inflationary period, but most people won't accept that a dollar or a euro is actually worth no more than 30 cents. So sellers are putting things which used to be included at a premium price. If people pay, then that is the price.

It's highly annoying as a customer, but the general public won't accept that product and services they pay for cost double than they used to. At the same time the general public demands that their real estate and stock investments should be valued at triple or quadruple than what they used to.