MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whoisyc | 2025-07-19 18:07:34+00:00
> This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.

The actual reason is almost always some business bullshit. Advertising trackers, analytics etc. No amount of trying to shave kilobytes off a response can save you if your boss demands you integrate code from a hundred “data partners” and auto play a marketing video.

Blaming bad web performance on programmers not going for the last 1% of optimization is like blaming climate change on Starbucks not using paper straws. More about virtue signaling than addressing the actual problem.
by skydhash | 2025-07-19 18:07:43+00:00
The reason that tools have not changed that much is that our needs haven't changed that much either. Even something like `find` or `ffmpeg`, while complex, are not that complicated to use. They just require you to have a clear idea of what you want. And the latter is why most people advocating for LLMs want to avoid.

IDEs have not changed that much. They've always been an editor superchaged with tools that will all share the same context of a "project". And for development, it's always been about navigation (search and goto), compile/build, and run.
by OldfieldFund | 2025-07-19 18:08:08+00:00
If they give Siri LLMs, there will be headlines that it drove kids to suicide. People really don't need LLMs.

Sideloading is bad for business. Most users don't care. Remember, we, the devs, are not the core target/biggest spenders. They are targeting a large audience of young people who are not tech-savvy.
by creer | 2025-07-19 18:09:08+00:00
> there's really nothing puritan about American business culture. [...] utterly amoral.

What? Puritanism is not about some kind of blanket purity to be recognized or expressed from any angle, perspective or religion. And in American business is both extreme and extremely selective.

It's also very much about appearances and image projected. You have to accept a difference between anybody's personal values (in so far as these can show through the mess of corporate decisions), and the image that businesses believe they much display.
by accrual | 2025-07-19 18:09:38+00:00
I think it's different to talk about a conversation with AI versus just passing the AI output to someone directly.

The former is like "hey, I had this experience, here's what it was about, what I learned and how it affected me" which is a very human experience and totally valid to share. The latter is like "I created some input, here's the output, now I want you reflect and/or act on it".

For example I've used Claude and ChatGPT to reflect and chat about life experiences and left feeling like I gained something, and sometimes I'll talk to my friends or SO about it. But I'd never share the transcript unless they asked for it.
by mook | 2025-07-19 18:10:01+00:00
But it's the human review that makes it not rude; not bothering to review means you're wasting the other person's time. If they wanted a chatbot response they could have went to the LLM directly.

It's like pointing to a lmgtfy link. That's _intentionally_ rude, in that it's normally used when the question isn't worth the thought. That's what pasting a chatbot response says.
by senkora | 2025-07-19 18:10:33+00:00
+1. Wikipedia has good info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle

Take anything past 1 billion years ago as highly provisional.

I also really like this site: https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#0

One reason why no one really talks about anything before Pangaea is that there wasn’t interesting land life much before that, so the previous supercontinents don’t “matter” much in terms of evolution.
by pyman | 2025-07-19 18:11:46+00:00
Didn't our parents go through the same thing when email came out?

My dad used to say: "Stop sending me emails. It's not the same." I'd tell him, "It's better. "No, it's not. People used to sit down and take the time to write a letter, in their own handwriting. Every letter had its own personality, even its own smell. And you had to walk to the post office to send it. Now sending a letter means nothing."

Change is inevitable. Most people just won't like it.

A lot of people don't realise that Transformers were originally designed to translate text between languages. Which, in a way, is just another way of improving how we communicate ideas. Right now, I see two things people are not happy about when it comes to LLMs:

1. The message you sent doesn't feel personal. It reads like something written by a machine, and I struggle to connect with someone who sends me messages like that.

2. People who don't speak English very well are now sending me perfectly written messages with solid arguments. And honestly, my ego doest’t like it because I used to think I was more intelligent than them. Turns out I wasn't. It was just my perception, based on the fact that I speak the language natively.

Both of these things won't matter anymore in the next two or three years.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-19 18:11:51+00:00
Markets are efficient at extracting value from things, but what that value is needs to be determined before we blindly create a market for it. In the traffic light case you mention the value is money, when it should be safety. Traffic lights are installed to ensure traffic flow and safety, so getting a monetary return on a safety device should be non-sensical, but here we are.

We should not be involving private market players as partners in 'investments' with public organizations tasked with public good, or else we get misaligned incentives since the partners both expect different types of returns.
by ReptileMan | 2025-07-19 18:13:03+00:00
Why do you call Trump fascist? Only three reasons - you are ignorant about what fascism is, you think your audience is ignorant about what fascism is, you think that authoritarian has more syllables than they are usually used to wielding. Even calling him Nazi - although blatantly wrong will be less wrong than fascist.

Trump is authoritarian probably mildly right wing if you base it on the assumption that he has some form of coherent ideology aside from "Trump is the center of the universe". He doesn't believe in white supremacy, he believes in Trump supremacy, he doesn't believe in American greatness, he believes in Trump greatness. There is not belief in him for something greater than himself - unlike Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, Il Duce, Stalin or Mao.

Don't complicate things too much. Trump's ideology is a mix between Trump uber alles and What is good for Trump is good for america.
by esseph | 2025-07-19 18:13:10+00:00
Do you often run out of memory?

Want to understand this more. I know I'm talking from a position of privilege, but it's really hard to find a machine these days with less than 16 or 32GB of RAM from the factory.

Even going back several years, DDR4 has been extremely cheap for a long time, and DDR5 is finally closer to general ram prices.

Are you using mini PCs with soldered ram?
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-07-19 18:13:23+00:00
Whether it's LLM output is orthogonal to rudeness, lack of sensibility or generic content.There are all sorts of tools out there which use LLMs as a front end for some pretty spectacular back-end functions.

If you're offered an AI output it should be taken as one of two situations: (a) the person adopts the output, and maybe put a fair amount of effort into interacting with the LLM to get it just right, but can't honestly claim ownership (because who can), or (b) the output is outside their domain of expertise and functioning as a toehold or thumbnail in some esoteric topic that no single resource they know can, and probably the point is so specific that such a resource doesn't exist.

The tenor of the article makes me confused about what people have been doing, specifically , with ChatGPT that so alienated the author. I guess the point is there are some topics LLMs are fundamentally incompetent to perform? Maybe its more the perception that the LLM is being treated as an oracle than a tool for discovery?
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-19 18:13:48+00:00
> now that we've reached peak data?

A) that's not clear

B) now we have "reasoning" models that can be used to analyse the data, create n rollouts for each data piece, and "argue" for / against / neutral on every piece of data going into the model. Imagine having every page of a "short story book" + 10 best "how to write" books, and do n x n on them. Huge compute, but basically infinite data as well.

We went from "a bunch of data" to "even more data" to "basically everything we got" to "ok, maybe use a previous model to sort through everything we got and only keep quality data" to "ok, maybe we can augment some data with synthetic datasets from tools etc" to "RL goes brrr" to (point B from above) "let's mix the data with quality sources on best practices".
by vitus | 2025-07-19 18:13:54+00:00
You're mixing your units -- 0.05% of 6L is 3mL. In order for that to weigh 3g, atmospheric CO2 would have to be as dense as water.

Most figures I see peg 1mL of CO2 at closer to 2mg (it's about 50% heavier than the equivalent atmospheric volume, since that's mostly N2 with some O2). Your estimate of 240 mL / minute is about 346L per day, or about 700g of CO2. That's roughly the same order of magnitude as the cited 1 kg / person / day.

edit: Another way of thinking about it: if you scale up your numbers to grams per day, you'd end up with a ludicrous 346 kg / human / day. Multiply that by 12/44 (mass of Carbon-12 vs CO2), and that's the equivalent of a human shedding 100kg of carbon every day from just breathing. Most humans don't even weigh that much.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-19 18:14:06+00:00
I assume a book is correct or I at least assume to author thought it was correct when it comes to none ideological topics.

But you can’t assume positive intent or any intent from an LLM.

I always test the code, review it for corner cases, remove unnecessary comments, etc just like I would a junior dev.

For facts, I ask it to verify whatever says based on web source. I then might use it to summarize it. But even then I have my own writing style I steer it toward and then edit it.
by creer | 2025-07-19 18:14:59+00:00
See cryptocurrency payments. So the good news in this direction is that bitcoin et al are very much making progress at these businesses. As far as I can see, many - perhaps even most - such businesses now accept 2-5 forms of cryptocurrencies as payment. That took long enough but we are finally getting there.

The bad news is that essentially ALL such businesses still believe that it is essential for them to accept credit card payments - and that means they must still implement whatever agenda these are pushing. On their entire customer base, even if paying by crypto. For now.

Hopefully this progress continues.
by hereonout2 | 2025-07-19 18:15:13+00:00
Scripts ending up in different places is nothing to do with Debian packaging though. It just puts them exactly where you tell it - you're in complete control of that.

If you're unaware, the FSH lays out some guidelines a lot of distros follow - /usr/bin is a good place for any executable coming from a package in my book.

Agree debuild can be opaque as it is really a wrapper around loads of dpkg-* scripts. Digging further into those helps but it's not obvious.

WRT git, I find it useful to get the entire repo as a tar.gz and treat it like an upstream source package. The have the Debian build stuff as a process on top of that.

This is how many packages are maintained for real in the distro (i.e. imagine being the package maintainer of redis or vim and do it that way). It kind of makes sense to me to follow the pattern as things are geared up for it.
by labrador | 2025-07-19 18:15:20+00:00
> what about the article strikes you as indicative of mental illness?

The title "Roko's Lobbyist" indicates we're on the subject of Roko's Basilisk, which is why I refered to Zizians, a small cult responsible for the deaths of several people. That's the chaos and destruction of mentally ill people I was referring to, but perhaps mental illness is too strong a term. People can be in a cult without being mentally ill.

I feel the topic is bad science fiction, since it's not clear we can get from LLMs to conscious super-intelligence. People assume it's like the history of flight and envision going from the Wright Brothers to landing on the Moon as one continuum of progress. I question that assumption when it comes to AI.

I'm a fan of science fiction so I appreciate you asking for clarification. There's a story trending today about an OpenAI investor spiraling out so it's important to keep in mind.

Article: A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say "I find it kind of disturbing even to watch it."

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-19 18:15:29+00:00
>Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.

I of course do not know all the individual EU country's rules, but my understanding was that the EU's view was what it was because derived at least from the previous understanding of its member nations. So the earlier French laws before ratification and implementation of the EU directive on author's rights in Law # 92-597 (1 July 1992) were also focused on the understanding of creators having creator's rights and that protecting these was the purpose of Copyright law, and that this pattern generally held throughout EU lands (at least any lands currently in the EU, I suppose pre-Brexit this was not the case)

You probably have some other examples but in my experience the European laws have for a long time held that copyright exists to protect the rights of creators and not of the public.
by skydhash | 2025-07-19 18:16:18+00:00
Not at all. The shell already provide us ways to get contextual information (PS1, ...). And the commands generally provides error message or error code.

In one of the example provided:

$ sdfsdf zsh: command not found: 'sdfsdf' zsh: current directory is /Users/ryan zsh: Perhaps you meant to run: cd agent_directory; sdfsdf

You could just use `pwd`, like most people that put the current directory in the $PS1 to make sure that the agent stays in the correct directory.
by const_cast | 2025-07-19 18:16:28+00:00
Then don't rent your house. This is a risk of rental properties.

Look, if you have a house in a tourist spot and you say "no parties!", you're not gonna make any money. And if the residents don't like said parties, they can rally together to make AirBNBs illegal in their area. That's how many (most?) touristy places are.
by kordlessagain | 2025-07-19 18:16:35+00:00
Agree with the whack-a-mole effect, where it goes from nailing the problem or bug to absolutely destroying the code. I would offer some of these MCP tools I wrote/had written to solve the problem: https://github.com/kordless/gnosis-evolve. Tools are in contrib-tools.

It has helped tremendously having a dedicated build service that CC can control through MCP vs running Docker itself because it can then restart the container and test. And, the fuzzy search tool and diff editor seem to perform better than the replacement strategy Claude Code uses, most of the time. I continue to work on the editor when I run into issues with it, so happy to help anyone interested in implementing their own file editing (and search) strategy.

You will need to convert these to Claude Code format, but all you need to do is ask CC to do it for you...
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 18:16:43+00:00
"Hey, I can't help but notice that some of the messages you're sending me are partially LLM-generated. I appreciate you wanting to communicate stylistically and grammatically correct, but I personally prefer the occasional typo or inelegant expression over the chance of distorted meanings or lost/hallucinated context.

Going forward, could you please communicate with me directly? I really don't mind a lack of capitalization or colloquial expressions in internal communications."
by tedsanders | 2025-07-19 18:16:46+00:00
Just to quickly clarify:

- OpenAI doesn't own Epoch AI (though they did commission Epoch to make the eval)

- OpenAI denied training on the test set (and further denied training on FrontierMath-derived data, training on data targeting FrontierMath specifically, or using the eval to pick a model checkpoint; in fact, they only downloaded the FrontierMath data after their o3 training set was frozen and they didn't look at o3's FrontierMath results until after the final o3 model was already selected. primary source: https://x.com/__nmca__/status/1882563755806281986)

You can of course accuse OpenAI of lying or being fraudulent, and if that's how you feel there's probably not much I can say to change your mind. One piece of evidence against this is that the primary source linked above no longer works at OpenAI, and hasn't chosen to blow the whistle on the supposed fraud. I work at OpenAI myself, training reasoning models and running evals, and I can vouch that I have no knowledge or hints of any cheating; if I did, I'd probably quit on the spot and absolutely wouldn't be writing this comment.

Totally fine not to take every company's word at face value, but imo this would be a weird conspiracy for OpenAI, with very high costs on reputation and morale.
by TFYS | 2025-07-19 18:17:06+00:00
You might be right, but I'm wasn't saying we should ban all use of any technology that has any negative effects, but that we should at least try to understand all the effects before taking it into use, and try to avoid the worst outcomes by regulating how to use the tech. If it turns out that fossil fuels are the only way to achieve modern technology then we should decide to take the risk of the negative effects knowing that there's such a risk. We shouldn't just blindly rush into any direction that might give us some benefit.

Regarding competition, yes you're right. Effective regulation is impossible before we learn global co-operation, and that's probably never going to happen.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-19 18:18:01+00:00
what is a right that has existed since time immemorial? Generally rights that have existed "forever" are codified rights and, in the codification, described as being eternal. Hence Jefferson's reference to inalienable rights, which probably came as some surprise to King George III.

on edit: If we had a soundtrack the Clash Know Your Rights would be playing in this comment.
by zrail | 2025-07-19 18:18:05+00:00
1Password is amazing for this, IMO. My spouse and I have been using 1Password together for more than a decade. One of the first things I set up is a "AAA Read Me First" note with links to a bunch of other notes and documents, including our estate planning stuff.

The biggest thing that makes me stick with 1Password, despite the semi-recent VC shenanigans, is the fact that if for some reason we fall behind on billing (for example, because the credit card got cancelled because I died) the account goes into read only mode forever. As long as 1P is a going concern the data we choose to put there is safe from the biggest risk in our threat model.
by sublimefire | 2025-07-19 18:18:18+00:00
The sad reality is that nobody ever cares about the security/ethics of their product unless they are pressured. Model evaluation against some well defined ethics framework or something like HarmBench are not without costs, nobody wants to do that. It is similar to pentesting. It is good that such suggestions are being pushed forward to make sure model owners are responsible here. It also protects authors and reduces the risk of their works being copied verbatim. I think this is what morel owners are afraid of the most.
by stillsut | 2025-07-19 18:18:27+00:00
> Just keep it away from me

I'm reminded of teaching bootcamp software engineering, when every day #1 we go through simple git workflows and it seems very intimidating to students and they don't understand the value. Which fair enough because git has a steep learning curve and you need to use it practically to start picking it up.

I think this might be analogous to the shift going on with ai-generated and agent-generated coding, where you're introducing an unfamiliar tool with a steep learning curve, and many people haven't seen the why? for its value.

Anyways, I'm 150 commits into a vibe coding project that still standing strong, if you're curious as to how this can work, you can see all the prompts and the solutions in this handy markdown I've created: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
by accrual | 2025-07-19 18:19:09+00:00
It would raise the barrier to entry, I suppose. I agree with GP that at some point in the future, real human output will become more rare and more valuable. And pure "human made" content (movies, music, books, blog posts, comments, etc.) may have access controls or costs associated.

We're already seeing the social contract around hosting your own blog change due to the constant indexing from AI crawlers.
by jsnell | 2025-07-19 18:19:17+00:00
The thing is, people claimed already a year or two ago that we'd reached peak data and progress would stall since there was no more high-quality human-written text available. Turns out they were wrong, and if anything progress accelerated.

The progress has come from all kinds of things. Better distillation of huge models to small ones. Tool use. Synthetic data (which is not leading to model collapse like theorized). Reinforcement learning.

I don't know exactly where the progress over the next year will be coming from, but it seems hard to believe that we'll just suddenly hit a wall on all of these methods at the same time and discover no new techniques. If progress had slowed down over the last year the wall being near would be a reasonable hypothesis, but it hasn't.
by stefan_ | 2025-07-19 18:19:36+00:00
Ha, did you see the outrage from people when they realized that them sharing their deepest secrets & company information with ChatGPT was just another business record to OpenAI that is total fair game in any sort of civil suit discovery? You would think some evil force just smothered every little childs pet bunny.

Tell people there are 10000 license plate scanners tracking their every move across the US and you get a mild chuckle, but god forbid someone access the shit they put into some for profit companies database under terms they never read.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-19 18:21:43+00:00
I did too, the AWS “house style” (former ProServe employee) of writing even before LLMs can come across as AI Slop. Look at some blog posts on AWS even pre-2021.

I too use an LLM to help me get rid of generic filler and I do have my own style of technical writing and editing. You would never know I use an LLM.
by WWLink | 2025-07-19 18:21:44+00:00
What's messed up about red light cameras is they can actually be useful - if used correctly!

The correct use case is "We seem to have a problem with red light runners at this intersection, so let's find out why by temporarily deploying red light cameras here."

I've seen this done and the city in question found out. They were able to make some changes to the light timing and at several intersections, that caused the amount of red light runners to drastically drop. (It was stuff like the left turn light not turning green when the straight forward light did).
by mgraczyk | 2025-07-19 18:22:54+00:00
This is actually not true. I just read the European commission's cookie policy.

The main reason they need the banner is because they show you full page popups to ask you to take surveys about unrelated topics like climate action. They need consent to track whether or not you've taken these surveys

Their banner is just as bad as any other I have seen, it covers most of the page and doesn't go away until I click yes. If you're trying to opt out of cookies on other sites, that's probably why it takes you longer (just don't do that).