MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-14 18:02:38+00:00
As others have mentioned you are just writing your own history to suit your narrative. There is no evidence to support "People complained endlessly about the internet in the early to mid 90s,".

In the early and 1990s, people effectively did not use the internet. Usage was tiny and miniscule, limited to only tiny niche groups. People heard about the internet via the 90 second blurb on the evening new show. It wasn't until sometime after the launch of Facebook that the internet was even mainstream. So I really don't think people complained about the internet being slow that they weren't using.

I can go on here, but I don't really need to spend paragraphs refuting something that is obviously false.
by weinzierl | 2025-08-14 18:03:08+00:00
For me it's the complete opposite. I stayed because I thought it's a storm that will pass. I even had hope Elon gets bored with it and writes off the loss. Nothing of this has happened and probably ever will.

Most of the interesting people in my circles have left and the ones that stayed are so disconnected that there is no real community any more.

The end this on a higher note. Would you be willing to share some people to follow that make being on X worthwhile for you.
by jojomodding | 2025-08-14 18:03:15+00:00
It's still that way. Germany has an apprenticeship system that is supposed to work just like the medieval system: You work in a company for 2-3 years at low pay, but you get trained in return. (Nowadays you spend some of that time in a trade school). The promise often is that if you do good, the company will hire you as a regular employee afterwards.

Unfortunately, experiences vary. The promise works out for some, but others have a shitty boss that does not teach them anything and makes them do menial jobs that do not require or teach any special skills (e.g. cleaning up the workshop or cooking coffee).
by lesuorac | 2025-08-14 18:03:16+00:00
How are we on buy vs rent for like the third time this month?

There are a million calculators out there and I've linked 4 in a previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794529). The math just works out in favor of renting because real estate doesn't appreciate as fast as other stuff.

There are of course no-monetary reasons to own a house.

As well as if you plug in an interest rate of say 2% it starts to look like owning is better than renting. But we're not in that environment for the next year or so.
Show HN: I built free Slack app that remembers every incident for on-call heroes
by alibasharat5 | 2025-08-14 18:03:31+00:00
Hey HN,

If you’ve been on-call, you know the drill. Pager goes off at 2 AM. You scramble into Slack, scroll through half a dozen threads, and realize… this exact alert happened three months ago. Someone debugged it, found the root cause, maybe even fixed it but that knowledge is buried somewhere in the channel history. So you start from zero. Again.

That’s the pain we’re tackling with RobinRelay: a Slack-native assistant that remembers everything your team has already done during incidents and brings it back right when you need it. DEMO Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHWsOZa0Gpc

Here’s how it works today:

When an alert is posted in Slack, RobinRelay checks if we’ve seen it before.

If yes, it replies in-thread with past triage notes, root causes, and who fixed it all pulled from your actual Slack discussions, 6-month old messages.

- It builds a knowledge base entirely from your team’s Slack history (no extra tools or documentation effort).

- Weekly digest in Slack: most recurring alerts, top noisy services, most active responders.

- Interactive RAG agent: you can DM RobinRelay or mention it under any alert and ask questions like “What usually causes this?” or “Has this happened in staging before?”

We don’t hide or suppress alerts — we work with the alerts you already have, giving you instant context and history without changing your existing monitoring setup. We integrate with any alerting tool because we work with Slack API rather than Tools API's, it removes the burden of integration with thousands of tools.

You can see alert summaries and heatmaps in the Slack App Home, it will help your team to improve alerts by seeing most frequent/noisy and we’re experimenting with features like auto-linking alerts to related services and proactive “should I remind you?” prompts.

We’re still early and would love feedback on:

Do you also discuss solutions/investigations in alerts channels of Slack? Do you spend time finding old messages? Would you like to have senior SRE co-pilot in your pocket while you are having coffee on Weekend?
by safety1st | 2025-08-14 18:03:41+00:00
I'm pretty much a layperson in this field, but I don't understand why we're trying to teach a stochastic text transformer to reason. Why would anyone expect that approach to work?

I would have thought the more obvious approach would be to couple it to some kind of symbolic logic engine. It might transform plain language statements into fragments conforming to a syntax which that engine could then parse deterministically. This is the Platonic ideal of reasoning that the author of the post pooh-poohs, I guess, but it seems to me to be the whole point of reasoning; reasoning is the application of logic in evaluating a proposition. The LLM might be trained to generate elements of the proposition, but it's too random to apply logic.
by anonymars | 2025-08-14 18:03:52+00:00
Not to take away from your thesis (I agree that this was likely a very solveable issue, and after all they didn't need to fly across an ocean), but even Little Boy was 9700 lbs, which was nearly 2000 lbs/25% more than the He 111's capacity even with rocket assisted takeoff. So it is indeed easy to overlook that simply having something to deliver the massive things was no small feat

> Up to 3,600 kilograms (7,900 lb) could be carried externally. External bomb racks blocked the internal bomb bay. Carrying bombs externally increased weight and drag and impaired the aircraft's performance significantly. Carrying the maximum load usually required rocket-assisted take-off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_111
by dogleash | 2025-08-14 18:04:01+00:00
> I'd love to live in a world where nobody does this grouping, but we're obviously not there yet.

The only way to get there is to go there.

I remember back when I was a kid and realized anti-discrimination was the feel-good message hiding the real message to continue discriminating but now with the correct standards. I sat all day wondering what people 100 years from today would think of our current standards. I reasoned they'll be as forgiving to us as we are to people from 100 years ago.

The person from 1925 would argue they're better than someone from 1825. Ok, sure, but that doesn't make Jim Crow a good thing.

The contemporary standards on how to discriminate will always be justified in the contemporary social context. That's how the cycle perpetuates. The only way to get to the world where nobody does the grouping is to live that life as much as possible today.
by jarjoura | 2025-08-14 18:04:46+00:00
Okay, I'm willing to entertain your cynical take. However, experience has shown me that if we need to solve a vague problem as a team of engineers and designers, we know to get ample context of what it is we're actually trying to build.

Plus, the most creative solutions often comes from implicit and explicit constraints. This is entirely a human skill and something we excel at.

These LLMs aren't going to "consider" something, understand the constraints, and then fit a solution inside those constraints that weren't explicitly defined for it somehow. If constraints aren't well understood, either through common problems, or through context documents, it will just go off the deep end trying to hack something together.

So right now we still need to rely on humans to do the work of breaking problems down, scoping the work inside of those constraints, and then coming up with a viable path forward. Then, at that point, the LLM becomes just another way to execute on that path forward. Do I use javascript, rust, or Swift to write the solution, or do I use `CLAUDE.md` with these 30 MCP services to write the solution.

For now, it's just another tool in the toolbox at getting to the final solution. I think the conversations around it needing to be a binary either, all or nothing, is silly.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-14 18:05:22+00:00
I do events for the Finger Lakes Runners Club which I look at like "Space Mountain", you paid admission so you should get at least one good pic, at this event there were a total of 1000 volunteers and runners and I think I got about 600

https://www.behance.net/gallery/232159469/Skunk-Cabbage-Run-...

mainly camped at the finish line. I went to a double-header basketball game of men and women Aug 31 and finally got around to developing it last week and got maybe 400 images that I processed with DxO, that is part of a program of building up a stock of images so I can always be posting them to social media. All of those are "good enough" but yeah the best 40 or best 4 of those are better. If I was selling pictures to the local paper I'd be selling 1 to 3 per game. My secret weapon for going through huge numbers of photos is an XBOX controller and

https://keysticks.net/

so I can push a couch up near the computer and sit back and grade photos quickly. I hear some pros shoot 10,000 images at soccer games. I regularly spend more time processing images from an event than I spend at the event.
by pixelready | 2025-08-14 18:05:41+00:00
Yeah, I always wonder: is the tail wagging the dog or vice versa? Like maaaybe society is going through some organic disruption at the moment, but it’s so easy to foment a sense of crisis through mass media that it seems more likely it’s just being done to serve an agenda (start a war, consolidate power, disrupt opposition, extract wealth upwards, etc…).

My measuring stick is how “on message” the people reporting it tend to be. A real disaster or crisis is chaotic, and authentic reporting about it tends to be too (think about mixed messaging during the early days of COVID). If something happens and there’s a very clear narrative from the start about who the good guys and bad guys are, especially if it is trying to make me scared or mad, I just assume I’m being manipulated.
by andrekandre | 2025-08-14 18:05:53+00:00
> So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents, together with JetBrains tooling, will generate the code of all of these platforms

i take it to mean no more kotlin multiplatform if ai will just generate platform specific code....?
by pessimizer | 2025-08-14 18:06:00+00:00
Please stop telling people what stuff "reads like" until after you go over what they actually said. And never say something "reads like" anything akin to "you sound like a hater."

Or at least just say that straight instead of surrounding it with empty verbiage. The overwhelming proportion of people all over the world don't care about the EU until it does a horrible (or a good) thing, and then they care about the thing it did and why it might have done it. It's not their ex-boyfriend.

People are trying to figure out why it's run by crazy people now, and they blame this on the fact that it is largely an undemocratic organization run by extreme multi-generational elites with a quickly lowering opinion on human rights, freedom of speech and the importance of peace. This is not personal. The EU is not a person.
by nebula8804 | 2025-08-14 18:06:32+00:00
Probably not within our lifetimes. IBM is still around. We can see from companies like Sears that it can take a long time for a company to completely disappear. They lasted what around 125 years right? Would be interesting to see how long NVIDIA lasts. Out of the companies you mentioned, if we look really long term they are the most replaceable, ie. on a long enough time horizon the Chinese could completely replicate/leapfrog what they do, they could become completely commoditized like sound cards were, or someone comes along that makes them irrelevant. Google/Microsoft have long term lock in that will keep them at the very least a trailing edge player just due to all the lock in and the bureaucracy of switching that entails.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-14 18:06:36+00:00
> Every single cost mentioned in the article is passed to the renter in one way or another.

That's not how markets work.

You can only charge in rent what the market will bear and if it's between renting a place out for a net loss of say -1500 or not renting it out and paying 3000 in expenses anyways some landlord is going to pick -1500 over -3000.

In general, being a landlord is a losing proposition. The whole reason renting is better than owning is because real estate appreciates less than the stock market. That's still the case if you buy the place and rent it out! You might make money but you're losing out on the opportunity cost of NVDA growth.

Now landlords could all gather together and decide that renting 150 units for 3000 generates more profit than renting 200 units for 2000 and yeah you'll end up with empty units. But its because the opportunity cost of the empty unit is in the landlord favor.
by jjk166 | 2025-08-14 18:06:54+00:00
20 years ago (ie mid 2000s) was a unique time of extremely high gas prices with 2008 being the all time high both adjusted for inflation and absolute. Adjusted for inflation, oil is currently higher than any point between 1990 and 2004, and in absolute terms since 2022 its been higher than any point outside of the 2006-2014 period.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-14 18:07:38+00:00
See my comment from two days ago in previous thread:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44876283

AIUI, the money they are taking out is 'surplus'. All current obligations will be handed off to either an insurance company / annuity or lump sum. Future retirement funds will probably be in personal 401(k)s.
by ttiurani | 2025-08-14 18:07:52+00:00
> there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.

Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?

Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.

Edit. Does the network actually work over at zeppelin.social alone if Bluesky servers go down?
by NietzscheanNull | 2025-08-14 18:07:56+00:00
This argument strikes me as fairly textbook "whataboutism."

TFA shows a clear and present case of a particular action taken by one political faction. Your argument, that the opposing faction is equivalent to a greater or lesser degree and would follow the same course of action, rests entirely on a hypothetical; it isn't supported by any concrete evidence or cited examples.

I'm certainly not asserting that any one faction/party holds a monopoly on moral high-ground, just highlighting that this kind of argument is frequently used as a tactic to deflect discussion away from ground truth considerations and shift the debate towards (artificially) neutral conditions.
by shad42 | 2025-08-14 18:08:11+00:00
LLMs are powerful assistants—as long as the user keeps a firm mental model of the problem. That’s why, for now, they complement software engineers rather than replace them (at least today).

When you already know exactly what needs to be built and simply want to skip the drudgery of boilerplate or repetitive tasks, a coding CLI is great: it handles the grunt work so you can stay focused on the high-level design and decision-making that truly matter (and also more fun).
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-08-14 18:08:25+00:00
Telling scientists things is hard. They love to be experts, and can be resistant.

Even computer scientists. Had one come to me, looking for an API for fast data copy in RAM. I asked what he was achieving, he told me. I asked the bus width on the CPU and the clock speed. Told him, that's what it can do. He went away, said he remembered there was a library routine that could do better and he would keep looking. I just shook my head.
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-14 18:09:26+00:00
I often think about how much of an effect things like "see it, say it, sort it" and "we do not tolerate abuse to our staff" and "you are being watched, cctv" and "thieves will be prosecuted" and "smartwater in operation" and "cash not left in tills overnight" in otherwise wealthy and low crime areas contributes to a feeling of unsafety and dog-eat-dog world
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-14 18:09:32+00:00
Here's one that we really don't want to acknowledge because it may give some sympathy towards Facebook (i do not work for them but am well aware of Cambridge Analytica);

Cambridge Analytica was entirely a third party using "Click here to log in via Facebook and share your contacts" via FB's OpenGraph API.

Everyone in their mind is sure that it was Facebook just giving away all user details and that's what the scandal was about but if you look at the details the company was using the Facebook OpenGraph API and users were blindly hitting 'share', including all contact details (allowing them to do targeted political campaigning) when using the Cambridge Analytica quiz apps. Facebooks fault was allowing Cambridge Analytica permission to that API (although at the time they granted pretty much anyone access to it since they figured users would read the popups).

Now you might say "a login popup that confirms you wish to share data with a third party is not enough" and that's fair. Although that pretty much describes every OAuth flow out there really. Also think about it from the perspective of any app that has a reasonable reason to share a contacts list. Perhaps you wish to make an open source calendar and have a share calendar flow? Well there's precedent that you're liable if someone misuses that API.

We all hate big tech. So do juries. We'll jump at the chance to find them guilty and no one else in tech will complain. But if we think about it for even a second quite often these precedents are terrible and stifling to everyone in tech.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-14 18:09:38+00:00
I have no connection to astral, and while we dabble in uv (which has been great) we mostly use conda because of CUDA linking etc, but an alternative is at the least welcome and at best an improvement, so I don’t get the degree of cynicism or even hostility on this thread. If you don’t want to use pyx stick with pypi or write your own damn python packaging server.
by andrewstuart | 2025-08-14 18:10:05+00:00
What effort do you folks take to see your models actually running on hardware such as AMD Strix Halo or Apple M3M4?

I get the sense that AI is at the “hobby kit computing” stage where they used to dump all the components in a box and give you a schematic and a soldering iron and happily say “you make it work!”

And that worked in the early days of computing because there was a small number of people really motivated for the outcome.

But fully assembled and packaged and tested in a nice looking box is where the real demand turned out to be.

I’m looking forward to the day Google doesn’t just dump a model and say “you do the rest”.

I want to fire up Ubuntu on a Strix Halo and say apt install then load the browser interface. Or just download and run a Mac installer and have it just work.

Arcane complex multi step build install configure processes for AI need to end in favor of one click install. I’m not interested in the process of making it run.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-14 18:10:13+00:00
>I think you're being downvoted because you're not sincere in the question. As you say, you already hold the position; you could make the argument yourself.

Except I am. And I did[0]. Asking others to do so as well isn't too much to ask is it?

>There are reddit forums where you'll find people better qualified to present the position opposite yours.

Are there? I wouldn't know. Nor am I interested to find out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44895106
by swat535 | 2025-08-14 18:10:26+00:00
Another issue is that LLMS have no ability to learn anything.

Even if you supply them with the file content, they are not able to recall it, or if they do, they will quickly forget.

For example, if you tell them that the "Invoice" model has fields x, y, z and supply part of the schema.

A few responses later, in the response it will give you an Invoice model that has a,b,c , because those are the most common ones.

Adding to this, you have them writing tautology tests, removing requirements to fix the bugs and hallucinating new requirements and you end up with catastrophic consequences.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-14 18:10:43+00:00
I'm making an app where literally all I want to do with an LLM is generate tags. This model has failed with flying colours, literally takes forever to parse anything and doesn't follow instructions.

Edit - I should add, currently the model I'm using is Gemini Flash Lite through the Gemini API. It's a really good combo of fast, follows instructions, gives correct results for what I want and cost-effective. I still would love a small open model that can run on edge though.
by wjrb | 2025-08-14 18:10:46+00:00
I have tried Math Academy after seeing a post here a few years ago (I think it was to Justin's blog? --- he's referred to early on in TFA).

Echoing what others say: it was very cool, went quickly at first, but within a few weeks, progress slowed because I just couldn't ingest the new information as quickly, even when doing two "blocks" a day.

It is superior to the free tier of Khan Academy.

I don't know if it's superior to textbooks and problem sets in a self-study capacity.

I found it better than the (highly rated) math education I partially received in HS.
by rectang | 2025-08-14 18:10:46+00:00
> stymy the flywheel effect that allows a handful of users (and thus sets of norms) to come to dominate so strongly

This prevents certain communities from forming and certain topics from being discussed. For example, you can't discuss LGBTQ issues with troll armies constantly swarming and spamming. If such communities are not given tools to exclude malignant disruptors by setting norms and "dominating" a given channel, they will have to go elsewhere (such as leaving X for BlueSky).
by accrual | 2025-08-14 18:11:17+00:00
> a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success

A great salesperson I learned from would often say something like "don't fight the resistance, join the resistance" with the implication that one must see through the other party's eyes before you can have a chance to really affect them. One must make them feel heard and understood rather than fought against.
by rangerelf | 2025-08-14 18:11:28+00:00
> The one I am assuming you are referring to is Meta, and they are getting sued. They arguably should also be facing criminal charges too under current law.

I think your assumption is falling too short, it's not just Meta, it's OpenAI, it's Anthropic, it's Google, and Microsoft, and others.

Like you said, the court case hasn't finished, but there's meddling from the Whitehouse already; I really doubt there's going to be any fair play in this case.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-14 18:12:00+00:00
Your front door isn't a hardened steel vault door... I'm assuming you still lock it.

This is a bad analogy, even it it's apt. Only in that an encryption scheme can be technically weaker than another, but still plenty secure. As long as it does the job and hasn't been broken.

For example, part of the spec is simply hashing and packet signing... not necessarily making the packets secret, but authenticating the origin/source. It isn't necessarily about creating the most secure vault in the world, but securing what might otherwise be completely insecure channels of communications/attack. It's also not about a $1000 smart phone, but a micro controller that's a fraction of a dollar on devices that have a total BoM that is very low cost or small.