MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by energy123 | 2025-07-15 05:18:15+00:00
> But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different.

It would be utopian, like how people thought of social media in the oughts. It's a common pattern through human history. People lack the imagination to think of unintended side effects. Nuclear physics leading to nuclear weapons. Trains leading to more efficient genocide. Media distribution and printing press leading to new types of propaganda and autocracies. Oil leading to global warming. IT leading to easy surveillance. Communism leading to famine.

Some of that utopianism is wilful, created by the people with a self-interested motive in seeing that narrative become dominant. But most of it is just a lack of imagination. Policymakers taking the path of local least resistance, seeking to locally (in a temporal sense) appease, avoiding high-risk high-reward policy gambits that do not advance their local political ambitions. People being satisfied with easy just-so stories rather than humility and a recognition of the complexity and inherent uncertainty of reality.

AI, and especially ASI, will probably be the same. The material upsides are obvious. The downsides harder to imagine and more speculative. Most likely, society will be presented with a fait accompli at a future date, where once the downsides are crystallized and real, it's already too late.
by lazyasciiart | 2025-07-15 05:18:54+00:00
I didn’t ask for a link to a company that can do it. I want pricing. I am saying that nobody here is willing to share anything even approaching specific pricing, which makes me very much doubt that any of them have the direct transaction experience they are claiming. I don’t doubt that underwater welding exists, but I do doubt that anyone in this thread has done it, or has any direct experience with it.
by ncruces | 2025-07-15 05:19:35+00:00
Writers won't queue up, rather they'll storm the place, taking turns at asking “can I go now” and sleeping for (tens, hundreds of) milliseconds at a time.

This only gets “worse” as computers get faster: imagine how many write transactions a serial writer could complete (WAL mode and normal synchronous mode) while all your writers are sleeping after the previous one left, because they didn't line up?

And, if you have a single limited pool, your readers will now be stuck waiting for an available connection too (because they're all taken by sleeping writers).

It's much fairer and more efficient for writers to line up with blocking application locks.
by tomhow | 2025-07-15 05:19:51+00:00
PG built HN in the hope of creating something that could avoid being dragged down by terrible flamewars like this.

We frequently remind people that it's not acceptable to comment in this style, no matter what you're replying to. If we want others to be better we have to hold ourselves to a high standard too. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by afavour | 2025-07-15 05:20:07+00:00
Feels somewhat like a self fulfilling prophecy though. Big tech companies jam “AI” in every product crevice they can find… “see how widely it’s used? It’s inevitable!”

I agree that AI is inevitable. But there’s such a level of groupthink about it at the moment that everything is manifested as an agentic text box. I’m looking forward to discovering what comes after everyone moves on from that.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-15 05:20:25+00:00
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.

Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”

Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.

It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
by visarga | 2025-07-15 05:21:30+00:00
> I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it.

While I must admit we have some choice here, it is limited. No matter what, there will be models of language, we know how they work, there is no turning back from it.

We might wish many things but one thing we can't do is to revert time to a moment when these discoveries did not exist.
by reilly3000 | 2025-07-15 05:21:47+00:00
What a tremendous waste of resources. As a startup engineer and leader your job is to build value for customers and investors as quickly and effectively as possible, knowing the privilege of their participation with you is fleeting. The time spent in those meetings or writing this vitriolic pdf would have gone a long way towards shipping features, even if you had to survive with a suboptimal approach for a while. Time isn’t cheap and this cost a fortune.
by mlsu | 2025-07-15 05:22:06+00:00
Yes, of course. What is AI freeing us of? Communicating with other human beings?

Ah what a chore. Other human beings. Wish I could just enter into a cocoon of solitude for the rest of my life. I mean I'm kind of being glib here but the ~amazing future~ we all seem to take as inevitable has me playing solo orchestra conductor, prompt pupettering a massive fleet of hyper intelligent code bots, prompting an AI to make prompts for its sub AIs in a giant scintillating cyberprism. Talking to an AI customer service agent. Having an AI secretary. Having an AI lover.

All alone, in the middle of it all.

Sorry, I actually like talking to my real human colleagues!
by tomhow | 2025-07-15 05:22:22+00:00
> For other readers: greenie_beans does not understand what LVT is, how it works

Personal attacks and shaming like this are unacceptable and it set off a hellish flamewar that you perpetuated. Please don't do this again. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44556051 and marked it off topic.
by godelski | 2025-07-15 05:22:46+00:00
It's insane too. Because many of us working on AI were working on it for different reasons. To me, it was to liberate us. To let me go spend more time outside, to stare at trees, and ask people "can I pet your dog?"

We use language and images because they are easier to evaluate. Because we don't know what to actually evaluate. So it's as good of a direction as any, right?

I'm not sure if another direction would have had a different result. But it feels like now we're trying to create AGI by turning humans into robots. It can create works of art, poetry, music, but it has no soul, no depth.

This should tell us that we've still have a long way to go to make AGI, that this ineffable depth needs further exploration. To learn what it truly means to be human (which definitely requires time outside). But I feel many of my peers do not want to see this. It feels like I'm being gaslight. It's like everyone is raving about the genius of Rauschenberg's White Paintings [3 panel], and I see a canvas waiting to be filled. Am I really so out of touch? To think it weird to talk about the "gospel" of Ilya or Karpathy? It seems everyone has found religion/god, but me.

I can see the beauty of a sunset, of a crashing wave, of the complexity of the atom so delicately constructed, the abstraction and beauty of math, but maybe I just do not have a refined enough taste to appreciate the genius of a blank canvas with no soul. Is not the beauty in what it can become? Because I thought the point was to make life. I thought the point was to give it a soul.
by riffraff | 2025-07-15 05:22:59+00:00
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".

It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.

We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
by mattigames | 2025-07-15 05:23:16+00:00
For the way you speak you seem to be fairly certain that they still gonna need you as it's user, that they aren't going to find a better monetization than selling it to people like you (or even small companies in general), I wouldn't be so sure, remember we are talking about the machine that is growing with the aim of being able to do do every single white-collar job.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-15 05:23:31+00:00
FYI in case anyone were wondering: Meta uses Hack, not PHP. (Hack's packaging, documentation, and availability suck because there's no performance review "impact" to making things better that no one inside Meta sees. Plus, there's job security in knowledge hoarding.)

Licensing: Meta and Google[1], and likely Microsoft, Apple, and most other megacorps explicitly forbid any use of AGPL software because it cannot be proven to be prevented from being invoked according to the vagueness of the "Remote Network Interaction" clause. So if you never want megacorps or anyone who runs a business to ever use your code, choose AGPL.

1. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
by mbgerring | 2025-07-15 05:23:53+00:00
I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time.

Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable.

Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tech. I am painfully aware of how much we need to do with energy in the coming decades to avoid civilizational collapse, and how difficult all of that will be, without adding all of these AI data centers into the mix. Without several breakthroughs in one or more hard engineering disciplines, the mass adoption of AI is not currently physically possible.
by Sabinus | 2025-07-15 05:24:18+00:00
Would you say the industrial revolution would have been able to be stopped by enough humans not wanting to achieve it?

>The unstated premise of this essay is that venture capital and oligarchs do not get to define our future simply because they have more money.

AI would progress without them. Not as fast, but it would.

In my mind the inevitability of technological progress comes from our competition with each other and general desire do work more easily and effectively. The rate of change will increase with more resources dedicated to innovation, but people will always innovate.
by jdiff | 2025-07-15 05:24:54+00:00
Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate.

The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.
by 112233 | 2025-07-15 05:25:31+00:00
But why? Person spends his time making useful thing, and decides to share it freely. Like, thanks! But you should also register a trademark, and monitor domain registrations and search engines and other projects and proactively issue takedown requests and litigate your trademark use. It is so irresponsible if you don't, because it may be confusing for some of the people using for free the thing you make.

Like, the only logical outcome I see is hobbyists pulling their projects.
by keithwhor | 2025-07-15 05:25:53+00:00
It’s also possible for LLMs to be inevitable, generate massive amounts of wealth and still be mostly fluff in terms of objective human progress.

The major change from my perspective is new consumer behavior: people simply enjoy talking to and building with LLMs. This fact alone is generating a lot (1) new spend and (2) content to consume.

The most disappointing outcome of the LLM era would be increasing the amount of fake, meaningless busywork humans have to do just to sift through LLM generated noise just to find signal. And indeed there are probably great products to be built that help you do just that; and there is probably a lot of great signal to be found! But the motion to progress ratio concerns me.

For example, I love Cursor. Especially for boilerplating. But SOTA models with tons of guidance can still not reliably implement features in my larger codebases within the timeframe it would take me to do it myself. Test-time compute and reasoning makes things even slower.
by Animats | 2025-07-15 05:26:42+00:00
There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much effort goes into cleaning up LLM messes.
by djtango | 2025-07-15 05:26:52+00:00
Trial and error is not reproducible. Lack of a unifying theory also precludes reproducibility. We know better than that and should push other methods to these kinds of standards.

But TCM practitioners of the past and present have "landed" on successful treatment that go beyond just placebo and throwing that out because of the differing methods used in discovery and delivery is a shame when the more opportunistic thing to do would be to isolate and identify why the thing works.

Better yet, understanding why TCM continues to persist for reasons beyond just "culture" and trying to apply them back into our own prevailing methodologies would surely lead to better outcomes
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-07-15 05:27:02+00:00
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I feel the same way, though I want to nit with one point you made:

> but at least we’ll all have a ton of money?

I just don’t see it going that way. The only ones that are going to win if this stuff actually makes it out of the primordial AI swamp are the ones training and running the models. It’s like any other capitalistic thing, the ones owning the means (the models and infrastructure and whatnot) make all the money.

The only thing I see in all of this is widening the wealth gap. Sure, there may be some performative, pity pennies thrown in the direction of a lucky few, to keep the envy alive, but it’s just going to enable amassing more and more wealth and resources to those that already have a pile of gold too large to spend even in one hundred thousand lifetimes.

I’ll tend to my tomatoes.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-07-15 05:29:19+00:00
We haven't even barely extracted the value from the current generation of SOTA models. I would estimate less then 0.1% of the possible economic benefit is currently extracted, even if the tech effectively stood still.

That is what I find so wild about the current conversation and debate. I have claude code toiling away building my personal organization software right now that uses LLMs to take unstructured input and create my personal plans/project/tasks/etc.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-15 05:29:22+00:00
Yep. Alan Dershowitz and Bill Gates are probably in there too. We must get past the idea that team red or team blue is "the better" party, because they're not because it's the ultra rich vs. everyone else.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties. - Gore Vidal
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-15 05:30:29+00:00
Do we have reasons why AI won't do the same "unlocked more work, different work, that led to better paying jobs" ?

One of the issues with [a change] is that some like it and some don't - but is there any reason to believe that society will get worse as a result?

My only real concern is meritocracy. It is hard enough already, but now rich kids can literally buy intelligence?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-15 05:31:00+00:00
I once dropped in on an abandoned tropospheric scatter site I saw hidden in the trees while fishing in the Inside Passage of Alaska. Massive RF dishes the size of buildings.

A couple things really stuck out for me. First, it looked like everyone that worked there had literally left for lunch one day and never came back. No orderly wind-down, just instantly abandoned, everything left behind. Second, they had these massive brass waveguides connecting the antennas to rooms of primitive mainframes. I found it interesting that no one had ever salvaged, legally or illegally, the considerable scrap metal value contained in those installations. These buildings have been abandoned since before I was born and there was literally tons of high-value scrap just sitting there.

These places have a strange vibe, they feel ancient. No one really messes with these abandoned places, they are treated like an archaic relic or monument even though they aren’t that old. It is sort of a surreal feeling of coming across the ruins of some dead civilization like some kind of sci-fi trope.

Really damn cool though.
by maz1b | 2025-07-15 05:31:52+00:00
Happy 20th birthday, Django! You've certainly unchained a lot of startups, businesses and enterprises to build out a ton of cool things.

Thanks to the creators, contributors, community, and maintainers.

I'm more of a Rails and Phoenix guy myself, but I have a lot of respect for this project. Never worked super deep with Django, but have worked with Flask and Tornado in the past.
by visarga | 2025-07-15 05:32:49+00:00
I am more and more convinced that social networks are causing the increased political instability and breakdown of communication. In the past media was centralized. So the powers that be focused on it and controlled the message. We had a kind of common understanding and language. Some idealize BBC or the great newspapers of the past, but they have been lying to us since forever. Remember the WMD discussions leading to Iraq war?

But now, because everyone can publish, they lost control. So instead they are bombarding us with all sorts of contradictory theories and conspiracies. We have come to be unable to communicate. And maybe that is the intended goal. If you can't control the message, make communication itself worthless. People choose emotionally and based on tribal allegiances. It has become an identity war. We can't even communicate with our parents now, there is an "explanatory gap" between identity tribes.
by trash_cat | 2025-07-15 05:33:02+00:00
This concept is closely reated to politics of inevitability coined by Timothy Snyder.

"...the politics of inevitability – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done."[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-...

This article in question obviously applied it within the commercial world but at the end it has to do with language that takes away agency.
by etaioinshrdlu | 2025-07-15 05:33:21+00:00
This is wrong because LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone (search style or banner ad style) for over 2 years now. And they are getting cheaper over time for the same quality.

It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API!

Zero chance all the users evaporate unless something much better comes along, or the tech is banned, etc...
by lsy | 2025-07-15 05:33:27+00:00
I think two things can be true simultaneously:

1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them.

2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume.

There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner), and several that seemed poised to displace both old tech and labor but have settled into specific use cases (the microwave oven). Given the lack of a sufficiently profitable business model, it feels as likely as not that LLMs settle somewhere a little less remarkable, and hopefully less annoying, than today's almost universally disliked attempts to cram it everywhere.
by ekinertac | 2025-07-15 05:33:28+00:00
20 years is an eternity in web development, and Django's longevity is a testament to its brilliant design philosophy. Happy birthday to the framework that gets things done.

Django is pragmatic, secure, and unbelievably stable. It's the framework you choose when you want to build a real business, not just chase the latest trend. It has powered some of the biggest sites on the web, and it's still the best choice for a huge number of projects.

Here's to 20 more years.
by brookst | 2025-07-15 05:33:33+00:00
So you’re imagining an unlikely, stupid, and pointless future to justify disliking a well-meaning, positive, friendly present?

I don’t get it. Is the slippery slope that irresistible? Like should I be opposed to all good things in reality because jt is possible to imagine someone pointlessly doing a strange riff on them that I wouldn’t like?
by pdmccormick | 2025-07-15 05:33:46+00:00
I remember studying the source code to the PHP Zend Engine 25 years ago, and seeing a triple C pointer for the first time (I think it was `zval***`?) I did a lot of PHP in the following years, including using PHP for a high school programming contest (but my submission was rejected because the PHP language and using it in a standalone CLI context in particular was unfamiliar to the staff). I appreciate what it enabled me to accomplish in that era.
by fooker | 2025-07-15 05:34:52+00:00
Existing high performance cuda code is almost all first party libraries, written by NVIDIA and uses weird internal flags and inline ptx.

You can get 90% of the way there with a small team of compiler devs. The rest 10% would take hundreds of people working ten years. The cost of this is suspiciously close to the billions in financial incentive you mentioned, funny how efficient markets work.