MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Rperry2174 | 2025-07-18 19:36:03+00:00
I keep seeing these Grok 4 intelligence claims, so I tried something very simple: "Animate a round robin tournament for 10 people."

Results: Claude: ~10s, perfect working demo ChatGPT: ~20s, solid solution Grok 4: ~1000s, failed completely, gave me a truncated base64 blob

This wasn't some obscure edge case... it was basic data visualization that any decent model should handle. Yet somehow Grok 4 is "competing with humans" and has "99% tool accuracy"...

I don't buy it..

links: Claude: https://claude.ai/share/7a413a6a-5c01-44a1-aaed-8b237e5e9e94 Chatgpt: https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/687a9f9d4304819187ac7d98d3... Grok 4: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw%3D%3D_20b61291-e1bb-45e5-a...

These benchmarks are either just wrong or measuring something completely divorced from practical utility imo...
by JadeNB | 2025-07-18 19:36:09+00:00
> Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple, distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"

This sounds like the thing that they do in parking garages where each level will have a color, an image, or sometimes even a musical theme. (Which is to say, it sounds like a good idea!)
by reactordev | 2025-07-18 19:36:22+00:00
Andrej's talks have helped me tremendously. They're up on YT [0]. For a long time I used to mentor and help machine learning scientists but when I hear Andrej speak, it's like I'm the student without any knowledge. It was a really strange feeling at first but I've come to value so much. I'm Jon Snow. I know Nothing (compared to Andrej).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy
by lbhdc | 2025-07-18 19:36:52+00:00
I think this is definitely the future for a lot of developers. Though, like other serverless platforms once you start getting scale this will likely be more expensive than always on variants.

GCP recently announced Cloud Run can do, more or less, what you are proposing. It scales to zero, and you only pay for the request duration.

https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/configuring/services/gpu-b...
by rkagerer | 2025-07-18 19:37:00+00:00
I've worked in tech all my life, and long ago learned how important it is to be impeccably diligent in documenting build processes whenever creating, deploying or adjusting new architecture.

Now it's simply become part of my engineering hygiene - as natural and effortless as brushing my teeth.

Actually drilling your DR is also crucial. If you never put it to the test, your documentation isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

In fact the last few years I've been thinking about ways for these systems to rebuild themselves on a continuous basis. Eg. I'd love a smartphone that competely restores itself from backup every night, even to brand new identical hardware, including secure element artifacts (either via private keys I securely control or reregistering everything in an automated fashion), with no user-noticeable impact.
by edgineer | 2025-07-18 19:37:06+00:00
"it is my professional opinion that Tesla's Autopilot is defective because Tesla knowingly allows the car to be operated in operational domains for which it is explicitly not designed for."

Outrageous; compare to cruise control on other cars.

In line with the outrageous regulation kill-switch-on-all-new-cars-after-2026, inside the infrastructure and jobs bill passed in 2021.

I see there's a newer bill drafted called No Kill Switches in Cars Act, hope it gets moving.
by blibble | 2025-07-18 19:37:22+00:00
> How do you propose we do that? If you buy AWS cloud services from Amazon, you don't buy from Amazon Inc. Seattle USA, you're buying from Amazon S.a.r.l. Luxembourg, an EU company. It's an EU-to-EU business contract.

exactly the same way VAT already works?

you could even use the existing VAT infrastructure: a custom rate on hyperscaler owned companies and subsidiaries

and forbid claiming it back

> which would be a great if your goal is to torpedo all foreign investment in the EU.

this is the point, where "all" means "US hyperscaler"
by WalterBright | 2025-07-18 19:37:22+00:00
The Gates family was indeed wealthy, but they were nowhere near the kind of wealth that would influence IBM. I'm sure Ms Gates was intelligent, well educated, and quite charming, but she didn't know anything about computers. IBM would have been foolish to let her decide their PC division's major decisions.

I.e. I'm not buying the notion that her influence went beyond simply suggesting they check into what her son was doing.
by trelane | 2025-07-18 19:37:26+00:00
You're right for home users. In businesses, the hill is also that some users are power users that have locked themselves in, in slightly different ways between the different power users. Also the company has also locked itself in by drinking deeply from the Microsoft well (e.g. AD and sharepoint and Windows etc) and marketing away will cost them a lot of time and effort, and therefore money.
by fifilura | 2025-07-18 19:37:34+00:00
Probably not for you then.

I think what's important for me is that for me this does not feel at all unhealthy. It is more a way to maintain a good habit, like brushing my teeth.

And I don't feel like I need to be saved by anyone.

Some days I run farther but most days I run 2 miles. As much as a lunch break allows.
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 19:37:35+00:00
Indeed, MPL/LGPL are often a better tradeoff than GPL.

But, in theory and according to the article, they should experience same effect. Just slower. When a (law-abiding) company finally has a strong reason to make some modification and keep it private, a proprietary replacement is coming. (Sometimes, as a "thin" fork of a permissive project, which then gets an engagement boost, reinforcing the point of the article)
by reaperducer | 2025-07-18 19:37:52+00:00
From all my years working in IT I've never had a good experience with the iOS/macOS mail app for either Exchange or Gmail, things break constantly. You're much better off using the proper Gmail or Outlook app.

Very strange. I've been using both iOS Mail and macOS mail with my company's Microsoft Exchange server for almost a decade with zero problems.

I've also been using both iOS and macOS with Gmail on my personal account for close to 20 years across close to a dozen computers and devices, and the only problem I've ever had is when Gmail suddenly decides to let some company bypass its spam filter.

I think I use Gmail's web interface maybe two or three times a year.
by piker | 2025-07-18 19:38:02+00:00
I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life.

Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.

MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.

The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

[1] Plug: https://tritium.legal
by andrewstuart | 2025-07-18 19:38:07+00:00
We have a general problem in our society in which people are desperate to NOT put stuff in landfill, and fail to realize that stuff is toxic and should not be reused. It should be thrown away.

“We didn’t know that used stuff was toxic.” Does not hold as an argument because stuff for recycling is often toxic it’s something we know, everyone should know, it’s obvious, assume it, don’t keep coming back saying “hey didn’t realize this or that was toxic and should be in landfill instead of recycled”.

Don’t recycle plastic and paper and use it for food and drink.

Don’t recycle car tires into roads and playgrounds and later realize they leach microplastics and are cancer causing.

We need to stop recycling toxic shit then saying “we didn’t know”.
by tantalor | 2025-07-18 19:38:26+00:00
That's rich because conservative and libertarian groups (especially the intellectual wing) have long opposed the idea that "speech can be violence" [1][2][3]

[1] https://adflegal.org/article/speech-not-violence-and-violenc...

[2] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/national-speech-index...

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-it...

Now they want us to believe that cameras are threats of violence.
by n8cpdx | 2025-07-18 19:38:28+00:00
Article does not make the case for why you must keep up.

AFAICT the best strategy would have been to completely tune out AI for the last ~3 years:

- AI has not meaningfully improved productivity (unless you’re doing something super basic like react and were already bad at it). If you are using AI in a transformative way, that looks different today than it did 6 months ago. - AI has not stolen jobs (end of ZIRP did that) - The field changes so fast that you could completely tune out, and at any moment become up-to-date because the news from 3 months ago is irrelevant.

I don’t get where this meme that “you have to keep up” comes from.

You have agency. You can get off the treadmill. You will be fine.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-18 19:38:48+00:00
> Nobody other than crazy micro-dosers is taking mushrooms often enough to cause a change in receptor density

This is so frustrating to me. Why not just google it before you think you know more about this than someone studying it for ten years? Two things can change receptor density: time and dose.

A Single Dose of Psilocybin Increases Synaptic Density and Decreases 5-HT2A Receptor Density in the Pig Brain

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33467676/

This is exactly why psychedelics last longer than prozac. It has less to do with half life and more to do with dose.

How is the mechanism not at least comparative to prozac since it is well know they both effect serotonin? The risk with psilocin is exactly the dose, as many people find out. And you thing there are not cardiac side effects from psychedelics?

A Case of Prolonged Mania, Psychosis, and Severe Depression After Psilocybin Use: Implications of Increased Psychedelic Drug Availability

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.22010...

Worsening suicidal ideation and prolonged adverse event following psilocybin administration in a clinical setting: case report and thematic analysis of one participant's experience

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11698204/

Safety First: Potential Heart Health Risks of Microdosing

https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/04/13/safety-first-p...
by majormajor | 2025-07-18 19:39:24+00:00
The big impact here seems to be on new companies, then, yeah?

Old established ones can absorb long-term expensing and more likely to be in cost-savings mode anyway.

But if you're a startup you are more incentivized to keep your development local. And I have seen a lot of near-shore, in particular, shops adverting aimed startup/medium-sized companies recently, so that might be significant.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-18 19:39:39+00:00
There's always been this security theater of people recommending arch because they "don't trust the companies" or Canonical or what have you but frankly I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner. Well or maybe it has and we don't know.

Running random binaries on your computer uploaded by some anonymous dude has to be the equivalent of buying heart medicine on craigslist. And because Arch is so barebones to begin with the AUR is very popular, you see a lot of arch users using it.
by Terr_ | 2025-07-18 19:40:17+00:00
I've always felt DX was an ironically realistic vision of 2052 when you consider what the average person would be able to see.

Sure, the protagonist sees hidden bunkers with weird science, but the average person? It's hard find work, their votes don't seem to matter, there's no real privacy anymore, and nobody will honor the warranty on the little floor-cleaner robot.
by albystein | 2025-07-18 19:40:18+00:00
Hi Peter,

Thanks for hosting this AMA. I’ve an immigration issue related to status transition. So I came to the U.S on an F-1 visa about 6 years ago. However, during the course of my undergraduate study, I found out that I qualified for TPS. So I applied and received it. Afterwards, I decided to take a leave of abscence from school to work on a startup because TPS allows me to. I was also made to change my status from F1 to TPS. And my I-20 status period expired a few months after I took the leave at the beginning of 2024.

Owing to the recent TPS terminations of various countries, I’m afraid that my TPS will be terminated once it’s up for review in a few months. My question regards transistioning back to F1 status. I’m wondering if I can change status back from TPS to F1 without having to leave the country. This is because a visa ban is currently in place for the country for which I hold TPS. As such I can’t risk traveling outside the country as I won’t be able to get back in because of the visa ban. Btw the ban anpplies to all visa categories including F1 and O1.

Thanks!
by positron26 | 2025-07-18 19:41:04+00:00
> Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with.

I feel the same.

The multi-line strings and string interpolation are both really nice. Unfortunately a lot of the text being munged is bash and usually already ugly, so the result is double-ugly.

The functional aspects are okay. However, as an expression language and being primarily used in a declarative way, it is frequent to have almost no idea what's going on in Nix. Reading the code and understanding the evaluation are extremely far apart.

callPackage... It's something I thought would be cool in a language until I actually experienced the depth of disorientation it can cause.

The remaining syntax has a lot of "but why?" where it just seems to do its own thing relative to other languages, which makes it harder to get into a rhythm.

Some of the subject matter is the real culprit. The cross compiling sliding window thing... I've studied it several times. If I had to actually do something with it, straight to the LLM. Compilers have targets.
by paulbjensen | 2025-07-18 19:41:04+00:00
I wonder if this tool by MSFT is able to handle that:

https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

I was amazed when I realised that Word docs were just zip files and you could poke around in the xml files embedded inside of them.

I almost implemented a working React -> Word document renderer back in 2017, but it didn't have support for creating the xml tags with : inside of them (which OOXML documents use).
by fsckboy | 2025-07-18 19:41:19+00:00
the paywall really cuts down on the readability of this story. a quick google showed plenty of news stories though, their shareprice dropped 40% on the market today.

I'd be curious what the numbers are for the "good" that this therapy does; is there any way that this therapy is still "worth it" at any scale? but I know little about this area so that's a fairly naive question.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-18 19:42:01+00:00
I've been writing compilers for 45 years now. Tokenizing is a big part of every textbook on compilers. To resolve expressions (which are recursive in nature) it would have had to do more than just tokenizing. While this isn't hard at all, it's "parsing" which is also qualifying it as a compiler.

I.e. the basic program was lexing and parsing. It's a compiler. A very simple one, sure, but a compiler.
by Tharre | 2025-07-18 19:42:02+00:00
First of all, this is incorrect, the checking would have to happen _before_ even building the package since malware is already being executed at that point.

But more importantly this is a terrible idea in regards to privacy/infosec. I do not want packages I build and install myself to be uploaded to a 3rd party website.

And for what benefit? 99% of new malware won't be detected anyway, and once it is known it is way more effective to just remove the offending package from the AUR.
by grep_name | 2025-07-18 19:42:04+00:00
> That said, Nix-the-language also suffers from all the same birth defects that manifest themselves in frontend development

That must be it. The GP's comment really resonated with me, in that learning scheme felt like no task at all whereas I STILL feel uncomfortable with the nix programming language and ecosystem despite using nixOS exclusively on my personal laptop for two years and on my work machine for about half a year now. I've always fumbled over frontend / javascript development though, and avoid it as much as I can at work although I still end up working in it every year or so.

Nix only won out for me because of the mac compatibility, without which I can't really use it at work
by lsy | 2025-07-18 19:42:20+00:00
If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in conversational form), then you probably don't need to consume a big diet of ongoing output from PR people, bloggers, thought leaders, and internet rationalists. That seems likely to get you going down some millenarian path that's not helpful.

Despite the feeling that it's a fast-moving field, most of the differences in actual models over the last years are in degree and not kind, and the majority of ongoing work is in tooling and integrations, which you can probably keep up with as it seems useful for your work. Remembering that it's a model of text and is ungrounded goes a long way to discerning what kinds of work it's useful for (where verification of output is either straightforward or unnecessary), and what kinds of work it's not useful for.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-18 19:42:55+00:00
yay is a package manager that has been made for AUR. yay is not the official package manager for Arch Linux, pacman is, and it does not support AUR. yay is not installed on Arch Linux by default, its official package manager, pacman, is. AUR is for unofficial 3rd party packages, i.e. "use at your own risk". It has always been the case.
by almatabata | 2025-07-18 19:43:14+00:00
> So I'm assuming Europe's goal is not to compete or break American moat but to force them to be polite and to preserve national sovereignty on important national security aspects.

When push comes to shove the US company will always prioritize US interest. If you want to stay under the US umbrella by all means. But honestly it looks very short sighted to me.

After seeing this news https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/the-networker..., how can you have any faith that they will play nice?

You have only one option. Grow alternatives. Fund your own companies. China managed to fund the local market without picking winners. If European countries really care, they need to do the same for tech.

If they don't they will forever stay under the influence of another big brother. It is US today, but it could be China tomorrow.
by alphazard | 2025-07-18 19:43:30+00:00
Unless you are speculating about tax policy, there is basically no case where you would want to do this. Losses now are worth more than losses later in terms of corporate tax. And if you are a startup burning runway, you might not live long enough to actualize the loss if you amortize it. From the perspective of day-to-day operations: the software engineers need to get paid, and that money has to come from somewhere, revenue, a loan, or the bank account. It's very much not spread out over 5 years in terms of your actual cash flow needs.

Typically businesses amortize large capital expenditures, and this allows the business to appear profitable even when they had a significant outbound cash flow. This is just something they're allowed to do with accounting in the US. There's an argument that you should take out a loan for situations like this, because then the cash flow events will more closely match the changing value of the business.

I would not try to make sense of it in terms of business accounting, there's no deeper understanding of business to be had. It's just politics; and it made it objectively harder for startups with revenue to survive and grow.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-18 19:44:08+00:00
> I'd go so far as to say if you're not seeing any significant increase in your productivity, you're using LLMs wrong.

It's always the easy cop out for whoever wants to hype AI. I can preface it with "I'd go so far as to say", but that is just a silly cover for the actual meaning.

Properly reviewing code, if you are reviewing it meaningfully instead of just glancing through it, takes time. Writing good prompts that cover all the ground you need in terms of specificity, also takes time.

Are there gains in terms of speed? Yeah. Are they meaningful? Kind of.
by wordofx | 2025-07-18 19:44:12+00:00
This is HN. Even with evidence people here get their feelings hurt and downvote. You cannot engage in conversation when one side is “the science is settled” mentality.

or in the case of AI, the majority of people are “wow this is useful and helpful” and then HN is like “it didn’t 1 shot answer from the first prompt I gave it so it’s useless”.

You only need to read every discussion on HN about AI. The majority here are against AI are also the same people who really have no idea how to use it.

So in the end there is no conversation to engage with because HN has tunnel vision. “Elon bad” “ai bad” “science bad” “anything not aligned with my political view bad”
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-18 19:44:15+00:00
Nearly all distros have this problem when it comes to packaging and distributing 3rd party software.

Even if you're using an immutable distro, your KDE Plasma session can get hijacked if you simply use the built in wizard to install 3rd party desktop widgets, which is a right-click + single-click away on any Plasma destkop.
by motorest | 2025-07-18 19:44:39+00:00
> Again, I ask whether you think Harris or Biden produced objectively good results, or fixed any of the problems identified in the article.

I beg you to pause, take a deep breath, look at any of Trump's terms, and compare it with the output of Biden's administration.

Do that, and you simply cannot say with a straight face that there was no choice or difference in outcomes. Not even as a joke.

If you are honest with yourself and with everyone, you will acknowledge how outlandish that idea is.

Let's be serious.
by kreeWall | 2025-07-18 19:45:59+00:00
Hi Mr. Roberts;

Thank you for doing this, yet again - your insights are always so valuable. I am on an H1B, and my company applied for a Greencard, and I have received a Priority Date with my i-140 (sorry if I'm not using the correct terms here, this process confuses me). When am I able to leave my current employer without losing my priority date? Would I need to get my new employer to apply for an H1B transfer and extension for me, or how does that work? Thank you!!
by guptadeepak | 2025-07-18 19:46:04+00:00
In this piece, I examine AI's tangible effects on job functions, workforce adaptation, and inequality risk.

Technically, current generative models are displacing routine tasks (e.g., data processing, content generation) but enabling hybrid roles that blend human judgment with AI augmentation.

The main challenge: building organizational and educational infrastructures to keep workforce skills aligned with rapidly evolving AI capability.

What upskilling approaches have actually worked in your organizations or fields?
by barbarr | 2025-07-18 19:46:20+00:00
The issue was not the gene therapy itself, but the delivery mechanism. They used a virus to administer the gene therapy, and this virus (like most bloodstream impurities) aggregates in the liver. At low doses this is fine, but at high doses, your body's immune response will be laser-focused on the liver, and you die from the side effects of this response.