MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scubbo | 2025-07-15 17:08:25+00:00
> I was being sold a "self driving car" equivalent where you didn't even need a steering wheel for this thing, but I've slowly learned that I need to treat it like automatic cruise control with a little bit of lane switching.

> Need to keep the hands on the wheel and spend your spare attention on the traffic far up ahead, not the phone.

Now _this_ is a more-balanced perspective!

(And, to be clear - I use AI in my own workflow as well, extensively. I'm not just an outside naysayer - I know when it works, _and when it doesn't_. Which is why unreasonable claims are irritating)
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-15 17:09:01+00:00
> I’ve never seen such glue code that is tedious to write.

Its a fair point, its not the writing per se thats tedious:

Fetch data from API 9522, write storage/trasformation/validation code, write display code. Test, tweak/fix, deploy.

Do you know how many badly designed and poorly documented API's I have had to go through in 25+ years? Do you know how many times I have written the same name/first_name/FirstName/First_name mapping between what comes in and what already exists. Today it's an old personal project, tommrow a client app, the day after home assistant (and templated yaml).

Why should I spend any time figuring out if the api doc is poorly or well written? Why should I learn what esoteric scheme of tokens you have chosen to put up the facade of security. Is mapping code fun to write? It's like the boiler plate around handling an error or writing a log message (things that you let autocomplete do if you can). Do you really want to invest in the bizarre choices of systems you USE but not often enough to make it worth your time to commit their goofy choices to memory (I'm looking at you templated yaml).

You are right that the "code is easy". It's the whole process and expense of brain power on things that are, in the long run, useless that makes it tedious. The study where people did not retain what the wrote/did with the LLM is a selling point not a down side. Tomorrow I have to do the same with API 9523 and 9524, and I'm going to be happy if it gets done and I retain none of it.
by mlyle | 2025-07-15 17:09:20+00:00
> So lets include the costs for decommissioning nuclear plants, dealing with the waste and that the public is on the hook for essentially the entire accident insurance?

Yes. All nuclear power plants pay into trust funds for decommissioning and waste disposal, and that's included in the LCOE.

And re: history: yes, deciding to build nuclear power and then chickening out is even worse than not building nuclear power. I agree.

> Pure insanity.

Are you really upset and that's why you're lashing out? Or is this just your normal way to treat another human you're discussing something with?

Because I would be happy to discuss more with you if you can restrain yourself from doing this. But otherwise, these just lead me to nope out quickly.
by humbleferret | 2025-07-15 17:10:05+00:00
I think it's circumstantial and dependent on individual situations. I personally think you should optimise for equity as much as you can. If you wanted to optimise just for cash, you could have found a better paying job most of the time.

From the small sample size of my friends in SF/NYC and are well funded by a top-tier VC, most take lower salaries for more equity. The majority have the same salary as their seed round with small bumps along the way, but nothing crazy. A couple have reduced their salaries to extend runway without diluting themselves further.

The only exception seems to be those with families and dependents.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-15 17:10:06+00:00
Sorry for the meandering nature of this thread. I was mistaken on a point of fact in my original comment, and I wasn't sure whether I even had an answer for you that you would find satisfying once I discovered my error relating to who the tabluating machine was for. I incorrectly recalled it was for the IRS, which was wrong, but the IRS did benefit from the machine being used for the census, because the census determines apportionment and so on. Due to the way the Constitution is written iirc, all members of a district count for representation in the House, not just US citizens.

The closure of the frontier was relevant because it signaled the end of unlimited growth in many ways. Many people today (and probably even back then) don't even know that the US had colonies. In a very real way, we colonized ourselves, but the shame of it is that we colonized others, and the US territories which remain are arguably vestiges of the US empire. Our treaties with the Native American tribes have also been willfully misinterpreted, to their detriment.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-15 17:10:22+00:00
I was thinking that it may be the point. This is a service paid by Americans, for Americans, and I suspect they don't want to make it too convenient, especially for non-Americans.

From the link:

> The service will be provided at no charge, and user keys may be used to connect to any of the servers whose addresses are listed below. Additional hardware will be added in the future if the demand for the service is sufficiently great to warrant it.

Making it clear that they are going to shoulder the extra costs.
by tessierashpool | 2025-07-15 17:10:23+00:00
no, they're serious, but they're not sincere.

once this system is up and running, they can use it to harass and "deport" (rendition) anybody they want based on what tax-deductible contributions they've made to various non-profits.

(it's rendition because a lot of these people are being sent to countries they're not even citizens of. obviously that pertains when sending people to prisons in El Salvador and Sudan. also, when deporting immigrant parents, they've "deported" US citizens who are children or infants to the countries of their parents' citizenship.)
by S0y | 2025-07-15 17:10:34+00:00
>it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible.

The biggest issue with the movie is that it's boring. I personally think the weirdness wasn't used to it's full potential.

A very similar (and highly underrated) movie is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales which in my opinion is far superior and vastly more entertaining to watch. Which I guess does prove there is some merit to your point, since this movie was also panned by critics and audiences for being "way too weird".
by secstate | 2025-07-15 17:10:40+00:00
That's a fair counter argument, and I do genuinely believe (not know) that everyone needs a balance of cynicism and optimism to function optimally as a human. I also believe the resignation you feel from cynicism is rampant exactly because as humans we've become very good at basic survival and beyond that it's not totally clear what our targets for living should be. Certainly we can all agree that trying to harness ever more energy and growing forever can't be the target. But that's all we've done for two millennia now. How to we avoid becoming a cancer to our planet (or any other environment we find ourselves in)?
by Avamander | 2025-07-15 17:10:48+00:00
> It's an amazing time to be alive. While not this precise, you can have atomic cesium beam clocks of your own for a few thousand dollars each, and some elbow grease.

How hard or expensive would it be for a reasonably equipped lab to build their own optical clock though? I see there are optical clocks the size of few rack units on the market for a rather hefty price, are the materials needed that expensive or is it just the expertise?
by rainingmonkey | 2025-07-15 17:10:51+00:00
What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology!

"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.

This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
by ksec | 2025-07-15 17:11:04+00:00
People who are a little late to the site may not know there was a time on HN where Erlang has even more frontage submission than the best of AI / LLM.

Ruby Rails, Postgres, SQLite, Rust, etc. They all have their moments and I dont think LLM right now is as overwhelming as any other hyped moments. Certainly not Erlang.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-07-15 17:11:22+00:00
RIP legend. Some say X-Files might not have had the success it did without that theme song.

Reminds of the X-Files soundtrack album that had a nice example of one of those "Red Book" standard-breaking CD pre-gap tracks ... "Songs in the Key of X" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_in_the_Key_of_X:_Music_f...
by mindcrime | 2025-07-15 17:11:37+00:00
Not me. I have been coding for nigh on 35 years now and I still enjoy it. Most of the time anyway. What annoys me isn't ever really "coding" in and of itself, but rather the incidental complexity that comes from the various tools and infrastructure stack elements. IDE plugins that don't work right, build tools that have byzantine and broken configurations, app servers that crash, hang, eat log messages, yadda yadda yadda.

But if anything, I lament that I don't get to code enough these days. Any time I get an opportunity to sit down and spend even a couple of hours actually writing code is usually the highlight of my week.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-15 17:11:45+00:00
Much appreciated, will read the paper tonight.

Having a LLM recall something with exact detail some 100k tokens ago sounds a bit like the ADHD test Cartman got in South Park. We don't recall exactly but rather a summarized version.

On the other hand, computers recall exactly when asked directly (RAM access) so in that sense it seems natural to want that from a LLM.

One thing we can do which current LLMs can't, at least directly as far as I'm aware, is to go back and re-read a section. Like on-demand RAG, or something.

In the meantime, good to know it's not terribly useful to have the full 128k context, as it usually is too much for my GPU anyway.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:12:09+00:00
Sorry, but you just made my point. Urban train rides are already an effect of advancing technology. Being packed like sushi simply wouldn't happen if we hadn't become addicted to advancing technology. That's a central tenet of technology which only occured around the 19th century. AI is the next stage and the apex of this process which alienate people from each other.
by raincole | 2025-07-15 17:12:24+00:00
Geometry node is not Houdini (yet) though. The main reason people use Houdini is it's easy to transfer data between modeling (SOP) and physical simulation (DOP) contexts. And they're working on integrating rigging/animation too.

Geometry node is quite a separate thing from what Blender already has. Last time I checked one couldn't even create vertex groups in geometry node, and there was no way to create an armature there either. (Not sure if it changed since I checked though)
by rick1290 | 2025-07-15 17:12:38+00:00
Yeah, that is a bit disheartening. It’s a reminder of how vital it is to support open source tools, especially when they’re going up against massive, well-funded competitors. These projects often power the backbone of the internet and tech ecosystems, but they can’t survive on goodwill alone.

If we want innovation, transparency, and community-driven development to thrive, we have to step up — whether it’s donating, spreading the word, or helping out however we can.
by Xss3 | 2025-07-15 17:13:03+00:00
There are serious cyber security implications too.

A recent discovery was a heart rate monitor used in hospitals that sent all data, including full patient details, to Chinese servers, and would accept arbitrary code updates from said servers.

If you wanted to kill a diplomat, muting or spoofing heart rate data while they have a cardiac event in hospital would be a very sneaky way to do it.
by vander_elst | 2025-07-15 17:13:10+00:00
I think the article makes sense for me. IMO, a 10x decrease in mental load at an affordable price would be the key. Examples: * You can bring and pick up the kids at the daycare/babysitter every day of the week, every time of the day. * Household chores take at most 10 minutes a week. * High quality school and education standards are available everywhere (Probably there's more) I think that if such problems would be cracked more people might consider having more kids. I think at the moment these problems are easily solvable with a lot of money, so it would seem that kids have become a luxury good. So affordable support for the masses might be an answer.
by timr | 2025-07-15 17:13:23+00:00
I use Copilot, with the occasional free query to the other services. During coding, I mostly use Claude Sonnet 3.7 or 4 in agent mode, but Gemini 2.5 Pro is a close second. ChatGPT 4o is useless except for Q&A. I see no value in paying more -- the utility rapidly diminishes, because at this point the UI surrounding the models is far less important than the models themselves, which in turn are generally less important than the size of their context windows. Even Claude is only marginally better than Gemini (at coding), and they all suck to the point that I wouldn't trust any of them without reviewing every line. Far better to just pick a tool, get comfortable with it, and not screw around too much.

I don't understand people who pay hundreds of dollars a month for multiple tools. It feels like audiophiles paying $1000 for a platinum cable connector.
by greenavocado | 2025-07-15 17:13:41+00:00
The Mozilla "organizations" are a two-headed grift piggy-backed on a non-profit shell so the IRS keeps smiling.

Firefox hasn't made a technical decision without first forwarding the minutes to Mountain View and Redmond since roughly 2017.

Every nine-figure Google wire lands promptly converts into $450 k-per-head salary vapor and off-site "all-hands," while the same week another 250 actual engineers get an email that begins: "You're talented and valued BUT-."

Servo? Jettisoned.

MDN? Gutted.

Security teams? Re-org'd into a Slack channel no one reads.

And the Foundation helpfully reminds donors:

"Your gifts don't pay for Firefox engineering."

No kidding. They pay for glossy pamphlets proclaiming the open-web gospel, first-class flights to "advocacy summits," and Mitchell Baker's $2.5 million thank-you note. Firefox isn't a browser; it's a loss-leader Google keeps in the closet for the next antitrust subpoena.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-15 17:13:55+00:00
I'll never get over the way Apple treated OpenCL. They saw the train coming down the tracks, spent so long hedging their bet against CUDA, and threw in the towel the moment actual demand started cropping up. CUDA very nearly had a serious, corporate-funded and write-once-run-anywhere competitor.

Normally I write something snide about not seeing where the puck was headed. But Apple did skate to the puck the puck here, they just did nothing with it.
Show HN: MileAway – A Social Travel Tracker to Share Your Visited Countries
by alepacheco99 | 2025-07-15 17:14:34+00:00
I built MileAway, an iOS app that tracks the countries you’ve visited and lets you share your travel map with friends.

The core idea is simple: • It auto-detects which countries you visit (based on location permissions) • You get a clean profile with flags, dates, and a travel history timeline • You can follow friends, compare maps, and compete on a country leaderboard • Optional import from photo library or manual input

It’s designed to be lightweight and visual. I built it solo for fun, mostly to solve my own need for a clean way to track where I’ve been and see my friends’ travels without the noise of social media.

I’m manually gifting 1 year of Pro to anyone who follows 3+ people and sends me their profile link.

Happy to answer questions or dig into the technical side if anyone’s interested.

→ https://mile-away.com → Example profile: mile-away.com/profile/qdUPqL2gt8eb6x9AYbsnWSYroAm2
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-07-15 17:14:36+00:00
Movie studios could care less if a billion people watch a movie or if 1 person sees it.

They care how much profit they make and what the growth in their profit margin is, as that sets their multiple on their stock price.

If it's a better strategy selling movie tickets to mostly single adult men at high prices than to families at lower prices, guess who movie studios are going to make movies for?

Movies studios reached their TAM in the West a while ago. The only way to make more money is charging more per ticket in real terms, which means a reduction in TAM
by wat10000 | 2025-07-15 17:14:53+00:00
And the LAPD seems to have decided OJ was guilty based largely on a feeling of racial prejudice. The fact that he actually did it was coincidental. I've often seen that trial described as the LAPD framing a guilty man. The prosecution did a terrible job and I'm not at all convinced the acquittal wasn't the correct verdict, even if it's pretty clearly contrary to the facts of what happened.

It seems safe to assume that the LAPD also did/does this to less famous people of color, in which case a higher rate of voting to acquit would not indicate bias by the jury.
by lastcat743 | 2025-07-15 17:14:55+00:00
You suffer from a common malady that you must be told what to do.

After decades you may develop your own mental mentor who tells you to do things and you listen, or maybe you will be an idle content your whole life (hey, direct personal familiarity here.)

You must find an objective or goal you will actually care to work towards at expense of your self satisfaction.

Or try another hobby/profession. Hardware sensors and the like are going through an auspicious time. Never before so cheap or plentiful. Get sensors and data flow going from everything commercial or civic.

You’ll have to learn discipline to become an independent contractor or proper business opportunist, otherwise you are a wage slave competitor like “everyone else.”
by ASalazarMX | 2025-07-15 17:15:02+00:00
The author's page links to the original SCP Wiki page, where you can read it in parts, as it was being created. It's not a straight book download, but you can think of each red link as a chapter.

Beware: SCP is as enthralling as TV Tropes.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
by yencabulator | 2025-07-15 17:15:30+00:00
You can have an agent loop in your IDE, I don't see why anything makes "IDEs lose to TUIs" there.

If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every step one at a time.

I hate trying to copy paste in/out of Claude Code's unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.

Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.

https://zed.dev/docs/ai/agent-panel
by throw0101c | 2025-07-15 17:16:48+00:00
That's great and all, but stepping back a bit: the US (and the West?) seems to be falling behind in distribution and resiliency. For high-accuracy timing stuff, China has space (BeiDou), terrestrial broadcast (eLoran), and fiber in production:

* https://rntfnd.org/2024/10/03/china-completes-national-elora...

As we've seen regularly, GPS/GNSS has major risks with it, and it seems to have become a single point of failure:

* https://gpsjam.org

* https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/msc-container-sh...

* https://gcaptain.com/gps-jamming-in-strait-of-hormuz-raises-...
by bhl | 2025-07-15 17:17:30+00:00
> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends.

There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months.

Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-15 17:17:33+00:00
That's often a problem with Open Source. Lots of people steering the ship, and it's hard for any de facto captain to really demand a direction. If they do, they may not have the contributors needed to really see it through.

This can be solved with paid contributors, but FOSS organization don't have the most funding out there. So it can be challenging when trying to attract specialized talent.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:17:43+00:00
> The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in.

I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI.

What keeping AI free for everyone is akin to is keeping an addictive drug free for everyone so that it can be sold in larger quantities later.

One can argue that some technology is beneficial. A mosquito net made of plastic immediately improves one's comfort if out in the woods. But AI doesn't really offer any immediate TRUE improvement of life, only a bit more convenience in a world already saturated in it. It's past the point of diminishing returns for true life improvement and I think everyone deep down inside knows that, but is seduced by the nearly-magical quality of it because we are instinctually driven to seek out advantags and new information.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-15 17:18:45+00:00
Yawn. If that were truly analogous to the current topic, rather than a gross exaggeration, the analogy would be unnecessary.

Replace "Careening at 90 miles per hour through a school zone crosswalk as kids dive out of the way" with the actual topic of "Spending your money on legal things without government tracking and control".

Your point is understood that you personally prefer one thing to another, compared to another person preferring the opposite.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-07-15 17:19:06+00:00
> This echoes a lot of the rhetoric around "but how will facebook/twitter/etc make money?" back in the mid 2000s.

The difference is that Facebook costs virtually nothing to run, at least on a per-user basis. (Sure, if you have a billion users, all of those individual rounding errors still add up somewhat.)

By contrast, if you're spending lots of money per user... well look at what happened to MoviePass!

The counterexample here might be Youtube; when it launched, streaming video was really expensive! It still is expensive too, but clearly Google has figured out the economics.