MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjani | 2025-07-20 10:02:20+00:00
> cheese is worse than pork, for example

Such figures are usually "per gram of protein", in which case, sure. Thing is, it's very common for people to eat 200+ grams of pork in one meal, whereas e.g. grated cheese on a pasta dish is <10g. A big slice of cheese is 25-28g, and half the time it's significantly less than 100% actual cheese, with a good amount of filler. The only cheeses that one might eat 50g+ of in one sitting are extremely mild ones like mozzarella, and those are the easiest to replace.
by thomascountz | 2025-07-20 10:02:35+00:00
I often use the metaphor of LLMs as calculators.

Mathematicians use calculators, and so too do elementary school students, and grocery store clerks, and civil engineers. What each person needs from a calculator can be similar, but would you give a graphing calculator to the store clerk and expect them to be more "productive?"

Admittedly, my metaphor is leaky—and I also can't comment on the participants of the PR—but after reading the comments and the code itself, I'm getting a lot of "here’s a new calculator with a bunch of graphing functions, trigonometric menus, and poem generators—now go do the basic arithmetic you were already doing, but you work for the calculator now" vibes.

Said another way, it took me a lot more time and effort to understand what the bots were saying and if I agreed, than it did for me to formulate my own thoughts and questions.

Like the saying goes, "the best calculator is the one you have with you," and I'd much rather just use my own.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-07-20 10:03:29+00:00
And somehow we still see great reviews about everything.

I looked at this hotel made from containers recently:

https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html

I thought it is an interesting concept. And it has a rating of 8.5 out of 10 on booking.com, which means "Very good".

But then I read through the details and the reviews (sorted by new) and see:

You can hear your neighbors.

You cannot open the windows.

Staff enters the room before your checkout time.

The rooms and the stuff inside the rooms are dirty.

Lots of broken amenities, including the air condition.

For check-in you have to enter your passport-id (where does it end up?).

And on and on an on ...

How is that "Very good"?

What threshold should one assign to book something on booking.com these days? 9.9/10?
by latexr | 2025-07-20 10:04:35+00:00
> It is the most incredible technology ever created by this point in our history imo and the cynicism on HN is astounding to me.

What astounds me is how proponents can so often be so rosy-eyed and hyperbolic, apparently without ever wondering if it may be them who are wrong. Or if maybe there is a middle ground. The people you are calling cynics are probably seeing you as naive.

LLMs are definitely not “the most incredible technology ever created by this point in our history”. That is hyperbolic nonsense in line with Pichai calling them “more profound than electricity and fire”. Listen to your words! Really consider what you’re saying.
by JadeNB | 2025-07-20 10:05:02+00:00
> Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.

Whole Foods used to be the place to go for quality throughout the store. It seems to me that now you can still get plenty of quality, but it's not guaranteed if you just go and grab something off the shelf. Instead, you have to know what's worth buying and what's not.

(I can't back this up with examples, because exactly this phenomenon means that I don't shop at Whole Foods as much. I could be wrong.)
by ath3nd | 2025-07-20 10:05:50+00:00
This is not inflation, it's divorced from all factors, these companies are raking in record profits, and they still squeeze out price increases, smaller seats, worse customer service, just because you have no alternative, you gotta take it.

It's called "Enshittification": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification. It's just the free market and the corporations giving a big middle finger to its clients. It's the same reason Microsoft can do all of the above:

- "The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April"

- "Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting about 6,000 people."

- "These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-cutting-3percen...

If you are thinking this is in any way tied to inflation, it's not. It's just greed and the absence of laws to curb that greed. So you are gonna get less and worse for more money, and like it, because the monopolies are lobbying the governments and can do literally what they want to do in countries susceptible to it.

When Broadcom tried these kinds of stunts in civilized countries, they quickly got shown their place:

- https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015489/dutch-court-for...

- https://licenseware.io/broadcom-faces-eu-scrutiny-over-contr...

Does 800% and 1500% price increase sound to you like related to inflation? Enshittification is not out of our hands if we elect governments that have our interest in mind.
by torginus | 2025-07-20 10:06:52+00:00
Another thing might be crucial equipment. One of my friends works in the film industry, and they told me the insane dance every that goes on every set. A-lister actors, directors, and insanely expensive equipment is flown in from all around the world, and they literally often have hours of having everything in the same place, during which window they have to record the scenes, then everyone flies off to somewhere else, and the meter is ticking to the tune of god know how many thousands of dollars per hour. No mistakes or delays are possible.

He once told me of a story when some exotic piece of equipment broke, and there was NO replacement on in Europe. After a mad scrable, they did find something and they had to fly in that special camera rig thing on a private jet.
by motorest | 2025-07-20 10:07:12+00:00
> Haha, wait until you hear how long and how many people it takes to change the text for a single button at a company like Google

I feel this is a needlessly obtuse statement. I'll explain you why, as I've worked professionally with frontend development. From your comment it seems you don't have that type of context.

The text that is expected to feature in a UI element is a critical factor in cross cutting concerns such as product management and UX design, and it involves things like internationalization and accessibility support. This means that if you change a line of text, it needs to be translated to all supported languages, and the translation needs to meet usability and GUI requirements. This check needs to be done in each and every single locale supported.

I can give you a very concrete example. Once I was tasked with changing a single line of text in a button featured in a dialog. It turns out the french translation ended up being too long that forced line breaks. The UI framework didn't handled those line breaks well and reflowed the whole UI, causing a huge mess. This required new translation requests, but it turned out that the new translations were too vague and ambiguous. Product Managers got involved because the french translation resulted in poor user experience. Ultimately the whole dialog was redesigned.

But to you it's just a text on a single button, isn't it?
by birn559 | 2025-07-20 10:07:35+00:00
Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general.

European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory.

Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
by jstummbillig | 2025-07-20 10:07:53+00:00
Quality has improved across many dimensions in nearly every domain I’m familiar with. In fact, I’d argue there are very few products or services that couldn’t be made today to a higher standard than at any point in the past, if we chose to prioritize that.

But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Products that were once expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough quality, to billions more people around the world.

Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win, and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to mourn.
by bradley13 | 2025-07-20 10:08:06+00:00
Somewhat related: I have an acquaintance who maintains the IT infrastructure for a rich guy's house. Lots of smart TVs. Lots of cameras, with local data storage. Lots of IoT.

At a guess, it's a 20% to 25% gig. Something is always breaking or misbehaving. The rich guy probably notices almost none of the problems. If he had to maintain it himself, he would insist on simplifying things.
by vdupras | 2025-07-20 10:08:11+00:00
The examples that the article give are "memory size and CPU speed for computers or horsepower and miles per gallon for cars", that is, technological improvements that would be a reason to adjust inflation value further down because "quality" went up. Without, of course, taking overall lifetime of the product.

So this would in fact make the inflation misreporting problem even worse.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-20 10:09:01+00:00
I said they'd try to break them. Which requires vigilance and regulators stepping in with an enormous hammer. So far national regulators have been pretty weaksauce which is indeed very frustrating.

I'm not against improving the system, and I even proposed something, but I am against letting data abusers run riot because the current system isn't quite 100% perfect.

I'll still take what we have over what we had before (nothing, good luck everyone).
by raspasov | 2025-07-20 10:09:11+00:00
"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia."

This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense.

I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.

I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.
by glimshe | 2025-07-20 10:09:37+00:00
Thank you - the old system is very much like what I faced in the 90s in Latin America. You do the test, get blindly ranked and are chosen based on the number of openings and your ranking. You could have been the least diverse human in the world - your test scores did the talking.

But the new system is actually not too different from many universities in the US. I never got a rejection letter from Yale but I don't think they are that specific in why you got rejected. As the parent of an American high schooler, I have to deal with this subjectivity myself. We hear things like "School X loves people who volunteer at nursing homes".

There are companies specialized in guiding your kid towards the subjective requirements of each school, including training your kid to say the things that certain schools like to hear
by petesergeant | 2025-07-20 10:09:37+00:00
As you point out, speaking to a human rather than AI is no worse than speaking to a human who isn’t empowered to do anything. Certainly ten years ago in the UK, if you called a customer service number and ended up speaking to someone with a thick Indian accent, it was unlikely — through no fault of their own — that they were empowered to do anything to solve your problem.
by kmarc | 2025-07-20 10:10:20+00:00
> you can argue that borg can just be scripted

And that's what I did myself. Organically it grew to ~200 lines, but it sits in the background (created a systemd unit for it, too) and does its job. I also use rclone to store the encrypted backups in an AWS S3 bucket

I so much forget about it that sometimes I have to remind myself to test it out if it still works (it does).

Original size Compressed size Deduplicated size All archives: 2.20 TB 1.49 TB 52.97 GB
by pjmlp | 2025-07-20 10:11:58+00:00
Java comes from UNIX vendor, and C# only exists because Microsoft lost against that UNIX vendor.

Many Linux folks also like to path themselves on the back that Android is Linux, thus UNIX land as well.

Swift and Objective-C also come from UNIX land vendors.

IDEs were invented at Xerox PARC, and companies exploring Lisp Machines.

All 1990's systems, with exception of classical UNIX werr adopting IDEs.

Mac OS, OS/2, BeOS, Solaris, NeXTSTEP, Oberon, Plan 9/Inferno ACME,...

It isn't a Windows only thingy, rather progress.

As someone that was around as UNIX was becoming mainstream, it looks like there is too many idealism going around about what UNIX as OS, and related vendors were all about, before the widespread adoption of GNU/Linux.
by chii | 2025-07-20 10:11:59+00:00
> people on Reddit accused me of being chatgpt

if they cannot make critiques of your content/comment without resorting to appeal to authority or ad hominem attacks (which i consider being accused of using chatgpt as one), then their "critique" is worthless and should just be ignored (with a comment saying so as a response).

I literally do not care that someone is using chatgpt, or anything generated, as a response or comment, or content. The content _itself_ speaks for itself, and the worthiness stands alone regardless of how it was made. Slop can be easily written by an author or ai, and pedigree has nothing to do with it.
by Mindfusefounder | 2025-07-20 10:11:59+00:00
Everything online seems built for visibility now. Every conversation is a post. Every post is a pitch. Even when people say they want “real connection,” it still happens under layers of identity, metrics, and performance.

The internet has connected us to billions, but somehow made deep, simple human connection harder than ever. Is there even space anymore for two people to just talk — anonymously, without posturing, without recording, without trying to optimize anything?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, especially as someone working in tech but feeling deeply alienated by it at the same time. We’ve optimized for scalability, not intimacy.

Curious if others here feel this too — and if anyone’s come across or built something that tries to go in the opposite direction.

(And yes, I’ve been trying something like that myself: https://mindfuse.io — not pitching, just genuinely trying to break away from the engagement spiral. Feedback welcome.)
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-20 10:13:19+00:00
On one side you have companies that are working hard 24/7 to have more money at any cost. On the other side you have average Joe who can barely work, have time for family and have time for relaxing.

Also it is expected for the company to have absolutely no care for ethics unless it affects their bottom line. And there are many blockers for the average Joe like ethics, feeling guilt etc. etc.

It is only natural that companies are pushing more and more as time goes on. And there is no reason it should stop other than companies messing it up?

Maybe if gains were huge, the regular people would get some benefits but it seems like the gains are just not enough for that to happen anymore?
by jcgrillo | 2025-07-20 10:13:28+00:00
Excellent thread, nicely juxtaposed to this utterly insane sentence:

> One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.

I've noticed this in clothing and vehicles. If you want to own a durable car, you need to get an old one. Mid 1990s seems optimal for most manufacturers, some skew earlier (e.g. Mercedes-Benz which peaked about half a decade earlier). If you want durable shoes, it's very hard to beat a set of custom Limmers which are made pretty much the same way they were in the 1950s. Neither option is cheap, but you get something for it--knowing your car won't strand you with some bewildering array of christmas tree lights on the dashboard, and that your feet will be fine if you have an unplanned 20mi hike.
by Letstalk123 | 2025-07-20 10:13:34+00:00
There’s a feeling I keep running into — in myself, in others — that everything online has become too loud.

Not in volume, but in intention. Every app wants your time. Every feature pulls your attention. Every update feels like more surface, less soul.

The original internet had weird corners. Anonymous message boards, slow forums, chats where people spoke like humans instead of brands. You could stumble into a stranger’s world and have a conversation that stayed with you for weeks.

Now, even the smallest interactions feel monetized. Even “authenticity” feels curated.

I wonder if we’ve reached the peak of that model. If there’s a shift coming — not a massive new platform, but a quiet return to spaces that feel more like parks than casinos.

Small-scale. Human-scale. Built for conversation, not content. Does anyone else feel this happening underground?

Or are we too far gone?
by LightBug1 | 2025-07-20 10:13:56+00:00
I became vegetarian early in life mostly because of the industrialisation of meat production, and the treatment of animals within that system, and the perception that it's just an incredibly unhealthy production line (e.g. steroid use in livestock, etc)

I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.

And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).
by jharohit | 2025-07-20 10:14:33+00:00
We have been building tons of internal apps with AI - some just cool widgets vs serious vertical apps.

Cool useful widget - A simple multi city clock homepage which is totally offline https://x.com/jharohit/status/1945756661706330574

vs.

A full blown NDA tracker which uses uploaded signed NDAs to process using gemini 2.5flash, metadata stored in Firebase and then a lightweight table to list all (incl when some are expiring in next 6 months) and what are key items to keep an eye out for, key details (name, company, country, counterparty, etc). NextJS deployed app on standard VM on office server (no replit tho). Will open source this shortly.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-20 10:15:07+00:00
This is a non sequitur, but I don't know. I don't. I think the reason is people aren't used to eating plants and find the tastes and textures disagreeable. It's a taste that can be acquired at any time, though. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but I'd only go back if I was literally starving. Vegetables taste so much better, but you need a cuisine that does vegetables properly, like Indian or Mexican. Trying to do a bland cuisine like American or British without meat isn't going to be a good time.
by AnonC | 2025-07-20 10:15:13+00:00
I’ve been looking at this project occasionally for more than four years. The development of version 2.0 started sometime in April 2022 (IIRC) and there’s still no release candidate yet. I’m guessing that it’ll be finished in a year from now.

What are the current recommendations here to do periodic backups of a NAS with lower (not lowest) costs for about 1 TB of data (mostly personal photos and videos), ease of use and robustness that one can depend on (I know this sounds like a “pick two” situation)? I also want the backup to be completely private.
by intrasight | 2025-07-20 10:15:41+00:00
I fully expect that in 1-2 years that SWE curriculum will have AI coding as a major feature. The question I have is will students be required to do their first year or first assignments in a given course without AI.

My ex teaches UX. We were talking about AI in academia last week. She said that she requires students to not use AI on their first assignment but on subsequent ones they are permitted to.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-20 10:15:50+00:00
> This is a special case of an even larger (IMO) misfeature, which is that the language tries very, very hard to hide the concept of a pointer from you.

When I came to Python from Perl, it only took me about one day of Python programming to realize that Python does not have references the same way that Perl does. This is not flame bait. Example early questions that I had: (1) How do create a reference to a string to pass to a function? (2) How do I create a reference to reference? In the end, I settled on using list of size one to accomplish the same. I use a similar trick in Java, but an array of size one. In hindsight, it is probably much easier for junior programmers to understand the vale and type system in Python compared to Perl. (Don't even get me started about the readability of Perl.) Does anyone still remember the 'bless' keyword in Perl to create a class? That was utterly bizarre to me coming from C++!
by FeepingCreature | 2025-07-20 10:15:58+00:00
Reality:

> The friend asks: "Alright. Doggy, answer as fast as you can without thinking. What is 387 times 521?"

> "201.627", the dog says, wagging his tail happily.

> "I don't buy it, Fred! This must be bullshit!"

(I did test it and it did give the correct answer. I was expecting a small error for the joke, but hey, works like this too.)
by AndyMcConachie | 2025-07-20 10:16:12+00:00
This author doesn't really understand quality and starts out by defining it purelt in subjective terms. Then makes the mistake in the rest of the article by following this subjective reasoning by talking about perceptions of quality as a stand in for actual quality.

Go read Zen anf the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a decent, if not weird, introduction to thinking about quality. Quality is both subjective and objective and therein lies the rub. This author does not understand that.
by hnfong | 2025-07-20 10:16:25+00:00
Unfortunately I think you've proven the GP's point at least on the cynicism part.

Unless you have something substantial to support your claim that `LLMs are definitely (emphasis yours) not “the most incredible technology ever created by this point in our history”.`

I mean, I personally think the jury is probably still out on this one, but as long as there's a non-zero chance of this being true, the "definitely" part could use some tempering.

PS: FWIW countering (perceived) hyperbolism with an equal but opposite hyberbolism just makes you as hyperbolic as the ones you try to counter.
by joegibbs | 2025-07-20 10:16:31+00:00
For public services, every year people get older, more of the economy has to be reallocated towards looking after them. More spending on pensions rather than education, more old people using all the health services (since they use up so much more than young people).

The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.