MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jll29 | 2025-07-07 19:37:50+00:00
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results

Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15% of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and customers may lose.

The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control of what they develop, usually once the project is completed if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do? Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?
by obirunda | 2025-07-07 19:39:24+00:00
You keep sidestepping the core issue with LLMs.

If all that you are really doing is writing your code in English and asking the LLM to re-write it for you in your language of choice (probably JS), then end of discussion. But your tone really implies you're a big fan of the vibes of automation this gives.

Your repeated accusations of "conflating" are a transparent attempt to deflect from the hollowness of your own arguments. You keep yapping about me conflating things. It's ironic because you are the one committing this error by treating the process of software engineering as a set of neatly separable, independent tasks.

You've built your entire argument on a fragile, false dichotomy between "strategic" and "mechanical" work. This is a fantasy. The "mechanical" act of implementation is not divorced from the "strategic" act of architecture. The architectural insights you claim to get from "running code and testing behavior" are a direct result of the specific implementation choices that were made. You don't get to wave a natural language wand, generate a black box of code, and then pretend you have the same deep understanding as someone who has grappled with the trade-offs at every level of the stack.

Implementation informs architecture, and vice versa. By offloading the implementation, you are severing a critical feedback loop and are left with a shallow, surface-level understanding of your own product.

Your food processors and compiler analogy—are fundamentally flawed because they compare deterministic tools to a non-deterministic one. A compiler or food processor doesn't get "creative." An LLM does. Building production systems on this foundation isn't "transformative"; it's reckless.

You've avoided every direct question about your actual workflow because there is clearly no rigor there. You're not optimizing for results; you're optimizing for the feeling of speed while sacrificing the deep, hard-won knowledge that actually produces robust, maintainable software. You're not building, you're just generating.
by MrJohz | 2025-07-07 19:39:30+00:00
These are two separate actions that Anthropic did:

* They downloaded a massive online library of pirated books that someone else was distributing illegally. This was not fair use.

* They then digitised a bunch of books that they physically owned copies of. This was fair use.

This part of the ruling is pretty much existing law. If you have a physical book (or own a digital copy of a book), you can largely do what you like with it within the confines of your own home, including digitising it. But you are not allowed to distribute those digital copies to others, nor are you allowed to download other people's digital copies that you don't own the rights to.

The interesting part of this ruling is that once Anthropic had a legal digital copy of the books, they could use it for training their AI models and then release the AI models. According to the judge, this counts as fair use (assuming the digital copies were legally sourced).
Show HN: Cursor's "Tab" Model in the Browser
by killianlucas | 2025-07-07 19:39:40+00:00
Hey HN! Wanted to share a project me and @vicdotso (https://vic.so) built this month— it predicts the next thing you’re going to do in your browser, then lets you press CTRL+CTRL to accept the prediction.

It’s incredibly fast. Uses Qwen-3 on Groq, with context of your DOM + the DOM from your last tab. Video demos are on the chrome extension page.

We worked forward from this theory: Code models exploded in popularity once you could use them for code completions (Github copilot, Cursor’s tab). Maybe computer-use models will have the same beginning?

Would love your thoughts on this / related ideas. Will computer-use products ever take off? What will that product look like? Why didn't Natbot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847504) work?
by cs702 | 2025-07-07 19:39:48+00:00
Every provider of AI as a service (AaaS), including OpenAI, has no choice but to spend money like a drunken sailor who recently touched land after being out at sea for a year.

The reckless spending is not fueled only by hype and FOMO. Customer switching costs are low or non-existent, so AaaS businesses can only charge as much as their most reckless competitor.

Speaking of which, all competitors in this space, being in the same position, are vying for the title of most reckless, to avoid losing out to the others.

As I understand it, none of these AaaS businesses can generate enough revenue to cover the cost of R&D, training, inference, or even, as we now know, employee compensation.

Everyone in this space is throwing cash into a giant bonfire.
by ezekg | 2025-07-07 19:39:50+00:00
It depends on what we're talking about. My number one motivator is providing for my family. But I also don't like change and I have strong internal motivation, so I naturally resist giving up on things almost to a fault. I tend to remove emotion from decisions and I hold myself to high standards, which helps me stay committed to my convictions even under peer pressure or without external validation. If I believe something is right, I'll stick with it to the end rather than do what I see as wrong; even if there's a big gap between what I think is right and what others think is right, I'll stick to my convictions in the face of 'adversity' (which manifests differently depending on what we're talking about, which is why I mentioned it at the start).
by kinow | 2025-07-07 19:40:19+00:00
> Sounds like a contradiction. If it's super competitive shouldn't it be easy to find candidates?

I know, it should be the other way around. I asked some locals, and so far some of the best answers I got for this are that the best brains here are abroad, at the Netherlands, Germany, etc.. There's a lot of applicants for every position we advertise (especially if we need someone from DevOps or Web -- not so much for Fortran, Scientific Programming, but that's normal).

But most don't pass the first filter. We try to select those that fill the basic criteria, even if they don't fill all the boxes (it's alright to learn on the job for us), even select some that do not pass to call for a short interview with HR or even with manager, but it's quite hard to find good candidates.

> How many candidates coming from EU companies have the work they do at their company made public like that? I never worked anywhere where this was the case. So what do I do then?

It's quite common for some companies in my current field, earth sciences. Many companies have public GitLab servers, or host their own containers (e.g. Mercator Ocean International, DKRZ, ECMWF, etc.).

As I mentioned in other comments, I'd interview someone that doesn't have public repositories or containers anyway. But in the end, if there are other candidates with good CVs, and interesting projects public on GitHub, etc., or if they collaborated to good Open Source projects (Dask, Xarray, Singularity, Jenkins, Python, fortran, etc.) changes increase.

> Only if you work in FOSS is your work public, but if you work from some bank or any other private company they don't expose their work on GitHub due to IP and legal concerns.

I worked in banks, insurance, credit bureau, telco, and government. In most of these the work was done in private CVS, Subversion, or Git servers.

But in most of these, we used Open Source projects, and normally we were allowed to send contributions back upstream, when we found bugs in numpy, python, etc.. There were some companies where I couldn't contribute, so I can only explain the systems I worked, and the tech stack we had.

> So to me it sounds like you're only selecting those who worked at FOSS projects/enterprises

We hire people without public repositories too. Having worked at FOSS projects/enterprises definitely helps.

It's the same as the degree you have. In the end it may be an advantage depending on the company. I, particularly, do not care much if someone is coming from physics, mathematics, economics, biology, or even architecture (we just hired an architect that enrolled in a CS degree in Portugal to work with data pipelines/NetCDF/xarray/etc.).

As long as the person has the technical knowledge required for the job, and some experience if needed, that's fine by me. But I worked with manager that only hired those coming from CS.

So even those with good public contributions or coming from enterprise/FOSS, acing a technical test, etc., nothing would help you to be selected when applying for that team.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-07 19:40:19+00:00
It kind of is though?

It's not the only reason fair use exists, but it's the thing that allows e.g. search engines to exist, and that seems pretty important.

> And you ever heard of a publishing house? They don't need to negotiate with every single author individually. That's preposterous.

There are thousands of publishing houses and millions of self-published authors on top of that. Many books are also out of print or have unclear rights ownership.
by const_cast | 2025-07-07 19:40:31+00:00
I think socially it's because addiction is stigmatized heavily. Despite having real psychological disorders that fuel it, addiction is still largely viewed as self-inflicted. Of course this stigma doesn't come out of nowhere - people who are addicts almost always devolve into dangerous and asocial behavior. If someone is an asshole who stole 50 bucks from you to shoot up, it's easy to think they're a heroin addict because they're an asshole. But really it's the other way around.
by m11a | 2025-07-07 19:41:11+00:00
That would be ASI I think.

But consider: technically AlphaTensor found new algorithms no human did before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication_algorith...). So isn't it AGI by your definition of answering a question no human could before: how to do 4x4 matrix multiplication in 47 steps?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-07 19:41:31+00:00
Right, but where that line will be drawn will have major impact on the near-term future of those models. If the user is liable for distributing infringing output that came from AI, that's not a problem for the field (and IMHO a reasonable approach) - but if they succeed in making the model vendors liable for the possibility of users generating infringing output, it'll shake things up pretty seriously.
by schuyler2d | 2025-07-07 19:41:36+00:00
There's definitely some relatable and transmitted stories like the flood, etc. However, the Levant and Egyptian gods "grew up" in different contexts than Mesopotamia. Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities. "El" means mountain and Baal was a storm god -- neither of which has (to my understanding) any trace to specific cities.

That said, I agree there was some idea of a god "living" someplace specific -- e g. YHWH living in the Arc so they could carry Him into battle.
by throwitaway1123 | 2025-07-07 19:41:48+00:00
> you can't just allow exact what you need in that category? You have to allow the entire category and then deny everything you don't want/need?

No, you can allow access to specific domains, IP addresses, filesystem paths, environment variables, etc, while denying everything else by default. You can for instance allow access to only a specific IP (e.g. `deno run --allow-net='127.0.0.1' main.ts`), while implicitly blocking every other IP.

What the commenter is complaining about is the fact that Deno doesn't check which IP address a domain name actually resolves to using DNS resolution. So if you explicitly deny '1.1.1.1', and the script you're running fetches from a domain with an A record pointing to '1.1.1.1', Deno will allow it.

In practice, I usually use allow lists rather than deny lists, because I very rarely have an exhaustive list on hand of every IP address or domain I'm expecting a rogue script to attempt to access.
by mettamage | 2025-07-07 19:42:01+00:00
I did it based on my last 1000 HN favorites.

> EU-based 35-ish senior software engineer / budding technical founder. Highly curious polymath, analytical yet reflective. Values autonomy, privacy, and craft. Modestly paid relative to Silicon Valley peers but financially comfortable; weighing entrepreneurial moves. Tracks cognitive health, sleep and ADHD-adjacent issues. Social circle thinning as career matures, prompting deliberate efforts at connection. Politically center-left, pro-innovation with guardrails. Seeks work that blends art, science, and meaning—a “spark” beyond routine coding.

Fairly accurate

"Seeks work that blends art, science, and meaning—a “spark” beyond routine coding."

That part is really accurate.
by spauldo | 2025-07-07 19:42:32+00:00
I gotta side with Thompson on this one.

There's no point in a carriage return without a newline. So why have both just because of the 1933 teletype's hardware implementation? It's purely a hardware thing. That's why Multics used \n, and that's likely why Thompson chose to continue that practice.

When ASCII came about, it wasn't really about text files. Computers didn't talk to each other back then. ASCII was about sending characters between devices, and for compatibility reasons a lot of devices copied \r\n from the teletype. But there were a lot of devices that didn't as well. Putting it in the driver makes perfect sense from the point of view of someone developing a system in the 1960s.
by const_cast | 2025-07-07 19:43:13+00:00
> Stop blaming capitalism for every problem in the world, it just makes you look childish.

Economics is intertwined with every other study. We can't pretend socio-economics isn't real, social interactions fuel the economy and the economy influences our social interactions.

Also, making connections to way capitalism might fuel addictive disorders, such as, say, talking about advertising of alcohol and tobacco, does NOT mean that we are saying communism is perfect. Communism fuels disorders in other ways. It's actually quiet childish to take any analysis of capitalism as a praise of communism. It's the sort of "team sport" mentality you see in politics among the most uneducated and reductive among us.
by jpalawaga | 2025-07-07 19:43:57+00:00
You're saying that a copy of a digital thing is the same as the "only" of a physical thing. But that's not true. You can't sell grain twice, but you can sell a movie many times (especially when you account for format changes, remasterings, platform locks, licensing for special usecases like remixing, broadcasts, etc).

You'd have to steal the author's ownership of the intellectual property in order for the comparison to be valid, just as you stole ownership of his crop.

Separately, there is a reason why theft and copyright infringement are two distinct concepts in law.
by kragen | 2025-07-07 19:44:25+00:00
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
by hitekker | 2025-07-07 19:44:41+00:00
When another Brilliant Jerk struck me down in my own little kingdom, using similar weapons & tactics. The Golden Rule is a Ruler that cuts both ways, turns out.

TL;DR I became a Christian. God broke my heart and opened my eyes. Like showing how my politics & diplomacy were tricks to escape from much-needed heartbreak. Much-needed for shifting my will from evil to good... or just giving me the will to leave a terrible but lucrative job.

Proverbs 26:11 and all that. I know I can be a jerk again, the difference is that the fear of God is in me now. A true blessing.
by Arcuru | 2025-07-07 19:44:48+00:00
I didn't realize Paul Lutus had an active blog! I would highly recommend not only reading this post but checking out the author. I read their book Confessions many years ago and it was one of the things that helped push me to look for fulfillment outside of tech.

It looks like he posted this so may see my comment. I just want to say thanks, I appreciate the things you've put out into the world.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-07-07 19:44:51+00:00
> As Brusatte notes, a lot of what we now know about dinosaurs has been naturally accumulative knowledge spanning decades of ongoing research.

Yeah I've felt this. I'm old enough (41) that some of the things that I was taught as a child are no longer beloved to be true. Not sure if I should feel sad that it's happening so slowly, or happy that's happening at all. Or concerned that we have no first principles way of estimating whether our scientific progress is fast or slow.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-07 19:45:10+00:00
Another good point, and it's a fine point as well.

You could split hairs over whether saving an item from the bin occurred after a procedure to remove covers and it was already dumped, or before any contemplation was made about if or when dumping would take place.

Saving either way would be preserving what would otherwise be lost, even if it was well premeditated in advance of any imminent risk.

What if it was the last remaining copy?

Or even the only copy ever in existence of an original manuscript?

It's just not a concept suitable for a black & white judgment.

That's a very good sign that probably an entire book of regulations needs to be thrown out instead, and a new law written to replace it with something more sensible.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-07 19:45:14+00:00
I haven't read that thread, but I don't believe that anthropologists thought boiling was impossible before the invention of pottery. Here's one youtube video that demos a method for survival scenarios, I'm sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU. I know I don't have the context, but unless there are sources for the remarkable claim, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass "the laugh test"
by MandieD | 2025-07-07 19:45:23+00:00
IG Metall is excellent, and I highly recommend working for companies whose employment contracts were negotiated by them - that would be a lot of “traditional” German industrial firms. When layoffs happen, you find out over a year in advance, usually two or three.

I got my dues’ worth in just the agreement they quickly got to during the post-COVID inflation to adjust our wages. Of course, I would have still gotten it had I not been a member, but it takes people willing to be members to make them (us!) strong enough that employers take them (us!) very seriously.

Oh, and the pay is way better than a lot of IT consultancies here, not to mention the hours and general working conditions.
by buran77 | 2025-07-07 19:45:45+00:00
> has an atrocious UX - a slow on/off button instead of a trigger, and an amazingly useless "smart power" feature that just varies the power almost completely randomly as you vacuum.

Contrast that with the Dyson v15 which has a trigger I have to hold continuously while I twist and turn the vacuum so I can't change the grip without it turning on and off as my finger slips off the trigger or inevitably gets tired. Or the amazingly useless "smart power" feature that just varies the power almost completely randomly as I vacuum an otherwise perfectly smooth hard floor.

Or the peak of uselessness, a display to tell me how many particles of dust it thinks it vacuumed, and their estimated sizes. Because I needed to be told I vacuumed 20 million dust particles of one size but only 1 million of another size. Counted twice just to make sure.
by groestl | 2025-07-07 19:45:54+00:00
> and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix

That's also how I'm approaching it. If all the condensed common wisdom poured into the model's parameters says that this is how my API is supposed to work to be intuitive, how on earth do I think it should work differently? There needs to be a good reason (like composability, for example). I break expectations otherwise.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-07 19:46:31+00:00
"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice.

As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.
by lurking_swe | 2025-07-07 19:47:30+00:00
that’s maybe fine for cleaning a car or some crumbs in the kitchen. It’s a solid vacuum. But not so useful for cleaning a room or house…different use cases.

The suction on the dyson v12 is fantastic at max speed, so it’s great for quick carpet cleaning. I also appreciate the very quiet hardwood floor attachment. I’d recommend it to any apartment dweller that’s not cost conscious. If they are, i’d recommend a cheaper shark vacuum.
by hiatus | 2025-07-07 19:47:55+00:00
> Turns out the Mobile OS are making this kind of communication nearly impossible. To work well, it basically needs background job (automatic scan of nearby ble/wifi/radio) and automatic connection without user interaction (imagine being prompted to accept a connection every time you pass by someone), both have been basically made impossible (especially after covid).

Isn't this how some covid-specific apps work to let you know if you've come in contact with an identified carrier? https://www.gao.gov/blog/covid-19-exposure-notification-apps...
by schuyler2d | 2025-07-07 19:48:16+00:00
I'd answer a bit differently than replies so far. Later monotheist post "merging" of El and YHWH didn't really have space for El's son so they had to treat him as a lesser and then hostile God. Any worship for him was considered bad.

Otoh, just like "Easter" is an echo of an earlier holiday, it just so happens Canaanites, as I understand it, celebrated the end of the storm god's season in spring ... Very similarly to how Passover is observed. With a sacrificed lamb shank bone and some other aspects.
by dkarl | 2025-07-07 19:48:28+00:00
I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon.

There are three choices, really:

You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it.

You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked.

Or you can give a quick explanation using jargon that they don't understand, which will leave them bored but impressed, which is the best of the bad options.