MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Google's harmful and careless use of AI
by b112 | 2025-07-17 21:46:30+00:00
I cannot think of anything more harmful to already struggling small businesses, than an AI calling with questions.

https://www.theverge.com/news/708210/google-ai-phone-calls-ai-mode-gemini-upgrade

Let's take an example. Curl. They've been having endless issues with AI bug reports. It's a time waste, useless, and literally sapping their strength:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/

Do you think people clicking to call will fare any better? It's opt-out! Busy small business owners will finding themselves pummeled with weird random calls. The literally will not understand what is being asked, who is calling, or why.

I find this to be highly dubious, ethically. I cannot imagine any good coming from it.
by qingcharles | 2025-07-17 21:46:31+00:00
The problem with sampling when you're out-and-about is that you get nose-blindness, even if you use the coffee shakers they give you to clear your head.

I don't know if it's still a good route, but I used to be able to buy sacks of random perfume sampler bottles from eBay sellers for peanuts and then I could try a couple every day and note down which ones I liked or not.
by spondylosaurus | 2025-07-17 21:46:41+00:00
This output reads like a knockoff SCP entry to me... which is unsurprising because I'm sure there were plenty of SCP entries in its training data.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

If you're unfamiliar, here's a classic one:

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-076
by adamrezich | 2025-07-17 21:46:51+00:00
I know a two-and-a-half hour video is a hard sell for most people, but I found this talk to be absolutely fascinating. It's not yet another tired “let's all shit on OOP just for the sake of it”-type thing—instead, it's basically nothing but solid historical information (presented with evidence!) as to how “OOP”, as we now know it, came to be. The specific context in which these various decisions were made is something that nobody ever cares to teach, such that it's basically long-since forgotten today—yet here it is, in an easily-digestible format!
by hirvi74 | 2025-07-17 21:47:13+00:00
To piggyback on the sentiment a bit -- I think the hardest part about ADHD, at least in my opinion, is that it is one of the handful of disorders in which much of the difficultly and misery originates from outside of the afflicted individual.

In other words, ADHD does not really cause me any direct misery, but rather, my ADHD makes others people miserable, and how I am treated because of that is the source of my misery. Honestly, it sometimes feels as if ADHD is just society's way of saying that I am too annoying, unreliable, and unfit to be a part of them, therefore there is something inherently dysfunctional with me.

Seriously, if I talk too much, who is more negatively affected, others or myself? If I need more time to complete work than others, then who is more negatively affected, my employer or me? Who is more negatively affected by my fidgeting, others or myself?
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-17 21:47:14+00:00
Along the 101/El Camino more like a series of small towns that blend into each other. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View at least have walkable streets with restaraubts, shops, etc, clustered around a “Main Street”, and residential areas laid out on a grid that mostly blend in to this area not sealed off in some way. Yes it is mostly single family homes and smaller apartments, with almost no high rises.

But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.
by immibis | 2025-07-17 21:47:45+00:00
Capitalism is to capital what monarchism is to monarch.

You've used terms in the past like "autocracy", "cascading failure", "plastic", "human capital", "optical media", and "infotainment". Is that what precision looks like? Was that CD, CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, BluRay, etc, made of polyethylene or polypropylene, or maybe polyvinyl chloride?
by brailsafe | 2025-07-17 21:47:50+00:00
In Canada, the working age population is massively subsidizing the older generation already, while getting fucked by them on the cost of shelter, and from every direction on the cost of basic necessities compared to income. There's fewer working age people per old age security and CPP recipient than ever, and it's our federal government's largest line items. An average 30 y.o in a population centre probably makes substantially less then the average retiree would have ever made, pays them more rent they'd ever have imagined, and pays most of their taxes directly into that hypothetical landlord's pocket. It's crazy and idk wth is going to happen because also there's almost no jobs available or clear upward mobility/stability, all of that shit went out the window long ago unless you're in a trade union already with a decade of experience, or just lucky.

[0] https://www.gensqueeze.ca/analysis_2023_federal_budget
by o11c | 2025-07-17 21:47:54+00:00
For me at least, most of the other debilitating chemicals appear in predictable and semi-avoidable contexts.

Traffic chemicals appear strongest on busy motorways with stagnant air, where people outside of cars don't spend much time.

Flower chemicals can cause problems but usually dissipate within 10 feet or so.

Fresh rain primarily eliminates free-floating chemical attacks and does not cause one itself.

Cooking is self-regulating because the person actively triggering the chemical emission is exposed much more strongly than people elsewhere even in the same room.

Grass can only be crudely avoided or mitigated during the seasons where it's problematic. (Thank God for COVID bringing awareness that masks make it physically easier to breathe.)

But perfume? You never know when you'll run across a person who chooses to be a targeted, walking violation of the Hague Convention. There's no way to mitigate this other than avoiding people entirely (which some people do choose to do, but which has negative side effects).

That said, in recent years I find the perfume from cleaning supplies or laundry supplies to be more problematic than the perfume from people.
by dcow | 2025-07-17 21:48:23+00:00
The point is not to not try and support causes you believe in, it’s about acting in an internally consistent way.

If you don’t support war, then you cannot indirectly support anything that has any part in supporting any war anywhere. You can’t pick and choose which wars and products are convenient enough to stand against while funding Google’s amoral corporate, US tax paying, attention machine because you won’t use a product which almost certainly undoubtably has contributed to vastly less harm than Kagi has (assuming we take as granted the premise that purchasing products of a company that is headquartered in a country at war has any political or financial significance whatsoever so as to be culpable for causing harm in the first place).

I mean you can, but the idea that you’re truly doing any good is entirely vapid. You’re just lying to yourself to feel good.

I guess most people probably don’t care if someone lies to themself to feel good. But to go piss on some product because they don’t have quite the same moral alignment as you do is rather silly and it’s entirely fair to see people calling this immature behavior out.
by serf | 2025-07-17 21:48:38+00:00
>Claude Code is not worth the time sink

there are like 15~ total pages of documentation.

There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..' , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that trigger that route.

Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and /help will list every command.

The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's a fairly straightforward system, too.

That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment itself.
by kulahan | 2025-07-17 21:48:58+00:00
I believe he is correct. The misunderstanding is from the old chart that showed certain tastes were only detected by certain parts of the tongue.

It’s still true that we can only taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. All other flavor complexities come from scent simultaneously giving us information. It’s why everything tastes so boring when you have a head cold.
by alganet | 2025-07-17 21:50:05+00:00
Google probably should be left alone (other parties stop investigating its traffic patterns and users). It's a delicate position, either all nations should have access to its workings or none of them. Finding the right combination of measures to ensure it serves all humans in a just way, without putting people in harm, serving its purpose of organizing knowledge, is hard. So many pitfalls in this kind of discourse.

The curl thing is probably not related to any of the major concerns regarding harmful AI use. It's just a popular project that attracts bounty hunters.

I don't see any reason to tie those two things. If you do, I expect more reasonable signs.
by pron | 2025-07-17 21:53:57+00:00
Python may be somewhat more popular [1] in terms of number of people using it (partly because a lot of Python programming isn't about shipping software and many Python users aren't professional programmers), but JS, Python, and Java, the three most popular programming languages today, are each dominant in specific domains, and none of them has a huge market share in the areas where the others dominate. There isn't a lot (relatively) of client GUI software written in Python or Java, there isn't a lot (relatively) of data analysis in Java or JS, and there isn't a lot (relatively) of serious servers in Python or JS.

[1]: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...
by WXLCKNO | 2025-07-17 21:54:05+00:00
In the system I'm building the main agent doesn't have access to tools and must call scoped down subagents who have one or two tools at most and always in the same category (so no mixed fetch and calendar tools). They must also return structured data to the main agent.

I think that kind of isolation is necessary even though it's a bit more costly. However since the subagents have simple tasks I can use super cheap models.
by suzzer99 | 2025-07-17 21:54:07+00:00
Agreed. I always try to design apps so that renaming or changing the file structure causes minimal disruption. I want as little friction to refactoring as possible.

I'm a huge fan of files that just work wherever you put them (think pages on a website), and then relative import paths to all their subcomponents. For subcomponents shared throughout the app, I always use absolute paths so that reafactoring my page-level components into subfolders won't break the import.
by fragmede | 2025-07-17 21:55:24+00:00
Most people live within a couple hours of a city though, and I think we'll see robot taxis in a majority of continents by 2035 though. The first couple cities and continents will take the longest, but after that it's just a money question, and rich people have a lot of money. The question then is: is the taxi cab consortium, which still holds a lot of power, despite Uber, in each city the in world, large enough to prevent Waymo from getting a hold, for every city in the world that Google has offices in.
by jraph | 2025-07-17 21:55:57+00:00
> I wonder if I should build my own.

Please consider improving one of the existing open source solutions before doing this: XWiki, Nextcloud, wiki.js...

There's advanced stuff that already exists and we could use some cooperation to get better instead of another competitor in a crowded space.

(I work for XWiki SAS - you can also pay them to build what's missing for you)
by throw0101d | 2025-07-17 21:56:38+00:00
> It’s hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn’t been affected by mainstream internet and mobile smartphone adoption, which happened the last 15-20 years.

The Internet got going in the 1990s, and everyone in the US was basically connected by (say) 2010. Can you be "more connected" that already having your business or home being online 24/7 (i.e., DSL or cable, not dial-up modem)? Certain transfer speeds have gone up, and going from a V.92 56kbps to DSL is improves things, but how much productive is going from 10 Mbps to 50Mbps: do you get a 5x rise in economic productivity?

Can you point to a FRED chart or cite a DOI that shows that GDP is better in societies pre- and post-smartphone?

If all KPIs have been affected, then it should be easy to post a graph and see where there is an inflection point or change in the slope.

If you find it so hard to believe, shouldn't it be easy for you to cite the data showing so?
by bugbuddy | 2025-07-17 21:57:06+00:00
The problem with LLMs and all other modern statistical large-data-driven solutions’ approach is that it tries to collapse the entire problem space of general problem solving to combinatorial search of the permutations of previously solved problems. Yes, this approach works well for many problems as we can see with the results with huge amount of data and processing utilized.

One implicit assumption is that all problems can be solved with some permutations of existing solutions. The other assumption is the approach can find those permutations and can do so efficiently.

Essentially, the true-believers want you to think that rearranging some bits in their cloud will find all the answers to the universe. I am sure Socrates would not find that a good place to stop the investigation.
by mittermayr | 2025-07-17 21:57:25+00:00
All I can say is, I asked Siri today (verbatim): What is 75 degrees fahrenheit in celsius, and what is 85 degrees in fahrenheit — and it offered a web search about fahrenheit. The "and" completely disabled its most basic ability to do metric conversions.

So, it's nice to see Apple is doing research and talking about it, but we're out here waiting, still waiting, for anything useful to make of it all on our thousand-dollar devices that literally connect us to the world and contain our entire life data. It's what I would've expected from one of the most valuable companies in the world.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-07-17 21:57:50+00:00
This video says that the helmet mic serves as a decent face scratcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VCuaZCRn1U

I've also read that many astronauts put strips of adhesive Velcro in their helmet for this purpose: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/42012/nose-scratch...
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-17 21:57:52+00:00
Having tried SOF selection myself (once, didn't get selected / quit before it was over), I can say that the selections are almost 100% designed to weed out people on their willpower, not physical strength. The people that aren't cut out physically, tend to be weeded out on the very first day.

And even if you get past the immediate pain stage, sooner or later you'll ask yourself "is this what I really want to do the next [N] years?".
by throwup238 | 2025-07-17 21:57:56+00:00
Funny enough, I was just reading about Percy Fawcett’s doomed expedition to find the lost city of Z in the Amazon and turns out he has been fully vindicated. He went against the general scientific consensus of the time that complex civilization was impossible and the area he is thought to have disappeared in the Xingu Park has since been found to hold a civilization of 20+ settlements and a peak populations of up to 50,000 inhabitants.

Wild stuff.
by TrueDuality | 2025-07-17 21:58:03+00:00
One with only manual interactions and regular context resets. I have a couple of commands I'll use regularly that have 200-500 words in them but it's almost exclusively me riding that console raw.

I'm only on the $100 Max plan and stick to the Sonnet model and I'll run into the hard usage limits after about three hours, that's been down to about two hours recently. The resets are about every four hours.
by ivanech | 2025-07-17 21:58:25+00:00
Just got it at work today and it’s a dramatic step change beyond Cursor despite using the same foundation models. Very surprising! There was a task a month ago where AI assistance was a big net negative. Did the same thing today w/ Claude Code in 20ish minutes. And for <$10 in API usage!

Much less context babysitting too. Claude code is really good at finding the things it needs and adding them to its context. I find Cursor’s agent mode ceases to be useful at a task time horizon of 3-5 minutes but Claude Code can chug away for 10+ minutes and make meaningful progress without getting stuck in loops.

Again, all very surprising given that I use sonnet 4 w/ cursor + sometimes Gemini 2.5 pro. Claude Code is just so good with tools and not getting stuck.
by runarberg | 2025-07-17 21:58:48+00:00
I am not a legislator, nor an expert in consumer law, and there is no way I could think of a regulation against targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. I think claiming it to be impossible demonstrate a lack of imagination. And I would even think some consumer protection, or privacy advocacy groups have already drafted some legislation outlines for regulating targeted ads (as I said, I’m not an expert, and wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for one [maybe the EFF?]).

> There isn't an inherent power imbalance that exists between the company and their customers

That is very simplistic, and maybe idealistic from an unrealistic view of free-market capitalism. But there is certainly an inherent power imbalance. Before leaded gasoline was banned, it was extremely hard for environmentally conscious consumer to make the ethical choice and buy unleaded gasoline. Before seatbelts were required, a safety aware consumer might still have bought a car without one simply because the cars with seatbelts were either unavailable or unaffordable. Those aren’t real choices, but rather choices which are forced onto the consumer as a result of the competitive environment where the consumer hostile option generates much more revenue for the company.
by jszymborski | 2025-07-17 21:59:01+00:00
> By that definition precisely noting is apolitical.

I'm with you

> Kagi values search quality over virtue signaling in line with whichever way the wind is blowing.

Wait, when did I suggest that they adopt values based on "whichever way the wind is blowing"? I'm just asking them to not support the economy of a country whose invaded another free and democratic country for the purpose of expansion, and has engaged in war crimes to do so. People are upset about this, not because it is trendy, but because they think it is wrong.
by reactordev | 2025-07-17 21:59:02+00:00
It’s purely ecosystem at this point. Deno, Bun, any runtime is more modern. It’s nice they are catching up but by the time typescript is a native citizen in node, others may take the crown. The codebase is ooof.

That said, there’s something to be said about being the first mover and having the ecosystem so node isn’t going away anytime soon, nor is the npm/npx ecosystem.

Go has the ability to, with a goja fork [1], to execute ESM but you would still need to transpile using another go tool to run it. I have such a runtime but it’s nowhere near as fast as bun or deno. I use it mainly so I can have agents do my local bidding.

[1] https://github.com/grafana/sobek
by biker142541 | 2025-07-17 21:59:16+00:00
As a 12 mini user daily since it came out in 2020, I've only just now started to hit any noticeable battery dip (~85% after almost 5 years usage). It's still pretty solid on a daily basis. On very rare occasions, the smaller battery has required charging before evening due to excessive photos taken and/or nav without a plug. FWIW, I will probably replace the battery by end of year, or next, and keep it going as long as I can... I refuse the massive "normal" phone size.
by JadeNB | 2025-07-17 21:59:17+00:00
While I personally wish that there were more people who had the ability to make such decisions, and exercised that ability, I think that this is a hostile response to someone who didn't have to spend the time to come on HN and describe the situation to the best of their ability. Calling people undignified because they, or their company, isn't perfect is just going to close down channels of communication.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-07-17 21:59:57+00:00
C'est ne pas une pipe, the map is not the territory, sure.

But I disagree that my argument doesn't hold here - if I re-watch a Hank Green video, I can perfectly model it because I've already seen it. This reveals the video is not alive. But if I watch Hank Green's whole channel, and watch Hank's videos every week, I can clearly tell that the entity the video is showing, Hank Green the Human, is alive.
by lotyrin | 2025-07-17 22:00:06+00:00
Yep, in the case of open source contributions as an example, the bottleneck isn't contributors producing and proposing patches, it's a maintainer deciding if the proposal has merit, whipping (or asking contributors to whip) patches into shape, making sure it integrates, etc. If contributors use generative AI to increase the load on the bottleneck it is likely to cause a negative net effect.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-17 22:00:25+00:00
Sigh. As others have commented, over and over again in the last 6 months we've seen discussions on HN with the same basic variation of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase."

I sympathize with both experiences and have had both. But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are _completely useless_, unless they're accompanied with a careful summary of at least:

* what kind of codebase you were working on (language, tech stack, business domain, size, age, level of cleanliness, number of contributors)

* what exactly you were trying to do

* how much experience you have with the AI tool

* is your tool set up so it can get a feedback loop from changes, e.g. by running tests

* how much prompting did you give it; do you have CLAUDE.me files in your codebase

and so on.

As others pointed out, TFA also has the problem of not being specific about most of this.

We are still learning as an industry how to use these tools best. Yes, we know they work really well for some people and others have bad experiences. Let's try and move the discussion beyond that!
by fragmede | 2025-07-17 22:01:00+00:00
Can you name any of the specific regulations that robot taxi companies are lobbying to get rid of? As long as robotaxis abide by the same rules of the road as humans do, what's the problem? Regulations like you're not allowed to have robotaxis unless you pay me, your local robotaxi commissioner $3/million/year, aren't going to be popular with the populus but unfortunately for them, they don't vote, so I'm sure we'll see holdouts and if multiple companies are in multiple markets and are complaining about the local taxi cab regulatory commision, but there's just so much of the world without robotaxis right now (summer 2025) that I doubt it's anything mure than the technology being brand spanking new.