MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by budududuroiu | 2025-07-08 01:32:26+00:00
Unrelated to article per se, but I’ve noticed a distinctive shift as to who tourism-dependent countries cater to. Thailand, Malaysia, etc. all shifted their tourism to cater to the Chinese tourist market, as Westerners don’t spend as big when travelling. Both places have big signs in mandarin in the airport going 友誼長存, meaning long lasting friendship (between our countries). Personally, I’ve never seen this level of glazing towards any Western country before.

Similar thing with luxury brands. While Louis Vuitton is closing stores in SF, they’ve custom built a huge boat-shaped one in Shanghai.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-08 01:33:32+00:00
> I wrote this the other day:

>> Hallucinations can sometimes serve the same role as TDD. If an LLM hallucinates a method that doesn’t exist, sometimes that’s because it makes sense to have a method like that and you should implement it.

A detailed counterargument to this position can be found here[0]. In short, what is colloquially described as "LLM hallucinations" do not serve any plausible role in software design other than to introduce an opportunity for software engineers to stop and think about the problem being solved.

See also Clark's third law[1].

0 - https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphiz...

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-08 01:35:32+00:00
The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.

Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.

Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?

And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
by Hilift | 2025-07-08 01:35:32+00:00
> Brusatte writes that while a Tyrannasaur could indeed run quite fast, adults couldn’t move as quickly as their young. Therefore, an adult wouldn't be able to speed up enough to match the horsepower of a Jeep like it does as it trails Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler in Spielberg's film.

I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-07-08 01:35:55+00:00
and a lot more shit to break. nice thing about a cheap car is it has manual seat adjustment, an AC and a radio.

My friend just bought a 20 year old volvo and the locking gas cap malfunctioned while we were being shown the vehicle and testing all the buttons out. The dealer just took a screwdriver and popped the lid with a screwdriver - now the gas cap doesn't latch at all.
by eadmund | 2025-07-08 01:35:57+00:00
> The business leaders pumping all this money of course don’t understand the technology.

True enough!

> They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, at the cost of shipping shittier products.

I imagine that they believe they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, shipping products at either the same level of quality for the same price or for a lower level of quality at a lower price.

> The first real cost is hypothetical: What if those business leaders are correct and they can gleefully dispose of millions of employees?

I am absolutely certain that when Tim Bray needs a ditch dug on his property, he does not insist that the contractors use spoons. I am pretty sure that he does not insist that the timber for his house be hand-sawn only. I am pretty sure that he does not drive a horse and buggy. I am pretty sure that he does not grow all his own food by hand, nor does he require that all his food be grown by subsistence farmers. I am absolutely certain that the computers he uses for work and play are not hand-built from raw inputs like sand and rubber trees, but are instead the end product of a massive industrial supply chain no single man can hold in his head. I think well enough of him that I expect he is not gleeful at the thought of how many more jobs he could create if only he abstained from all technology developed after, say, 753 B.C.; why will he not extend that same grace to business executives?

I’m being a bit ridiculous, but that’s kind of the point. Technological innovations free up labour for more productive uses. If you go back far enough, most of our ancestors lived miserable, short lives of back-breaking effort. It wasn’t until the 1920 census that the majority of Americans lived in cities.

There’s no ‘mental stench’ (to use his infelicitous phrase) involved in using technology to reduce the amount of precious human labour required to achieve an end. Desktop publishing made high-quality output accessible to a much larger number of people than before; so too has generative AI.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-08 01:36:30+00:00
This isn't a new trend.

When it comes to luxury, some of this trend is even on the way out. If you at Estee Lauder's earnings calls, they are having serious issues because of the drop spending in duty free zones by Chinese.

Overall you're right of course, just thought I'd add an anecdote that I happen to recall.
by grumpymuppet | 2025-07-08 01:36:35+00:00
There are enormous pressures on a new parent -- stress about getting back to a normal work routine and lack of sleep compound into a unique kind of stress and things start to slip.

For me: I decided I could just slow down a bit. Standing out isn't worth the stress. I don't want to slack, but I don't feel compelled to cram productivity into every moment.
by TZubiri | 2025-07-08 01:36:53+00:00
Beware, the feature in OP isn't something that people would have found useful, it's not like chatgpt assigned to OP's business a request from a user in some latent consumer-provider space, as if chatgpt were some kind of market maker connecting consumers with products, like a google with organic content or ads, or linkedin or producthunt.

No, what actually happened is that OP developed a type of chatgpt integration, and a shitty one at that, chatgpt could have just directed the user to the site and told them to upload that image to OP's site. But it felt it needed to do something with the image, so it did.

There's no new value add here, at least yet, maybe if users started requesting changes to the sheet I guess, not what's going on.
by bentley | 2025-07-08 01:37:16+00:00
> There was an expectation that if you traveled to another city, you should sacrifice to its god.

The Bible even has the example of Naaman the Aramean, who after being convinced of the might of Israel’s God, asked for a gift of two mule‐loads of Israeli earth so he could worship Him after returning home. (2 Kings 5:17)
by II2II | 2025-07-08 01:38:02+00:00
I had a watch that was sitting in the closet for a few years (cheap watch, broken strap). It was not only keeping time after several years of neglect, but the time was reasonably accurate. It did not have any high-tech features like time synchronization. It did not even have the benefit of the time being adjusted manually twice a year.

But that's not really the point. For most people a smart watch has as much to do with time keeping as a smartphone has to do with telephony. The devices earned their name due to the form factor rather than the intended use.
by dotancohen | 2025-07-08 01:38:03+00:00
I see, thank you.

Another thing that I'm sure you explored, and I'd love to hear how it went, would be to rearrange the elements in the vectors such that perhaps the denser parts could be more contiguous, and the sparser parts could be more contiguous, on average. That sounds like something that would be easier to compress. Were the distributions such that a rearrangement like this might have been possible? Or were they very evenly distributed?

I.e. could you have rearranged a Gaussian-like distribution into a Poisson-like distribution?
by dietr1ch | 2025-07-08 01:38:50+00:00
TDD meets LLM-driven API design.

I recall that early on a coworker was saying that ChatGPT hallucinated a simpler API than the one we offered, albeit with some easy to fix errors and extra assumptions that could've been nicer defaults in the API. I'm not sure if this ever got implemented though, as he was from a different team.
by simoncion | 2025-07-08 01:39:54+00:00
> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.

Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.

> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.

There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.
by rockemsockem | 2025-07-08 01:40:25+00:00
You're assuming discrimination on the basis of groups. That seems bad to me.

Laws and their enforcement are a clusterfuck. To achieve greater justice we should strive towards better judgements overall.

God, stop with the group on group bs please and engage with things the way they're written without injecting the entirety of your cynical worldview layered on top.
by brailsafe | 2025-07-08 01:41:17+00:00
To me, things like mobile-first responsive design and grid-based graphic design thinking are core components of designing for the web, so it's a bit wild to me that Figma, with such popularity, is just now getting grids, and as far as I'm aware no GUI tool has ever succeeded at building a capable visual responsive design tool close to on-par with just designing in the browser.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-08 01:41:34+00:00
> how you think that the US entities are using your data against you? And why you are so certain that Chinese entities are not?

Kinda pointing the obvious but...we're straight discussing this on a US forum managed by a US company. The major social media outlets used outside of China are US based. I'm writing this on a US designed device and OS.

If you live outside of the US and China, you're probably giving up tons of data to US entities for sheer convenience while China would need to go hack it. Getting a Chinese OS smartphone would change that a bit, but still not _that_ much IMHO.
by NaOH | 2025-07-08 01:42:20+00:00
Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44444626 - July 2025 (89 comments)

Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307138 - May 2024 (335 comments)
by duxup | 2025-07-08 01:42:46+00:00
I just wish we could roll back most of that security system.

It's a mess. Every time it's going through these lines with TSA employees playing hall monitor shouting often conflicting instructions, often within earshot of each other and the backup is NOT the passengers, it's the machines. Everyone hurries up and waits for the machines to scan bags.

Sporting events in the US, same thing. I'm outside in a huge crowd of people in public where anyone could do something terrible to these densely packed people on the street. They're all waiting to go through metal detectors so nobody for some reason wold choose to wait in line to go inside and do something terrible, inside. As opposed to just doing it right then and there ...
by p_ing | 2025-07-08 01:43:24+00:00
What sort of tension is derived from watching a bunch of plant-eaters on the plains? The creature feature is what audiences want -- the T-Rex 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear' chase scene is iconic. As is that roar. Heck, so are the grossly mis-sized velociraptors. When they're in the kitchen with the kids, watching those animals be nervous of all things -- the entire scene is a treat.
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-08 01:44:05+00:00
It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.)

Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would put my money on the Madeira any day.
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-08 01:45:37+00:00
I think this is a great question! There are also many good vampire movies.

All I can think of is that zombies and vampires are so deeply engrained in our stories that they are merely part of the setting and the real movie is about something else. It's like saying why are there so many movies set in New York?

If this theory is correct, then it also explains why we can have lots of alien invasion movies but only a couple of good Alien movies.
by ordu | 2025-07-08 01:46:16+00:00
> With all that said, I prefer to first explain my job in an “explain like I’m 5” style and, if the other party indicates interest, add detail and jargon

It is just your choice. I'd prefer a short answer full of jargon. It gives people the opportunity to clarify what they want to ask. Do they really want to know details? Or they want a rough idea of an answer? Or they just filling silence with small talk?

Though other times, when I really want to talk about it, I'd go with some ELI5 explanation, while watching people, are they interested or not?

> Honestly, I think not appreciating simple explanations indicates both low mathematical/logical and social/emotional intelligence.

It can be. But mostly it is not. People are sending signals by choosing one form of the answer or another, you just need to decode their signals. And it will be better, if you don't jump to conclusions about their persistent psychological traits, based on the first impression.
by zmgsabst | 2025-07-08 01:46:30+00:00
> This is not a failure of the experts to understand what's going on.

> We don't have a model of why it works / if there's a more comprehensible layer of reality below it.

Counterpoint:

You’ve just admitted they don’t understand what’s going on — they merely have descriptive statistics. No different than a DNN that spits out incomprehensible but accurate answers.

So this is an example affirming that QM isn’t understood.
by jerf | 2025-07-08 01:48:47+00:00
The apparent "immense cost to run Jurassic Park" is largely a side effect of Hollywood's need to stack the deck to an implausible degree in favor of the dinosaurs so they can escape and create havoc and eat people.

In reality, if we assume the dinosaurs can breed true, they wouldn't be particularly more expensive than any normal zoo exhibit. We contain lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, venomous snakes, alligators, and all sorts of other things almost perfectly safely, completely routinely, and the dinosaurs would largely be no different; such exceptions as there may be we simply wouldn't have to keep them in a zoo. (I'm mostly thinking the pteradactyls here.) Smaller zoos wouldn't keep the larger ones around any more than they keep large herds of elephants and giraffes.

There's no reason it wouldn't simply be part of every zoo in the world to have a dinosaur section after a while.

But in the world of Jurassic Park, there is no such thing as people who know how to contain animals. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to build a dinosaur park in a world that is presumably losing hundreds or thousands of people a year to lions and tigers and bears in conventional zoos in which they are utterly inadequately contained, and all the people running the zoos have crazily bizarre reasons why even so no one is allowed to have any sort of effectual weaponry.
by asoneth | 2025-07-08 01:50:05+00:00
> Can someone help me understand when this bifurcation happened

The distinction is as old as art and design. If I had to pick modern moments that articulated it well I'd go with Arts and Crafts followed by Bauhaus.

> solve the right problem for the right people

Solving problems is the core of design and a design can be evaluated on the basis of how well it solves a problem. Whereas art is free to simply exist. Many works have elements of both, but if you hire someone to solve a problem and they believe their job is to make art then you'll both be disappointed.

I'm unsure what motivated the rest of your post though I can feel your frustration. I will say that bureaucracies and processes have been around for centuries, they just shift language every decade or so. There has also always been a tension between the people who Do and the people who Decide but both are necessary for a functional organization.
by tom_m | 2025-07-08 01:50:05+00:00
Your business isn't the code. It's a combination of things, but you can't just expect to write some code and go win. You have to sell it. Market it. Maintain it. Listen to customers. Support customers.

A very long time until a 1-person unicorn. For good reason. You need a lot more than software. Even if you say oh well AI can also automate marketing and customer support, etc. Bulls---. Only to a degree.

You want to know why Facebook was successful while others weren't? Or why people couldn't just copy them? It's not the software.
by r0ze-at-hn | 2025-07-08 01:51:04+00:00
This is within the larger story of Homo Sapiens. Because CYP21A2 variants are much older and come from the primate tree there would have been continuous and separate adaptations on each branch. Homo Erectus improved language today and is associated with better estrogen signaling while Neanderthals went down the immune system and grain path. Denisovan which did interbreed with Neanderthals reporting the same rs6467 variant might have pursued another branch of selection pressure such as TAAR, and I highly suspect, but have not confirmed, kept or selected for longer AR promoter reducing AR signaling. The most famous of all is Denisovan introducing a Zinc deficiency variant which is such a good adaptation it is found in all non-african humans and notably can reduce ER signaling directly via BHMT. The combination of each adaptation increases the fecundity of atypical HPA axis individuals and the associated intelligence.

Because humans can develop a zona reticularis in their adrenals (unlike marmoset which has partially solved this with an adaptation) the way HPA axis variants interact with steroidogenesis influences sexual differentiation and reproduction in homo sapiens there is constant push and pull.
by danpalmer | 2025-07-08 01:51:28+00:00
That's true of most companies, unless you're a customer or they think they can sell you something, they're unlikely to give you much time even if you can theoretically call them up.

In this case, you point to the hypocrisy of being uncontactable but demanding your contact details, except that Google does provide support to customers, and in this relationship they are essentially a customer of your CT log, and given the criticality of that service they rightly expect the service provider to be held to a high standard. I don't think they're holding you to a standard that they themselves wouldn't agree to be held to for a service that critical. I've got to make it clear that this is my personal opinion though.
by dekhn | 2025-07-08 01:52:08+00:00
What I've done is create one github project in my repo that is public, well-architected, implemented, tested, and commented. That's what I share if somebody wants a code example. I wrote the whole thing from scratch based on personal knowledge and some documentation (pyparsing and SMILES strings). I wrote it while working for a company, and went through their open-sourcing of personal work process.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-08 01:52:08+00:00
The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project).

Eh, that's underselling Luis Alvarez a bit. He wasn't just "a physicist," he was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the twentieth century's few Renaissance men. My favorite Alvarez hack was when he used muon imaging to 'X-ray' the Great Pyramid. He didn't find any hidden chambers, but later researchers did.

In the Alvarez mass-extinction hypothesis, he simply followed where the evidence led, unlike the supposed professionals in the field.
by rhinojosa | 2025-07-08 01:53:45+00:00
But as an owner of the Dyson WashG1 mop, It is quite magnificently the greatest cleaning equipment I enjoy using often. It guides well, vacuums well, mops amazing and overall a marvel in design and function. It's a must for those with pets and little ones tracking everything everywhere. There is literally only two design complaints I have, the pull out tray to clean should have a cocking slide trigger to release all the residue and junction joint frame from the dual canisters is a little to cheap plastic for me, it's only a matter of time before the latches break.
by userbinator | 2025-07-08 01:54:28+00:00
There’s a smaller gap in smartphone makers, where Apple and Samsung dominate globally and in the USA, but once you look at the next manufacturers after the leaders you notice that names like Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, and Huawei together constitute a sizable global share. And, yes, those are all Chinese brands.

There were a lot more Chinese Android "brands" (most of them probably OEM'd, but I digress) around 10-15 years ago. Ainol, Blackview, Cubot, Doogee, Elephone, Gionee, Goophone, iOcean, Jiayu, KingZone, Leagoo, Meizu, Nckia (yes, seriously), NO.1, Oukitel, TCL, THL, Ulephone, Umidigi, UniHertz, Vivo, Zopo... how many of those still exist today? It's rather interesting that the ones which still do have gone the same user-hostile route as Apple and Samsung. The era of Shanzhai has unfortunately mostly passed.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-08 01:55:25+00:00
If only money could absolve liability. Liability's why crazed gunmen target concert venues and dance clubs and sporting events, it's because they know it sends a message directly to the top. If you're a CEO that has to contend with your customers worrying for their lives, you have a critically threatened business. Street violence is zero-sum by comparison.

Sufficiently traumatized people (read: average American) will want to stop this before it happens, particularly when their bottom line counts on it. The administrative class is more than willing to degrade your experience if it ensures the survival of their business in an unsafe environment. It will happen again.
by markbao | 2025-07-08 01:57:52+00:00
I don’t see how it could be categorically wrong. To me it’s categorically right: Auto Layout specifically is intended to restrict the possible layout options.

You trade off adding limitations for how much you can do in a design and move things around freely, and in return you gain more convenience and less work needed to organize designs. You can change designs around quickly… as long as they’re within the rather confined limitations of Auto Layout.

I think the fundamental disagreement is that one person sees creative empowerment as freedom from doing busywork, whereas another (including the author) sees it as freedom to experiment with a design without limits. Neither is inherently wrong, but the two are inherently in conflict.