MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-17 23:40:28+00:00
This is gonna kill Craigslist :-). You see these pictures of a really nice car and get there and find it has a crushed left fender, rust holes in the hood and a broken headlight.

We had a realtor list a property in our area and they had used generative AI to "re-imagine" the property because the original owner who had bought it in 1950 and died in it in 2023 had done zero maintenance and upgrades. People who showed up to see it were really super pissed. The realtor argued this was just the next step after staging, but it certainly didn't work here. They took it off the market and a bunch of people showed up to fix it up (presumably from the family but one never knows).
by lossolo | 2025-07-17 23:41:04+00:00
In the context of our conversation and what OP wrote, there has been no breakthrough since around 2018. What you're seeing is the harvesting of all low-hanging fruit from a tree that was discovered years ago. But fruit is almost gone. All top models perform at almost the same level. All the "agents" and "reasoning models" are just products of training data.

I wrote more about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426993

You may also be interested in this article, that goes into details even more:

https://blog.jxmo.io/p/there-are-no-new-ideas-in-ai-only
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-17 23:42:09+00:00
Yeah how many of these have we had now? Literally every test and study about UBI comes back with similar data: it improves lives, reduces stress, and nobody becomes a drain on the system. It doesn’t matter. The people who oppose it aren’t looking at the data, they just don’t want "my tax dollars" going to support people struggling to get by.
by pembrook | 2025-07-17 23:42:29+00:00
Uber operated at a loss for 9 years. They're now a profitable, market-winning business.

Amazon operated at a loss for 9 years, and barely turned a profit for over a decade longer than that. They're now one of the greatest businesses of all time.

Spotify operated at a loss for 17 years until becoming profitable. Tesla operated at a loss for 17 years before turning a profit. Palantir operated at a loss for 20 years before turning a profit.

And this was before the real age of Big Tech. Google has more cashflows they can burn than any of these companies ever raised, combined.
by Bender | 2025-07-17 23:42:54+00:00
This is both a political and technical issue. Change the laws to allow server operators to just send an RTA header [1] and leave the verification to parental controls on the client side. It's not a server operators job to be everyone's parent. It's not perfect, it will be bypassed by teens but it's better than what we have today and does not leak identities.

- Add header to anything that may contain adult content or user-provided content.

- Change law to allow RTA headers as an alternative means of adult verification.

- Set a time requirement in the law for all major browsers and all web clients used by small children to implement or utilize existing parental controls. When enabled check for header and prompt for authentication unless the site was already approved by the parent in parental controls. That is where parental controls belong.

- Remind politicians that the 3rd party verification sites will ultimately leak all their data and their family members data just like what was used to reverse engineer trips to Epstein island. [2] All of the politicians kinks will be exposed using such sites and/or they will be at risk of being blackmailed. Whatever lobbying or kickbacks they are getting for approving the 3rd party sites will not be worth it.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

[2] - https://www.wired.com/video/watch/we-tracked-every-visitor-t...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-17 23:43:26+00:00
I've never been convinced by point 2 (AI Outputs Are Stolen From People Like You).

Every artist has stolen. I mean, that's probably putting too fine a point on things, but you'd have to show me a painting someone has created where they never saw another artist's work before. Or a book written by someone who never read a book before.

I drew all the time as a kid — making a point at age 12 to learn to draw the human figure. I started with the standard proportions that every decent book on drawing the human figure puts forth. I started with shapes representing the hips, the rib cage, the skull — you sketch lines determined by muscles over those hard structures. You draw the clavicle, divot defining the knee caps, suggest the inverted triangle over the figures back-side, shoulder blades protruding....

And in time I started looking at how Mort Drucker drew mouths. How another MAD artist did pockets on short-sleeve shirts. How Angelo Torres draws the ears....

In time you become an amalgam of your favorite bits and pieces of your favorite artists.

(And then you find out that R. Crumb was lifting styles from Warner Brothers, etc. when he was ramping up his craft. But of course he did.)
by sothatsit | 2025-07-17 23:43:29+00:00
I think people also expect models to be optimised over time. For example, the 5x drop in cost of o3 was probably due to some optimisation on OpenAI's end (although I'm sure they had business reasons for dropping the price as well).

Small models have also been improving steadily in ability, so it is feasible that a task that needs Claude Opus today could be done by Sonnet in a year's time. This trend of model "efficiency" will add on top of compute getting cheaper.

Although, that efficiency would probably be quickly eaten up by increased appetites for higher performance, bigger, models.
by snickerbockers | 2025-07-17 23:43:35+00:00
I ditched them after the way they unceremoniously killed off the Wii U and 3DS Miiverse almost immediately after switch released. Miiverse was a massive part of Wii U's experience, so it was a pretty big punch to the gut when it suddenly went away in 2017. the main menu on Wii U is populated with dozens of randomly chosen miis running around and "discussing" games by displaying speech bubbles with Miiverse posts and it also integrated the Miiverse directly into several games. For the last 8 years that's all been replaced with generic, fake miiverse posts that are hardcoded into the firmware as a fallback for when the internet isn't working. Any game that previously had miiverse functionality lost it in summer 2017, less than five years after the Wii U's release.

Super Mario Maker (September 2015) actually became nigh-unplayable less than two years after its release because it relied on Miiverse to share levels with other players. You can still make your own levels and not share them with anyone, but being able to share your levels online with other players was a significant part of that game.

And that's on top of the fact that anything you buy from Nintendo's many online "eshops"/"shop channels" (there's literally a new online store+account system for every console!) will be destroyed within a decade because they don't think of you as a customer anymore once they have your money.

BTW another great example of how much Nintendo screwed over their most loyal customers: prior to the switch's announcement, preview of Breath of the Wild had a minimap on the Wii U's controller but that was removed in the final release because they didn't want the Wii U version to have an advantage over the Switch port.
by edge17 | 2025-07-17 23:43:42+00:00
A lot of the technology is regulated by FDA requirements, which apply to humans but not animals. Some of these requirements are challenging engineering problems - like how to do certain type of liquid transfers without exposing the contents of a container to the atmosphere, etc. There are lots of tools for doing liquid transfers that mimic what a human would do, but FDA places a different bar when it comes to developing a controlled manufacturing process.

There's also the question of, who writes the rules. Often it's industry experts that are already working on the process, and have incentives like keeping others out or licensing their own IP.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-17 23:44:59+00:00
I see nothing insulting in my comment, unless you think that just so much as questioning any of the premises of an emotional response in someone suffering is automatically an insult. In that case, you're just wrong and irrationally so.

Being sick doesn't make a person free of possibly feeling entitled or coming to unreasonable conclusions, nor does it make it wrong to question their feelings. I did so fairly politely. In my comment above, I was honestly asking for them to clarify who they think is worth being angry at, and why. I also explained reasonable reasons for why it's misdirected to claim as unfair a very general thing that's removed from you specifically only because it hasn't yet gotten around to creating relief for a problem you have, in a complex world full of problems that can't all be solved all at once or in just the way any one person desires.

This is a reality that all of us live with, so how the hell is it insulting if someone points it out?

>The parent didn't go on a screed and rage at the world. They didn't try to claim their anger is righteous. And they certainly didn't ask you to play two bit therapist

No, but they commented about their problem in a comment thread where people comment back and debate randomly. I don't give shit one about being anyone's therapist, but if you mention something personal, in a comment thread of all things, expect the possibility of someone responding with questions or opinion, like you yourself are doing. Should I feel insulted too?

I too have a long-term, very tedious and problematic health condition I need to deal with day by day, and it has no real medical remedy yet. I try to temper my frustration though. I understand that some things just aren't easy to fix.
by kevin42 | 2025-07-17 23:45:08+00:00
You made a lot of bold assertions there. It's as if you have a complete and definitive theory of human intelligence to compare it against. Which if true, would be incredible, because there isn't a scientifically accepted theory, nor is there consensus from a philosophical standpoint.

I can't say that you are wrong, you might be right, especially about AGI. And I think it's unlikely that LLMs are the direct path to AGI. But, just looking at how human brains work, it seems unlikely that we would be intelligent either if we used your same reductionist logic.

An individual neuron doesn't "think" or "understand" anything. It's a biological cell that simply fires an electrochemical signal when its input threshold is met. It has no understanding of language or context. By your logic, since the fundamental components are just simple signal processors, the brain cannot possibly learn or be intelligent. Yet, from the complex interaction of ~86 billion of these simple biochemical machines, the emergent properties of thought, understanding, and consciousness arise.

Dismissing an LLM's capabilities because its underlying operations are basically just math operating on tokenized data is like dismissing human consciousness because it's "just electrochemistry" in a network of cells. Both arguments mistake the low-level mechanism for the high-level emergent phenomenon.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-17 23:45:16+00:00
“It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.”

This is probably another marketing stunt. Turn off the flow of cocaine and have users find out how addicted they are. And they'll pay for the purest cocaine, not for second grade.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-17 23:45:53+00:00
We already have something that resembles a basic income in developed countries. It's called retirement pensions. And what we see there is that most people, as soon as they are eligible for their pension, they stop working. Sure, they may volunteer a few hours a month here and there, but their productivity plummets compared to the previous year when they didn't collect that pension. I don't blame them one bit -- it's exactly the same thing I did once I retired.

So what happens as we lower the age at which they receive a pension? Different countries and companies have sometimes offered pensions to some of their senior workers to reduce their workforce -- the results were the same. Most people stop working as soon as they have a lifetime guaranteed income that allows them to afford life's essentials, even if they are in their forties.

A pilot where the participants know or suspect that the money will soon stop flowing won't capture the real-world effect of this decades-long experiment that we call pensions.

And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
by cyberax | 2025-07-17 23:45:53+00:00
And I know someone with a stash of 100000000 bitcoins. The yield of gold mines is known, and it's pretty easy to extrapolate into the past.

I understand where all these conspiracies come from. It typically starts with "there must be enough gold to back all the savings, because Bretton-Woods or something". Then they check the total cost of the world's gold. It's a small fraction of the total savings.

So obviously most of the gold is hidden somewhere.
by capnrefsmmat | 2025-07-17 23:45:59+00:00
I don't think the AI companies are systematically working to make their models sound more human. They're working to make them better at specific tasks, but the writing styles are, if anything, even more strange as they advance.

Comparing base and instruction-tuned models, the base models are vaguely human in style, while instruction-tuned models systematically prefer certain types of grammar and style features. (For example, GPT-4o loves participial clauses and nominalizations.) https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107

When I've looked at more recent models like o3, there are other style shifts. The newer OpenAI models increasingly use bold, bulleted lists, and headings -- much more than, say, GPT-3.5 did.

So you get what you optimize for. OpenAI wants short, punchy, bulleted answers that sound authoritative, and that's what they get. But that's not how humans write, and so it'll remain easy to spot AI writing.
by avianlyric | 2025-07-17 23:46:17+00:00
Erm, have you heard of these things called apps? It’s this magical concept where other companies can run code your iPhone, and deliver all the features you just talked about.

I don’t really understand why Apple has to provide a ChatGPT product, baked directly into their software. Why on earth would Apple want to get involved in the race to the bottom for the cheapest LLMs? Apple doesn’t produce commodity products, they package commodities into something much more unique that gives them a real competitive advantage, so people are willing to pay a premium for the Apple’s product, rather than just buying the cheapest commodity equivalent.

There is no point Apple just delivering an LLM. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc already do that, and Apple is never going to get into the pay-per-call API service they all offer. Delivering AI experiences using on-device only compute, that’s something OpenAI, Anthropic and Google can’t build, which means Apple can easily charge an premium for it, assuming they build it.
by Arathorn | 2025-07-17 23:46:27+00:00
the spec core team’s employers are:

* alexey (red hat)

* clokep (simplisafe)

* tulir (beeper)

* travis (funded by fdn)

* uhoreg (element)

* richvdh (element)

* dbkr (element)

* andrew (element)

* erik (element)

and me

from memory andrew & uhoreg all joined the team before later applying for jobs at Element - the fact being that if you wanted to be paid to work on Matrix back then, Element was pretty much the only place to do so (being the company formed by the team who created Matrix). I’m not going to fire people from Element or kick them off the SCT and lose their braintrust though.
by hatthew | 2025-07-17 23:48:34+00:00
I'm sure there is already much discussion about this, but I feel like basic income pilots will never show the true impact. Someone who knows they'll have guaranteed income for the rest of their life is more likely to stop working than someone who is told they will receive guaranteed income for a few years. Especially when this pilot is cancelled and now people won't trust that future ones will last even for the few years specified.
by krapp | 2025-07-17 23:48:58+00:00
As a whole? No. But only because Hacker News is not a monolith, and there are many groups with various viewpoints here.

Are there pro-fascist posters here? Absolutely. I've seen full throated advocacy for some vile things here. The worst of it usually gets flagged.

Is there a strong correlation between flagging political posts and support for fascism? Not necessarily. Although some of that is definitely the HN Trumpist/right-wing contingent, this forum harbors a particular distate for anything not explicitly tech related (often beyond what the actual site guidelines state to be on topic) which includes politics of any kind.

And HN is designed so that flagging and downvoting has a much greater weight than upvoting, so it really doesn't even take much to tank a thread.
by synack | 2025-07-17 23:49:00+00:00
> Through a foundational change, Amazon EKS has offloaded etcd’s consensus backend from a raft-based implementation to journal, an internal component we’ve been building at AWS for more than a decade. It serves ultra-fast, ordered data replication with multi-Availability Zone (AZ) durability and high availability.

I'd love to know more about this. Is it Paxos or something else?
by javawizard | 2025-07-17 23:49:07+00:00
This. If there's one thing I've found AI to be a huge timesaver for, it's writing things that interact with libraries/frameworks/codebases that have an atrociously large surface area. AI can sift through the noise so much faster than I can and get me going down the right pack in way less time.

(Aside: Hi Ben! If you are who I think you are, we started at the same company on the same day back in August of 2014.)
by SR2Z | 2025-07-17 23:49:37+00:00
We already have the EITC, which is frankly a better version of UBI (it incentivizes working more and literally goes up as you increase your earnings). Expand the EITC and tax capital gains as regular, inflation-adjusted income to pay for it and we've basically done it - a single Democratic administration could.

In fact, during COVID, an increase to the child tax portion of the EITC reduced childhood poverty by _70%_ at a relatively low cost. Guess why we don't do that anymore?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#/medi...

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expirat...

(US focused even though the article is Canada lol)
by bborud | 2025-07-17 23:49:57+00:00
Here's the thing: there has never been a lack of people who have declared this problem as solved in the 20 or so years since Python started Poking its way into my professional life. (And for about 12-13 years before that I could gladly ignore it since nobody did much of anything in it). People have said this since the days of the Blackberry.

Multiple times people have explained why they think whatever they are madly in love with now is the definitive solution. And none of those times, over those couple of decades did it turn out to be true.

I understand that you are enthusiastic about things. I get it. But perhaps you might understand that some people actually need to see things stick before they declare a winner? I'm not big on wishful thinking.
by II2II | 2025-07-17 23:49:58+00:00
> You couldn’t think of ANY of these?

There can be a thousand reasons to favour something, yet it only takes one reason to reject it.

As for the inexpensive bit, I've never really viewed Nintendo in that light because the games themselves are rather expensive. For my older DS/3DS it wasn't much of an issue since there was the secondhand market. It sounds like the secondhand market is a gamble with the Switch 2 which, at least in my case, makes it a non-starter. That is especially true since they are punishing the person with the legitimate cartridge, who may or may not have been the person who pirated the game.
by arevno | 2025-07-17 23:50:08+00:00
Parent never said pure glue code, they said "a lot", which is roughly correct.

Any nontrivial business application will be on the order of ~60% glue, API, interface/model definition, and CRUD UI code, which LLMs are already quite good at.

They're also good at writing tests, with the caveat that a human reviews them.

They're pretty decent at emitting documentation from pure code, too.

The only way these models don't result in mass unemployment in this industry is if the amount of work required expands to fill the gap. Which is certainly possible! The Jevons Paradox of software development.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-17 23:50:28+00:00
I can't think of a more bland misuse of a public image than keeping it strictly neutral so that it doesn't offend the ideological fetishes of people who just want you to shut up if you deviate from whatever they indulgently decide is correct.

Like any human being, an athlete can have other opinions on other things and all the right in the world to express them without having to be a certified expert. You're doing the same now, as did the comment above. That's the only qualification necessary.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-17 23:51:18+00:00
Gotta polish that fig-leaf to hide Apple's real stance towards user privacy: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/

> Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information,"
by winstonewert | 2025-07-17 23:51:20+00:00
Some thoughts:

- It says that 3/4 of people kept working; to me, that seems like a big drop.

- Data is based on a survey of people in the program; I distrust data from surveys on principle.

- There seems to have been a reduction in the payment as they earned money, so its not really UBI as typically advocated.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 23:52:41+00:00
I work in PHP, I would say about 90% of all bugs are type errors.

Even if they're not type errors, if I sit back and think about what the root cause is, it's the type system and dynamic typing.

Addressing an array at null? Type error! Referring to a key that doesn't exist? Believe it or not - not a logic error, that's a type error! If we uses objects or structs that's not possible, but arrays are basically structs with dynamic member ;(

Anything around empty()? Type error. Arithmetic errors? Almost always type errors! Using postfix logic operators? Believe it or not, type error! Anything around DateTime? Usually a type error!
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-17 23:52:51+00:00
I'm willing to grant non-symbolic externality. Though, I don't know how useful that is.

We will never access the signified only the signifier. When we believe that signifiers exist externally, we are engaging in a suspension of epistemic honesty, and I get why we do it - it makes talking about and engaging with the world infinitely easier. But we shouldn't ever believe our own trick. That's reverting to a pre-operational version of cognition.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-17 23:54:09+00:00
I'm still haunted by the "AI slop" called "Jodorowsky's Tron" [example 1] that went viral a bit ago. If an art director had taken those to represent sketches and then created costumed based on them, it would have made for a mind-blowing film.

(Come to think of it, sounds like a good cosplay opportunity. Go as "Jodorowsky's Tron AI Slop".)

[1] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9414a3_977e028d2ca6472294...