MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by utyop22 | 2025-08-27 22:17:01+00:00
This is beautiful.

I also had a similar epiphany 3 days ago - once it hits you and you understand it, you can see clearly why LLMs are destined to crash and burn in their present form (good luck to those who will have to answer the questions regarding the money dumped into it).

What will come out of the investment will not justify what has been invested (for anyone who thinks otherwise, PLEASE GO AHEAD AND DO A DCF VALUATION!) and it will have a depressing effect on future AI investment.
by sunshowers | 2025-08-27 22:17:14+00:00
Right, in general a lot of uses of mutexes are to temporarily violate invariants that are otherwise upheld while the mutex is released, something that can usually be reasoned out locally. Reasoning about cancellation at an await point is inherently non-local and so is much harder to do. (And Rust is all about scaling up local reasoning to global correctness, so async cancellation feels like a knife in the back to many practitioners.)

The generally recommended alternative is message passing/channels/"actor model" where there's a single owner of data which ensures cancellation doesn't occur -- or, at least that if cancellation happens the corresponding invalid state is torn down as well. But that has its own pitfalls, such as starvation.

This is all very unsatisfying, unfortunately.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-27 22:17:44+00:00
HN is usually negative, cynical, skeptical, eyerolling, regardless of topic.

Just the other day someone posted the ImageNet 2012 thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830), which was basically the threshold moment that kickstarted deep learning for computer vision. Commenters claimed it doesn't prove anything, it's sensational, it's just one challenge with a few teams, etc. Then there is the famous comment when Dropbox was created that it could be replaced by a few shell scripts and an ftp server.
by IshKebab | 2025-08-27 22:18:16+00:00
Whenever someone talks about a surprising paper cut like this you always see misguided "this is obvious" comments.

No shit. It's obvious because you literally just read a blog post explaining it. The point is if you sprinkle dozens of "obvious" things through a large enough code based, one of them is going to bite you sooner or later.

It's better if the language helps you avoid them.
by epc | 2025-08-27 22:18:38+00:00
Personally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life.

In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.

At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.
by adt | 2025-08-27 22:18:46+00:00
Steve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview:

In 1977 you said that computers were answers in search of questions. Has that changed?

Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s…

You’d start to teach it about yourself. And it would just keep storing all this information about you and maybe it would recognize that every Friday afternoon you like to do something special, and maybe you’d like it to help you with this routine. So about the third time it asks you: “Well, would you like me to do this for you every Friday?” You say, “Yes,” and before long it becomes an incredibly powerful helper. It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: “You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row.”

Steve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview: https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-jobs-1984-access-magazin... https://archive.md/uSuxo
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-27 22:19:02+00:00
> That loophole got closed once inter-state data sharing became possible and Oregon merchants were required to start collecting those out-of-state taxes at the point of sale.

Oregon merchants are not required to collect sales tax for any other jurisdictions outside of Oregon. And they don’t, any non Oregonian can go to any merchant in Oregon right now, and you will be charged the same as any other customer who lives in Oregon.

Also, it was never a loophole to buy things in Oregon to evade sales tax. All states with sales tax require their residents to remit use tax for any items brought into the state to make up the difference for any sales tax that would have been paid had it been purchased in their home state.
by yesco | 2025-08-27 22:19:33+00:00
LLMs write in a very coherent, easy to understand way. I see no reason why someone wouldn't want to copy their style or vocabulary if they want to improve their communication skills.

Despite all the complaints about AI slop, there is something ironic about the fact that simply being exposed to it might be a net positive influence for most of society. Discord often begins from the simplest of communication errors after all...
by jacobsenscott | 2025-08-27 22:20:03+00:00
Remember the pre package manager days was ossified, archaic, insecure installations because self managing dependencies is hard, and people didn't keep them up to date. You need to get your deps from somewhere, so in the pre-package manager days you still just downloaded it from somewhere - a vendor's web site, or sourceforge, or whatever, and probably didn't audit it, and hoped it was secure. It's still work to keep things up to date and audited, but less work at least.
by TGower | 2025-08-27 22:20:27+00:00
A few tradeoffs you might not be considering:

EV battery packs operate at voltages that are seriously hazardous. Consumers coming anywhere near those plugs is a non-starter, so even more bulk, weight, and complexity would need to be added to make the installation process foolproof.

Waterproofing is critical, the mechanism has to work flawlessly over insertion/removal cycles to keep a watertight seal.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-27 22:20:30+00:00
Yes, context is really important. But:JS Bach made a whole raft of music, and quite a large fraction of it was religiously inspired. In spite of that it is perfectly possible to appreciate it at a deep emotional level without that particular spiritual connection. This is the genius of art to me: that it opens up an emotional channel between two individual separated by time and space and manages to convey a feeling, as clear as day.

Take U2's October as a nice example. (You mentioned Zombie, incidentally one of my favorites, the anger and frustration in there never fail to hit me, I can't listen to it too often for that reason), superficially it is a very simple set of lyrics (8 lines I think) and an even simpler set of chords. And yet: it moves me. And I doubt any AI would have come up with it or even a close approximation if it wasn't part of the input. That's why I refuse to call AI generated stuff art. It's content, not art.
by bluecoconut | 2025-08-27 22:20:39+00:00
Interestingly this one seems it is from before 高輪ゲートウェイ (Takanawa Gateway) station which opened in 2020, but the numbering shows the gap (JY 25 -> JY 27). That led me to looking it up, and turns out that they introduced the numbering in 2016, and that already came pre-planned with the gap ready [1].

[1] https://www.jreast.co.jp/press/2016/20160402.pdf
by VenturingVole | 2025-08-27 22:20:44+00:00
This is really cool of you to openly share the prompt - props for that.

Really cool product, as someone currently attempting to build a somewhat similar internal tool I have an understanding of some of the pain points involved.

Please don't allow yourselves to be bought out by Apple in the way Buddy Build were back in 2018 though! (and then shut down)
by dakiol | 2025-08-27 22:21:20+00:00
Same. Also, when asked for anonymity at work, I usually make mistakes that do not correspond to my native tongue (let’s say I’m french and working in an international company. I would write comments in a supposedly anonymous survey like “He ist like…” to camouflage myself as german).

It’s so easy to trick everyone. People who doesn’t do that is just too lazy. In slack, you cannot just copy paste a two-paragraph answer directly from chatgpt if you’re answering a colleague. They will see that you’re typing an answer and suddenly 1 sec later you sent tons of text. It’s common sense.
by pilingual | 2025-08-27 22:21:24+00:00
I stopped using Apple products but need to create a couple of iOS apps. I was debating buying a Mac Mini or using "Macincloud" but this seems like an excellent option. Being able to edit the Swift code means fixing nuances.

I'll likely subscribe to your service.

For distribution strategy you could experiment with letting people create simple apps for free and put a perpetual ad for your service ad the bottom of the app.
by philjohn | 2025-08-27 22:22:15+00:00
This.

One of the biggest things I see in junior engineers that I mentor (working in backend high throughput, low latency, distributed systems) is not working out all of the various failure modes your system will likely encounter.

Network partitions, primary database outage, caching layer outage, increased latency ... all of these things can throw a spanner in the works, but until you've experienced them (or had a strong mentor guide you) it's all abstract and difficult to see when the happy path is right there.

I've recently entirely re-architected a critical component, and part of this was defense in depth. Stuff is going to go wrong, so having a second or even third line of defense is important.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-08-27 22:22:57+00:00
> We’re ingesting Apple’s SDK frameworks into Bitrig piece by piece. If you try to build something and hit a missing framework, let us know and we’ll prioritize adding it.

Submitted request for WebKit to be added.

In the app I asked it to make, I requested that it use a web view to log into YouTube. The generated app opens a mostly blank screen with no web view, and from what your app told me I think it’s because it’s missing WebKit.

WebKit as a whole might be big, but maybe some subset of it to support web views and get cookies from the web view could be supported?
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-27 22:23:30+00:00
> Since some idiotic courts have ruled a website’s Terms of Service to be legally binding, why can’t I just say no one from Mississippi is allowed to access my site and be done with it?

That would allow you, perhaps, to sue people from MS that used your site for violating the ToS (though, "some idiotic courts have ruled" does not mean "the courts which actually create binding precedent over those that would adjudicate your case have ruled...", so, be careful even there.) But that doesn't actually mean that, if someone from MS used your site and you took no further steps to prevent it you would not be liable to the extent that you did not comply with the age verification law.

> There’s precedent for saying that’s unauthorized access, so the feds (not the state; “Interstate Commerce Clause” and all that) should prosecute the visitor for violating my ToS.

Most things in interstate commerce, except where the feds have specifically excluded the states, are both federal and state jurisdiction, but neither the feds nor the state are obligated, even if applicable law exists which allows them to, to prosecute anyone for violating your ToS. You can (civilly) attempt to do so if you are bothered by it.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 22:24:05+00:00
That's not the standard we hold "human generated" media to. Not even "mockbusters" are illegal under copyright law. Nothing is new and everything is a remix. And I see no reason to make an exception for AI.

Copyright law is a disgrace, and copyright should be cut down massively - not made into an even more far-reaching anti-freedom abomination than it already is.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-27 22:25:14+00:00
When you trim for space you have to make choices.

And about removing the "scaling does" part: (1) it's Gary Marcus, so the point is surely and factually about the "does not" part, and (2) my reading of the article did not show any relevant "does" part.

Normally I also note the edits in the title, as in:

# What scaling_ doesn’t buy_: peeling back the hype [on] Google‘s trendy Nano Banana

but on this occasion I thought it was not worth it.
by apaprocki | 2025-08-27 22:25:22+00:00
Similarly, I explained to someone how to systematically solve it like this, but then when I suggested they now apply it in a new game, I chose all the same color for the code and watched them second guess themselves until all guesses were exhausted. They just couldn’t accept the possibility that the code could simply be all the same color. Was a good opportunity to quote Sherlock Holmes.
by adrr | 2025-08-27 22:26:20+00:00
This is an important concept. More you push to zero fraud, the more inconvenience you put on your customer. You can cut bunch of fraud if you only allow shipments to the billing address but then you inconvenience people who want to buy gifts, recently moved or have a vacation home. You can block all traffic from cloud providers but you'll end up blocking outbound proxies for people on military bases or corporate proxies.
by layer8 | 2025-08-27 22:27:20+00:00
When you cross the event horizon, you’re falling at close to the speed of light, relative to the event horizon. But due to relativity, light bouncing off the falling objects still propagates at light speed in all directions relative to the falling objects (including the falling observer). That light can’t move outwards, due to being inside the event horizon, and accelerates towards the singularity, but the observer accelerates to the singularity faster, relative to light being reflected outwards. The falling rest frame accelerates towards the singularity, but within that accelerating rest frame, light behaves normally between objects in that frame (assuming a large enough black hole so that the differences in radial distance between the objects is negligible).

Consider two cars driving on a highway at the same speed. If one of the cars decelerates, it appears to be moving backwards relative to the other car, while still continuing to move forward relative to the road. It’s similar for light and an observer falling towards the singularity. They both fall towards the singularity, but light being reflected backwards will fall a bit slower, thus appearing to move backwards relative to the observer, even though the light still moves forward toward the singularity.
by MarkusQ | 2025-08-27 22:27:51+00:00
This sort of model-free projection is basically useless. It's like the people who predicted that "Moore's law" improvements were over because clock rates were maxing out, but missed out on the parallelism that made GPUs possible.

It isn't like "longevity gains" are some sort of spontaneous process powered by historical inevitability. All the past gains came from people identifying and mitigating problems, and all the future gains will come from similar efforts. These efforts, which have yet to take place, obviously won't show up in the trend data.
by wtallis | 2025-08-27 22:28:03+00:00
AMD has definitely been moving in that direction, and arguably doing a better job of it than Intel. But for now, AMD's desktop parts are still built with the same CPU core chiplets as their server parts, and none of the server parts are using heterogenous cores yet (from AMD or Intel). At some point AMD could theoretically build a desktop processor from one Zen chiplet and one Zen-c chiplet, but there hasn't been a good reason to do that yet.
by tallytarik | 2025-08-27 22:28:23+00:00
ISPs have no obligation, although the ubiquity of sites and apps relying on IP geolocation mean that ISPs are incentivized to provide correct info these days.

I run a geolocation service, and over the years we've seen more and more ISPs providing official geofeeds. The majority of medium-large ISPs in the US now provide a geofeed, for example. But there's still an ongoing problem in geofeeds being up-to-date, and users being assigned to a correct 'pool' etc.

Mobile IPs are similar but are still certainly the most difficult (relative lack of geofeeds or other accurate data across providers)
by arjunchint | 2025-08-27 22:28:41+00:00
Quick takeaways from Anthropic's Research Preview Extension:

- Using VERY HIGH RISK Debugger Permission that malicious websites can exploit to get device access. Very surprising a major tech company shipping product with such risky permissions to consumers. More info on debugger risks: https://dspace.networks.imdea.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12..., https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40091993.

- Prompt injection risks combined with Debugger permission on user device is asking for trouble.

- Will trigger captchas/bot detection even on your normal browsing due to this permission.

- Kind of slow. Limited to current open tab as opposed to capability of multi tab action because only current active tab get rendered. For example rtrvr.ai can open a batch of tabs and take actions on background tabs.

- For some websites like Bloomberg asking to go to claude.com
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-27 22:29:01+00:00
> the customer should be smart enough

Oh how I wish that were true in all cases :)

Integral occupancy sensors are usually an easy sell, like you said the energy savings usually cover the added cost of the sensor and relay, given that most LED pole heads draw anywhere from 50w to 150w. It also simplifies installation and maintenance since you don’t need to switch a whole line of poles with a single occ sensor and contactor.

The more esoteric options are usually a harder sell, stuff like glare shields and non-standard optics/distribution. I see options like this selected when a commercial property borders residential property, but it’s atypical.

Photometric studies can be done to figure out what options should be selected, but the customer, engineer, and contractor are all overworked and don’t always design things the way they could (or should) be designed. I will say that wealthier areas tend to have the budgets and time to go the extra mile on stuff like this.

FWIW, one of the things I do at my day job is sell LED pole heads (and a full range of electrical services) to municipalities (and others).

Here’s an example pole head cutsheet that shows the options that can be selected for reference: https://pdmassets.azureedge.net/library/LL/documents/specshe...
by abtinf | 2025-08-27 22:30:43+00:00
I am trying it for the first time. One point of feedback, with the caveat that my only experience so far is opening the tutorial:

I immediately hate that when intending to scroll vertically using the trackpad on my macbook, it constantly unintentionally scrolls horizontally as well and I have to correct it. It is particularly irritating since there is no content on the canvas to see when scrolling.

Maybe I'm just super accustomed to browser scrolling behaviors, which snap scrolling based on initial direction.

I'm mostly posting this because its the kind of papercut that might be forgotten over time.
by j1mr10rd4n | 2025-08-27 22:30:59+00:00
> learning when I can be doing something more efficiently

hardtime.nvim[1] (or vim-hardtime[2] if you're old-school) do exactly this but within your editing session. There's an associated blog post[3] explaining the rationale behind some of the workflow choices and you can of course bring your own.

[1]: https://github.com/m4xshen/hardtime.nvim

[2]: https://github.com/takac/vim-hardtime

[3]: https://m4xshen.dev/posts/vim-command-workflow
by jonahbenton | 2025-08-27 22:31:22+00:00
That isn't the argument- the "fractional reserve is madness" thing is a hobbyhorse of the stablecoin people but it is not the thing that makes people lose faith in fiat currencies.

What makes people lose faith in fiat currencies- the actual thing driving an enormous amount of stablecoin use right now, every day- is depreciation/inflation in those fiat currencies. (Yes, the "dollar" being the predominant unit of value in stablecoin use- that it is itself on track to be dramatically inflated away in the next several years...we can talk about that some other time).

Fiat issuers who maintain a low level of inflation enjoy very high degrees of confidence, even with a fractional reserve system, as long as there is competently managed insurance.

An "n private currencies" world reintroduces the counterparty risk on basically every transaction that was absolutely not preferable in the wildcat banking era. People want stable stores of value and no counterparty risk.

I think stablecoins are cool but they are definitely a "now you have n problems" thing for most people.
by roenxi | 2025-08-27 22:31:26+00:00
We're talking about one vague paragraph in a book that was making a lot of heavy arguments against any level of government planning. It isn't at all clear he was talking about any of those specific things.

"common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision" does not technically include arthritis, diabetes, cancer and so on. Most people can make adequate provisions against those things. The median wage in the west is north of $50,000 - that is a huge amount of slack available for saving for the likelihood of sickness.

And insurance in that passage probably means actual insurance. The modern conception of universal government funded healthcare is a long way from that.

If you focus on specific phrases I'm certainly happy to admit it is a reasonable read. The issue is in context of the entire sentences and, indeed, the nature of the book itself it isn't the most likely meaning of the passage. He's not advocating for universal, government funded healthcare in the sense that it gets used in modern everyday conversation.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-27 22:32:11+00:00
Don't the people who dislike socialized tax and regulation have reasons though?

Part of it is that there is more than one opponent. So for example:

> automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.

There are presumably real people with this concern, and it's not completely ridiculous. But then there should be ways to mitigate it. Let's compromise by requiring tax withholding to show up on bank statements. Instead of your bank statement just showing that you got a +$1100 deposit from your employer, it's required to show the full +$1800 they paid you and then separate the -$700 in transfers to the state and federal governments for the various tax withholdings.

That should satisfy the people concerned about making taxes invisible because then you're actually giving them what they want. But then there are the other opponents, and that compromise is obviously not going to satisfy the politicians taking bribes from the TurboTax company.

But it's still useful to distinguish them, because you may not need both. You only need 51 votes, not 100. If you started with 45, maybe that sort of compromise can get you 6 more.