MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jakobnissen | 2025-07-22 12:17:44+00:00
I think the author's take is overly bleak. Yes, he supports his claim that AI businesses are currently money pits and unsustainable. But I don't think it's reasonable to claim that AI can't be profitable. This whole thing is moving so extremely fast. Models are getting better by the month. Cost is rapidly coming down. We broadly speaking still don't know how to apply AI. I think it's hubris to claim that, in the wake of this whole bubble noone will figure out how to use AI to provide value and noone will be profitable.
by nchmy | 2025-07-22 12:18:34+00:00
I've started, in this thread, likening it to Plato's Cave - people who are just using git are just seeing/using a blurry facsimile/projection of actual reality/possibilities. It's not a perfect analogy (jj is, I suppose, the projection, and people are chained in the cave), but it makes the point that there could be so much more.

The matrix or people happily in a cult would be similar analogies. Perhaps even Stockholm syndrome...
by louwrentius | 2025-07-22 12:18:37+00:00
AI is a temporary buoy for FAANG and the tech industry to keep the financial markets happy while they switch to their next source of growth:

Military contracts.

I hope people understand the irony, but to spell it out: they need to live on government money to sustain growth.

Corporate welfare while 60% of the USA population doesn't have the money to cover a 1000$ emergency.
by audinobs | 2025-07-22 12:18:42+00:00
Child mortality is the best example of what we take for granted.

"The child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday"

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

It is so horrendous that I don't think we are really able to process the difference in 2025.
by benreesman | 2025-07-22 12:19:00+00:00
Knowing what code runs when i invoke an executable or grant it permissions is a fucking prerequisite for any kind of fucking security.

Portability is to any fucking kernel in a decade at the ABI level. You dont sound stupid, which means youre being dishonest. Take it somewhere else before this gets okd school Linus.

I have no fucking patience when it comes to eirher Drepper and his goons or the useful idiots parroting that tripe at the expense of less technical people.

edit: I don't like losing my temper anywhere, especially in a community where I go way back. I'd like to clarify that I see this very much in terms of people with power (technical sophistication) and their relationship to people who are more vulnerable (those lacking that sophistication) in matters of extremely high stakes. The stakes at the low end are the cost and availability of computing. The high end is as much oppressive regime warrantless wiretap Gestapo shit as you want to think about.

Hackers have a responsibility to those less technical.
by LeroyRaz | 2025-07-22 12:19:04+00:00
What makes it clear to you that they don't mean what they explicitly write? What are you defending and why?

Philosophical discussions aside, it is entirely possible for current AI to use concepts (but the research they are describing does not employ that kind of AI).

I also think most lay people seeing the term AI are likely to think of something like ChatGPT.

It is a) literally incorrect what they write, and b) highly misleading to a lay person (who will likely think of something like ChatGPT when they read the term AI). Why are you defending their poor writing?
by aredox | 2025-07-22 12:19:11+00:00
>can be utilized to censor things without any accountability or transparency

What is the current accountability or transparency of the X algorithm?

Ah yes, Musk promised to make it public, and... it hasn't been updated in two years. https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm And clearly, the promotion of Musk's tweets on everyone's timeline is completely organic.

>This is why the burden of proof is on the person making accusations Yeah, this is all a WITCH HUNT! No justice department has ever done any investigation in the history of humanity, warrants don't exist, people are only judged by what is publicly known without police ever seizing any private material. WITCH HUNT!

Go back to truth social, mister President.
by sto11z | 2025-07-22 12:19:37+00:00
I tried transitioning to FF from Chrome several times, but it just feels so unresonsive and slow in comparison. I really wanted to, but ultimately couldn't.

On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:

- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input

- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’

- Enable it and relaunch browser

- Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases

- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it

- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
by agentcoops | 2025-07-22 12:19:44+00:00
I agree with your point, but I think it's worth noting that there's a real problem of language today both in popular and scientific communication. On the one hand, in popular understanding, there's the importance of clearly separating the era of "machine learning" as let's say Netflix recommendations from the qualitative leap of modern AI, most obviously LLMs. This article clearly draws on the latter association and really leads to confusion, most glaringly in the remark you note that the AI probably took up some forgotten Russian text etc.

However, scientifically, I think there's a real challenge to clearly delineate from the standpoint of 2025 what all should fall under the concept of AI -- we really lose something if "AI" comes to mean only LLMs. Everyone can agree that numeric methods in general should not be classed as AI, but it's also true that the scientific-intellectual lineage that leads to modern AI is for many decades indistinguishable from what would appear to be simply optimization problems or the history of statistics (see especially the early work of Paul Werbos where backpropagation is developed almost directly from Bellman's Dynamic Programming [1]). The classical definition would be that AI pursues goals under uncertainty with at least some learned or search‑based policy (paradigmatically but not exclusively gradient-descent of loss function), which is correct but perhaps fails to register the qualitative leap achieved in recent years.

Regardless -- and while still affirming that the OP itself makes serious errors -- I think it's hard to find a definition of AI that is not simply "LLMs" under which the methods of the actual paper cited [2] would not fall.

[1] His dissertation was re-published as The Roots of Backpropagation. Especially in the Soviet Union, important not least for Kolmogorov and Vapnik, AI was indistinguishable from an approach to optimization problems. It was only in the west where "AI" was taken to be a question of symbolic reasoning etc, which turned out to have been an unsuccessful research trajectory (cf the "AI winter").

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.04258
by aiisjustanif | 2025-07-22 12:19:58+00:00
Depending on the subject and writing methods it’s still not this straight forward. Regardless GPTs are hard to detect. Here are some examples.

- If it is an English class and you have to write about a personal experience, that would still take a lot of prompting.

- Other courses in psychology, political science, and journalism can pull from events too recent for writing subjects.

- Writing essays by hand in a tests setting or just as an exercise can solve two things. Now you would know a students writing style for the future and write without a computer.

- Using Google Docs to analyze revision history, not perfect by any means but helpful.
by simonh | 2025-07-22 12:20:26+00:00
There are plenty of well documented and unambiguous cases where the CIA has overthrown governments, directly interfered in elections and exerted covert influence but Ukraine really doesn't look like one of them. Possibly in the covert influence sense, sure, but nowhere near at the level of determining the outcome.

The constitutional crisis in Ukraine in 2014 was between President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian Parliament, which is actually the sovereign institution. In a constitutional sense it wasn't even really a revolution because the sovereign institution was never overthrown. It pressured Yanukovych into resigning, backed by massive public support.
by alganet | 2025-07-22 12:20:37+00:00
The very fact that you are hypothesizing about my intentions is, in fact, an act of asking questions on its own.

You are worried that I might be suggesting some form of conspiracy, but these worries are all in your head.

There is uncertainty about the effects post acquiring a covid flu. If there weren't, the article wouldn't mention the efforts in trying to figure out what these symptoms and causes are. I'm sure they are also "asking questions".

Instead of criticizing me, perhaps you could try to put your guard down and try to investigate if other more reputable sources asked the same questions as I did:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=psyc...

I haven't read those papers, and I'm not qualified to discuss them in depth. However, they indicate that my assessment of the situation is not as outlandish as you suggest.
by foo-bar-bat | 2025-07-22 12:20:53+00:00
I think the sorting hat outcomes for technical polymaths and driven entrepreneurs is the hat is sometimes quantum, and can rightfully put you into any or multiple houses at Hogwarts? Like Harry.

Last time I had a major surgery the anesthesiologist at Stanford was also simultaneously a full time employee of Apple. (At the time we were competitors; we figured out during surgical prep that we had friends/colleagues in common.)

Similarly, while working at another FAANG company, one of my colleagues was simultaneously a practicing MD (PCP) at Stanford. He later left both jobs, to start own biz.

At one point he referred me to another Stanford doc who was simultaneously the founder of a diagnostic-tech startup, which sadly has since fizzled.

Lastly, I know a practicing anesthesiologist married to a serial entrepreneur who's built and sold stuff you've heard of. They or some of their hundreds of employees may be here, dunno. Won't out them.
by nullc | 2025-07-22 12:21:04+00:00
It's also a time asymmetry thing. Prior to AI there were widespread slop problems because 1 unit of writing time might cause 10000 units of reading time, and so it's easy to waste people's time entirely out of proportion with the time you put in.

W/ LLMs you can put out 100x writing with 1/100th of the time, and now that asymmetry is so much worse.

Tired: This meeting could have been an email.

Wired: This email could have just sent the prompt.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-22 12:21:21+00:00
To dispel some apparent ignorance, both left and right hand dexterity is important for playing fretted string instruments, such as the guitar.

On the guitar, the left hand is doing a lot more than just pressing on strings: chords, slides, bends, tapping as in hammer-ons/pull-offs, natural harmonics, even muting strings in some techniques (see Stevie Ray Vaughan’s style).

The right hand is also doing more than just strumming or picking: two-handed tapping, artificial harmonics, palm muting, using the whammy bar to produce vibrato or whole-chord bends.

There are also techniques like sweep picking which require very precise coordination between both hands.

Same goes for fretless string instruments: playing long notes by drawing the bow over the strings (legato) is the bread and butter of bowed instruments like the violin and the cello, but they can also be played with short stabs of the bow (staccato) or by picking the strings with the fingers of the right hand (pizzicato), among others. Vibrato and slides are played using the left hand, simply by moving the finger up and down the string.
by homebrewer | 2025-07-22 12:22:31+00:00
If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any other dev server that serves each file separately instead of bundling them).

If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server.

Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc.

That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.
by NickC25 | 2025-07-22 12:22:41+00:00
> I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front,

This needs to be shouted from the rooftops to the crazed Trumpers who think that USAID is a waste of money.

It's a jobs program for midwestern farmers to grow unprofitable legacy crops and then it morphs into an intelligence operation by giving those crops to the poorest of the poor as food donations in some resource rich but economically poor and geopolitically strategic areas, all while creating tremendous goodwill and ground-level intel.

And somehow, this combo deal that puts money in poor farmers' pockets AND creates tremendous political goodwill AND serves as a fountain of continuous strategic information in vital localities is seen as a bad thing by Trump fans.

I don't get it. It's probably one of the most economically beneficial operations the CIA has ever taken part of outside of trafficking cocaine.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-22 12:23:15+00:00
>Ironically I think the extremely indiscriminate nature of Trumpism might be its downfall when the security agencies finally turn on him. I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front, and if they're offended that it was burned down without consulting them.

If it was a swamp/intel front I don't think it could've gotten burned down. I think the CIA laughed the whole time "this is what those idiots get for not doing their stuff under our umbrella and letting us take our cut".
by Veen | 2025-07-22 12:23:41+00:00
Resistance to free market economics is not necessarily Marxist. Old-fashioned one-nation conservatives also find offshoring of this sort objectionable. If you consider the job of the state to be to cultivate a stable, cohesive society, you're going to favour regulation of actions that undermine that objective, including business strategies that erode the local skill base and economy.
by bastosm | 2025-07-22 12:23:51+00:00
I can tell from the reactions to some of my recent posts that I’m hitting a few sacred cows, and I don’t mean to, but the volume of likes and comments suggests that more people quietly agree with me than I initially thought.

So let’s pop one of the biggest sacred cows of all:

I don’t think “team building” is necessary for high performers.

Hear me out before you start typing furiously at me, If the work is meaningful, hard, and challenging enough, that is the team building. Facing real engineering problems side by side, whether it’s a complex architecture issue or a late-night deployment, that’s what bonds people.

If the work itself isn’t interesting or impactful enough to bring your team together, maybe that’s the problem. And if your managers aren’t technical enough to be in the trenches with the team, that’s another one.

I’ve noticed this pattern: when leaders can’t contribute directly to solving the core problems, they try to create camaraderie around the work, through games, exercises, or “fun” sessions. But it’s a substitute for what should be the real challenge. A manufactured sense of connection in place of the kind that naturally forms when you’re pushing through hard things together.

The best managers I’ve worked with were technical enough to be hands-on, debugging with us, writing code, staying up for the 2am deploy. No games needed. The work itself was enough. And when it is, that’s all the team bonding you really need.
by jonyt | 2025-07-22 12:23:59+00:00
The article comes off as a laughable attempt to fire the arrow and then paint the target around it. For example the author claims about 9/11 that "the first attack had already achieved its aims: it dragged the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, pushed the country back into the moral swamp of torture, and, as a bonus, helped goad America into invading Iraq." Bin Laden was a fanatical mass murderer and his aim was to establish a caliphate. I highly, highly, highly doubt that he saw the attacks as an attempt to degrade the morals of the CIA (or any of the other outlandish claptrap that the author claims).
by jppj | 2025-07-22 12:24:13+00:00
tl;dr - how to Firefox? Blind taste test.

Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.

It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
by andsoitis | 2025-07-22 12:24:33+00:00
There's more nuance to this.

JPMorgan is reported to considering accepting stablecoins as collateral to loans. Stablecoints are pegged to assets such as the US dollar, Unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which are not backed by an underlying asset.

Like most US banks, JPMorgan does not keep cryptocurrencies on its balance sheet.

It should also be noted that while JPMorgan has been against cryptocurrencies, it has been active in digital assets more broadly and developed one of the first bank-backed digital coins in 2019.
by riwsky | 2025-07-22 12:24:34+00:00
Mental model: “everything is a commit”. Commits are commits. Stashes are commits. The working tree is a commit. The index doesn’t exist, because it’s unnecessary.

The data model is technically of revisions, which are stable across operations like rebases (which change the underlying git commit).

How to conceptualize a branch: as a bookmark of a specific commit.
by gchamonlive | 2025-07-22 12:24:35+00:00
Great point. I think it's different from AI because there isn't a large industry that spends lots of resources on advertising like the sugar industry does to deliberately make people consume it more even though it's bad for them. There is a large industry behind AI, one of the greatest, it's just that for now it's different than these other more traditional industries when it comes to advertising.

And I think we need to fight these kinds of bad incentives in society, but at the end of the day if you don't want to exercise nobody can make you. If you want to delegate all your work to AI, nobody can stop you.

I'm more concerned about those that understand the problem, want to change but feel overwhelmed.
by pritambaral | 2025-07-22 12:24:56+00:00
> Firefox has no profiles.

Patently false. Been using profiles for years.

> bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

Rarely have I had to that. Until I added rules to open certain URLs in specific containers.

> Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here.

Absolutely not. Profiles are a poor "alternative" to containers. How do I add a rule to pin URLs to specific profiles? How would that even work, if it did? A new window for some links? Re-use some random window with the same profile? How do I switch to it? Switch back? Don't tell me to use the Window Manager via Alt-Tab. I organise tabs into windows by shared context.

Then there's the whole issue of sync. Profiles don't share anything. Each profile needs to be configured individually. I like not having to add uBlock Origin to every browser profile. I like not having to think if I have my password for this rarely visited site in this profile or another one. Or a bookmark. Or form info.

----

Just because containers have no use to you / you couldn't find a use for them, doesn't mean the rest of us also shouldn't have the luxury of using this feature. Feel free to use Profiles as you'd like. Leave what works for us alone.
by icanhasjonas | 2025-07-22 12:25:26+00:00
Only because Microsoft offers “certified professional” badges and the MSCP’s are pushing the only thing they are certified for, and the corporations buy into the whole “certified” thing.

I have a ton of customers where the admins are constantly reminding everyone about the certifications they have, all while their basic security is below average.

… but they are certified!
by nchmy | 2025-07-22 12:25:30+00:00
The relevant question is, why would a stranger take time out of their life to evangelize an open source VCS tool?

What other tools do people do that for? Not many. I see the most similar language and behaviour with regards to uv, which similarly revolutionized/simplified python tooling.

Likewise mise, which makes it similarly frictionless to install and manage tooling and their versions across projects and system-wide.

The evangelizing for these things comes because these tools start to heal the trauma that came from immense friction. We want others to be similarly liberated.

For those who say "I don't feel friction/trauma with git, legacy Python tooling etc", I can only say that you're living in Plato's cave/the matrix/in a cult/with Stockholm syndrome and just don't know what you're missing out on.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-22 12:25:32+00:00
> What makes it clear to you that they don't mean what they explicitly write?

Because that's how language works - it's inherently ambiguous, and we interpret things in the way that makes the most sense to us. Your interpretation makes no sense to me, and requires a whole host of assumptions that aren't present in the article at all (and are otherwise very unlikely, like an AI that can literally work at the level of concepts).

> Why are you defending their poor writing?

I'm defending them because I don't think it's poor writing.
by logicchains | 2025-07-22 12:25:40+00:00
1. The facts absolutely do support it, even Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada . Check the "Canada visible minority, aboriginal and Caucasian (assumed for 1981 to 2016) population as a percentage of the total population over time" chart there. The "Caucasian" proportion is down from 93.3% in 1981 to 69.8% in 2021

2. I defined white, as the skin looks white, not brown or darker. If you want more specific: someone that 90+% of Canadian people would agree "looks like a white person". Or just use whatever definition of "Caucasian" Wikipedia uses.

3. Nobody said anything about good or bad. The question of whether it's good or bad is completely orthogonal to the question of whether or not "white" people are projected to become a minority in Canada.
by gabrielgio | 2025-07-22 12:26:50+00:00
> I don't have a lot of problems with git that I need to solve, that's the thing. And I don't get why people keep trying to convince me

You are in *forum* in a post *about jj* saying there is no reason to use jj. We are just interacting as you'd expect in forum. If you don't see any reason to use anything else and don't want to hear anything about it steer away from these posts.

No one is trying to convince you personally, we are just discussing the tool. Go use git and be happy.

I sincerely won't read anything else past that line.