MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bigpet | 2025-07-15 16:10:29+00:00
You can already subscribe to projects or single issues/PRs on github and reply via email to post comments.

I can understand not wanting to use GitHub/GitLab/etc. for various reasons. But I don't understand how usability vs mailing lists is one.

How is a set of 9+ mailing lists any better? It has significantly worse discovery and search tools unless you download all the archives. So you're creating a hurdle for people there already.

Then you have people use all kinds of custom formatting in their email clients, so consistent readability is out the window.

People will keep top-posting (TOFU), transforming the inconsistent styles in the process. Creating an unnecessarily complicated problem for your email client to "detect quotes", or you have to keep reminding people.

Enforcing structure of any kind in email lists seems so tedious. I'm not advocating for bugzilla style "file out these 20 nonsensical fields before you can report anything" but some minimal structure enforced by some tooling as opposed to manual moderation seems very helpful to me.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-15 16:10:35+00:00
This was my answer as well. And I think it just highlights all the serious dangers for the "API wrapper companies" compared to the foundation model companies.

User experience is definitely worth something, and I think Cursor had the first great code integration, but then there is very little stopping the foundation model companies from coming in and deciding they want to cut out the middleman if so desired.
by Dwedit | 2025-07-15 16:10:44+00:00
WEBP is two image formats bolted together.

First, there's Lossy WEBP, based on VP8 video compression. It is better than JPEG, but mediocre by today's standards. Lossy AVIF and Lossy JXL greatly outclass lossy WEBP.

Second, there's Lossless WEBP, which is not in any way based on VP8. Lossless WEBP is a stellar image format that not only compresses very well, but also decompresses very quickly. Its biggest competition is Lossless JXL, which usually compresses to a smaller file, but decoding that image is slow enough to be annoying. Sometimes lossless WEBP produces a smaller file than lossless JXL.
by 0xEF | 2025-07-15 16:11:17+00:00
Nobody is rewriting history. I also remember the Google engineer who claimed encountering sentience, etc. What we're discussing here is dollars being put towards manipulating people into thinking the "AI" has consciousness like a person. Not whether superintelligence or AGI is possible, or maybe even closer than we think.

While the thread you link is quite the interesting read (I mean that with all sincerity, it's a subject I like to mull over and there's a lot of great opinions and speculation being displayed there) I'm not seeing any direct callouts of someone billing the current LLMs as "people," which is what the original conversation in _this_ thread was about.

There's A LOT to read there, so maybe I missed it or just have not hit it, yet. Is there specific comments I should look at?
by spyckie2 | 2025-07-15 16:11:20+00:00
I think the author is encouraging out of the box thinking. The framing of "inevitable" is a box (an assumption) that we can include in our analysis or judgment, rather than assume it to be true.

But to your point, his debate analogy does imply that tech enthusiasts are arguing in bad faith in order to win an argument, because the goal of winning a debate has no good faith aspect to it (good faith in debate terms is seeking the truth, bad faith is winning an argument).

But just because he is wrong doesn't mean he isn't useful.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-15 16:11:37+00:00
> It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".

The irony with Webvan, they had the right idea about 15 years too early. Now we have InstaCart, DoorDash, etc. You really needed the mobile revolution circa 2010 for it to work.

Pets.com is essentially Chewy (successful pet focused online retailer)

So, neither of those ideas were really terrible in the same vain as say Juicera, or outright frauds like Theranos. Overvalued and ill-timed, sure
by noleary | 2025-07-15 16:12:23+00:00
It seems to lean more into transactional email than being a 1:1 Substack clone, but I have heard good things about Dittofeed [1]. It's pretty self-hosting friendly, all things considered. [2]

We went with Substack basically because it's really easy to newsletters live on as webpages, but if you're going through the trouble to self host and build a website anyway, Dittofeed might be a good fit.

--

[1] https://www.dittofeed.com/

[2] https://docs.dittofeed.com/deployment/self-hosted
by materiallie | 2025-07-15 16:12:37+00:00
It feels like there's a lot of shifting goalposts. A year ago, the hype was that knowledge work would cease to exist by 2027.

Now we are trying to hype up enhanced email autocomplete and data analysis as revolutionary?

I agree that those things are useful. But it's not really addressing the criticism. I would have zero criticisms of AI marketing if it was "hey, look at this new technology that can assist your employees and make them 20% more productive".

I think there's also a healthy dose of skepticism after the internet and social media age. Those were also society altering technologies that purported to democratize the political and economic system. I don't think those goals were accomplished, although without a doubt many workers and industries were made more productive. That effect is definitely real and I'm not denying that.

But in other areas, the last 3 decades of technological advancement have been a resounding failure. We haven't made a dent in educational outcomes or intergenerational poverty, for instance.
by captainzidgel | 2025-07-15 16:13:30+00:00
i believe its patently bad when it comes to AI. 1) it could create an economic bubble if the only people interested in LLMs are LLM providers (unlikely scenario though) the real issue is 2) deepfakes and the end of "authentic video". Let me explain. Now, bearing in mind that most of us can still recognize a Veo 3 clip instantly, generative AI videos are getting better and better, and soon old people will be seeing clips on facebook of presidential candidates telling them not to vote, or that they're satan worshippers, or something, i don't know. But here's the key - video AI takes a lot of resources. A text GPT can reasonably be run on a researcher's computer with a good GPU. Could the videos that look 90% real be done without billions of dollars of investment from Google and OpenAI? No. When there are AI political ads on the TV and Google or Meta or some other AI company is decrying these or lobbying against them and saying "Veo is meant for good! We didn't intend for it to be used this way! Read the TOS!", remember they're the ones who enabled it. TL;DR Google put billions into Video AI to create a product worth buying, that product is a threat to democracy and rational thought and probably wouldn't exist without their investment. QED, not inevitable.
by DanMcInerney | 2025-07-15 16:13:35+00:00
These articles kill me. The reason LLMs (or next-gen AI architecture) is inevitably going to take over the world in one way or another is simple: recursive self-improvement.

3 years ago they could barely write a coherent poem and today they're performing at at least graduate student level across most tasks. As of today, AI is writing a significant chunk of the code around itself. Once AI crosses that threshold of consistently being above senior-level engineer level at coding it will reach a tipping point where it can improve itself faster than the best human expert. That's core technological recursive self-improvement but we have another avenue of recursive self-improvement as well: Agentic recursive self-improvement.

First there was LLMs, then there was LLMs with tool usage, then we abstracted the tool usage to MCP servers. Next, we will create agents that autodiscover remote MCP servers, then we will create agents which can autodiscover tools as well as write their own.

Final stage of agents are generalized agents similar to Claude Code which can find remote MCP servers, perform a task, then analyze their first run of completing a task to figure out how to improve the process. Then write its own tools to use to complete the task faster than they did before. Agentic recursive self-improvement. As an agent engineer, I suspect this pattern will become viable in about 2 years.
by Analemma_ | 2025-07-15 16:13:38+00:00
You may want to read both, they are going to be pretty different. For starters, AIUI the new published version is not going to be an SCP story, probably because of rights issues. I assume it will be "SCP with the serial numbers filed off", but we won't know for sure until it comes out. I'd read the existing one and then decide if you like it enough that you want to preorder the new one.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-15 16:13:50+00:00
Two things are true for me:

* I think Django is an amazing piece of software, developed by a lot of clever, brilliant people.

* I don’t want to use Django.

I think Django is unmatched for building a Django app. That is, if you want to connect to a relational DB, make CRUD queries with its OR , and spit out the results in the exact HTML or JSON it supports, you’re going to have a great time. If you want to hit non-relational backends (including APIs), form your own outputs, or reuse the SQLAlchemy models you built for another part of the project, you’re entering a world of pain. Mark it zero and move on. Turns out most of my stuff is doing non-Django patterns. But if that were different, if I were building a traditional website on top of PostgreSQL and starting with a blank slate, sure, it’d be high on my list of options.
by phtrivier | 2025-07-15 16:14:06+00:00
I'm in dire need of good news, so help me see it in an optimistic lens: can you imagine a path (even very indirect) where this kind of discovery ends up having a practical use that makes real life better here on Earth ?

(I'm not in the age-old debate about "is research useful ?" - I agree the answer is yes ; I just have a failure of imagination that prevents me from answer the question "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?")
by nlawalker | 2025-07-15 16:14:18+00:00
tl;dr - the personalized cover letter, much maligned by job seekers nowadays (https://www.google.com/search?q=cover+letter+dead), is actually incredibly effective for applying to small companies (of the size where the inboxes of the CEOs and founders aren't heavily filtered and managed) if you keep it short and human and send it directly to those folks.
by chasil | 2025-07-15 16:14:26+00:00
It might be necessary to ensure that your exit node is not in the UK or another locality that is otherwise blocked.

That procedure depends upon your platform and client.

http://www.b3rn3d.com/blog/2014/03/05/tor-country-codes/

Edit: Use this link instead (thanks mzajc!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20180429212133/http://www.b3rn3d...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-15 16:14:28+00:00
A wonderful app that, I find, benefits from LLMs to help you figure out how to use it. That or you more or less have to dive in for months and months. The people on YouTube that make Blender look so easy … Blender is really all they do. ;-)

At some point I see an LLM more or less integrated into the UI.

At some point I see whole apps written so complexly that an LLM is the required interface.
by bko | 2025-07-15 16:14:52+00:00
I'd prefer the version where the government states a goal and a market based process is used to determine who can provide best for that goal.

Imagine if the government said no food stamps, we'll just run our own grocery stores to provide for the less fortunate and we'll hire the best people.

You see the difference? Do you really think government run corporations would be able to design better military defense systems?
by ljlolel | 2025-07-15 16:15:10+00:00
First, I applaud you building something and encourage it.

Next, I want to say I don’t understand these llm “apps”. I tried this in ChatGPT with the minimal prompt (that you can keyboard shortcut) “fill in curly” and it gave me exactly the correct full sentence plus even better alternatives.

Why would I use a separate app?

In general why would I use any of these separate apps vs my included ChatGPT that I’ll have a button away with included unlimited subscription
by briangriffinfan | 2025-07-15 16:15:17+00:00
The way I see it is, AI cannot nail these things until you can imbue it with a comprehensive set of human experiences, knowledge and opinions, and the knowledge of every step of the artistic creation process, AND how to weave these two different things together to create something that conveys inherent meaning to other humans by virtue of being the thing that it is.

Basically until we can actually model a human brain in real time, AI generated media will always be kinda shit. Not exceptionalism - just the truth.
by zuminator | 2025-07-15 16:15:19+00:00
For those like me who aren't familiar with this topic, SCP stands for Special Containment Procedures. The SCP Foundation is an online fictional shared universe hosted on https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com with various works of genre fiction in the urban paranormal/sf area, accompanied by various fake documents and bureaucratic procedures involving weird anomalies, artifacts, and creatures. SCP-055 is one such anomaly. More info on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
by dathinab | 2025-07-15 16:16:04+00:00
The is why I said read the WAL doc page in a different answer ;)

They do point out the risks here: https://sqlite.org/wal.html#avoiding_excessively_large_wal_f...

sqlites design makes a lot of SQL concurrency synchronization edge cases much simpler as you can rely on the single writer at a time limitation. And it has some grate hidden features for using it as client application state storage. But there are use-cases it's just not very good at and moving from sqlite to other DBs can be tricky (if you ever relied on the exclusive write transaction or the way cells are blobs which can mix data types, even it it was by accident)
by th0ma5 | 2025-07-15 16:16:31+00:00
There's to me a sole unimpeachable use case... Two SMEs of adjacent fields can work with an LLM SME to find overlaps in research. This is a manual slog of evaluating hints at patterns and holistically trying to discover something and the LLM is only a part of it. All of the other use cases I've heard of have some kind of religious undertone or assumption and leads to people wanting to make blanket summarizing statements to avoid digging into inconvenient realities.
by bostick | 2025-07-15 16:16:31+00:00
FYI, in my opinion, clang `[[musttail]]` is not quite ready for prime time. (cannot speak to GCC)

I was excited when it was introduced but quickly ran into issues.

Here is a silent miscompilation involving `[[musttail]]` that I reported in 2022 and is still open: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/56435
by kevingadd | 2025-07-15 16:16:32+00:00
This post gradually seems to tiptoe towards eugenics, which makes me a little nervous, closing with this bit:

> If we took this history seriously, we might spend more money on not only parents of young children but also the basic scientific breakthroughs that would make it easier for future parents to have the children they want, whenever they want them.

This is in the context of enabling broader fertility by making it easier to get pregnant, to be completely fair. But for me it does raise the question of what 'the children they want' looks like in a modern climate where heritable traits not only affect your capabilities in life but now dramatically impact how you are treated, whether it's being mistreated based on skin color or being at a disadvantage in education & the workplace due to conditions like adhd, chronic fatigue, etc. Raising a child with heritable conditions (or random genomic quirks) can also be much more expensive than a child that is closer to the norm, too.

I'm still not sure where I land on the question of whether it's appropriate to try and edit these 'disadvantageous traits' out of an embryo. It seems like a classic slippery slope problem and I don't know if it's possible to trust anyone (or anything, if one were to suggest AI as a solution) to navigate it right.
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-15 16:16:40+00:00
To begin with, this would be a non issue if HN just introduced something like user provided tags and users can vote for/against (to circumvent abuse)

Then the people wanting to filter "x" could just do it via simple grease monkey scripts or if HN natively supported it.

Sure, it wouldn't be perfect, but neither does it have to be.
by braum | 2025-07-15 16:16:47+00:00
I've been trying Rails again thanks to Lex and DHH podcast. The official docs are good but have some obvious errors in the code snippets, that were not obvious to me until I asked AI to explain.

Also I was reading the free chapters of the "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" but it still refers and suggests using AWS Cloud 9 which no longer allows new users, since 2024... I emailed the author but they have not replied. At $39 per MONTH it seems a bit much for such an obvious oversight. Seems borderline gauging to me to pay $39 just for the eBook, it is not for sale otherwise AFAIK. And to have the first chapter about getting set up to reference something that has been outdated since July 25th of 2024 does not leave a good impression for me.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/how-to-migrate-from-aws-...

I'm not a cheap sob, I will pay for content and books. But when the free content is already out of date... I don't hold much hope for the premium content and chapters at $39mo.
by Supermancho | 2025-07-15 16:16:48+00:00
The assumption that a war would trigger another baby boom is incorrect. The conditions are very different than in the 50s and there's no going back. World devastation, reverting to the stone age or some agriculture society will not result in a population growth for decades, maybe a generation at best, as western society falls into the familiar throes of barbarism and resource starvation.

The more likely approach is some sort of mass socialism, for starters. Even if you had technological innovations to breed humans en masse, there would have to be subsidized care. Creating a breeding class, who's job it was to breed and care for children would require a massive upheaval in the social fabric. It's not possible anytime soon.

If it was easy, another boom would have already happened.
by bdavbdav | 2025-07-15 16:16:49+00:00
(Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more developed as older) career on hold

Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-15 16:17:15+00:00
Thirty-four years after the collapse of the USSR, the US has re-invented корректировка[1]. Who would've thought, that at the "end of history", we'd start cribbing notes from the Soviet style guide?

1. https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%80%D0%B...
by jdiff | 2025-07-15 16:17:24+00:00
Exactly the problem. It doesn't need to be good enough to work unsupervised in order to gain real adoption. It just needs to be a performance or productivity boost while supervised. It just needs to be able to take an AI-friendly FOSS dev (there are many), and speed them along their way. If we don't have even that, then where is the value (to this use case) that everyone claims it has? How is this going to shake the foundations of the IT industry?
by yubblegum | 2025-07-15 16:17:25+00:00
Your entire outlook is based on an assumption. The assumption that 'emergence of meaning' is a 2nd order epiphenomena of an organic structure. The 1st order epiphenomena in your view is of course consciousness itself.

None of these assumptions can be proven, yet like the ancients looking at the sky and seeing a moving sun but missing a larger bit of the big picture you now have a 'theory of mind' that satisfies your rational impluses given a poor diet of facts and knowledge. But hey, once you manage to 'get into orbit' you get access to more facts and then the old 'installed hardware' theory of yours starts breaking down.

The rational position regarding these matters is to admit "we do not have sufficient information and knowledge to make conclusive determinations based on reason alone". Who knows, one day Humanity may make it to the orbit and realize the 'simple and self apparent idea' of "everything revoles around the Earth" is false.
Ask HN: Where Do Hacker News Readers Come From?
by nicgrev103 | 2025-07-15 16:17:32+00:00
I took a look at similarwebs data on the geographic locations of Hacker News visitors. Thought some of you might find it interesting too. Here’s the breakdown of where readers came from, by country:

United States – 49.17%

China – 6.75%

United Kingdom – 5.96%

India – 5.29%

Canada – 3.97%

If anyone has more detailed information I'd love to see it. I wonder if posters are equally represented? I was surprise to see no EU countries, perhaps a language thing?

Also interested to see if anyone comments from somewhere really remote.
by acdha | 2025-07-15 16:17:33+00:00
You said “largely” and I think that’s painting with too broad a brush. The dotcom world included a bunch of companies which are still around (or were acquired later after surviving the collapse), and it wasn’t hard to tell who those were even at the time. There was a lot of lazy boosterism and criticism painting the whole field as the same, and that was a disservice to readers who could’ve used a more thoughtful triage approach. That’s especially the case for companies like Kozmo which actually had a popular idea and had the potential to be profitable (they were in most urban markets) but made the mistake of expanding too quickly or taking on more debt than they could service.
by zerkten | 2025-07-15 16:17:42+00:00
I think what you are observing is for it to be more valuable to own any part of the Premier League. The top clubs were spoken for long ago in terms of ownership, so anyone looking for a piece of the pie needs to pick clubs lower down. When picking a club, you want one that has stability.

Eventually you get people having to invest in riskier clubs, like Leeds United, who don't quite have traction as they float in and out of the Premier League. This is still viewed as more valuable than other European leagues.

There are factors like ownership rules, limits on tickets prices, and politics in other leagues which make it less attractive for external entities to buy in. Therefore, there is less value in owning a smaller piece of it.

As with the Super League you'll get a lot of resistance from the clubs and authorities when there is a threat to some of the big clubs. They know that when things start changing, investment will come to some of the smaller and less successful clubs which will change the dynamics. Everyone knows that it'll change many elements of the game and people are rightly protective when they can be.
by Centigonal | 2025-07-15 16:17:46+00:00
The point I'm making is that, even in the extreme case where we cease all additional R&D on LLMs, what has been developed up until now has a great deal of utility and transformative power, and that utility can be delivered at scale for cheap. So, even if LLMs don't become an economic boon for the companies that enable them, the transformative effect they have and will continue to have on society is inevitable.

Edit: I believe that "LLMs transforming society is inevitable" is a much more defensible assertion than any assertion about the nature of that transformation and the resulting economic winners and losers.