MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deadbabe | 2025-07-30 13:51:45+00:00
Honestly I doubt this. You can learn endlessly and never get any closer to succeeding in something. It’s like the developer equivalent of people who keep reading business books and case studies and going to network events because they want to start a business.

After 1 or 2 failed side projects, you should have learned roughly 80% of what you need to know. A few more might get you the next 20%, but 17 failed projects is likely not teaching you anything you couldn’t have learned before, you’re just wasting time at that point.

The optimal amount of failures before a successful project is probably about 3. After that, you need to seriously consider that maybe you just don’t have what it takes and move on. Otherwise you spend your whole life chasing something that will probably never happen, and avoiding better opportunities.
by Groxx | 2025-07-30 13:51:54+00:00
Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the random upload slowdowns.

Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the software.

Every Dropbox user I've talked with has complained at length about the cost, and is looking for alternatives, but the marginally-better software keeps them there for now (gdrive and onedrive have a fair number more issues).

Yes, I think it matters. But they exploded their headcount and now they have to compete in areas they aren't anywhere near as good in (document management, etc) to make the higher profit they need to keep going, and raise the cost for everyone who doesn't use it.

Basically they went B2B and have been coasting in a gradual decline on their consumer side. A tale as old as time.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-30 13:52:02+00:00
Sure, and it wouldn't be surprising to see different pricing for realtime AI API usage vs slower (overnight, etc) response times (to fill up the seats and keep the hardware occupied). It remains to be seen how the dynamics of this works out though - function of cost of increasing capacity vs customer demand at various price points and service levels.

LLM pricing seems to still very much be up in the air though - models getting more efficient, serving hardware getting more efficient, use cases evolving, and not all providers operating with same business model (e.g. Meta, maybe China).
by lumost | 2025-07-30 13:52:15+00:00
It depends, there are certainly founders who come from sufficient money that the value of founding a unicorn is not material to their Net worth.

However I’d also suggest that the concentration of tech in the last decade is also partly due to startups chronically stiffing their employees on equity. The difference in compensation potential naturally forces a talent split where talent joins larger and much better compensated firms.
by mcdeltat | 2025-07-30 13:52:35+00:00
As someone into photography as a hobby, I don't get why we invest in smartphone cameras nor why people care. It all looks like the same trash.

If you want a photo to reminisce on, sure use a smartphone. In which case anything short of 1800s camera quality will do the job great. If you want to make a photo that might look good then do yourself a favour and get a cheap dedicated camera.
by throw0101c | 2025-07-30 13:52:55+00:00
> It's crazy seeing the people who cried "Political partisanship" and "Weaponization of government" are doing it all now, in a higher magnitude than anything they complained about.

Every accusation is an admission.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/every_accusation_is_a_confess...

* https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/karl-marx-enemy-quote/
by gitremote | 2025-07-30 13:53:03+00:00
The statement was "AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day."

Prompts are specific to LLMs. Most neural networks don't have prompts.

Additionally, prompts happen during LLM inference, not LLM training. There are many non-technical people who claim they have experience "training" LLMs, when they are just an end user who added a lot of tokens to the context window during inference.
by getnormality | 2025-07-30 13:53:04+00:00
I wonder what the role of RLHF is in this. It seems to be one of the more labor-intensive, proprietary, dark-matter aspects of the LLM training process.

Just like some humans may be conditioned by education to assume that all questions posed in school are answerable, RLHF might focus on "happy path" questions where thinking leads to a useful answer that gets rewarded, and the AI might learn to attempt to provide such an answer no matter what.

What is the relationship between the system prompt and the prompting used during RLHF? Does RLHF use many kinds of prompts, so that the system is more adaptable? Or is the system prompt fixed before RLHF begins and then used in all RLHF fine-tuning, so that RLHF has a more limited scope and is potentially more efficient?
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-30 13:53:06+00:00
>> She said that she is afraid of the world where a state can decide that they will plannedly un-live whole other nation and nobody is willing to do anything about that.

> You may explain her that this is a different face of the same world where a state has been targeted by hatred and terrorism for 80 years, and everybody insisted on them being patient and just live with it.

Being upset at the world and unwilling to engage in diplomacy is, thankfully, not a valid justification for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

> What's happening is sad, but it is not sadder than what preceded it.

The ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians is definitely sadder than what preceded it.
by Danau5tin | 2025-07-30 13:53:32+00:00
Exactly my first thought when I realised the cost! Currently LoRA is not supported by rLLM (The team told me they aim to support in next release), but it is certainly possible to port to verl directly or another RL framework for sure. I just did not have the time to port again (already done 2x as other RL frameworks had issues)
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-07-30 13:54:08+00:00
All I want is for dotnet watch to behave in a predictable way. In .NET 9, even when using —no-hot-reload, sometimes CSS changes to components are not picked up on Blazor components.

It’s so aggravating because ASP.NET with server side Blazor components really has it all: type safety, server-side components ala Astro, fantastic ORM model, great runtime perf. But this little issue makes dev quite tedious at present: did I mistype a Tailwind class name, or did dotnet watch miss the change?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-30 13:54:23+00:00
>regardless of how good technology gets

Technology increases aren't there so you work less hours for the same pay, they're there so your business owner gets more money form you working the same hours.

If a machine gets invented that can do your job it's not like you can now go home and relax for the rest of your life and still keep receiving your pay cheques. This utopia doesn't exist.
by ubermonkey | 2025-07-30 13:54:45+00:00
>Stuff like external cables actually are better for you as someone who isn’t a pro cyclist since shifting is smoother without under handle wraps, cables last longer with less tension in the brifter.

My bike doesn't have cables at all, since SRAM's electronic groups are wireless, and the brakes are hydraulic.

Actual gear range on a modern 11- or 12-speed bike can be FAR wider than you'd get with 7- or 8-. On gravel bikes where close ratios aren't important you can dwarf an 80s bike's range with a 1x setup. On road bikes, you can keep tight ratios that are great for faster paceline rides while still having a wider gear range.

I mean, then as now faster riders love a straight block cassette, right? In 1989 that might've meant 13-25 or so, with 7 or 8 cogs. My Giant is 10-28 with TWELVE cogs, but 10-30 and 10-33 are available, all of which preserve 1-tooth transitions at the low end of the block.

>People did big descents just fine on rim brakes for decades until they came out with disk and made it seem like an issue.

People had big families just fine for hundreds of years until they came out with vaccines and made it seem like an issue.

I mean, I kid, but in hilly or wet places disc brakes are a giant boon.
by jameskilton | 2025-07-30 13:54:49+00:00
Facebook / Meta and Mark in particular are an amazing case of someone who is, at least at this point, incapable of learning from past mistakes, or even recognizing the mistakes they have made and are continuing to make.

Facebook's mission of "connecting the world" turned out to be the absolute worst thing anyone should ever try to do. Humans are social creatures, yes, but every connection we make costs energy to maintain, and at a certain point (Dunbar's Number) we apply the minimal amount of energy and effort. With Internet anonymity, that means we are actually incapable of treating each other as people on the Internet, leading to the rise of toxicity and much, much worse.

Mark has never understood this, and as his fortune is built around not understanding this, he never will.

There is nothing good that will come from Meta's "superintelligence" and this vision is proof.
by sneak | 2025-07-30 13:54:58+00:00
That isn’t a snarky position; early employees in high output orgs like this generally work just as much as founders do.

The founders aren’t really taking on that much more risk than the rest of the early team; it’s the VC’s money, not theirs.

I absolutely don’t agree with the idea that employees deserve the same upside as founders (because I think initiative and persistence against adversity/inertia is insanely rare and valuable and should be rewarded immensely), but it is not an insane proposition.

It’s especially popular among people who think the actual work output is more important than the leadership initiative. Both are obviously essential, and founders do both, while employees do only the first (or they’d be founders themselves).
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-07-30 13:55:26+00:00
> Most tech-oriented people did

In fact it's the opposite. People who aren't into tech thinks Instagram is listening to them 24*7 to show feed and ads. There was even a hoax near my area among elderly groups that Whatsapp is using profile photo in illegal activity and many people removed their photo one time.

> I didn't, or I would have removed all of my websites from the public web years earlier than I did.

Your comment is public information. In fact posting anything in HN is a sure shot way to giving your content for AI training.
by Rooster61 | 2025-07-30 13:55:27+00:00
I was thinking along the same lines, but bigger. Mitochondria don't "shut down" when we sleep. If they did, we would die very quickly. If anything, they produce quite a bit of energy during things like REM sleep and digestion. I'm sure I'm missing some subtle details about HOW they "rest", but from a 30000 ft view, it's puzzling.
by lvl155 | 2025-07-30 13:56:11+00:00
Last time I commented on Zuck on HN I got a warning. That said, this stuff confirms for the 100th time that he is out of touch with reality. Perhaps that’s why he wanted to make VR work so badly. I think he might try to change Co’s name again since Meta doesn’t fit the bill anymore. How about they buy Intel and reverse merge just for the name?
by jon-wood | 2025-07-30 13:56:43+00:00
I think whether your take on this is correct depends on why people are doing side projects. Personally I do them for fun, there's some tool I kind of want to use, or a new programming language I want an excuse to play with. The side project is just a vehicle for that rather than something I expect to become a source of income.

I've got way more than 17 failed projects, and that's fine, because the project was never the point.
by herdethics | 2025-07-30 13:56:54+00:00
Sorry about that! I was just trying to answer the question, not debate. Hmm ... that seems to be the difficult part. How to concisely share tons of information - as people, including myself, would have a bunch of questions. I can't assume people will read the book, etc. Thanks for pointing that out, I will be thinking of better ways to go about this.
by cess11 | 2025-07-30 13:57:10+00:00
The Baghdad bombings are well known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bomb...

Nowadays I think the Lavon affair is less known, but it happened a couple of years before the emigration of jews from Egypt peaked in 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair

The zionist movement more or less invented modern terrorism and the state of Israel has always been a fervent sponsor of terrorism in Palestine and abroad. It has also consistently been a supporter of criminal, particularly genocidal, states, like apartheid South Africa, the tyranny in El Salvador and Guatemala, the timorese genocide, and so on.
by abxyz | 2025-07-30 13:57:13+00:00
“As recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose”

More people today are dying from starvation than people existed on earth 200 years ago. Celebrating our achievements in making shareholders rich is one thing, but to take credit for freeing the people. Yikes. Mark is more out of touch than seems possible.
by matrss | 2025-07-30 13:57:21+00:00
My point was that you don't have to take a photo of a receipt to run into this issue, actual machines specifically build to digitize receipts and other documents already made this kind of mistake.

No idea if this can happen with what modern smartphone cameras do to photos. If "AI" is involved then I would expect such issues to be possible because of the basic nature of them being random generators, just like how LLMs hallucinate stuff all the time. Other "enhancement" approaches might not produce issues like this.
by kylebenzle | 2025-07-30 13:57:31+00:00
Bitcoin (BTC) doesn't work at all for payments less than $100 (as by design) and so adding a second layer on to that only makes it MORE expensive, not less.

Like saying I can't afford my credit card fees so I'll just take a cash advance on my credit card, put the money in a bank account, then use a debit card for transactions. It makes no sense and would only work to trick a moron that doensn't understand how the system works.

Bitcoin (now called Bitcoin Cash) solved the problem 10+ years ago, then Blockstream hijacked the BTC GitHub repo and injected the SegWit and RBF code that killed the project.
by derdi | 2025-07-30 13:57:47+00:00
OK, if you're going to be prescriptive, I'm going to be prescriptive too.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/contentious "1. Marked by heated arguments or controversy." There are heated arguments about this (among laypeople). The people arguing heatedly happen to be wrong, but the dictionary doesn't say that the heated arguments must have merit, only that they happen.

BTW, your "There is literally no credible argument why 0 would be considered odd." suggests that you didn't read the linked Wikipedia page and didn't look at the results of the Mastodon poll. Take a look what actual laypeople self-report about their position on this issue.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-30 13:57:52+00:00
>- The PR has surprisingly little meat. It contains 128k lines, but most of them are AI-generated documentation (86K lines, 68%). It also contains 9K lines of AI-generated tests (7%). So the actual code is just 32K lines (25%).

When you hear about a huge PR or change this should be your default assumption regardless of whether AI or otherwise.

Most huge PRs are only a few thousand lines of "serious logic" code. That code then spawns a bunch of duplication of logic, stuff like adding a dozen few thousand line handling routines to convert a dozen inputs into some single thing. Those then spawn several times their own line count in docs and tests and whatnot.
by codingdave | 2025-07-30 13:57:59+00:00
Yep, we are in agreement. That is one reason that I am so adamant that people should not see college as a path to a job - if you need a job, get one. College can (and arguably should) be done later in life when you have the time, flexibility, and maturity to maximize what you get from education.

Frankly, if I had it to do over again, I'd work a few years first before going to school. The experience did have value, but I could have done far better when I was a little older.
by qprofyeh | 2025-07-30 13:57:59+00:00
Reads as RIP Metaverse to me.

Any time a CEO publishes such empty, wordy essays, it's probably earnings reporting time. I can't shake the feeling it's a public subreply at one of or a cluster of doubting investors, who started to doubt the CEOs vision for the company, or find the lack of one on a certain topic concerning.
by 9rx | 2025-07-30 13:58:18+00:00
Of course, that's why experts started pushing college/university as the way to find escape, with an understanding that people could use its research facilities to create capital instead of falling into the labor class.

But it was ultimately lost in translation. The layman heard: Go to college/university to become a more appealing laborer to employers. And thus nothing improved for the people; the promises of things like higher income never occurred — incomes have held stagnant.
by shazbotter | 2025-07-30 13:58:37+00:00
The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it.

I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.
by aschobel | 2025-07-30 13:58:51+00:00
> We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source. Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible.

So maybe no more open source because of "safety"?
by FinnLobsien | 2025-07-30 13:58:53+00:00
Interesting! I guess government doesn't equal government and highly depends on where you work and what you work on. The same way being a product manager at Google vs. a founding engineer at a startup vs. a research scientist at OpenAI are different, though they all "work in tech".

Plus, I'm in Europe and my friend runs his own startup, so very different environment.
by scythe | 2025-07-30 14:00:09+00:00
>In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.

No, I think the "other side of the story" here is laughably weak. Four measly charging stations in the whole city of Seattle owned by Tesla? That barely warrants a comment on Hacker News, much less a town hall.

And "contaminated land"? How contaminated are we talking about here? It's crippling to any hope of widespread brownfield redevelopment that something so minimally invasive could be shut down by nebulous, ill-defined contamination. Perhaps we need a standard grading system for land contamination instead of just lumping gasoline and arsenic in the same category.

>I am just as inclined to believe that this is some small pet project of interest to the author, who no one else really cares about, and he's invoking some grand criticism of government writ large as a way of bringing urgency and grandeur his idiosyncratic interest that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

I am inclined to think that this argument could be used to shut down any case study used to critique the bureaucracy. The idea that eight city-owned parking spaces are somehow personally important to anyone is weird enough to demand at least a little evidence.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-30 14:00:26+00:00
You mean the not-bitcoin bolt-on that pretty much mandates using a 3rd party wallet to ensure always online status and has been bleeding capacity for the last few years?

It would be a travesty if society decides bitcoin is the defacto payment crypto, in part because you need to use a totally separate service in order to reasonably send bitcoin.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-30 14:00:42+00:00
Is this not just reinventing the utmost basic portfolio website of quarter of a century ago? Are people not already doing this with cheap or even free turn-key templates? Could probably have an LLM excrete one in minutes.

I get daily outreach from fly-by-night operations in other countries using LLMs and templates to crap out the above, complete with client logos and project examples that don't belong to them. Where is the "proof"?

If you're aiming at devs, why would they use this over the likes of GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages?
by hopelite | 2025-07-30 14:00:46+00:00
Same here. It was movies and TV for my parents. I have thanked them for it on several occasions when it occurred to me as an adult how affected people are by having not just grown up watching various age inappropriate movies and were trained by TV in general, because their whole world view, their whole mental superstructure is extremely influenced by TV and movies.

It has clearly spread across the world to some degree, but I don’t think the average person even realizes just how much the post ~1920 American consciousness is trained on Hollywood, TV, movies. It has become a bit more diffuse lately due to decentralization of TV and movies, but the training on TV also seems to have gotten worse, even if in more covert ways because of the decentralization. You consume your TV drug in isolation and do not even talk about it anymore because everyone is watching different things at different times now. America has gone from the social drinker, the highlight of the party, to the binger I’m downs a bottle of vodka TV a day, alone.

Our culture is effectively centered around what is on the real life telescreen, the one that you carry around now, that knows where you are at all times and can listen in on you. Even Orwell could only imagine a world where telescreens were fixed and could be evaded at times, or maybe he just believed that.