MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-06 20:42:22+00:00
>Who’s to say it’s saturated?

Well, you apparently just did. Saturation is indeed relative (or rather, on a spectrum with varying subjective lines). You can explain why it's saturated, but that still means it's saturated.

>Like it or not AI is not only a huge trend, it really is a paradigm shift in all sorts of aspects

Sure, so was fracking. I wasn't in this community back then, but I'd wager somehow we didn't have 1 in 5 articles about how much better society can drill oil.
by necovek | 2025-07-06 20:42:27+00:00
There is fuzzing, FWIW.

But the same also holds for people who are "independent testers" and unaware of the same issues.

What I found is that software developers are bad at testing edge cases while they are in the creation mode (when they focus on happy path), but that good engineers switch to breaking mode once they try to cover things with sufficient tests. TDD also encourages breaking things first, but really, this is a mindset change that is usually skipped.
by sysmax | 2025-07-06 20:42:53+00:00
I don't see it as anything bad. LLMs are a interesting, alright. They can very quickly do a lot of mind-numbing work that used to be done by hand, and then they can stumble and produce total nonsense that no human being would even consider writing. And then you tweak the prompt in a weird way, and you're suddenly back in business.

To me, it feels like studying a new physical phenomenon. Like when Nicola Tesla was playing around with coils and wires, eventually loading to the creation of an entire industry.

Except, with LLMs, you don't need multi-million dollar equipment to play around with models. You can get pretty cool stuff done with a regular GPU, and even cooler if you use cloud.

I would say, if you are not spending some spare time fiddling around with LLMs trying to get them do some of the work you would otherwise do by hand, you are missing out.
by Ukv | 2025-07-06 20:43:23+00:00
> Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG

To my understanding, this wouldn't affect MMORPGs where you're explicitly buying X months of access (so long as you do get the access you paid for, or a refund if it's shut down early) which is how most I'm aware of work.

> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems,

The proposal requires leaving the game in a reasonably playable state, but not any specific actions like these. In fact the FAQ specifically says "we're not demanding all internal code and documentation".

> while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers

I don't see why the company would be liable for this. Moderation of the private servers would be up to those running the private servers. If there is something to this effect in EU law that I'm unaware of, it seems like it'd already be placing undue burden on games that do currently (or want to) release their server software and that this initiative would be a good opportunity to exempt them from that liability.

> but it hurts small developers

If anything I'd speculate small developers are likely to have less issue releasing server software/code, and more likely to have a game this doesn't even apply to in the first place, giving them an edge over larger publishers.

But even if it were a significant burden, I feel it's really just providing what was already purchased. At the extreme, do you think it'd be okay to take $70 from someone for a singleplayer game, then shut down authentication servers (rendering it unplayable) a few minutes later?
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-06 20:43:27+00:00
Would I be correct in assuming that your name comes from 'The Point'? What a classic!

I also appreciate your point about the reality of agriculture, I think too often people miss just how narrow the margins there are and why farm life has always been so financially unstable. It used to be the weather that could make or break you, and it still is, but not world commodity markets, the price of fuel and fertilizer, and trends in a number of areas can all do it as well. Add in the top-down pressure to keep prices low and bottom-up pressure to target migrants and... what a rough mix.
by phil21 | 2025-07-06 20:43:50+00:00
This is effectively my "dream" job for semi-retirement at the moment. I don't need to make top dollar any longer, but I crave doing something "real" that actually matters and I work for/talk to people who actually make useful things for humanity. I still need a decent income to pay for toys, hobbies, and time off work until I hit retirement age.

A contracting IT job trekking between a few farms and monitoring them remotely sounds pretty great to me! And right up my alley in terms of skillsets and interests.
by ghusto | 2025-07-06 20:44:02+00:00
Silly that this is being downvoted, especially since the book industry comparison is an interesting one:

There will always be people like myself who enjoy older (even outdated) books, but even we still buy new books because they are part of the zeitgeist and carry new ideas/developments. It'd be the same for new video games, some people would enjoy older games, but they'd likely still pick up a similar new game that developed something novel.

I guess the real problem here is that video game companies don't want to create anything novel, not least because it's a risk.
by ttoinou | 2025-07-06 20:44:38+00:00
The author seems to be a great educator and computer scientist, much respect to his work. But from what I can gather, although I'd love to study more infinite sized matrices, he proved / showed nothing in this article. What he wrote is not true at all, they are only analogies and not rigorous maths. Functions are not vectors. But finite polynomials are vectors yes, this is trivial.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 20:45:32+00:00
This comes with a lot of trade-offs. The complexity of regulation explodes, because everything takes more hops and there's more context switching.

Even with just 50 states in the US currently, the complexity is very high. Operating in all 50 states or just a few is very difficult and costs a lot of money. Usually what happens is the "lowest common denominator" solution: whereby companies just follow the superset of laws that comply with the most stringent regions.

That's why California law is pretty much the most important state law. California has the biggest economy, and a lot of companies are headquartered there. In addition, their laws tends to be more restrictive for companies. So even if you're in Texas, there's a good chance you're just controlled by California law.
by torginus | 2025-07-06 20:46:10+00:00
Except all the jobs where the job is repetitive and salary is tied to performance inevitably start out as comfortable ways of earning easy money, and turn into nightmarish hellscapes as the owners do the frog boiling routine.

Food delivery is the perfect example. Right before covid, and during lockdowns, in my country, it was a lucrative job with easy work that earned a decent chunk of change, while being so cheap for consumers, that I've once or twice skipped out on going around the apartment block to the pizza place and just ordered it to my door.

Nowadays, prices are sky high and the wages are so low, and the system so punishing, is the only delivery drivers you see are illegal immigrants hanging on for dear life.
by chowells | 2025-07-06 20:47:01+00:00
Forbidding \r\n line endings in the encoding just sort of sinks the whole idea. The first couple ideas are nice, but then you suddenly get normative with what characters are allowed to be encoded? That creates a very large initial hurdle to clear to get people to use your encoding. Suddenly you need to forbid specific texts, instead of just handling everything. Why put such a huge footgun in your system when it's not necessary?
by cs702 | 2025-07-06 20:47:01+00:00
According to Indian regulators, every trading day Jane Street would:

1) buy large volumes of stocks and/or stock futures that are part of an index tracking India’s banking sector, early in the day,

2) subsequently place large options trades, betting that the index would decline or volatility would spike later in the day, and

3) later in the day, cash out of the large long positions, dragging the index lower, making far more money on the options trades than on the long positions.

Jane Street can and likely will claim the firm was only arbitraging away pricing inefficiencies, nothing more, nothing less. It was just business as usual, etc., etc.

However, given the scale of the operation, Jane Street's actions sure look like textbook market manipulation. Calling it like I see it.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-06 20:47:29+00:00
Any pretense that does not give you disadvantages is misleading. Small shops and retail don't have to worry about e.g. slippage like the big guys do when taking positions. Big shops can work out custom instruments sometimes but on the other hand they also need them a lot more, as trying to pick up adequate hedging in derivatives mkts could wind up with yet more slippage. Etc.
by sshine | 2025-07-06 20:48:34+00:00
From the article:

> Then there’s the other thing that nobody talks about, the massive greenhouse-gas load that all those data centers are going to be pumping out.

Arguably, the GPU emissions are lower than the carbon footprint of the human workers they seek to replace.

Before you downvote: yes, we can’t just “deprovision” humans, but unless you think reproduction is immoral because of the environmental impact (an extreme), it has to be possible to increase total industrial production and negate global warming simultaneously. It’s a big equation. The hard part seems to coordinate anything whatsoever as a species.
by haroak | 2025-07-06 20:49:21+00:00
One thing I always found tedious during early-stage validation is getting a clear view of the competitive landscape. Not just who the players are, but what features they offer, how they price, what customers say, and where the gaps might be.

I put together a free AI bot to speed that up — you type in your idea or niche, and it pulls together: • Key competitors • Their pricing and positioning • Feature breakdowns • Review insights • Suggestions on where you might differentiate

I originally built it for myself, but I’ve kept refining it based on feedback. It’s pretty barebones right now — no login, no upsell — just a free way to cut down research time.
by jonchurch_ | 2025-07-06 20:50:14+00:00
This is handled in the framing of the question:

“… it doesn't ever have to handle more than one request at once (at least from the same client, so we can assume this is a single-server per-client type of architecture).“

For sure a multithreaded async queue would be a very interesting interview, but if you started with the send system the interview is constructed around youd run out of time quickly.
by ghusto | 2025-07-06 20:50:19+00:00
> Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition ... server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

The only people you're effecting are legitimate players. Pirates crack the games and have an easier time for it. Unless you're talking about multiplayer games, which wasn't the target of the proposal (though even there I'd argue it's definitely doable).

> I work for a game company

You work for a shit game company.
by binarymax | 2025-07-06 20:50:50+00:00
Wow, this is pretty silly. If things are like this at Apple I’m not sure what to think.

https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

EDIT: just to be clear, things like this are easily bypassed. “Boris Johnson”=>”B0ris Johnson” will skip right over the regex and will be recognized just fine by an LLM.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-07-06 20:51:15+00:00
I was going to reply with this:

“If anyone wants to implement this, I think the way to do it is to put the mouse cursor randomly on the edge of a circle whose radius is a few hundred pixels. The randomness is important, though I’m not sure it would be possible to count how many cursors there are.”

And then I realized that doesn’t work, for a few reasons.

One is that you won’t be able to count how many cursors appear during one second. It’ll all look like a jumble.

That leads to the argument that you should place the cursors at a consistent spacing, and the spacing needs to make it so that the cursors stay at the same spot on the screen each loop around the circle.

Unfortunately that doesn’t work either, because you’ll end up seeing a trail of cursors going around a circle once per second, and counting the cursors is hopeless.

So I think you’d need to make a list of the spots on the circle where the cursors should go, then randomly select from them as quickly as possible. That will let each cursor be perceptible because they’ll be spread out over time; the next cursor won’t be just one pixel apart, so this eliminates the “trail of cursors” problem.

I’m still a bit skeptical this could work, but I admit I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t. You’ll need to be careful, because it’s really easy to fool yourself that you’ve done it correctly when you haven’t.

It would be interesting to make a WebGL canvas and try this out for real. Or maybe just reposition the mouse cursor with Python instead of doing anything graphical.

It seems important to reposition the mouse cursor rather than use WebGL to draw frames, but I think both could work. Actually, the WebGL route would be more faithful to the question of whether gamers specifically can notice 240Hz; there are all kinds of reasons why repositioning the mouse cursor wouldn’t really tell you that. Vice-versa too, because it might be possible to notice when repositioning cursors but not when using WebGL, though I can’t think of why that would be the case.

Neat idea. Thanks.
by jeberle | 2025-07-06 20:52:03+00:00
If BasicAppleGuy is taking requests, I'd love (OK, hate) to see the progression of the XCode hammer icon. It tells a story unto itself. Once a legit carpenter's hammer, now something out of a Fisher-Price toy box.

Likewise, similar dismay over the box of Crayolas in the Color Picker. How can someone do that to a UI!?
by phil21 | 2025-07-06 20:52:20+00:00
> It's all one big pile.

I don't believe this to be true. SBA in theory has it's own "pile" that they can of course use to substitute with a FBA third party seller if they deem it cheaper as they are confident that they are substituting like for like.

Given how FBA items are labeled differently (the Amazon required ASIN sticker) than SBA I can't recall a time I've received a third party item when buying direct from Amazon. I also can't really say with any certainty it does not or did not happen, but it was not obvious at least.

I've also seen contracts the explicitly forbid the co-mingling for brands that sell direct to Amazon. By necessity these would need to be under different piles on the backend - and it's easy to see different ASINs for the same SKU by searching for common big brand items. There will be a SBA listing, and then many other listings gaming the qty/size of the item that are FBA. An item that comes in the same size and packaging often is listed twice (or more) times with one being SBA and the rest third party.

It's definitely clear as mud, but I think the "sold by amazon/fulfilled by amazon" being co-mingled is largely urban legend. It's all speculation like this thread here, and very few verifiable facts when you dig into any of the reporting/social media accounts. I'm 100% sure it happens by mistake and very well may have happened as routine business in the past, but these days I cannot come up with an example that shows this happening on any scale.
by timr | 2025-07-06 20:53:48+00:00
I'm not on the political right, but it's plain that they don't give it equal time.

I don't expect the audience cares very much about this, though, which is sort of to OPs implied point. We've reached a place where each side of the political spectrum is not only happily ignorant of the other side's good points, but in fact, fearful of even having the discussion. If you go too far afield from the party line, you will be punished, and public radio (along with non-public radio, cable, broadcast news, and most other forms of legacy media) is a shrinking market, unwilling to alienate the core audience.

(The shorthand term for this is "audience capture", and IMO, This American Life has a death grip on a very particular sort of audience, which even if you set partisan politics aside, is representative only of itself.)
by Trasmatta | 2025-07-06 20:54:13+00:00
> One possible explanation for racist incidents while taking DMT is that the occurrence of racist DMT entities isn’t merely accidental or coincidental. Considering the Latinx origin of DMT and ayahuasca, it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that these racist entities are extensions of conflicts happening in the everyday realm; a sort of “spiritual turf war” going on between the Black and Latinx community.

> This is the inevitable and direct result of white supremacy.

wtf
by tptacek | 2025-07-06 20:54:29+00:00
I don't think we even approach this science-fiction analysis of the carbon footprint of human workers vs. LLMs, because LLM inference apparently has a carbon impact in the vicinity of, like, a couple Google searches. The environmental concerns over LLMs seem mostly to be ported in from cryptocurrency (where they were a very real concern, because crypto put a serious cash value on energy arbitrage).
by j45 | 2025-07-06 20:54:32+00:00
Uber doesn't pay more than a job as a taxi driver as far as I know (take home).

The take home pay after carrying more expenses probably makes it worse.

Uber sells demand for transport. They don't own the transport and the burden of owning, and maintaining the transport is pushed on to freelancers, who have less certainty of income than they would as employees might.

Theres been lots written about the insecurity to employment that is created by more things offering gig jobs on one hand but not always ending up also offering part time or full time positions.

From the customers side, apps like Uber provide a sense of certainty (visual map) that existing industries haven't been willing to invest the same kind of capital into and those apps as a result are not comparable or inviting.
by omneity | 2025-07-06 20:54:39+00:00
Looking at the post, the methodology (checking the presence of a few keywords, not even including "LLM") is very simple with a lot of potential false negatives. 20% is closer to the lower bound.

It could also explain the lower votes, "AI" or "GPT" being more generic terms is correlated in my personal experience with lower quality.
by fmajid | 2025-07-06 20:55:10+00:00
The officer in charge, Cressida Dick, was given a slap on the wrist. She was later appointed head of Scotland Yard, where she was a signal failure. The Mayor of London, fed up with her equivocations on malfeasance, corruption and abuses in her force, pushed her out, and was criticized for this by the chief Inspector of constabulary. After all, she was a good old girl from the right family who went to the right school and the Establishment protects its own.

There has never been any occurrence of accountability for criminality, malfeasance or gross negligence in the UK for at least 100 years (Aberfan Disaster, Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday, Grenfell, Iraq, Afghanistan, the list goes on).
by baxtr | 2025-07-06 20:55:12+00:00
How do you define an AI doomer? I’m wondering if I’m one too.

My position is that I think AI is an amazing tool, but that’s it. It’s like any other tool we humans have developed before – we use it to create more quickly, with less effort.

Personally, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to achieving AGI, and I find the tech bros’ AGI fantasies appalling.
by phil21 | 2025-07-06 20:55:13+00:00
> Of course I always prefer remote work for companies in the same city. Being able to come in easily when necessary helps a lot.

I wouldn't really call this "remote work" though. I know the terms are a little fuzzy.

My favorite option is incredibly selfish for me. I love working from home relatively close to an office I can come into at any time I wish. This requires everyone else working in the office on a daily basis so I can come in as my whims desire.

That is not remote work though. That's working remotely for an in-office organization and it only works if you are in the extreme minority in some special positions. Fully remote orgs with no offices whatsoever are a different beast entirely in my mind and require much different organization and communication setups.
by AngryData | 2025-07-06 20:55:24+00:00
If amphetamines were legal we could get a lot of people to switch away from black market meth into cleaner and safer amphetamines in better controlled doses though. With most amphetamines being illegal and the fewer medical amphetamines being highly controlled and restricted to limit supply, you guarantee people are going to be taking black market street meth of unknown quality and type. There is a reason prescribed adderall has 4 different amphetamine salts in it and not just one random one, and is a large reason why problems with adderall abuse are so less common and severe than problems with unregulated meth abuse.

If your goal it to have zero bad effects from people using drugs, and you think you can achieve atleast close to that, then prohibition does seem like an ideal policy. But if you believe a decent number of people will find or produce and consume drugs regardless of the law or enforcement capabilities, as evident by the last 60+ years of failed strong illegal drug policies, prohibition drug policies for any drug is silly and leaves you almost no room to educate people about drug usage or how to minimize harm and addiction and limites their choices in being able to pick the safest versions of a drug.
by troupo | 2025-07-06 20:55:33+00:00
> The real problem · It’s the people who are pushing it. Their business goals are quite likely, as a side-effect, to make the world a worse place

Me, 10 months ago:

--- start quote ---

Someone on Twitter said: "Do not fear AI. Fear the people and companies that run AI".

After all, it's the same industry that came up with pervasive and invasive tracking, automated insurance refusals, automated credit lookups and checks, racial ...ahem... neighbourhood profiling for benefits etc. etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41414873

--- end quote ---
by flysand7 | 2025-07-06 20:55:41+00:00
I'm kinda wondering are there any countries that still use the long scale nowadays? For me the biggest thing I've had to learn is that in Russian we use a short scale, except we don't have "billion" and instead it's "milliard". So it's just that you need to be careful with translating that one word. Are there other countries where the scale "shifts"?
by ptramo | 2025-07-06 20:55:41+00:00
First it's settings not real numbers. I'm not claiming that's how the mice actually perform, only how I tell them to perform.

Second 3200 was DPI not Hz. I can trivially tell how much I have to move with 3200 DPI (my sweet spot with 2 4K monitors), 4800 DPI, and 6400.

For Hz, it was the polling rate. With a configured 8000 Hz polling rate which is a lie/peak, I still see stalls in the 4ms range with my hardware.

As to acceleration I disable it. To truly lose it at high DPIs I've had to install RawAccel on Microsoft Windows.
by pvtmert | 2025-07-06 20:56:41+00:00
To me, the `inetd` _is_ the CGI. Which made internet waay more fun. I, myself hosted various shell scripts through inetd, even an HTTP one which was written completely in Bash.

Although the VPS is long gone, and I did not use any version control at the time. The laptop I wrote the stuff are gone too :'(. But it was certainly quite fun. Deployment was as easy as Makefile + scp and testing was the another Bash script with bunch of `netcat`s and greps.

What a time to be alive :)