MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troyvit | 2025-07-29 16:39:07+00:00
> The law is effectively forcing companies to spend millions re-scanning the same books over and over for no reason.

Oh but the reason is that they're now making $3 billion/year, partially because of those books. I see an argument for the inefficiency behind having to rescan books that are already scanned, but not the cost. If there was a way to buy pre-scanned books from Google Books or whatever then I somewhat see where you're coming from.

I argue that there were positive effects of Anthropic having to buy and scan physical books:

* The choices people made choosing which physical books to buy and scan helped make Claude what it is. Personally I sense a difference between Claude and OpenAI and Gemini, and part of it comes down to the choices they made in training material. Sorry to go on and on, but how many choices here were made because it was a rainy day and the trains were down, so an intern went to bookstore A instead of bookstore B?

* While buying the books used didn't help the authors it helped the struggling bookstores selling their books. Literal dollars into the hands of local workers. When I fast forward to today and see how LLM companies are literally stealing the energy from the communities their data centers are based in, and polluting them with shitty power plants I can at least think of that as one positive outcome, even if it only happened once.

As far as the 7 million+ books Anthropic didn't pay for, their series B in 2022 brought in $580 million. They could have afforded those books.
by donmcronald | 2025-07-29 16:39:14+00:00
> you can let Copilot see all your open tabs so it can understand the full context of what you’re exploring online

Isn't that going to poison the context with low quality, SEO blog spam? How long is it going to be before content mills start filling the web with defensible lies?

For example, "exploding cell phone charger X is built with a high quality transformer." The AI will mindlessly regurgitate that without considering the nuance of source. When I evaluate that stuff the source plays a major role in the weight I give to the statement.

None of the AI I've seen does a proper job of considering the source and I'm guessing it's because they can't attribute sources due to the massive IP theft that was required to build the systems.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-29 16:39:21+00:00
It's really more of an inversion. No true Scotsman is "No Scotsman would ever (commit murder)" "What about (Scotsman that committed murder)?" "Ok, no true Scotsman would commit murder"

Whereas this follows the form more of "Murder is bad" "I dunno, a lot of Scotsmen commit murder" "Ok, but no true Scotsman would commit murder"

It's the same (annoying) assertion, but the fundamental argument is about the value of murder, not the category of "Scotsmen," so it's not the same extremely obvious fallacy of redefining the literal topic at hand whenever a counterexample is presented.
by quesera | 2025-07-29 16:39:50+00:00
Language is defined by the masses.

We've lost "hacker" and "crypto" and "literally" and "decimated". (plus every political word I can think of, but do not care to introduce into this well-mannered thread)

We will never get them back, so those of us who like words are stuck avoiding them, overclarifying our usage, and accepting that everyone else will use them incorrectly.

Calling attention to ourselves as the losers of these battles isn't particularly productive.
by Aachen | 2025-07-29 16:39:51+00:00
> or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.

Wouldn't it be like half the cost to your organisation if you do it for them? If govt agency xyz doesn't have the resources to build this, offer to make it, get access to the source, plug it into a dead simple API, get your data and everybody's happy?

I've never held a data analysis position so I have no idea if such an org would be open to it. If not, it sounds more like the former issue (gatekeeping and unwillingness) than the latter (inability or resource lack)
by fn-mote | 2025-07-29 16:40:09+00:00
> I jest; the vagueposting led to [...]

Resurrecting a 4 month old issue that evaporated in a day or two seems like poor form to me.

Also I believe most of the responsibility for the negative behavior should be assigned to those actually engaging in it, not the initial post. I understand others reasonably disagree (notably about the accusation and harrassment).

Tbh, it sounds like you might have been personally affected? At any rate, I certainly don't condone a mob mentality.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-29 16:40:21+00:00
What are you talking about?

This is about hyper-scaling unicorns who can create and scale a business faster than the regulatory framework[government] can respond. "Disruption" is a dog whistle for "we're going to break the law faster than the government can keep up." The game is scaling from disruption to entrenchment before the first "The United States vs You" hits your desk.

If you don't have the ability to play the game then you can believe it doesn't exist, but those playing it found a slot machine that only lands on 777.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-29 16:40:38+00:00
Not the OP but I don’t recall the actual law saying 24/7 moderation was required.

Given the UK already has a “watershed” time where terrestrial TV can broadcast mature content between set hours (from 9pm), I cannot see why the same expectation shouldn’t exist that moderation isn’t happening outside of reasonable hours.

Typically with laws in the UK (and EU too) is to use more generalised language to allow the law a little more flexibility to apply correctly for more nuanced circumstances. Such as what is practical for a small forum to achieve when its specialty isn’t anything to do with adult content.

You’ll definitely find examples where such laws are abused from time to time. But they’re uncommon enough that they make national news and create an uproar. Thus the case goes nowhere due to the political embarrassment that department draws to itself.

Though to be clear, I’m not defending this particular law. It’s stupid and shouldn’t exist.
by bprew | 2025-07-29 16:40:39+00:00
His point isn't that you can run a model on an average laptop, but that the same laptop can still run frontier models.

It speaks to the advancements in models that aren't just throwing more compute/ram at it.

Also, his laptop isn't that fancy.

> It claims to be small enough to run on consumer hardware. I just ran the 7B and 13B models on my 64GB M2 MacBook Pro!

From: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/11/llama/
by bccdee | 2025-07-29 16:40:57+00:00
> Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.

Strongly agree. It kills me that nobody is seriously discussing robust, industry-standard childproofing.

Even if you require a driver's license, how hard is it really to swipe your mom's ID from her purse and write down the serial number? There is no solution to this problem that doesn't require parents to actually parent their children a bit and lock down their devices.
by Analemma_ | 2025-07-29 16:41:14+00:00
This is good to do for its own sake, but on a large scale it does not decrease health care costs: it makes people live longer, but they will still ultimately need the kind of end-of-life care where the majority of health care costs come from. Those costs don't go down for healthier people, and it might even increase health care spending on net if it takes people longer to die.
by MantisShrimp90 | 2025-07-29 16:42:25+00:00
This sparks a thought experiment I've been having. In this world where llms can be thought of as the new layer of compilers, things like pickle are likely going to be the main unit of work for humans.

Only now instead of this developing brittle generated tests, it will instead be used by the llm as guidance to generate the actual code and tests.

Before people jump down my throat, I know we are nowhere near that today and I promise I'm not pitching this to my leadership because they would gobble it up too fast.

But for us engineers, I think there is an interesting space for thinking of llms as akin to garbage collection, a feature that allows us to abstract to a slightly higher level of thought. Yes we still need to know how to check under the hood, but this is looking like the right level of precision-flexibility ratio that llms thrive in
by ndriscoll | 2025-07-29 16:42:30+00:00
As always, it requires a knowledgeable interviewer. Is the candidate using it as a slightly advanced autocomplete? That's fine. Are they relying on it to design things for them/can't articulate out loud what they're hoping it will produce for them/can't identify and articulate when and how it does something stupid or wrong or differs from how they were thinking of doing it? Then they don't know what they're doing.

I do peer coding with people at work and we have copilot on. We'll discuss what we're trying to accomplish and make little comments out loud along the lines of "sure, almost" or "not quite, copilot" when it generates something. It's obvious whether someone is working in a way where they know what they want the tool to do.
by infecto | 2025-07-29 16:42:40+00:00
You’re asking why it’s not possible like it’s some big mystery, but it’s not ideology. It’s basic political and economic reality. You’re proposing nationalizing a private financial network in a country that can’t even pass basic data privacy laws or agree on net neutrality.

Visa and Mastercard aren’t some low-friction government acquisition target. They’re entrenched public companies with deep lobbying arms, international dependencies, and systemic importance. This isn’t turning the post office into USPS. It’s unpicking decades of privatized infrastructure and assuming the government can suddenly become a nimble tech operator. That’s the fairy tale.

And yes, laws exist, but enforcement is uneven, regulators are captured, and the ambiguity around “obscenity,” “adult,” and “high-risk” content is exactly why these companies over-police. You keep asserting benefits of a public solution as if that’s evidence it could happen. It’s not. It just shows you’re imagining a world that doesn’t resemble the one we live in.

You’re free to dream. I’m just pointing out the bridge you’re missing between vision and implementation.
by rwyinuse | 2025-07-29 16:42:57+00:00
Yeah, also over here in Finland the amount of money our public sector spends on stuff like Microsoft licenses is insane. Then there's lots of other craziness, like buying a very expensive and totally unsuitable American healthcare management system from Epic, and then spending lots of money on license fees and customizing it for local purposes (the end result also sucks, and is universally hated by healthcare staff).

I'm not sure whether it's a result incompetence, corruption or both, but massive amount of money is wasted on IT solutions that could be implemented more cheaply in-house, or at least by European companies.
by blablabla123 | 2025-07-29 16:43:27+00:00
Nobody is going to read these test cases any way, except when troubleshooting or adding new code. But that is never any of the stakeholders

It's quite funny that now with AI-based no/low code the same thing is attempted again. Even if the regexes might disappear, it's even more text, with even less structure (assuming anyone checked those prompts into git in the first place)
by aanet | 2025-07-29 16:43:33+00:00
Techmeme:

QUOTE:

Sources: Mark Zuckerberg mulls more shake-ups to Meta's AI strategy; he lost faith in Meta's AI team during the controversy over allegations it gamed benchmarks.

...

While the predecessor, Llama 3, was a hit with developers, they haven’t taken to Llama 4 because it’s seen by some as more difficult to customize and integrate into their apps. That’s resulted in many coders preferring Llama 3 over its successor, people familiar with the matter said. Additionally, Zuckerberg lost confidence in his generative AI team and its leadership in part due to a controversy over whether Meta may have gamed certain industry AI benchmark tests, the people said.

Llama 4′s struggles can be traced back to January, when the sudden rise and ensuing popularity of the open-source R1 AI model by DeepSeek caught Meta off guard, leading to a reevaluation of Llama’s underlying architecture, the people said.

/QUOTE
by xtajv | 2025-07-29 16:43:39+00:00
https://hothardware.com/news/google-sued-by-original-pixel-o...

IDK about you, but I went from "die-hard Nexus lover/Pixel preorder" to ungoogling everything in my life (including every piece of "family tech support" hardware for which I do tech support and periodic maintenance).

For the uninitiated: The Google Pixel had a factory defect in soldering that made the chip housing the audio codec flat-out fall off. For me, the issue manifested at month 13 into a 12-month warranty, with the symptom that I could receive phone calls or play music, but no audio in/out of any kind was actually reaching the device, no matter whether I used 3rd party peripherals, wired headphones, native speaker, the works.

Google's "solution" for the factory defect --which they acknowledged in a thousand-person google group dedicated to debugging the issue-- was the following inane reasoning: "Well, these are cell phones, which means that we have your cell phone number... so how about we just call you?"

Keep in mind, this required me to keep my SIM parked in a non-functional device for the prospect of receiving a phone call which I would not be able to hear or respond to.

I still remember that bug nearly a decade later and will NEVER use a Google Pixel, Google Fiber subscription, or Waymo vehicle unless I see substantial convincing evidence to suggest that anyone at the company understands that "reliability engineering" includes building a support and repair model for paying customers.

Until then, Goodbye, Google.
by stavros | 2025-07-29 16:43:39+00:00
I don't understand your point. You seem to be saying that we should be getting code from the source, then adapting it to our project ourselves, instead of getting adapted code to begin with.

I'm going to review the code anyway, why would I not want to save myself some of the work? I can "see how they work" after the LLM gives them to me just fine.
by marojejian | 2025-07-29 16:43:58+00:00
archive: https://archive.is/D8Wh3

Paper (subject of the NYT article): https://www.nber.org/papers/w33844

Because this violates my priors, and appears a high-quality RCT, I found this very interesting.

>The researchers specified in advance seven measures on which they thought children in high-cash families would outperform the others. But after four years they found no group differences on any of the yardsticks, which aimed for a comprehensive look at child development.

There are several reasons to discount the evidence, such as the Covid pandemic conditions. But... there are always reasons to discount, that's how post-hoc bias works.

So seems like important evidence to learn from, especially if you still believe in transfers and want them to provide a good ROI.

>While researchers publicized the earlier, more promising results, the follow-up study was released quietly and has received little attention. Several co-authors declined to comment on the results, saying that it was unclear why the payments had no effect.

Sad response, but understandable if I were in their shoes. Kudos to NYT for covering it despite their bias.
by seec | 2025-07-29 16:44:14+00:00
Even apps that are not strictly for dating are full of scams, a lot of catfishing is going on with a ton of onlyfans egirl type of profile.

A while ago (about 3 years), I downloaded a ton of apps made (allegedly) to meet new people in cities you don't know (I was going to spend about 3 weeks at a friend and he would be busy with his job); Meet with Locals types of apps.

I shit you not, the vast majority were filled with scam profiles and a lot of what I assume is escort services/soft prostitution and whatnot.

So, I just deleted them all and just met people the old-fashioned way (which was just fine, not sure technology has a real use case for that); but it was an eye-opener.
by kristianc | 2025-07-29 16:44:22+00:00
Ah right, yeah, because the Guardian-reading, PPE-educated, civil service "concerns have been raised" class that we trust to govern in our enlightened best interests have been doing such a fantastic job of things. My mistake.

Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.
by donmcronald | 2025-07-29 16:44:25+00:00
> "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph"

Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?

Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.
by wohoef | 2025-07-29 16:44:46+00:00
I'm quite worried by this post. After reading the first paragraph it is obvious that this is AI generated, or at least heavily edited by AI. Read some of the other comments on this post for examples of how this is obvious.

The author is a professor in Computer Science at Yale. As well as an ex-research at Microsoft and IBM. You would think this person has the necessary writing skills to write this article themselves. There is no excuse to use AI for writing this. It makes it much harder to read. And always leaves me wondering if I don't understand the point the author is trying to make or if there wasn't one to begin with.

Overall I'm just annoyed by how often I see people use genAI to write stuff for them. Do they think people won't realize it is generated by AI? Do they just not care? Or has it become socially acceptable to write emails, articles, and memos with AI? Just give me the f***g prompt. Then at least I don't have to deal with reading the AI slop.

Let alone how ironic it is to write an article that talks about AI in education, with AI.

PS: I'm not trying to attack the author. This is becoming a widespread issue and I don't want to single him out.
by yujonglee | 2025-07-29 16:44:46+00:00
Thanks. I learned that running a server on the Rust side and calling it from a TypeScript frontend is a good approach. For example, we run an OpenAI-compatible server using a Tauri plugin (https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/tree/main/plugins/local...) and call it using the Vercel AI SDK.
by varispeed | 2025-07-29 16:45:00+00:00
This is because these measures are not about protecting children.

It's a distraction.

Real objective is to further increase the barrier of entry for SMEs to compete (try start your own forum or any kind of challenger to Facebook et al). Government on the other hand gets a tidy surveillance tool as a sweetener.

So whenever time comes to turn a screw on dissent, the law is ready to be used.

Welcome to British corporate fascism.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-29 16:45:15+00:00
I don't see CPKC as a reason for approving this. It won't compete with them in Canada or Mexico at all (since neither UP nor NS go there). And it won't compete much with them in the US, since CPKC pretty much just does north-south in the middle of the country.

I mean CPKC might be the excuse, but that's not the same thing...
by frollogaston | 2025-07-29 16:45:26+00:00
It's hard to screw up Postgres to the extent that your entire DB is made fully accessible by all users. This has happened many times with Firebase apps, for over a decade.

You could have a SQL injection vuln, but any SQL lib will very clearly steer you to parameterized queries, and even then such a vuln takes some expertise to find and exploit.
by kburman | 2025-07-29 16:45:44+00:00
It feels like one user-hostile move after another from Microsoft lately. Forcing Edge, using dark patterns to block Chrome, resetting telemetry with updates, the whole Recall fiasco... and now this. It's exhausting.

My working theory is they see Google's browser revenue and think, "we're the OS, we deserve a bigger cut." It's an incredible level of arrogance that's burning through decades of user trust for short-term gain.

Instead of all this, why not actually compete by being better? They could make Windows a bastion of privacy that protects users from app snooping. They could foster a real native app ecosystem again, like on macOS, so the OS itself adds unique value. That's how you build loyalty, not this constant squeezing of your user base.
by autoexec | 2025-07-29 16:46:21+00:00
> It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.

Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.
by nolok | 2025-07-29 16:46:35+00:00
But I can ask the AI, it understand what I want and give me the steps. I can ask it to give it to me in api call instead and it does, after a bit of mashup.

Sure the api link and permissions and yada yada plays a part, but thats exactly how they can trap us into office365, with already use azure permissions and everything.

Again I'm sure it's harder than it looks, but it's not an AI problem anymore, and they're throwing billions at it.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-29 16:46:56+00:00
Yeah that makes sense, here I'm just curious if 38% of developers really use Vim (i.e., Vim [24%] + Neovim [14%]), which seems really high to me (even if it's assumed a lot of these are using Vim as a second editor). Or if it's just that a lot of folks are checking both Vim and Neovim.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-29 16:47:11+00:00
I remember when heartbleed was the big thing. There were many people digging into the person who committed the bug. Looking for where they lived, worked, and traveled. Many people were so desperate to find something to prove he was a spy.

If you google his name, 80% of the results are articles about how he denying doing that on purpose.
by FredPret | 2025-07-29 16:47:39+00:00
I love the idea of that 90mm prime.

But usually when I have passers-by take photos, the context is that we are posing in front of a church in Europe or something, and space can be limited.

I can't very well ask people to take a photo and but first to take 20 paces back and then do a crouch!

My wife wants to see our shoes as well as the church spires in the same photo. Maybe a 35mm or even 28mm would work well in our case.
by djoldman | 2025-07-29 16:47:52+00:00
Indeed; these seem to be more frequent of late. The language seems over-the-top, almost breathlessly pearl-clutching without any sort of evidence:

"Childhood itself, reframed: not as a journey to be nurtured, but a system to be streamlined."

"But what starts as adaptation ends in control."

"And when you name your school Alpha, you signal something deeper: Not growth. Not care. But dominance."

"What’s lost in Alpha’s world isn’t content—it’s interiority: the struggle, the slowness, the human friction."

"And in that shift, the soul becomes overhead."

"Human scaffolding gives way to sleek sterility."

"...we risk raising children who are fluent—but forever waiting for the next prompt."

"It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task..."