MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-29 16:31:20+00:00
A big ongoing challenge is how to automate human actions on websites - specifically those that don't offer any API for the data needed, and and make it as hard as possible to scrape them. Almost every data job I've had, have had such part time projects going on internally, typical "How do we automate data extraction from [x] site" where the websites either refuse to provide any services, or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.

I'm not talking about nefarious motives for doing such either, for our part it is just tedious task where humans spend too much time filling in forms / clicking on UI components, and doing the download manually.

So while letting agents run wild on problems like this can (and surely will) lead to abuse, it will likely also free up so much time for the people doing such tasks for actual work.
by billy99k | 2025-07-29 16:31:21+00:00
"Oh hang the economy. I don't care about money, I care about people."

You should care about the economy. More money means jobs and prosperity. Less people dying in the streets and more tax revenue to help the helpless.

"in my country and the UK."

The UK has universal healthcare and it's been touted for years as the best answer to healthcare. What happened?

"libertarian fantasy of you being and island and accountable to nothing and no one but your own piddly, small notion of what moves you forwards."

I see. You are still bitter about Brexit.
by ta1243 | 2025-07-29 16:31:24+00:00
These sites implementing this could also implement a DNS TXT record or similar saying they are over 18s only (gambling sites would be included here too, and with a little thought you can categorise the sites).

They could publish their IP addresses so that the traffic can be blackholed at the router by the account holder.

The choice would then be down to the person paying the bill whether to block or not.

It won't apply to shady sites, but those sites won't do age verification anyway.

The problem is nobody wants the account holder to have the power.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-07-29 16:31:38+00:00
> I dont think we need bother with a handful

I wish I could agree, I'd like nothing more than to let nature take its course with anti-vax people. But the concept of herd immunity [1] tells us that, if enough people refuse to get vaccinated, even if the relative percentage is small, it affects the rest of us as well.

1. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22599-herd-im...
by quesera | 2025-07-29 16:31:48+00:00
You have it backwards.

The original (computing/model railroad-context) meaning of "hacker" goes back to the 1960s at MIT.

The corrupted 1980s popular media meaning was "criminal". (I cast no aspersions here)

The 2000s PG/HN meaning was an attempt to point toward 1960s MIT, which was probably well-intended (and poorly received at the time), but has failed to convert the popular media, and perhaps has morphed into some gross sticky goo including VCs and tech bros.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-29 16:32:05+00:00
Those sort of sites already had better moderation than big tech because they’d have their own smaller team of volunteer moderators.

I suspect any smaller site that claims the Online Safety Act was a reason they closed, needed to close due to other complications. For example an art site that features occasional (or more) artistic nudes. Stuff that normal people wouldn’t consider mature content but the site maintainers wouldn’t want to take the risk on.

Either way, whether I’m right or wrong here, I still think the Online Safety Act is grotesque piece of legislation.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-07-29 16:32:18+00:00
I usually participate, this year I don’t remember being notified about it, but I guess that probably goes to show I haven’t been using SO nearly as much as I used to due to AI tools.

On a separate note, why are things like cargo/apt/homebrew being put into the same category as Docker and Terraform, which also includes entire cloud platforms themselves (Azure, GCP,etc…). Might as well throw programming languages in there for good measure xD
by NoGravitas | 2025-07-29 16:32:32+00:00
> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?

Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.
by nolok | 2025-07-29 16:32:57+00:00
I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.

They have 50 different offers, all with their own pricing, and they all suck, and Microsoft themselves don't like their results in that field.

Let me solve it for you Microsoft: the money maker you're sitting on today, is "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph". None of their product does that right now, instead they tell you the step on how to do it.

Instead of making a bazillion different weird thing, Excel and Office already have their API, just make your "AI" bridge natural talk to excel common task and see every company register it for their employee. I'm not even exagerating, I would in an instant.

I tried many AI tool for excel and none of them come anywhere close to that. It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.

For a company that own business logic as a basic idea, they're really terrible at exploiting it with new ideas. Even just natural talk to power query steps would be worth it.
by shkkmo | 2025-07-29 16:33:04+00:00
I think including specific stories is already an ethical hacking violation.

Including the pseudonyms associated with those stories creates unnecessary risk of, and arguably incentive for those individuals.

I also just don't get the mindset of dumping something like this into an AI tool for a summary. You say "a 300MB JSON file that (hopefully) only exists on my computer" but then exposed part of that data to generate an AI summary.

Having the file on your computer is questionable enough but not treating it as something private to be professionally protected is IMHO another ethical violation.
by mbostock | 2025-07-29 16:33:10+00:00
We’re interested in adding a TypeScript cell mode, probably first with type stripping rather than validating types. I was hoping for a pure JavaScript implementation; maybe we’ll try https://github.com/bloomberg/ts-blank-space? I’ve also been looking at https://github.com/val-town/codemirror-ts for the editor, but it’s a lot of machinery.
by ezxs | 2025-07-29 16:33:15+00:00
The architecture of the agentic apps will force you to evolve your engineering platform and deployment story. Artificial intelligence is making a lot of people rethink the old CRUD interface to their business apps and agents take it a step further. Agents build on the advantages of AI interfaces (https://mikebz.com/llms-will-change-ux-of-business-apps-a9de... ) with a feedback loop that allows the agent to complete more sophisticated tasks.
by justacrow | 2025-07-29 16:33:26+00:00
Here is a picture of Yazan, 2 (article from today): https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/un-agencies-warn-key-f...

Here is a picture of a child and others begging for food at an aid center (also today): https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/g-s1-79039/gaza-children-star...

Here's Siwar Ashoura (14th May): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjdznz727z8o

Here's what Ahmed el-Sheikh Eid, seven, looks like (4th of May): https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/g-s1-79039/gaza-children-star...

Here's Osama, lying in a hospital (April 25th): https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-malnutrition-children-blo...

If you see these or other pictures of starving children, you are looking at images of children intentionally being starved by Israel, and you should reconsider what you think of their methods and intentions.
by morkalork | 2025-07-29 16:33:36+00:00
This managerial anti-pattern crops up with so many DIY tools; like reporting/dashboard platforms where engineers go through all the work funneling data to a 3rd party tool just for management to open tickets asking the same engineers to build dashboards in the UI. If we knew we were going to get stuck making the reports too, we'd probably choose any option that let's you specify them in some kind of code/markup instead and commit it to version tracking rather than a proprietary platform and their own internal history etc. etc.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-29 16:33:48+00:00
And so... how does a property tax fix any of what you're describing? If it's a bullshit patent that's not being deployed to the market, it can't possibly be very valuable, ergo will have no carrying cost. Only the patents that are deployed to the market and valuable will have high carrying costs.

> But all too often it's a malign fantasy.

All too often to severely destroy the incentive to invent new drugs? Yeah, gonna need a better source than your intuition as a patent lawyer to substantiate that.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-29 16:34:12+00:00
This "complication" or messiness is real, but the implication is the opposite it is claimed to have. That it makes further civilian violence on either side more understandable, or less easy to judge.

Both countries fomented war for decades. On civilians.

Israel by tacitly/actively letting Israeli citizens illegally "settle" land that was not theirs, and the violence, theft and worse those settlers imposed on Palestinian civilians.

Those actions would be considered acts of war, if done against any stronger actor.

And Hamas fomented war with its responses and atrocities against Israeli civilians.

But this "complication" is of a kind that makes it even more egregious for either side to claim any moral high ground for continued harm to the other side's civilians. Making genocidal type starvation of an entire territory's civilian population even less acceptable. If that is even possible.
by blueflow | 2025-07-29 16:34:17+00:00
The narrative is wrong - the wages are low while the working times are exhausting. Half of each trainee's leave each year, while the nurses that can actually endure this shit are going into pension in the next 10 years. And the money is spent on SAP systems who further take time from the already overworked nurses, because they now have to spent a ton of time entering data into a computer with no benefits.

Its not people getting sicker, its mismanagement. Source: Two nurses in family
by billy99k | 2025-07-29 16:34:58+00:00
"Like all text, even this, written in an authoritarian/strongheaded/textbook way, people believe. They believe textbooks, the news, political reasonings, company mission statements, and federal reserve policies. Turtles all the way down."

I use AI every day and so do my coworkers. If it ever told me to do something, I would not ever listen to it. The people that 'believe' are mentally ill.

"It cant, i tried, it cannot create anything new, it cannot reason from first principles, its a glorifed spell checker that summarizes articles reall well for me."

This may be true, but it definitely has value in its current form and I've definitely gotten more value out of it than a 'glorified spell checker'.
by pamelafox | 2025-07-29 16:35:05+00:00
I was exaggerating slightly - I think it's some combo of the apps I use: Edge, Teams, Discord, VS Code, Docker. When I get the RAM popup once a week, I typically have to close a few of those, whichever is using the most memory according to Activity Monitor. I've also got very little hard drive space on my machine, about 15 GB free, so that makes it harder for me to download the larger models. I keep trying to clear space, even using CleanMyMac, but I somehow keep filling it up.
by skybrian | 2025-07-29 16:35:07+00:00
They made the syntax look familiar so that standard editors (and LLM’s) will work, but this is still a custom file format that requires a build step to convert into an HTML page. See my other comment.

The build tool is open source and unlike a Jupyter notebook, it’s easy to edit without a custom editor. So you don’t need their editor, but it will still be nicer to edit with their editor.
by runarberg | 2025-07-29 16:35:12+00:00
The way I see it is that Palestinians have been fighting for civil rights since 1948 with dismal results. This fight has included violent and non-violent tactics, and the verdict on the non-violent tactics is pretty clear, that it only results in more violence and less civil rights for Palestinians.

Oct. 7 was not only the most deadly day for Jews since the holocaust, it was also the most deadly day for Zionists since the conception of Zionism. Whatever Israel did after Oct. 7 was not to protect Jews, but to protect Zionism. The very same ideology which has stripped Palestinians of their civil rights. And because Zionism is a foundational ideology of Israel, I would expect them to behave exactly the way they did. But I also see Zionism as a fundamentally immoral ideology which should not be a policy of any state. So from a human rights perspective, the right thing for Israel to do since Oct. 7 (as well as much earlier) was to admit defeat, grant Palestinians civil rights (including the right of return and reparations for past wrongs), and abandon Zionism as a policy. Later they could file criminal charges, or have a special tribunal punishing the perpetrators of oct. 7, maybe even as a part of a peace treaty which also grants Palestinians civil rights.

I am not naïve, and I know Israel was never going to do that. That is where international laws should have kicked in which were supposed to pressure Israel into doing the right thing, by doing stuff like sanctions and boycotts. International law, however, failed spectacularly.

EDIT: to prevent misunderstanding, when I say Zionism I mean the belief that Israel should be a Jewish supremacy state on Palestinian lands, like I explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718838
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-29 16:35:17+00:00
> One can be completely factual yet only publish limited info.

This is part of what I had in mind, selective reporting of facts is a method of fact manipulation, statistical gaming is another.

> So unless you scour the internet for each topic, the full bias isnt obvious.

Bias on a mass scale is a tool of propaganda, and it cannot be dealt with, if it isn't understood as such.
by sarchertech | 2025-07-29 16:35:32+00:00
> The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs.

Sure but that doesn’t impact the OPs point at all because there are numerous copies of reverse engineered source code available.

There are numerous copies of the reverse engineered source code already translated to JavaScript in your models training set.
by weberer | 2025-07-29 16:36:09+00:00
Whats important is VRAM, not system RAM. The 4090 has 16gb of VRAM so you'll be limited to smaller models at decent speeds. Of course, you can run models from system memory, but your tokens/second will be orders of magnitude slower. ARM Macs are the exception since they have unified memory, allowing high bandwidth between the GPU and the system's RAM.
by abhgh | 2025-07-29 16:36:09+00:00
Evals somehow seem to be very very underrated, which is concerning in a world where we are moving towards (or trying to) systems with more autonomy.

Your skepticism of "llm-as-a-judge" setups is spot on. If your LLM can make mistakes/hallucinate, then of course, your judge llm can too. In practice, you need to validate your judges and possibly adapt to your task based on sample annotated data. You might adapt them by trial and error, or prompt optimization, e.g., using DSPy [1], or learning a small correction model on top of their outputs, e.g., LLM-Rubric [2] or Prediction Powered Inference [3].

In the end, using the LLM as a judge confers just these benefits:

1. It is easy to express complex evaluation criteria. This does not guarantee correctness.

2. Seen as a model, it is easy to "train", i.e., you get all the benefits of in-context learning, e.g., prompt based, few-shot.

But you still need to evaluate and adapt them. I have notes from a NeurIPS workshop from last year [4]. Btw, love your username!

[1]https://dspy.ai/

[2]https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.745/

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlFpVpFx7JY

[4] https://blog.quipu-strands.com/eval-llms
by mytailorisrich | 2025-07-29 16:36:21+00:00
Reacting quickly means what's proportionate and reasonable. This is quite standard wording for a law.

The Act (section 10 about illegal content) says that "In determining what is proportionate for the purposes of this section, the following factors, in particular, are relevant—

(a) all the findings of the most recent illegal content risk assessment

(b) the size and capacity of the provider of a service."

"24 hour coverage" is the maximum that can be achieved so it's not going to be proportionate in many, if not most, cases. People have to ask themselves if it is proportionate for a one-man gardening forum to react within 5 minutes at 3am, and the answer is not going to be "yes".

Obviously you can also automatically hide a flagged submission until it is reviewed or have keywords-based checks, etc. I believe these are a common functionalities and they will likely develop more (and yes, a consequence might be to push more people towards big platforms).

People need to have a calm analysis, not hysteria or politically-induced obtuseness whatever one might think of this Act. If they are a small and not in the UK they can probably completely ignore in any case.
by billy99k | 2025-07-29 16:36:50+00:00
"Yes, defend the narcissistic pedophile"

All politicians are narcissists, so this is moot. Prove he's a 'pedophile'. Biden took showers with his underage daughter (in her own words) and I never see people like you mention it ever. It's a hell of a lot more proof that anything you seem to think trump did.

You are the one brainwashed here.
by qcnguy | 2025-07-29 16:37:00+00:00
A majority of apps nowadays are using proprietary forks of open source DBs running in the cloud, where their feature set is (slightly) rounded out and smoothed off by the cloud vendors.

Not that many projects are doing fully self-hosted RDBMS at this point. So ultimately proprietary databases still win out, they just (ab)use the Postgresql trademark to make people think they're using open source.

LLMs might go the same way. The big clouds offering proprietary fine tunes of models given away by AI labs using investor money?
by parsimo2010 | 2025-07-29 16:37:44+00:00
The article is pretty good overall, but the title did irk me a little. I assumed when reading "2.5 year old" that it was fairly low-spec only to find out it was an M2 Macbook Pro with 64 GB of unified memory, so it can run models bigger than what an Nvidia 5090 can handle.

I suppose that it could be intended to be read as "my laptop is only 2.5 years old, and therefore fairly modern/powerful" but I doubt that was the intention.
by svachalek | 2025-07-29 16:37:48+00:00
In addition to the tools other people responded with, a good rule of thumb is that most local models work best* at q4 quants, meaning the memory for the model is a little over half the number of parameters, e.g. a 14b model may be 8gb. Add some more for context and maybe you want 10gb VRAM for a 14gb model. That will at least put you in the right ballpark for what models to consider for your hardware.

(*best performance/size ratio, generally if the model easily fits at q4 you're better off going to a higher parameter count than going for a larger quant, and vice versa)
by brookst | 2025-07-29 16:38:01+00:00
If you’re on HN you’ve probably been around enough to know it’s never that simple. You implement the counter, now customer service needs to be able to provide documentation, users want to argue, async systems take hours to update, users complain about that, you move the batch accounting job to sync, queries that fail still end up counting, and on and on.

They should have an indicator, for sure. But I at least have been around the block enough to know that declaring “it would be easy” for someone else’s business and tech stack is usually naive.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-29 16:38:04+00:00
> still think it’s noteworthy that a model running on my 2.5 year old laptop (a 64GB MacBook Pro M2) is able to produce code like this—especially code that worked first time with no further edits needed.

I believe we are vastly underestimating what our existing hardware is capable of in this space. I worry that narratives like the bitter lesson and the efficient compute frontier are pushing a lot of brilliant minds away from investigating revolutionary approaches.

It is obvious that the current models are deeply inefficient when you consider how much you can decimate the precision of the weights post-training and still have pelicans on bicycles, etc.
by FigurativeVoid | 2025-07-29 16:38:29+00:00
I have thought that we should make entering the medical professions much easier. In order to become a nurse, you usually need a 4 year degree. This has two issues:

1. This is way to much time in the classroom. Much of that coursework simply isn't necessary.

2. You have people that would be good nurses piking other programs because they can't get passing marks in classes that are irrelevant to day to day nursing.

Binding what are essentially professional programs to the academy is a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I love the academy. But we need nurses.
by fragmede | 2025-07-29 16:38:46+00:00
> it uses hashed non-reversible IP address as credentials; I don't store IP addresses

I'm sorry but by my math, there aren't that many publicly routable IP addresses (like 2.5 billion?). Generating and storing rainbow tables for all 2.5 billion publicly routable IP addresses wouldn't take an exorbitant amount of time, making that part semi-reversible.
by mmh0000 | 2025-07-29 16:38:47+00:00
It should also be mentioned, Linux Load Average is a complex beast[1]. However, a general rule of thumb that works for most environments is:

You always want the load average to be less than the total number of CPU cores. If higher, you're likely experiencing a lot of waits and context switching.

[1] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load-aver...
by amluto | 2025-07-29 16:39:05+00:00
How, exactly, does the “specifically studied as prep” process determine whether a person *who is taking a very long-active antiviral medication” acquired HIV?

Here’s one of the papers:

https://en.iacld.com/UpFiles/Documents/1e4ad0d2-4a73-4365-9b...

It gives no details whatsoever about how testing was performed except to mention that both rapid and central laboratory tests were used. It does not discuss whether the study medication could interfere with testing. It does not even say whether the tests looked for antibodies, RNA or something else. The actual study protocol is in the paywalled supplement information.

I’m not saying the studies are wrong. But I would be a lot more impressed if the studies actually discussed the issue.