MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sekai | 2025-07-15 13:08:15+00:00
> Did you write your own letters? Did you write your own arguments? Did you write your own code? I do, and don't depend on systems other built to do so. And losing the ability of keep doing so is a pretty big trade-off, in my opinion.

Gatekeeping at it's finest, you're not a "true" software engineer if you're not editing the kernel on your own, locked in in a cubicle, with no external help.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-15 13:08:31+00:00
Yeah, as I've said on many incident calls...we can pay for transaction recovery at shutdown or we can pay for it at startup, but it's got to happen somewhere.

The "SIGKILL or keep waiting?" decision comes down to whether you believe the DBMS is actually making progress towards shutdown. Proving that the shutdown is progressing can be difficult, depending on the situation.
by roenxi | 2025-07-15 13:08:59+00:00
They also would like it if occasionally everyone reviewed legislation in light of whether it actually had a positive cost-benefit. The claim has to be something significantly more valuable than a few 100 people dying from poisons each year for the thousands to millions of deaths caused by inefficiencies in the biomedical industry. 3,000,000 people die in the US each year right now. Optimising the medical system for nimbleness and low costs is a much better path to take rather than optimising for something that is presented as a statistical rounding error.

If people don't think a drug manufacturer is safe they don't have to buy drugs from them.
by 123yawaworht456 | 2025-07-15 13:09:16+00:00
I was trying to say that people whose values don't fit in the Overton window keep their opinions to themselves. In China, it's contempt for the CCP, in Russia, it's contempt for Putin, and in the US, it's contempt for DEI/ESG/etc.

in all three countries, dissent is an informal crime.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-07-15 13:09:38+00:00
It does matter whether something is useful and I really wish people would stop making comparisons to crypto because it's an absolutely terrible comparison.

AI is certainly in a bubble right now, as with dotcoms in 1999. But AI is also delivering a lot of value right now and advancing at an incredible pace. It will become ubiquitous and at a faster pace than the Internet ultimately did.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been around for 17 years and there still are no non-criminal use cases apart from buying it and hoping it will be worth more in the future.
by pron | 2025-07-15 13:10:03+00:00
I'm not saying it's not impressive or that it doesn't show great promise, but there are clearly challenges, and we don't yet know when or how they'll be solved.

From some big LLM fans I've heard that one major problem is that of trust: Unlike tools/machines, LLMs cannot be trusted to reliably succeed or fail in an obvious way; unlike people, LLMs cannot be trusted to communicate back useful feedback, such as important insights or pitfalls. So while in some respects LLMs are superior to both humans and existing automation, in others they're inferior to both.

Maybe we'll be able to fix these problems within the current LLM technology, and maybe we'll be able to do that soon, but neither of these is obviously inevitable.

My pet issue with one form of inevitability, as I mentioned above, is that if we get to a point where software can reliably write other software for us, then we're also at a point where we don't need any of other software to be actually written, at least not in some human-readable form. There will just be one (kind of) program that does what we ask it to; why would we ask it to write programs?
by bbor | 2025-07-15 13:10:36+00:00
It’s just the natural counterpart to dogmatic inevitabilism — dogmatic denialism. One denies the present, the other the (recent) past. It’s honestly an understandable PoV though when you consider A) most people understand “AI” and “chatbot” to be synonyms, and B) the blockchain hype cycle(s) bred some deep cynicism about software innovation.

Funny seeing that comment on this post in particular, tho. When OP says “I’m not sure it’s a world I want”, I really don’t think they’re thinking about corporate revenue opportunities… More like Rehoboam, if not Skynet.
by yawpitch | 2025-07-15 13:10:37+00:00
Amongst the Jews it was public knowledge long, long before '43. By the time the camps started being liberated by the Soviets pretty much everyone knew something truly abominable was happening, they just didn’t know about the piles of hair and teeth or the showers.

In other words the world saw a genocide and did f**k all… then it was forced to see that this wasn’t just a genocide, it was a bad genocide, so it hung a few and shot a few and then expatriated the rest to run their space race.

What’s been happening in Gaza has been clear since at least '48… this is just the final turn of the horrible screw, but the screw’s been grinding since long before I was born.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-07-15 13:11:01+00:00
It doesn't really matter what use cases cryptocurrencies were supposed to have — their actual use cases turned out to be scams and speculation. We can wax philosophic about the failed promise, but to a rounding error scams and speculation have always been their only use cases.

Which makes it very understandable that crypto companies became subject to KYC laws as they tried to scale up to serve the American public! Online gambling and securities trading are already subject to KYC. The rest of the activity is the scams and crime that (despite your cynical reading) KYC was intended to fight in the first place.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-15 13:11:04+00:00
That's the more general issue, isn't it? Users demand software, guarantees, ... and refuse to pay for it.

That goes for the AI industry itself, but equally for everyone using it.

Microsoft won when it found a way to extract software fees as a tax from hardware manufacturers.

FANG won when it found a way to extract software writing and hosting fees from advertisers, effectively making it a tax on everything you buy.

Both of these (Operating systems and basic cloud services like email hosting) can be done for a lot cheaper if they were paid for by end users, but those just won't pay. In fact, for a while they were paid by end users (microsoft did that, gmx.net, infomaniak, ...). Then everyone switched to "free" and here we are.

And we all know there's no way back, so what's the point discussing it? We all know most people will just not have email or web search if they had to pay even 5$ per year to get it, and I seem to recall an article stating Google effectively earns over $100 per year per account.

Reality is: give it another 2 years and the "art, music, articles, newspapers, books and open source code" industries will reach absolutely nobody except through AI providers. That could be avoided if every creator paid $1 per year to have free infrastructure for their services, but there's no way in hell they will do that ... so here we are. In 2 years instead they'll pay $1000 every time they want someone to actually look at their art.

And yet, the situation with banking services is far worse, imho. So bad, in fact, that even charging $0.01 per year for internet services would be a nonstarter.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-07-15 13:11:14+00:00
> Unfortunately, this is probably illegal.

Since when has something being illegal/unconstitutional stopped the current administration from doing anything?

So its still a choice they are making, just one that further shows that with the current administration (and ultimately SCOTUS with their shadow docket bullshittery) the rights of corporations are protected far more than the rights of individuals.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-07-15 13:11:52+00:00
> that's because they are racing improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their user base you think they don't have a successful business model?

I imagine they would’ve flicked that switch if they thought it would generate a profit, but as it is it seems like all AI companies are still happy to burn investor money trying to improve their models while I guess waiting for everyone else to stop first.

I also imagine it’s hard to go to investors with “while all of our competitors are improving their models and either closing the gap or surpassing us, we’re just going to stabilize and see if people will pay for our current product.”
by CalChris | 2025-07-15 13:12:00+00:00
The earlier 1997 paper on Disco [1] by Bugnion, … was written just before VMware was founded in 1998. It was circulated for review and reputedly made its way to Bill Gates. However, VMware was self funded; so Gates wasn't an early investor. Disco was a lot more similar to VMware's first product before Intel+AMD added VT-x to make hardware assisted virtualization easier.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/838/Spring2013/Pape...
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-15 13:12:28+00:00
> I actually think it's dangerous to view these people as intelligent, because I really think they believe the things they say.

Actually, it's a lot more dangerous to view these people as stupid, because the decisions they make are singularly focused and very, very effective. coldpie is absolutely right, if the policies are intelligent, the policy-makers should be considered intelligent too, so we can focus on the goals and methods pursued by that intelligence.

> but I think these people are so far gone that they can't understand any difference now.

There's no way to be sure, it might be theatrics all the way down... They do gain handsomely from their actions so why call them stupid? It's very unconvincing because it doesn't make sense.

As for the rest of us there's nothing to gain and a lot to lose in viewing the present policies as a string of random stupidity.
by ghc | 2025-07-15 13:13:29+00:00
Actions within that system may be unethical: certainly nobody is defending what America did to Cambodia, or countless other war crimes. But you're painting participation in the system as unethical. Therefore, Ukrainians defending their homeland are unethical.

Let me reframe what you said in terms of christianity:

----

If you believe that:

a) Jesus is our savior b) The salvation of humanity depends on accepting (a)

...then yes, at some point everyone needs to back away from other religious systems, right down to atheism.

----

I'm not trying to make light of what you believe, but framing others' participation in a system you don't believe in as unethical is exactly what leads to oppression of religious minorities and other outsider groups. It's a tactic of religion, not reason.
by mjr00 | 2025-07-15 13:13:37+00:00
Sorry, I'm not going to let people rewrite history here: for the first ~year after ChatGPT's release, there were tons of comments, here on HN and the wider internet, arguing that LLMs displayed signs of actual intelligence. Thankfully I don't have too many HN comments so I was able to dig up some threads where this was getting argued.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40730156
by mark_l_watson | 2025-07-15 13:13:46+00:00
Of course we are in a massive bubble. At least in the US where I live, everything is about driving short term profits, with less than a little thought to what is good for the non-special interests/insider class.

I have lived and worked through two previous ‘AI winters’ and I expect the current bubble to eventually pop in a dramatic way. There will be good things produced by AI, but I am skeptical of the panic FOMO rush to AGI or super intelligence.

Look at the process of shifting manufacturing out of the USA: that was all about driving extreme wealth for special interest insiders. Sadly, most people look to their particular little political party for some form of relief - how is that working out?
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-15 13:14:00+00:00
I know for a fact that’s not true. You must have misunderstood the issue.

This is one of the main technical differences between Azure Functions and Google Cloud Run vs Lambda. Azure and GCP offer serverless as a billing model rather than an execution model precisely to avoid this issue. (Among many other benefits*)

Both in Azure and GCP you listen and handle SIGTERM (on Linux at least, Azure has a Windows offering and you use a different Windows thing there that I’m forgetting) and you can control and handle shutdown. There is no “suspend”. “Suspending nodejs” is not a thing. This is a super AWS Lambda specific behavior that is not replicable outside AWS (not easily at least)

The main thing I do is review cloud issues mid size companies run into. Most of them were startups that transitioned into a mid size company and now need to get off the “Spend Spend Spend” mindset and rain in cloud costs and services. The first thing we almost always have to untangle is their Lambdas/SF and it’s always the worst thing to ever untangle or split apart because you will forever find your code behavior differently outside of AWS. Maybe if you have the most excellent engineers working with the most excellent processes and most excellent code. But in reality all Lambda code takes complete dependency on the fact that lambda will kill your process after a timeout. Lambda will run only 1 request through your process at any given time. Lambda will “suspend” and “resume” your process. 99% of lambdas I helped move out of AWS have had a year+ trail of bugs where those services couldn’t run for any length of time before corrupting their state. They rely on the process restarting every few request to clear up a ton of security-impacting cross contamination.

* I might be biased, but I much much prefer GCR or AZF to Lambda in terms of running a service. Lambda shines if you resell it. Reselling GCR or AZF as a feature in your application is not straight forward. Reselling a lambda in your application is very very easy
by naasking | 2025-07-15 13:14:05+00:00
> They are akin to making everything async, which proves my point: you have to make everything of one kind in order to solve the problem.

You can use ordinary direct style compilation, but all references to stack values simply have to be relative offsets, then a simple implementation of shift/reset is just capturing context and copying stack fragments, which you can do using setjmp/longjmp in C (although there are better ways [1]).

This is not akin to making everything async, nor is everything "of one kind", whatever that means. A delimited continuation is very much its own kind of thing, distinct from other values, and doesn't have to influence the function call/return semantics unless you're targeting a less flexible runtime like the JVM.

[1] https://github.com/koka-lang/libhandle
by TFYS | 2025-07-15 13:14:32+00:00
Not to the same extent, and the solution to that is to improve the FDA, not to demolish it and let companies poison and fool people freely.

Class action is what I meant with the difficulty of organizing. To make a class action happen and win, the damage done must be massive enough to get enough people to notice it and take action, and must be easily and cheaply provable. A class action is not going to fund expensive scientific studies that prove their problem was caused by the company they're suing. Your solution would only prevent the absolute worst cases. Any damage that's rare, hard to notice or prove, small, long term, etc would not get compensated and would cost society much more than properly funding FDA.
by desumeku | 2025-07-15 13:14:57+00:00
>This increasingly likely future is made all the more infuriating by the annoyances of the current reality of AI. The fact that AI is so presently inescapable despite how many glaring security-affecting flaws it causes, how much it propagates slop in the information commons, and how effectively it emboldens a particularly irksome brand of overconfidence in the VC world is preemptive insult to injury in the lead up a reality where AI will nevertheless control everything.

So basically: "yes, I know AI is actually completely and totally useless and a net negative on the world just like you say it is, but I can imagine that things will suddenly turn into the sci-fi ultraverse for no reason so therefore you're wrong."
by brahma-dev | 2025-07-15 13:15:15+00:00
Here's some BS for you.

That's an unfair mischaracterization of their position. Criticism doesn't equal rejection, and skepticism isn't the same as ignorance. Pointing out limitations, failures, or hype doesn't mean they are claiming there's nothing useful or that the entire technology is inherently worthless.

Being critical is not about denying all value—it’s about demanding evidence, accuracy, and clarity amid inflated claims. In fact, responsible critique helps improve technology by identifying where it falls short, so it can evolve into something genuinely useful and reliable.

What you're calling "willful ignorance" is, in reality, a refusal to blindly accept marketing narratives or inflated expectations. That’s not being closed-minded—that’s being discerning.

If there is something truly valuable, it will stand up to scrutiny.
by paul_milovanov | 2025-07-15 13:15:48+00:00
Vinay Prasad, the new FDA chief medical and scientific director, is an extremely sensible guy and a co-author of a great 2013 book on evidence-based medicine targeting the lay audience (Ending Medical Reversal)

Here's an EconTalk podcast with the other co-author, Adam Cifu, talking about the book. https://www.econtalk.org/adam-cifu-on-ending-medical-reversa...

The NYT article presents his COVID vaccine policy changes as yet more crazy MAGA shit, whereas in fact he holds nuanced views, based on up-to-date review of available evidence. He has published in NEJM and elsewhere on the topic:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2506929

A short take on the above from Adam Cifu, whom I respect greatly: https://www.sensible-med.com/p/prasad-makary-and-an-evidence...

With all of that, I suspect that the rumours of FDA's death are greatly exaggerated.
Show HN: Write better AI system prompts
by Marten42 | 2025-07-15 13:16:13+00:00
Hi,

I just created an assistant to write better system prompts (to leapfrog the first few minutes of setting up a new agent/loop).

Try it here: https://www.tramann-projects.com/MagicPromptWriter/index.php

example for the instruction:

I need a quality assurance assistant. Based on the users input he should answer with a table reporting anomalies in the production.

example for the user prompt:

Production Line: A12 Date: 2025-07-14 Shift: Night Total Units Produced: 5,200 Defective Units: 180 Average Cycle Time: 56 sec Standard Cycle Time: 48 sec Downtime: 45 minutes Expected Downtime: ≤ 15 minutes Machine Temperature Spike: Yes (Exceeded 90°C for 10 minutes) Operator Notes: "Machine slowed down mid-shift. Restarted once."

In my experience so far, the following prompting format for system prompts works best:

- Set up the role of the AI/LLM. - State the task. - Explain the high-level plan (and then break it down into sub-steps if needed). - Add important notes to keep in mind (if needed). - Tell how to structure the output/feedback. - Provide an example output of what is expected <- this one really, really increases output quality

And this is also what this assistant does, if you should have additional ideas for further prompt improvement, let's start a discussion in the comments : )
by ghm2180 | 2025-07-15 13:17:01+00:00
I also do the same. I am on the 200$ maxpro plan. I often let the plan go to pretty fine level of detail, e.g. describe exactly what test conditions to check, what exact code conditions to follow. Do you write this to a separate plan file? I find myself doing this a lot since after compaction Claude starts to have code drift.

Do you also get it to add to it's to-do list?

I also find that having the o3 model review the plan helps catch gaps. Do you do the same?
by gametorch | 2025-07-15 13:17:15+00:00
It's not black and white.

It's reasonable to assume Cursor isn't trying to screw you over and you don't need to audit their code.

It's also reasonable to assume some of the arbitrary 3rd party extensions are trying to screw you over.

You don't have to be so rigid and extreme in your thinking. You can take the reasonable middle ground and make good guesses yourself.
Show HN: ProjectD – Google Drive-based, AES-encrypted C2 in C/C++
by bernking | 2025-07-15 13:17:16+00:00
ProjectD is a proof-of-concept that demonstrates how attackers could leverage Google Drive as both the transport channel and storage backend for a command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.

Main C2 features: - Persistent client ↔ server heartbeat; - File download / upload; - Remote command execution on the target machine; - Full client shutdown and self-wipe; - End-to-end encrypted traffic (AES-256-GCM, asymmetric key exchange).

Code + full write-up: - GitHub: https://github.com/BernKing/ProjectD - Blog: https://bernking.xyz/2025/Project-D/
by p_l | 2025-07-15 13:17:20+00:00
I imagine it could take some minor contributor deciding they don't like what you do and taking extreme interpretation of AGPL including trying to insist everything that talks over network to it is derivative work, vs interpretation of yours (let's say you're not modifying an AGPL project at all, just running it vanilla, and it's part of some bigger offering, and your lawyers said it's not crucial enough for the bigger offering to be considered derivative)

As far as many people are concerned, AGPL is vague enough it would end up in court, so the question becomes "do I want to have this sword of Damocles of unnecessary complications and upsets?"
by reactordev | 2025-07-15 13:18:05+00:00
This looks really cool except for having to learn a new syntax (is gherkin that bad?) however, something has been bothering me with all of these Agent AI based workflows.

At what point do you actually do engineering? This was a great demo for a project manager. Lead your “team” through feature development. But without proper architecture, development really does become spaghetti.

There’s vibe coding - and then there’s this, where I feel like I’m a PM, not an engineer.
by spopejoy | 2025-07-15 13:18:07+00:00
> People like communicating in natural language

It does puzzle me a little that there isn't more widespread acclaim of this, achieving a natural-language UI has been a failed dream of CS for decades and now we can just take it for granted.

LLMs may or may not be the greatest thing for coding, writing, researching, or whatever, but this UX is a keeper. Being able to really use language to express a problem, have recourse to abbreviations, slang, and tone, and have it all get through is amazing, and amazingly useful.
by nathan_compton | 2025-07-15 13:18:11+00:00
No one does that either. The nondeterminism in QM is basically just an experimental fact which sort of inveigles itself into the structure of the mathematical framework which makes it hard to ignore when one tries to understand what the theory may mean philosophically.

I've been to phil. physics conferences and I've never encountered anyone who has any kind of strong attachment to nondeterminism. In fact, in general, I think almost every physicist who learns QM has a prejudice against it which never entirely goes away unless they get deep into foundations which forces a more detached perspective.
by colinmorelli | 2025-07-15 13:18:21+00:00
It is absolutely possible for the unit economics of a product to be profitable and for the parent company to be losing money. In fact, it's extremely common when the company is bullish on their own future and thus they invest heavily in marketing and R&D to continue their growth. This is what I understood GP to mean.

Whether it's true for any of the mainstream LLM companies or not is anyone's guess, since their financials are either private or don't separate out LLM inference as a line item.