MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-07-08 15:59:33+00:00
Sure they could. We just want it to be otherwise.

What benefit might human review have? Maybe they could make sure the SERP list entries actually have the keywords you're looking for. Even better, they could make sure the prices in the shopping section are correct! Maybe even make sure they relate to the product you actually searched for... I might actually pay money for that.
by saghm | 2025-07-08 16:00:11+00:00
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-08 16:00:35+00:00
In the case of the phone number or email it is just so frickin' predictable what will happen.

Adding multiple non-list fields is seductive because going to the list is a "structural instability" that requires using different coding techniques.

Right now I really like https://www.react-hook-form.com/ for forms that have list values. Back in the day there were a set of techniques that seem forgotten (like how the Egyptians built the pyramids) that some developers knew and others didn't.

It isn't hard at all to make a no-JS form where you had an "add" button next to a list of values. When you click on that button the POST data contains everything in the form as well as the key/value pair for that particular button (and not other buttons) so the back end can tell which button was pressed and redraw the form with another field. Delete can be handled the same way. If your form is not junked up with 50MB of trackers and ads and metadata for every social platform it is really fast, it was really fast even on dialup.

With a handful of helper functions and a "router" that can display different forms depending on what you enter you can make powerful no-JS forms but that knowledge didn't quite reach 100% penetration before Angular came along, but developers who came on after that never learned it.
by takklz | 2025-07-08 16:00:44+00:00
I've listened to so many CEOs in various industries (not just tech) salivating at the potential ability to cutout the software engineering middle man to make their ideas come to life (from PMs, to Engineers, to Managers, etc.). They truly believe the AI revolution is going to make them god's gift to the world.

I on the other hand, see the exact opposite happening. AI is going to make people even more useful, with significant productivity gains, in actuality creating MORE WORK for humans and machines alike to do.

Leaders who embrace this approach are going to be the winners. Leaders who continue to follow the hype will be the losers, although there will probably be some scam artists who are winners in the short term who are riding the hype cycle just like crypto.
by aldanor | 2025-07-08 16:01:02+00:00
Used to be an immortal (admin/main dev) in Solace MUD based on dragonlance. It's actually running now apparently, revived after some years offline.

It was funny how myself and my friend became imms there - we offered a patch to fix a real bug to then-admin who couldn't code a thing because he inherited the project, injecting a security hole so we could stream source code through the mud itself, lol. Lots of stuff learned, lots of hacks, tons of dirty C code. Test it all in production, on real people.
by kgwxd | 2025-07-08 16:01:40+00:00
> Sensitivity to suffering and the need to protect the vulnerable > Concerns about equality, proportionality, and reciprocity > Resistance to domination and restriction of freedom

Great.

> Valuing group cohesion and detecting threats to the group > Respect for legitimate hierarchy and tradition > Protection against contamination, both physical and spiritual

Here's where it all falls apart.

Who decides "group" membership? Why is hierarchy and tradition so often allowed to violate the other "morals", even within the "group"? WTF is "contamination"?

It's so easy to see the latter "morals" are just tools for tyrants. The former "morals" exclude them outright, so why does anyone accept them as being part of the same "foundation"? When I see people doing that, I feel the urge to "protect the vulnerable". I clearly see how they're giving up their equality and freedom to liars, cheats and thieves that will betray the group whenever it benefits them.

It's frustrating as hell.

The "group" should simply be "everyone", except the would-be tyrants. Guess some people just want that submissive life.
by zelon88 | 2025-07-08 16:02:01+00:00
Watching these two behemoths wrestle over the future of a space we all share, and wondering if they will need to loop in regulators on one side or another, convinces me that we shouldn't have gifted all of our digital infrastructure to just 2 companies. Inlcuding our economy, healthcare, government, and civil infrastructure. We've put all our eggs into only a couple of very greedy, impossible to audit baskets. We've really done this all to ourselves. We've raced ourselves all the way to the bottom.
by ryan42 | 2025-07-08 16:02:49+00:00
I actually brought back some of the joy of programming for myself by leveraging LLMS

Context. I'm burnt out,doing web software development for business apps for 15 years now and going

I started to get into game development. I started to test out chatGPT and claude to assist and it's been going great. I make so much progress and the results are fun which makes the coding process fun. The LLM covers gaps in my knowledge of math and physics and game dev strategy and architecture. But since I know how to code I can take what it gives and accomplish all kinds of things that would be much more difficult going on my own.
by tucnak | 2025-07-08 16:03:49+00:00
Yeah, they would often claim that C API is at fault, but believe it or not, blaming Rust just as much. I've had an interesting discussion with pgrx people: https://github.com/pgcentralfoundation/pgrx/issues/1897#issu... to quote @workingjubilee

> Rust has formally rejected the notion that any function can return twice. Even LLVM has no special knowledge of the name of "sigsetjmp" or "setjmp", only that some functions can return twice.

> Thus, when you call sigsetjmp or setjmp from Rust, Rust doesn't believe that you called a function that can return twice. The Rust compiler refuses to annotate it with the required LLVMIR annotation. Thus LLVM sees a call to sigsetjmp that it believes cannot return twice... it's just an ordinary function that someone named "sigsetjmp" because they have a sense of humor. What LLVM does next is between itself and whatever gods that compilers believe in, and we have no more voice in such a matter.

In this particular case, it's hardly the fault of a "C wrapper."
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-08 16:04:12+00:00
I can strain the analogy just enough to get something useful from it.

If we laboriously create software shops in the classical way, and suddenly a new shop appears that is buggy, noisy, etc but eventually outperforms all other shops, then the progenitors of those new shops are going to succeed while the progenitors of these old shops are not going to make it.

It's a strain. The problem is AI is a new tech that replaces an entire process, not a product. Only when the process is the product (eg the process of moving people) does the analogy even come close to working.

I'd like to see analysis of what happened to the employees, blacksmiths, machinists, etc. Surely there are transferrable skills and many went on to work on automobiles?

This SE q implies there was some transition rather than chaos.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46866/did-any-ca...

Stretching just a bit further, there might be a grain of truth to the "craftsman to assembly line worker" when AI becomes a much more mechanical way to produce, vs employing opinionated experts.
by vidarh | 2025-07-08 16:04:16+00:00
It's not quite in the same league as any of this, but when I was a child, we sent our Commodore 64 in for repairs several times because it started "writing" by itself. Gibberish would slowly appear as if someone was randomly hitting the keyboard.

Each time it took several days before they repair centre got to it, and they then contacted us to tell us there was nothing wrong with the computer at all.

After we picked it up, eventually, when it started happening again for the third or fourth time, we realised the problem:

The "large" (a whopping 26") CRT TV we'd recently started placing it under when not in use caused it... A few days away from the TV to dishcharge it, and it was fine - hence why the repair technician didn't find anything.
by guywithahat | 2025-07-08 16:04:16+00:00
I'm not OP, and I'm at work so I can't get the links for you, but the CEO/company was pretty vocal about the need for censorship, especially around and after the 2016 election. It's a legitimate concern, and it's why I don't use Mozilla products if possible. The company is run by ideology and could blow up at any moment
by myrmidon | 2025-07-08 16:04:38+00:00
> The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end.

It seems a matter of perspective to me whether you call it "dead end" or "stepping stone".

To give some pause before dismissing the current state of the art prematurely:

I would already consider LLM based current systems more "intelligent" than a housecat. And a pets intelligence is enough to have ethical implications, so we arguably reached a very important milestone already.

I would argue that the biggest limitation on current "AI" is that it is architected to not have agency; if you had GPT-3 level intelligence in an easily anthropomorphizeable package (furby-style, capable of emoting/communicating by itself) public outlook might shift drastically without even any real technical progress.
by r0uv3n | 2025-07-08 16:04:47+00:00
I think this is enough of a classic to be widely known even among younger people. I'm 23 (doing math msc) and I think all the CS people that I know would instantly recognize the 500 miles title.

Though I do somewhat envy the possibility of having read the article close to publication and feel in some sense part of the history when it crops up again like this.
by djaychela | 2025-07-08 16:05:19+00:00
But for many, they wouldn't even know this was possible. Yes, when you look into it it will be all the usual software, but 95% of people don't even know there is a world beyond windows and macOS, so that might be something that gets them to look for a couple of minutes and consider they might be able to use this.

But I get what you're saying.
by scottLobster | 2025-07-08 16:05:38+00:00
So would a universal cancer vaccine, but no one is acting like it's just around the corner.

I'm old enough to remember when "big data" and later "deep data" was going to enable us to find insane multi-variable correlations in data and unlock entire new levels of knowledge and efficiency.

AI as currently marketed is just that with an LLM chatbot.
by marcodiego | 2025-07-08 16:05:48+00:00
I've seen energy-aware scheduling, literately decades of effort that culminated on the EEVDF scheduler so that it was possible to have a good scheduler that worked well on desktops, servers and HPC... and, between all those efforts, a giant parallel one to prevent or influence to OOM-Killer to behave better.

I really wonder if a "simple" memory-aware scheduler that punished tasks whose memory behavior (allocation or access) slows down the system would be enough. I mean, it doesn't happen anymore, but some years ago it was relatively simple to soft-crash a system just by trying to open a file that was significantly larger than the physical RAM. By 'soft-crashing' I mean the system became so slow that it was faster to reboot than wait for it to recover by itself. What if such a process was punished (for slowing down the system) by being slowed down (not being scheduled or getting lower cpu times) in a way that, no matter what it did, the other tasks continued fast enough so that it could be (even manually) killed without soft-crashing the system? Is there a reason why memory-aware scheduling was never explored or am I wrong and it was explored and proved not good?
by quietbritishjim | 2025-07-08 16:06:21+00:00
> I'm sure there has to be a mismatch between what we define as "those questions".

When I said "these questions" in my comment, I meant the questions in the article. That's what this discussion is about! Those are not inverting linked lists or traversing binary trees. They're about networking, asynchronous actions and time outs.

And yes, I do deal with those things all them. Maybe not every day, but certainly multiple times in each project. Ever had to deal with a timer where it might still be triggered even after you've cancelled it [1] (because its underlying implementation has already fired but the callback is still waiting in the completion queue)? Or even trigger twice because you then re-set it while the first callback was still in the queue? That's just an example, but that's exactly the sort of fiddly condition that permeates every corner of a heavily async or multithreaded / distributed system. If your work involves that then it's totally fair to ask about them in interviews.

[1] https://think-async.com/Asio/asio-1.10.6/doc/asio/reference/...

> ... I've also had it super strict on rails, interviewer silent and just expecting you to one-shot the optimal path. ...

Well, I agree, that's bad. But, as you say, the same questions can go either way depending on the interviewer. The very reason that I mentioned these being "discussion based" in my comment was because I took it as read that silly tricky questions are bad and to make the point that these questions don't seem to be designed for that.

Are we not allowed to ask technical questions in an interview just because some interviewers are bad? Should we be "embarrassed" about the questions in the article, as was said in the comment that I was replying to? That was what I was objecting to.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-08 16:06:32+00:00
The assumption is that "Google" is a good player, not a malicious one. Same idea as robots.txt. It's only there to configure the "good guys" behavior not to prevent malicious actors.

So I'm assuming Cloudflare is basically asking Google to split its crawler's UA and distinguish between search and AI overview and respect something akin ot robots.txt
by replete | 2025-07-08 16:06:37+00:00
I reviewed ZorinOS last year when considering going all-in on Linux at home last year, testing around 30 distributions.

While it wasn't a good fit as a techie, I rated Zorin the best distro for 'general desktop computing' for "normal" people who have used Windows their whole life.

I was impressed by how integrated and easy to use the desktop environment was. Now, this is not a statement of Gnome vs KDE etc etc, it is of the experience of using it - e.g. simple settings for making the general OS feel like Windows or MacOS, lots of sensible things.
by afavour | 2025-07-08 16:06:47+00:00
I hope this succeeds where others have, well, not failed, but not had overwhelming success. Years ago I installed Linux Mint on a family member's computer but they got frustrated enough with it (and required my regular intervention enough) that we ended up switching away. Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games" or boasting about the vast software library feels like asking for trouble. It won't be long before users run into rough edges.

TBH in the current environment I still think the best OS for "revive an old computer for a not very tech savvy person" is ChromeOS. I've never tried the open source alternatives for that but I'd be much happier setting up a relative with a glorified browser as an OS than something that attempts to do everything.
by dsign | 2025-07-08 16:06:58+00:00
If you run a website, you'll realize it's very difficult to get human traffic. Worse, trying to understand what those eyeballs are doing is a swamp; there are legitimate privacy concerns for example. Maybe all you care about is if your articles about sewing machines are getting more traction than your articles about computing Pi, but you can't get that without navigating all the legal complications of your analytics platform of choice, who wants to make sure you suffer for not letting them collect private information on your visitors to sell to third parties and to dump ads onto your visitors. Were it not for the bots, you would be fine just by running grep on your access logs. But no, bot traffic leaves noise everywhere; and for small websites that noise is more than enough to bury the signal and to be most of the traffic bill.
by nartho | 2025-07-08 16:07:03+00:00
>Zorin OS is built on the same Open Source software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station.

>Thanks to the advanced security features of Linux, Zorin OS is resistant to PC viruses and malware

The whole landing page is full of those statements. It seems like they are targeting a demographics with low tech literacy, but I don't know how productive those statements are really.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-08 16:07:08+00:00
See https://scikit-learn.org/stable/model_selection.html

This concept https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/calibration.html is the missing link for models that can deliver value commercially. In financial trading, a calibrated model + a Kelly better is a trading system that can make money, an uncalibrated model burns money at best. (See the curve at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion to realize how worthless uncalibrated predictions are)
Tell HN: Anything you are working on in AI could become an industry standard
by TimCTRL | 2025-07-08 16:07:13+00:00
Here are a few examples;

Vibe Coding - Using an LLM or LLM Powered IDE to build an application.

Messaging Interface popularised by ChatGPT - Standard way for textual conversation with LLM

Typing Text Animation - Standard way of outputting text across all mainstream text based interactions with LLM's

$20/Month Subscription - De facto standard pricing for LLM's and LLM based applications

Token Based Pricing - Standard too for API based usage

Prompt Engineering - Standard way to steer LLM output/behaviour

MCP - Standard way for LLM's to speak to external data sources and tools

To mention but a few...
by trealira | 2025-07-08 16:07:15+00:00
> But but but the creator himself said it is gif like in gin and giraffe... right?

Yeah, that's what the creator said, and that's actually how I pronounce it, too. Just pointing out that "gi-" words can have both hard and soft Gs.

> TIL: gimp is gimp and not gimp? I always pronounced this like gin.

You learn something new every day!
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-08 16:07:38+00:00
> I don't understand how AI scrapers make up such a large percentage of traffic to websites, as people claim it does.

I think a lot of people confuse scraping for training with on-demand scraping for "agentic use" / "deep research", etc. Today I was testing the new GLM-experimental model, on their demo site. It had "web search", so I enabled that and asked it for something I have recently researched myself for work. It gave me a good overall list of agentic frameworks, after some google searching and "crawling" ~6 sites it found.

As a second message I asked for a list of repo links, how many stars each repo has, and general repo activity. It went on and "crawled" each of the 10 repos on github, couldn't read the stars, but then searched and found a site that reports that, and it "crawled" that site 10 times for each framework.

All in all, my 2 message chat session performed ~ 5-6 searches and 20-30 page "crawls". Imagine what they do when traffic increases. Now multiply that for every "deep research" provider (perplexity, goog, oai, anthropic, etc etc). Now think how many "vibe-coded" projects like this exist. And how many are poorly coded and re-crawl each link every time...
by pjc50 | 2025-07-08 16:08:08+00:00
The whole point of publication is so that humans can read it. Robots not so much, especially if they're not paying customers. This is the distinction between how the web works technically and how it works socioeconomically.

This is the next iteration of things like the news snippet case. Publishers are not happy that Google crawls their content (at their expense) and then republishes it on their own site, while serving ads around it and getting user data, without cutting in the publisher who originally made it. And, for what little it's worth, owns the copyright.
by xp84 | 2025-07-08 16:08:19+00:00
I really wouldn't have predicted the extreme amount of centralization, and arguably unnecessary centralization, that we have today for things like university email and web servers. Even 20 years ago when I was in college, the servers I interacted with including email, were all in our school's /16. They did have software packages for LMS and stuff, but those were mostly deployed on-prem.

Today the websites are hosted on third party cloud servers (my school's main website is some company that hosts your Wordpress or Drupal site so you don't have to) and the email by Microsoft or Google. Same for every school it seems. I guess the IT department that used to run all the infra is now probably just a few people in charge of ordering new laptops for faculty/staff when they break, and replacing Wi-Fi access points every 5 years.
by biggestfan | 2025-07-08 16:08:56+00:00
And in place upgrades! It was a massive problem for years with Zorin (and still exists with other "user friendly" distros like Elementary), requiring a full system reinstall every time a new version released.

That being said, I still think this is a bit of a strange option when there's several Ubuntu flavors with more Windows-esque desktops, plus Linux Mint which offers a lot of these benefits with a much larger userbase and therefore better support (though Zorin is more "modern" looking). Not a bad option but not one I'd think to recommend often.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-08 16:09:13+00:00
I have but I've been trying to figure out what you mean since e.g. Slack (from homebrew) did show for me. Based on this I take it you mean you expected the cli (core) homebrew apps to also show not just gui (casks) ones? I think that's a fair complaint, it just wasn't clear from the PSA.