MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krick | 2025-07-19 19:13:30+00:00
I wonder how this type of pressuring can be made illegal. To be clear: I certainly think this has to be made illegal, and even attempt to coerce a payment network to force a business to do something should be a serious crime. If the product is not illegal, you can sell it, either on your platform, or on a third party platform (Steam), if the platfrom is ok with selling your product. It's arguable, but perfectly reasonable to say that Steam can also choose to not sell it if it doesn't want to. But then, of course, it doesn't seem like a huge leap to say that a payment network can choose to not handle transactions for some type of business if it doesn't want to. Sure, you can appeal to it being a de-facto monopoly, but isn't Steam a de-facto monopoly as well? I mean, I have some trouble formally drawing a line here, yet it clearly seems not right to me, that a payment network can choose at all if they want to handle this or not.

And, as I said, attempt to apply pressure on a payment network, in order to apply pressure on its customer, in order to apply pressure on their customers... well, I think it's pretty obvious why this is a problem, and that things are not supposed to work this way.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-19 19:13:40+00:00
Everything new is old.

Would recommend reading chapters 2 & 3 of this, on early 60s grappling with how to achieve arms control between antagonistic and equivalent powers, via constructing scenarios where it’s in mutual self-interest: https://archive.org/details/armscontroldisar013124mbp/page/n...

It’s been a while since Americans have had to burn brain power to solve problems like this, but it has happened before.
by highwaylights | 2025-07-19 19:13:43+00:00
This. Even if LLM’s ultimately hit some hard ceiling as substantially-better-Googling-automatons they would already accelerate all thought-based work across the board, and that’s the level they’re already at now (arguably they’re beyond that).

We’re already at the point where these tools are removing repetitive/predictable tasks from researchers (and everyone else), so clearly they’re already accelerating research.
by dataflow | 2025-07-19 19:14:08+00:00
Likely vs. unlikely is rounding to 50%. Single digit is rounding to 1%. I don't think the parent was suggesting the former is better than the latter. Even before I read your comment I thought that 5% precision is useful but 1% precision is a silly turn-off, unless that 1% is near the 0% or 100% boundary.
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-07-19 19:14:44+00:00
I'd recommend reading the Swiss table design notes[1] in the Abseil documentation. You might also like F14 maps[2] from Folly.

[1]: https://abseil.io/about/design/swisstables

[2]: https://engineering.fb.com/2019/04/25/developer-tools/f14/
by dang | 2025-07-19 19:14:51+00:00
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we unbanned you because you promised you wouldn't do this kind of thing, and your account seems to have reverted to the earlier pattern. I'm not just talking about the current comment—I mean the pattern of using HN primarily to comment on political/national/religious/ideological topics. If you would please fix this so we don't have to ban you again, that would be good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35505325
by tim333 | 2025-07-19 19:14:51+00:00
>The core of the problem is the mythology. You have chief executives and venture capitalists acting like high priests, delivering sermons from conference stages about the imminent arrival of this ill-defined "Artificial General Intelligence".

A lot of the AGI prediction is a fairly mundane business of extrapolating Moore's law like growth in computing and comparing it to the human brain. I don't think calling it mythology from high priests is a very accurate appraisal.
by grishka | 2025-07-19 19:14:53+00:00
I am Russian but am also fluent in English so I watch videos in both these languages. This automatic translation doesn't happen that often with my usage of YouTube, but when it does, it frustrates the crap out of me. So yes, I did look for a setting to turn it off, but didn't find any.

Relatedly, Google and Microsoft insist on showing machine-translated developer docs by default. A translate button is fine, but doing it by default?! I struggle to understand who thought that this could possibly ever be a good idea.
by alexjplant | 2025-07-19 19:15:54+00:00
Mine was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2YhXQaNiY4

Of course this device didn't actually exist in the consumer market. Half of my aunts and uncles worked for IBM and none of them knew anything about it. From cruising the YouTube comments it looks like a simpler version of the system had a few industrial applications but nothing remotely like the commercial. With AR glasses I think we're pretty much there nowadays but most people would rather use Robinhood and AirPods on an iPhone to do the same without bothering pigeons or looking like a weirdo on public transit.
by BrianCripe | 2025-07-19 19:16:08+00:00
Agree 100% that CLI interface design needs to be altered to include AI Agents as a new type of user persona, but I don't think it's as drastic of a change as one might expect.

We designed Desktop GUI & Web Browsers on top of the terminal to allow a type of user to interact without speaking "lower level" commands, but we've also created abstractions to hide complexity for ourselves at this layer. We just so happen to call them CLI Apps, Scripts, Makefile targets, Taskfile tasks, Justfile recipes, unix tools, etc. It consists of a pseudo-natural language short-code name combined with schema-validated options and some context around what each option does (via the --help view). The trick is how do we optimize for both human developers and AI Agents to have access to the same tools but in the optimized interface for each.

In an experiment to let my agents share the exact same 'tools' that I do for developing in a repository, I gave it direct access to load and self-modify the local project Justfile via MCP: https://github.com/toolprint/just-mcp

Just as (pun intended) I create tools for myself to repeat common tasks with sane defaults and some parameters, my agents immediately gain the same access and I can restrict permissions to use these instead of ANY bash command (IE: "Bash(just:*)"). The agent can also assist in creating tools for me or itself to use that would save on time and token usage. I'd love to see the paradigm evolve to the point it feels more like warp.dev where you don't have to switch between two text boxes to choose whether you're talking in natural language or instructing to run a known 'tool'.
by anonym29 | 2025-07-19 19:16:36+00:00
I don't think it would require manual labor. AI research labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet's Gemini team, etc already make extensive use of LLM's internally, and there has been quite a bit of work already done on models to detect toxicity in text, which could simply be inserted between the message router and the actual inference initialization on the user's prompt at very little computational cost.

See: Google's Perspective API, OpenAI Moderation API, Meta's Llama Guard Series, Azure AI Content Safety API, etc.
by svieira | 2025-07-19 19:16:55+00:00
It is in fact dogma that IVF is forbidden to Catholics (see Humanae Vitae #12 and the Catechism #2376)

https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...

https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...
by rconti | 2025-07-19 19:17:33+00:00
Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995 around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33 computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run it so I was going to be left behind anyway. 16MB of RAM (the only sensible upgrade due to stick sizes) would have been a colossal $400 ($840 today).

Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember, so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway; it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native experience, rather than living on the internet through some piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software.

Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM, rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.

It could start X, but only very, very slowly

At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web became a reality for me as well.

Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and plenty of lynx for web.
by fragmede | 2025-07-19 19:17:38+00:00
To the article's point, I built my own version of your agro tool that I use to manage my own git worktrees. Even if I had known about your project, I still would have built my own, because if I build it (with LLM assistance, obvs) then I get to design it for myself.

Looking at other industries, music production is probably the one to look at. What was once the purview of record labels with recording studios that cost a million dollars to outfit, is now a used MacBook and, like, $1,000 of hardware/software. The music industry has changed, dramatically, as a result of the march of technology, and thus so will software. So writing software will go the way of the musician. What used to be a middle class job as a trumpet player in NYC before the advent of records, is now only a hobby except for the truely elite level practicioners.
by pbronez | 2025-07-19 19:18:16+00:00
Your license is interesting. To meet your intent, I suggest you revisit this definition:

> “Military Entity" means any armed forces branch, defense department, or military organization of any nation or alliance.

As written, this only applies to nation states. It excludes many kinds of human organizations that use force to impose their will on others. The word for this is “Terrorist.”

While that term has been applied to many groups for many reasons, it technically means “the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims.”

If you add Terrorism + Nation-State Militaries should cover most everyone you intend here, including organized crime and private military contractors. You could add “financial gain” to the definition if you want to ensure those last two are captured.
by Herring | 2025-07-19 19:18:19+00:00
Different perspective: I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes like 20 pages of rambling text by an amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends, and they all love the new style.

My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care enough to ask them to do so. Those 4 pages needed a whole lot of fine-tuning. But I'm optimistic eventually people will figure it out.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-19 19:19:25+00:00
Tagged templates probably won’t help, or will be quite messy. But you can just use a thunk with some parameter destructuring:

const tpl = ({ name }) => `hello ${name}`; const n1 = tpl({ name: "joe" }); const n2 = tpl({ name: "bob" });

Or if you don’t like the duplication of property names, you could do it without destructuring:

const tpl = (o) => `hello ${o.name}`;

Look for the free online book ”You don’t know JS”, it is good reading.
by ModernMech | 2025-07-19 19:20:24+00:00
> But there is also the area of boilerplate, where non-LLM-AI-based IDEs for a few decades already help a lot with templates and "smart" completion.

The thing for me is that AI writing the boilerplate feels like the brute force solution, compared to investing in better language and tooling design that may obviate the need for such boilerplate in the first place.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-19 19:20:59+00:00
I don’t think it should be made illegal, it should be made impractical.

One way would be to ensure proper competition in the payments space. If there were dozens of options then some of them would decide that it’s a competitive advantage to ignore the busybodies and cater to people who want to buy this stuff. We see this at work with hosting. There’s a multitude of options and it doesn’t seem like adult sites have much trouble finding a host that will allow them, even if others might reject them.

Another would be to regulate payment processors like common carriers and require them to serve everyone equally regardless. We see this model with the Post Office. As long as you’re not sending something that will compromise the safety of the workers, they’ll ship it.
by efitz | 2025-07-19 19:21:10+00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about what AI means about being human. Not about apocalypses or sentience or taking our jobs, but about “what is a human” and “what is the value of a human”.

All my life I’ve taken for granted that your value is related to your positive impact, and that the unique value of humans is that we can create and express things like no other species we’ve encountered.

Now, we have created this thing that has ripped away many of my preconceptions.

If an AI can adequately do whatever a particular person does, then is there still a purpose for that person? What can they contribute? (No I am not proposing or even considering doing anything about it).

It just makes me sad, like something special is going away from the world.
by z3c0 | 2025-07-19 19:21:39+00:00
I'm a native English speaker who asks myself the same questions on most emails. You can use LLM outputs all you want, but if you're worried about the tone, LLM edits drive the tone to a level of generic that ranges from milquetoast, to patronizing, to outright condescending. I expect some will even begin to favor pushy emails, because at least it feels human.
by jimt1234 | 2025-07-19 19:21:53+00:00
I worked at a small hotel during college. A couple of girls wanted to rent a room, but they didn't have a credit card. We didn't rent rooms without credit cards, but I made an exception. They paid for the room in cash and provided a small deposit. The girls were so sweet, how could anything go wrong? Well, they threw a party and completely trashed the room. Lots of damage. The police eventually showed up, but the girls were gone. The ID they provided turned out to be a fugazi. They played me.
by aorth | 2025-07-19 19:22:20+00:00
> Why should we believe that these people won’t simply capture more power with more powerful technology?

This is exactly what I suspect will happen. Large companies have consistently and repeatedly destroyed good faith by their behavior and I don't see that changing any time soon. I'm very pessimistic.

Tech-savvy users can host their own infrastructure, install ad blockers, refuse to use social media, fund open source projects, etc, but what about the rest of the people in the world?
by rconti | 2025-07-19 19:22:52+00:00
I'd ask support, if you care. I just took a glance at the forums over on forums.sonic.net, and I'd expect a huge outcry about such a change, and don't see anything. Agreed it doesn't matter in principle (hell, I can't ever use more than about 1.25Gbps even on download), but the downgrade would bother me.
by davepeck | 2025-07-19 19:23:14+00:00
Hah!

T-strings use the exact same syntax as f‑strings, but their “format spec” (the part after the optional :, like .2f) can effectively be anything.

That might make creating a quiz tricky? With f‑strings, Python immediately calls format() on that spec; with t‑strings, it's simply captured in Interpolation.format_spec. It's up to your code to decide whether to call format() or do something entirely different with this value.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-19 19:23:22+00:00
> That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever

When you look at a single gene, you can see there’s no benefit. But when you look at the gene in contacts of the whole genome, there could certainly be a benefit to having a slower COMT enzyme.

For example, in someone with higher homocysteine, this would be an advantage.

So you see the problem, you see the gene is bad because of looking at the gene as an individual, but I see it as probably beneficial when I look at the whole genome. And this is why I am against gene editing. Unless you take the gene, you wanna edit in the full context of the whole genome you don’t see the bad effects it might have in the long run. And who is doing that? nobody.
by distantprovince | 2025-07-19 19:23:46+00:00
I can see the similarity yes! Although I do feel like the distance between handwritten letter and an email is shorter than between email and LLM generated email. There's some line it crossed. Maybe it's that email provided some benefit to the reader too. Yes, there's less character, but you receive it faster, you can easily save it, copy it, attach a link or a picture. You may even get lucky and receive an .exe file as a bonus! LLM does not provide any benefit for the reader though, it just wastes their resources on yapping that no human cared to write.
by stefan_ | 2025-07-19 19:23:49+00:00
The day infosec nerds get rid of their unhealthy obsession with expiration and realize that systems irrecoverably breaking on an arbitrary random instant or requiring a true source of time to work are REALLY FUCKING INCOMPATIBLE with the real world, they might actually get something done. Until then, please don't bother the rest of us trying to get work done (and having to cleanup the mess you made - what do you mean you can't just update it?!)
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-07-19 19:23:57+00:00
No, i fully disagree.

The economic viability to do proper journalism was already destroyed by the ad supported click and attention based internet. (and particular the way people consume news through algorithmic social media)

I believe most independent news sites have been economically forced into sensationalism and extremism to survive. Its not what they wilfully created.

Personally, i find that any news organisations that is still somewhat reputable have source of income beyond page visits and ads; Be it a senior demorgaphic that still subscribe to the paper, loyal reader base that pay for the paywall, or government sponsoring its existence as public service.

Now what if you cut out the last piece of income journalists rely on to stay afloat? We simply fire the humans and tell an AI to summarise the other articles instead, and phrase it how people want to hear it.

And thats a frightening world.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-19 19:24:25+00:00
Debit cards are really common in the US as well. Pretty much every bank gives you one with a checking account and they’re accepted everywhere. You’ll have no problem never getting a credit card, aside from a couple of very specific cases such as renting a car where they’ll require a substantial deposit if you don’t use a credit card.

But it’s irrelevant to this issue, because the debit cards are still handled by Visa or Mastercard.
by like_any_other | 2025-07-19 19:24:33+00:00
The article pretends to be nuanced, while entirely ignoring how holding platforms liable for content published by others, and imposing no liability for erroneously censoring legal content, leads to over-censorship and chilling effects, not to mention deputizes private corporations to act as judge and jury on what speech is permitted.

In its world, the worst part about censorship [1] is that it's "not fun". Any concerns (never described except in the vaguest of terms) someone might have are dismissed confidently and without citing any evidence [2].

[1] The article never calls it "censorship" in its own words, only when quoting others. It only ever uses the mild, generic term "regulation".

[2] But decision-makers who consider the realities in their countries to develop reasonable regulations and also invest in longer-term, sustainable solutions—such as digital literacy—can chart a path that addresses the challenges of the day without compromising the democratic foundations they aim to protect.
by buovjaga | 2025-07-19 19:24:52+00:00
> It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.

I didn't try it, but this seems interesting: https://github.com/jesse-greathouse/eIRC

"eIRC is a modern, scalable enterprise messaging architecture built on the IRC protocol. Designed for organizations that require ephemeral, real-time communication without the heavy operational overhead of pub/sub systems like Apache Kafka, eIRC delivers high-throughput, low-latency chat experiences while minimizing memory and CPU usage per user."

It does support history as well: "IRC History Bridge: Implement Redis-backed buffer for message replay".
by c1ccccc1 | 2025-07-19 19:25:04+00:00
I meant in a general sense that it's better when reporting measurements/estimates of real numbers to report the uncertainty of the estimate alongside the estimate, instead of using some kind of janky rounding procedure to try and communicate that information.

You're absolutely right that if you have a binary random variable like "IMO gold by 2026", then the only thing you can report about its distribution is the probability of each outcome. This only makes it even more unreasonable to try and communicate some kind of "uncertainty" with sig-figs, as the person I was replying to suggested doing!

(To be fair, in many cases you could introduce a latent variable that takes on continuous values and is closely linked to the outcome of the binary variable. Eg: "Chance of solving a random IMO problem for the very best model in 2025". Then that distribution would have both a mean and a variance (and skew, etc), and it could map to a "distribution over probabilities".)
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-19 19:25:45+00:00
If you take the case of sickle cell anemia, you’ll find this is not the case. You need to understand more about genetics and why these mutation survive over generations. They don’t survive by accident they survive because when they are heterogeneous, they are beneficial to the population. It’s only the unlucky child that ends homozygous that will suffer from illness. But that is the balance and sacrifice nature makes to keep a population alive. It’s indifferent and amoral, it’s utilitarian. And it’s way beyond the comprehension of human knowledge.
by dredmorbius | 2025-07-19 19:25:45+00:00
NB: "average" can mean any of three measures of central tendency: the mean (sum/count), the median (middle value), or the mode (most frequently occurring value). All three may be valid choices in specific contexts.

Whilst it's common to interpret "average" as "mean", this isn't strictly accurate or reliable.

The Economist's article errs in failing to distinguish which measure of central tendency is actually meant by "average".
by thechao | 2025-07-19 19:26:29+00:00
I wonder if it's possible to not lock themselves into an ABI with a built in vtable implementation? I kinda get where they're coming from: let vtables be a user problem; but, yeah, modern compilers can do magic when they "know" the rules for built in vtables. It kinda feels like they're leaving a real performance opportunity on the ground?
by wolfgang42 | 2025-07-19 19:26:51+00:00
I think what you want is to just make a function and pass it the values:

const template = ({name}) => `hello ${name}`; const n1 = template({ name: 'joe' });

(Tagged templates won’t help here because the bit in curly braces is an expression which is evaluated to a value first; you’d need some kind of macro system to get access to the original variable name at runtime.)