MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Forgeties79 | 2025-07-17 20:42:56+00:00
>The more generic and spread an agent is (can-do-it-all) the more likely it will fail and disappoint.

To your point - the most impressive AI tool (not an LLM but bear with me) I have used to date, and I loathe giving Adobe any credit, is Adobe's Audio Enhance tool. It has brought back audio that prior to it I would throw out or, if the client was lucky, would charge thousands of dollars and spend weeks working on to repair to get it half as good as that thing spits out in minutes. Not only is it good at salvaging terrible audio, it can make mediocre zoom audio sound almost like it was recorded in a proper studio. It is truly magic to me.

Warning: don't feed it music lol it tries to make the sounds into words. That being said, you can get some wild effects when you do it!
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 20:43:27+00:00
Yes, virtually every commercial application I've ever seen allows exfiltration of data, usually close to all of it, and you agree to it by signing both an EULA and privacy policy.

Based off of that, I then assume that other companies are exfiltrating as much data as possible off my devices.

I mean, even your car, which, keep in mind, is a multi-tens-of-thousands dollar product, exfiltrates your location, all your texts, all your phone calls, and as much data from your phone as possible.

Yes, this is a "leap of faith". I am not bound by a purely evidence-based worldview - I consider that naivety. I do not need strong irrefutable evidence of bad things happening. When people are untrustworthy, I approach them with skepticism in order to protect myself.

For example, I have absolutely no proof that the NSA is surveilling SMS and telephony right now. None at all. But I know Prism was a thing. It is safe to assume the NSA is absolutely surveilling SMS and telephony.

And, I'm almost always right, in my experience.
by bGl2YW5j | 2025-07-17 20:43:37+00:00
Yes! I’ve been thinking along similar lines: agents and LLMs are exposing the worst parts of the ergonomics of our current interfaces and tools (eg programming languages, frameworks).

I reckon there’s a lot to be said for fixing or tweaking the underlying UX of things, as opposed to brute forcing things with an expensive LLM.
by belthesar | 2025-07-17 20:44:15+00:00
One of the big questions that I haven't seen a compelling answer for re: heat pumps in the US is why heat pumps are so expensive compared to AC exchanges. The amount of equipment differences between an AC and a heat pump are largely a valve to reverse refrigerant flow and the small bit of electronics to control said valve. Yet heat pump units in the US are significantly more expensive for effectively the same COP and operating efficiency ranges as their cooling-only brethren.
by spiderxxxx | 2025-07-17 20:44:57+00:00
fossil is great, and I wish more companies used it. It's so simple, has everything you need, documentation, bugs, email alerts, chat, a forum, a wiki. It's all there. Having to go to jira to manage something, confluence for something else, git for source code and bug tracking, it's all a mess, when you can use something like fossil. Yet all I hear when I mention fossil is "never heard of it, not using some toy project, sticking to what I know".
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-07-17 20:45:23+00:00
I have the same issue and in recent days I seem to have gotten an extra helping of overload errors which hit extra hard when I realize how much this thing costs.

Edit: I see a sibling comment mention the Max plan. I wanna be clear that I am not talking about rate limits here but actual models being inaccessible - so not a rate limit issue. I hope Anthropic figures this out fast, because it is souring me on Claude Code a bit.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-17 20:45:44+00:00
Sequencing all of the interesting parts of the human genome is $300-$400 and a few weeks wait.

The bioinformatics to find a simple mutation and design a crispr fix or one of the other gene therapy methods is about 1 grad student week.

I am talking about garage hacking and there sure are a bunch of risks and chances of ineffective treatments, but researchers used to take a lot more risks and I can see folks with degenerative, terminal, or otherwise very severe conditions being happy to say fuck it let's try something.

And with an appetite for risk and a fuck it attitude, you can try something for less than the cost of a used toyota.

And as mainstream treatments develop, custom gene editing as a fully safe therapy option is going to become common.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-17 20:46:54+00:00
Yeah, that's about the point where I would have started mandating every insert be awaited and not just "fire and forget" (or "let the unhandled promise rejection handler sort it out"). Take the linter's advice there and do it everywhere. Would solve a lot more timing heisenbugs and race condition uncertainty, in my experience.

Also yes, eslint is quite slow on larger codebases, but getting faster.

I've more and more using `deno lint` which is similar to oxlint (also Rust based, also trying to be more or less similar to eslint with certain "presets" available) because I mostly like its typescript "required" opinions (I don't configure it much beyond its out of the box configuration). You can use `deno lint` just fine even if you aren't using deno as a runtime.

I think if I was working on a production Node app with a large codebase right now I'd consider `deno lint` or `oxide` as first pass in the inner developer loop and `eslint` configured with the same presets as a CI-mostly second pass.
by blub | 2025-07-17 20:47:19+00:00
The contractors working on my house sometimes paint a room bright pink for no particular reason.

When I point that out, they profusely apologize and say that of course the walls must be white and wonder why they even got the idea of making them pink in the first place.

Odd, but nice fellows otherwise. It feels like they’re 10x more productive than other contractors.
by GregDavidson | 2025-07-17 20:47:19+00:00
AI used to refer to the extensive range of techniques of the field of Artificial Intelligence. Now it refers to LLMs and maybe other multi-layer networks trained on vast datasets. LLMs are great for some tasks and are also great as parts of hybrid systems like the IBM Watson Jepardy system. There's much more to Artificial Intelligence, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and... et al.
by unsui | 2025-07-17 20:47:57+00:00
>Our PMs don't like making things opt-in

That is an implementation detail. What matters is the outcome:

Notion leadership has signed off on this being opt-out.

The calculus here, as you indicated, was that opt-in has little buy-in.

What leadership didn't take into account was the risk of this being publicized, and the blowback from this awareness.

That, or leadership has already calculated that not enough people will care (possibly true).

I suppose it's then up to those that do care to make more noise about this, to tilt the odds?, so this specific calculus (also known as enshittification) doesn't keep occuring (i.e, if the blowback costs are disproportionate to the value provided by default opt-out....)
by jdiff | 2025-07-17 20:48:09+00:00
Good news for you then, this idea is less and less born out by the data. The productivity and efficiency gains aren't there, so there's no reason to be compelled by the spectre of obsolescence. The models may be getting better, but it doesn't seem to be actually changing much for programming. The illusion of busywork, perhaps, is swallowing up the decreased mental bandwidth in constant context switching.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-07-17 20:48:28+00:00
> It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

I have mixed feelings; because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior; but it also (I think) threatens the stability of senior level jobs long term, especially as seniors slowly lose their knowledge and let Claude take care of things. The result is basically: When did you get into this field, by year?

I’m actually almost afraid I need to start crunching Leetcode, learning other languages, and then apply to DoD-like jobs where Claude Code (or other code security concerns) mean they need actual honest programmers without assistance.

However, the future is never certain, and nothing is ever inevitable.
by apwell23 | 2025-07-17 20:48:51+00:00
> It’s kind of mind blowing how well my cobbled together home brew version actually works. It doesn’t have the fancy CLI GUI but it is more or less performant as CC when running it through the Sonnet API.

I've been thinking of rolling up my own too. but i don't want to use sonnet api since that is pay per use. I currently use cc with a pro plan that puts me in timeout after a quota is met and resets the quota in 4 hrs. that gives me a lot of peace of mind and is much cheaper.
by combyn8tor | 2025-07-17 20:49:40+00:00
While you're here - can you tell your PM's that your auto update on windows is annoying. Every time I start the app there's a prompt asking me to either "Install and Relaunch" or "Remind me later" (which seems to just hassle me again on next app start). The worst part is the pop-up doesn't show until 5-10 seconds after I start the app. So I'll start the app, start clicking around and then I'm interrupted by this pop-up. This seems to happen every day because you push a lot of updates.

I'd prefer an option to silently grab non-security/non-fix updates once every [Day, Week, Month] in the background, and install automatically on next app start up. Urgent updates can happen immediately. The default should be every week as every update is around 85mb. You could go a step further and have an option to only download over WiFi.

As for the mic "issue", I'm not sure what everyone's on about. Acting like it's the first app on Windows to monitor what the system is doing to provide a feature.
by cyberax | 2025-07-17 20:49:42+00:00
> But for offshoring, I'm clueless as to how manage to "reshore" the money, so to speak, so that you can eventually... Spend it to buy stuff. (Or isn't that the purpose of hiding the money ?)

Why would you reshore the bulk of funds? We're talking about people for whom a couple of million is just spare money.

If you want to buy a company, you just use the offshore funds directly. If you want to buy a major luxury good (a yacht or a jet), you do the same and then just lease/rent it to yourself.

If you _absolutely_ need cash in the US, you can pay yourself dividends and take a hit paying taxes on this amount only.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-17 20:49:51+00:00
My wife and at least one of my children are sensitive to perfume. They get headaches, at a minimum.

A bit east of Elkhart Indiana, there's a place that claims to sell "natural perfume". Does anyone who is perfume-sensitive have any experience with that? Is it possible that the chemicals used in "non natural perfume" are at the root of the sensitivity? (I haven't dared to test it on my wife, so I'd be interested in any reports.)
by freediver | 2025-07-17 20:50:54+00:00
Please reach out to me at vlad@kagi.com and we'll set you up on an account (on us) and I'll personally get involved to see what is happening. Most our searches complete in less than 1000ms. We do dig much deeper than Google though, and we more often than not place what you are looking for in the top 3 results - and that has to count for something too.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-07-17 20:51:25+00:00
> Is that actually right? Feels pretty suspect to me, you have to hold onto the data at least a little bit to transmit it to all connected clients, being a client-server protocol. I don't think this passes by the courts, not any more than holding onto a few dozen or a few minutes of logs in a non-persistent fashion (i.e. in-memory only) would.

It doesn't excuse failure to moderate the service at all, but if there is no chat history, you cannot be excepted to moderate it specifically. Basically, in any even remotely fair legal system, one cannot be excepted to delete something that doesn't exist in the first place.
by pksebben | 2025-07-17 20:51:26+00:00
Given the structure of hierarchical orgs, both can (and likely are) true.

Moustache-twirler A: We've identified these metrics that correlate with increased shareholder value

Moustache-twirler B: But what do those metrics say about user privacy?

(both laugh. This is very funny)

MT A: no but really, fire any PMs that don't make these go up and let the survivors figure out why

MT B: sounds great. See you at golf this weekend

(some time later, in a less fancy conference room)

Engineer: This new feature is great, but could be construed as an invasion of privacy. Can we make it opt-in?

PM (panicking): Oh good heavens, no! Also send the opt-out button to the UX team, that way it doesn't come down on us.
by masylum | 2025-07-17 20:51:30+00:00
Hey, this is Pao, the guy building https://fika.bar.

Fika is a place to save, discover and share content built upon 3 products:

- A local-first bookmark manager (Works 100% offline) - A feed reader: With feed discovery from your bookmarks. - A blog/newsletter platform

The only thing it currently does not have is e-reader integration yet. But you get the other 2 products bundled together which make a lot of sense.
by chatmasta | 2025-07-17 20:52:07+00:00
Yeah, people complaining about accuracy of AI-generated code should be examining their code review procedures. It shouldn’t matter if the code was generated by a senior employee, an intern, or an LLM wielded by either of them. If your review process isn’t catching mistakes, then the review process needs to be fixed.

This is especially true in open source where contributions aren’t limited to employees who passed a hiring screen.
by kleiba | 2025-07-17 20:52:12+00:00
> Pizza is a fairly balanced food, depending on toppings. Generally some protein, some vegetables. Macronutrient wise, it's a bit carb heavy, but not overwhelmingly so. Usually not a lot of added sugar, unless you're having a BBQ pizza, and not that much natural sugar either; some places might put more sugar into the pizza sauce though.

Just because there's comparatively little sugar in pizza, does not make it a fairly balanced food. It's high in fat and consequently high in calories. Case in point: that personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut is the size of a man's palm and has around 600 calories. 600! For a young child, that tiny thing alone is a third of the total recommended [1] daily calory intake. My son is 10, and he could probably eat 4 or 5 of these suckers easily.

[1] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
by RistrettoMike | 2025-07-17 20:52:25+00:00
Throwing another answer in for Instapaper. It’s not as new and flashy as something like Readwise or Matter, but also doesn’t try to do too much.

Killer features of Instapaper for me include the kindle digest and IFTTT integration (which I use to mirror my archived articles to Raindrop.io)
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 20:52:27+00:00
I don't use notion, but it would be a fun experiment to install a root CA and see the traffic.

It's probably not always this easy. I see many connections on apps using UDP, so who knows how, exactly, they are encoded.

The data may also be "encrypted", similar to how Zoom "encrypted" data. That is to say, the data is encrypted, but the private key is on the same server. So, if you MITM, it looks encrypted - but there's no security.
by sgjohnson | 2025-07-17 20:52:49+00:00
> Requiring TLS on an inter-LAN connection is mostly useless, and impossible if no Internet gateway is available.

what do you mean?

> Requiring TLS on an inter-LAN connection is mostly useless

there are many ways to intercept inter-LAN traffic, and:

> and impossible if no Internet gateway is available.

DNS validation? Run your own CA and trust it in your intranet?
by Qem | 2025-07-17 20:52:51+00:00
> No wheel, no bronze/iron and lots of child sacrifice…

Regarding child sacrifice, we are not faring much better today:

"UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell told ambassadors that an average of 28 children are killed in Gaza every day – “the equivalent of an entire classroom.” - https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165415
by MattSayar | 2025-07-17 20:52:57+00:00
I just wrote a post on my site where the LLM had trouble with 1) clicking a button, 2) taking a screenshot, 3) repeat. The non-deterministic nature of LLMs is both a feature and a bug. That said, read/correct can sometimes be a preferable workflow to create/debug, especially if you don't know where to start with creating.
by seydor | 2025-07-17 20:53:21+00:00
I said apple does not do that. Apple invented the smartphone before samsung or anyone.

There is no such thing as "slow" in business. If you re slow you go out of business, you re no longer a business.

There is only one AI race. There is no second round. If you stay out of the race, you will be forever indebted to the AI winner, in the same way that we are entirely dependent on US internet technology currently (and this very forum)
by shaky-carrousel | 2025-07-17 20:53:30+00:00
There are open source models, yes, but they are way worse than the commercial ones. I know it because I try every one that comes out. Nothing really compares to commercial ones. And what's going to happen is same story as always. Building a LLM is similar in effort as building a search engine. In the end we'll have one LLM everyone will use. And they'll do whatever they want with it.

Also, what I said is that people using LLMs to write code in programming languages they don't know won't learn to program such languages. Because, as hopefully everyone knows, you learn to program by writing code, not by reading it.

So, you will be a better programmer if you put the effort and properly learn to code in the language, instead of lazily use the LLM clutches. And that's not gatekeeping, that's a fact.

Once you really learn the language, go for it, use the LLM. And then you'll discover the LLM is optimized to find the most average and mediocre solution, the one that takes the least amount of effort to generate. Because obviously they are optimized to be efficient for their owners.
by rickdeckard | 2025-07-17 20:54:00+00:00
> Therefore we’re more encline to notice video consumption than other usages [..]

That's not relevant, as this is then forming our decision at the point-of-sale towards a media consumption device.

> many don’t want/need to carry a half-tablet all day long in case someone shared a tiktok on the messaging group.

Only while no media is consumed. Many people take less than one photo a day on average, but still the camera quality is a dominant decision-factor.

I'd even argue that the majority of price-premium paid by a customer today is for camera and display. Those will be the factors at the point of sale to decide whether to pay 50-100 USD more or not...
by spapas82 | 2025-07-17 20:54:08+00:00
I used to try and buy a lot of perfumes some years ago. Unfortunately I concluded that it isn't really worth it since beyond some classics (Fahrenheit , terre d Hermes, declaration, narcisso for him, dior home, ysl m7, armani code, zv this is him, ck eternity, chanel egoiste platinum and of course aventus) there aren't many truly unique scents. Most perfumes try to copy another existing, mass appealing one.

Also male perfume nowadays is either too weak or too sweet (or too expensive if you go the niche route). So either I'll wear a perfume that will smell for 30 minutes and nobody will notice or I'll bite the bullet and wear a club perfume that will suffocate people (and not even smell good).
by function_seven | 2025-07-17 20:54:20+00:00
While (human) vision is 3 colors, reviews of visual arts obviously can't just describe the colors of the thing. It also has shape, depth, style, etc.

Food reviewers don't note the levels of salt, sour, etc. They describe flavors and textures and parings.

But also, I don't buy that taste is just the composition of 5 components. This sounds like a reference to that diagram of the tongue we've all seen. It's as complex as scent is. There's no way you can define the taste of cinnamon by specifying some sort of 5-tuple.
by elric | 2025-07-17 20:54:31+00:00
That's a load of hogwash. Humans are only allowed to learn from books they buy or loan from libraries. We can't download books en masse from the interwebz just because we want to learn something. We're also not allowed to read stuff on websites and then regurgitate it verbatim pretending we made it. We can't even make songs that are vaguely similar to songs thag other people have made, even if they've been dead for a good while.
by belter | 2025-07-17 20:54:38+00:00
Their head of AI alignment clearly has no idea on how to go on alignment, as you can see here, during this 30 min rambling into nothing, on the subject.

At correct time stamp: https://youtu.be/Wo95ob_s_NI?t=1040

What is in contrast to the published vision of Thinking Machines Lab.
by slau | 2025-07-17 20:54:39+00:00
I’m a bit confused. I’m fairly certain I’m using split tunnelling with macOS on Wireguard, and I’m fairly certain you are doing so as well.

But why are you adding configurations for every website you want to visit to your VPN config? Surely it’s much saner to list the (hopefully static or subnetted) resources in your company, and then let everything else go through your home network?
by mandevil | 2025-07-17 20:54:58+00:00
The experience of patients who received Luxterna was that the single most important difference in how large the improvement was and how many complications they had was the quality of the surgeon who delivered the actual therapy. The best surgeons saw much better results and far fewer complications, and these surgeons are way beyond the capability of some grad student in a lab. The best surgeons were way better than other licensed, trained surgeons! That these sorts of non-gene factors dominate the outcomes- and costs- of gene therapy is the point that the original article is making.

The articles example for this is Casgevy, a gene therapy that can mostly cure Sickle Cell. The problem is in order for that gene therapy to work it takes surgeons, full transplant teams, super-chillers, chemotherapy, and full hospitals to deliver it and for the patient to recover in while being carefully monitored. This is what drives the cost, and so it doesn't matter how cheap the actual gene sequencing or editing is, the rest of the costs dominate. This is Amdahl's law, but for costs- the costs are dominated by the non-gene editing part of the process and so that determines the improvement in cost you will see.
by simonw | 2025-07-17 20:55:02+00:00
!!!

Yeah, it turns out those speaker avatar images are 1MB+ PNGs! And there are 170 of them.

What a fantastic cautionary tale about vibe-coding on a mobile phone (where performance analysis tools aren't easily available.)

I just fixed that with Codex - thanks for the tip: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6879631d99c48191b1ab7f84dfab8dea

As far as accessibility goes... yeah, the lack of semantic markup is pretty shocking! I'll remember to prompt for that next time I try anything like this.

I just tried it in VoiceOver on iOS and the page was at least navigable - the buttons for the days work - but yeah, I'd be very ashamed to ship something like this if it wasn't a 20 minute demo (and I'm a bit ashamed even given that.)

I'm running "Make open-sauce-2025.html accessible to screenreaders" in Codex now to see what happens.
by deeshee | 2025-07-17 20:55:38+00:00
I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be as important as the technical ones.

Bunch of comments online also reflect how there's a lot of "butthurt" developers shutting things down with a closed mind - focusing only on the negatives, and not letting the positives go through.

I sound a bit philosophical but I hope I'm getting my point across.