MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smelendez | 2025-08-11 18:38:36+00:00
It's surprising to me that AP customer newspapers don't want book reviews to pad out their Sunday papers. Bookstores are opening more than closing in the US, and people love library apps like Libby, so you'd think they'd want reviews too. But I guess it's possible people are getting as many book recommendations as they can use from social media and TikTok and aren't interested in more detailed reviews.

It doesn't surprise me that people aren't seeking out book reviews on the AP website or app—I don't think AP is particularly associated with reviews, maybe deliberately because they've historically been read in local papers that don't emphasize the AP sourcing, so people wanting reviews from a national source probably go to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, the New Yorker, etc. first.
by filoleg | 2025-08-11 18:38:46+00:00
> AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification

I don’t know what you had in mind by “big porn sites”, but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing that.

They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.), and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting third parties to just receive and process ID documents just so that users could watch porn was both not secure at all and absurd).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 18:38:50+00:00
You call it strong arming, I call it malicious compliance. Wikipedia hosts images, it "may contain pornographic material". Make anyone trying to search up a top 5 website see it before their eyes on how this isn't just a way to affect pornhub.

>respect the democratic decisions

Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-11 18:39:04+00:00
I agree with your observations. The future will not be as bright as the past, the population boom was already squeezed for the gains. Immigration at the levels needed to change this are unpalatable to most electorates, and with total fertility rate dropping across the world, it's important to be mindful that net migration to Earth is 0 (slide 39). As the economic future deteriorates due to the ever increasing drag of these obligations, I'd expect total fertility rate to continue to decline at present rates (if not slightly accelerate). This creates a self reinforcing feedback loop. A "Demographic Doom Loop" [1].

Happiness is reality minus expectations.

[1] https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1753526235173450213 | https://archive.today/rY4WG
by 827a | 2025-08-11 18:39:12+00:00
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.

I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
by crestfallen33 | 2025-08-11 18:39:21+00:00
I'm not sure where the author gets the $100k number, but I agree that Cursor and Claude Code have obfuscated the true cost of intelligence. Tools like Cline and its forks (Roo Code, Kilo Code) have shown what unmitigated inference can actually deliver.

The irony is that Kilo itself is playing the same game they're criticizing. They're burning cash on free credits (with expiry dates) and paid marketing to grab market share -- essentially subsidizing inference just like Cursor, just with VC money instead of subscription revenue.

The author is right that the "$20 → $200" subscription model is broken. But Kilo's approach of giving away $100+ in credits isn't sustainable either. Eventually, everyone has to face the same reality: frontier model inference is expensive, and someone has to pay for it.
by derbOac | 2025-08-11 18:39:53+00:00
I'm sympathetic to the text file, but for me the problem comes when you have todo lists that you are sharing with someone else, like a spouse. Then you have/want to share and edit them collaboratively.

Simple enough, there's ways to do that, but by the time you set that up to work across multiple devices of your own and someone else's, it's simpler from a UX perspective to just use an app dedicated to that task. I suppose we could use a Google doc or something but there's Keep.

I'd be interested in trying something else — I have tried other things — but keep going back to Google Keep.
by StratusBen | 2025-08-11 18:39:55+00:00
I started https://www.vantage.sh/ - a cloud cost platform that tracks Infra & AI spend.

The $100k/dev/year figure feels like sticker shock math more than reality. Yes, AI bills are growing fast - but most teams I see are still spending substantially lower annually, and that's before applying even basic optimizations like prompt caching, model routing, or splitting work across models.

The real story is the AWS playbook all over again: vendors keep dropping unit costs, customers keep increasing consumption faster than prices fall, and in the end the bills still grow. If you’re not measuring it daily, the "marginal cost is trending down" narrative is meaningless - you’ll still get blindsided by scale.

I'm biased but the winners will be the ones who treat AI like any other cloud resource: ruthlessly measured, budgeted, and tuned.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-08-11 18:40:22+00:00
Also, I'm not so sure smart pointers and destructors actually prevent memory leaks

Well, they do, that's why people use them. I'm not sure why you would make the case against using another language that makes management manual.

Also reference counting cycles are only even possible if you use reference counting in the first place, which isn't necessary for single threaded scope based memory management.

Java does prevent leaks due to cycles

Fantastic but you said zig is safe than C++, what does java have to do with it?
by fragmede | 2025-08-11 18:40:40+00:00
The paper itself is fairly popular, with several thousand citations.

Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer

Noam Shazeer, Azalia Mirhoseini, Krzysztof Maziarz, Andy Davis, Quoc Le, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean

https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06538
by caryquinn | 2025-08-11 18:40:55+00:00
This is an extremely import topic and one I'm glad is being brought up. I come from the physical ID and anti-counterfeiting space (think passports, banknotes, etc..) there is A LOT of buzz around this and how it relates to one's digital footprint and identity. We need to think differently about how to approach encryption... math-based cryptography is becoming very vulnerable.

We're building something that even the smartest ai or the fastest quantum computer can't bypass and we need some BADASS hackers...to help us finish it and to pressure test it.

Any takers?? Reach out: cryptiqapp.com (sorry for link but this is legit collaborative and not promotional)
by scoofy | 2025-08-11 18:41:03+00:00
I honestly don't know how to feel about changes like this, but I feel like they are important. Whether they are good or bad? I'm not sure.

In a sense, information is massively cheap now. You could get dozens of reviews on goodreads or any other site for a book. No, those reviews are likely not vetted, or written by credentialed individuals, but they are a solid heuristic. The decline of the professional art critic is lamentable, but it also doesn't really seem like it should be a job in the first place.

I write a blog about golf, and I've examined the aesthetic underpinnings of golf course design pretty seriously: theory of reviews, axioms of frameworks and their affects on reviews, and the epistemological concerns we should have with what reviewers actually say. In the end, I think the "named critic's opinion" is far and away the best way to do aesthetic reviews, as long as there are a significant number of named critics. I think this is applicable to every art form.

Social media has made this possible, but very few websites have actually make the matching of causal critic to a larger audience. For critical reviews to be useful, connecting large swaths of people to the nerds with correlating opinions in that art form would be a huge value add... while it's definitely doable with machine learning, nobody seems to want to recommend critics, they only recommend content. It's a bummer.

If the decline of professional "named critics who are nerds in their favorite genres" continues, if there is no rise of casual named critics, I do think we lose something real from a functional perspective in these areas. I only hope someone can create a platform that efficiently connects interested parties in finding a casual critic who shares their aesthetic tastes.

-----

My writing on aesthetic theory of reviews (about golf course architecture):

* A look at a functional perspective of aesthetic reviews, Howard Moskowitz, and collaborative filtering: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/golf-course-rankings-a...

* A look at review framework axioms: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/from-doak-to-digest-go...

* I'll be publishing my essay on epistemological concerns this week.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-11 18:41:13+00:00
This is where it starts to get subjective, but changing one part of the toolkit can have a huge effect on the quality of the assistant. For example I tried GPT 4.1 instead of Claude 4 recently and it took my setup from improving my productivity by 3-5x on coding tasks to, like, 0.5x. I can't point to a specific change other than tasks went from being done in 5 minutes if back and forth to being only partly done in 15 minutes.

I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear similar things from colleagues.
by danielbln | 2025-08-11 18:41:17+00:00
Now take Google away, and LSP. And the computer. Write CTEs with a pencil or bust.

I'm exaggerating of ourse, and I hear what you're saying, but I'd rather hire someone who is really really good at squeezing the most out of current day AI (read: not vibe coding slop) than someone who can do the work manually without assistance or fizz buzz on a whiteboard.
by mcswell | 2025-08-11 18:41:45+00:00
"fake understanding" is exactly the right term. And the image is just fine, it's the labeling that's bonkers. What it illustrates is that the LLM can repeat words, but it has no idea what it's saying. Whereas any pre-1817 engineer, reading descriptions of bicycles (which GPT-5 obviously has access to), could easily have labeled a picture of one. (1817 is the date the first real bicycle is believed to have been invented, but driven by the rider's feet on the ground. Bicycles with chain drives weren't invented until decades later. But an engineer would have understood the principle.)
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-11 18:41:47+00:00
Unfortunately the US is missing a lot of competition in this space. Chinese EV companies haven't been allowed to sell cars to consumers by tariffs and other disincentives/regulatory hoops. Japanese and Korean automakers aren't importing their sub-$30k EVs to the US because their US divisions don't understand them/want them because they don't look like oversized trucks or SUVs. Similarly for the EU automakers that have US divisions/affiliates. Renault, Dacia and Skoda among others making cheap EVs have no US presence at all.

So much for 'home of the free market' that between regulatory capture and broken dealership models and import tariffs the competition looks so bad.
by trhway | 2025-08-11 18:42:15+00:00
>Mostly the best market is intelligence agency vendors.

That makes me wonder - may be the original bug was really a backdoor created as a result of a deal with an intelligence agency/vendor. So, can it be that Google gets money (or more generally some kind of browny points; also interesting aspect - giving that the agencies may exploit individual engineers, it would seem to be more preferable for the company to play ball and have it organized under the company's control) for a backdoor, and once backdoor is found - pays the bug bounty. The bug bounty is thus a kind of backdoor quality control program :)
by ramoz | 2025-08-11 18:42:47+00:00
It's not really the same because the provider in this case isn't necessarily shipping a traditional service, they're shipping intelligence. We've confused APIs as the end-state for providers. Providers are going to eat every abstraction along the way in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. Claude Code is just the start. A true agentic intelligent capability that shifts a paradigm for ways of working. It will evolve into Claude Agent for general-purpose digital work.

There's a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be more economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to consumer. Vs token arbitrage.

Lastly, there's a lot of industry hype and narrative around agents. In my opinion, Claude Code is really the only effective & actual agent; the first born. It shows that Anthropic is a signaling that the leading providers will no longer just train models. They are creating intelligent capabilities within the post training phases / in RL. They are shipping the brain and the mech suit for it. Hence, eat the stack. From terminal to desktop, eventual robotics.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-11 18:43:30+00:00
I know the submission parent of the discussion I'm gonna link is not for everyone and might be considered a "rant", but the subject immediately reminds me of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456

Make Fun of Them (42 days ago, 43 comments)

Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.

Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's something to it.

I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded me of that post I read on the weekend.
by bachmeier | 2025-08-11 18:43:36+00:00
I've never found that emailing to a todo.txt file works very well. Seriously, though, if your only goal is to make a long list of things you don't want to forget, use a text file, paper, or any system you want. I get a boatload of things to do in my email. Forwarding the message to a task manager reduces a lot of stress.

Another thing for me is the ability to capture files or take pictures. I just can't do that with todo.txt in an efficient way. Being able to grab my phone and snap a picture or create a new task and upload a file is hard to beat. I can later come back and add some comments.
by variadix | 2025-08-11 18:44:22+00:00
Yeah but floats can typically be formatted with E notation, i.e. it makes sense to parse floats with E notation. I’m not aware of any integer formatting functions that will emit integer strings in E notation. The leading zeros and unary sign mentioned by a sibling comment are typically available options for integer formatting, i.e. make sense to parse according to GPs reasoning. I assume the reason float parsing is more forgiving is because of how often floats are written in E notation, also float parsers typically have to handle things like NaN and inf.
by al_borland | 2025-08-11 18:44:28+00:00
As someone who bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts for the em dash and ellipsis, this makes me sad.

Even in posts not using these things, I’ve been accused of being an AI bot a few times now. I’m not sure what it is I’m doing that makes people think that. My natural reaction is to double down on whatever I was trying to explain, which seems to make things worse. Such is life…
by lemontheme | 2025-08-11 18:44:41+00:00
I prefer keeping everything in one file as well, since even the act of creating a new file is sometimes enough of a hassle for me to skip jotting something important down.

Question for fellow one-file'ers: what do you on mobile? My problem in the past was that all plain text editor apps on iOS open files at the top, which meant scrolling all the way down every time I opened my notes file.

These days I use NotePlan, but I don't really use enough of its features to justify continuing my subscription (the dev is really great though).
by sleepybrett | 2025-08-11 18:44:43+00:00
Smaller communities too.

I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community was small enough that after a bit I just knew who everyone was OR could find out very easily.

When the internet came along in the early 90s and I started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked them small where I could get to know most of the userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username, not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge forums, etc started popping up and now with even more mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.

I now spend most of my online time in a custom built forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil conversation there, though we still do get the occasional flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied to a government name is valuable for a thriving and healthy community.
by belthesar | 2025-08-11 18:44:52+00:00
With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical max of 56k.

Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.
by mockingloris | 2025-08-11 18:46:10+00:00
@g42gregory This would mean that for the certain devs, an unfair advantage would be owning a decent on-prem rig running a fine tuned and trained model that has been optimized for specific use case for the user.

A fellow HN user's post I engaged with recently talked about low hanging fruits.

What that means for me and where I'm from is some sort of devloan initiative by NGOs and Government Grants, where devs have access to these models/hardware and repay back with some form of value.

What that is, I haven't thought that far. Thoughts?

└── Dey well
by machinemusic | 2025-08-11 18:46:15+00:00
A warm thank you to the Hacker News community for all the conversation after the Outside Lands Festival, especially around how Tupac's voice was engineered for the Drake track. For those curious about the mechanics, here’s a breakdown of how a machine approaches this:

First, the machine analyzes the input by breaking the sound down into its core building blocks (spectral morphing) while also reading the text to map its emotional content. It then actively reshapes the audio by adjusting its rhythm and timing, creating an immersive soundscape, and adding nostalgic textures based on that emotion analysis. Finally, the system fine-tunes these changes and polishes the track to create the final, normalized audio output.

On a final note, I'll be at the AWS Builder's Loft in San Francisco today. Hope to see some of you there!

ps- we will not re-engineer Tupac's voice - thanks for sending your remixes!

https://memorysoundscapes.app/
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-08-11 18:46:21+00:00
I know, it's crazy how we see israel perpetrating a holocaust in palestine and justifying it with the same language germany used to justify theirs.

Anyways, no serious proposals from you, it seems. I'll refer you back here for guidance on the matter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44738860
by Terretta | 2025-08-11 18:46:27+00:00
WITHOUT ever speaking to anyone on the phone or by email, you can scale even $1M a month and get auto-scaled (very deep) discounts with big providers like AWS who certainly have enough "enterprise sales" to waste everyone's time on the phone, suggesting there's no good reason to make anyone talk to your SaaS if they don't have to.

If they have to, because they don't know how to use what they buy, that's one thing. But don't force a call to, let's say, sign in with OIDC or turn on audit logs.
by kiitos | 2025-08-11 18:46:44+00:00
> For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language. ... boring tasks cause extreme discomfort ... Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff!

The problem with this perspective, is that when you try to offload exactly the same boring task(s), to exactly the same LLM, the results you get back are never even close to being the same. This work you're offloading via natural language prompting is not programming in any meaningful sense.

Many people don't care about this non-determinism. Some, because they don't have enough knowledge to identify, much less evaluate, the consequent problems. Others, because they're happy to deal with those problems, under the belief that they are a cost that's worth the net benefit provided by the LLM.

And there are also many people who do care about this non-determinism, and aren't willing to accept the consequent problems.

Bluntly, I don't think that anyone in group (1) can call themselves a software engineer.
by mrs6969 | 2025-08-11 18:46:47+00:00
The fact that many pro israel person believes they are the right side, and we just don’t get it.. is just bothering.

Literally every sane human being there is seeing what is going on, yet they refuse to see. Really interesting; especially when you think people used to question how germans followed hitler, and did not see what is going on. I think we all saw how such might happen these days.

Also the fact is; this whole thing will be considered as a genocide, will be told for generations. Palestinian holocoust will he the new one told in the ‘not again’ lessons, and name ‘israel’ will live with it.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-11 18:46:55+00:00
US should slap travel bans on UK politicians travelling to Disney parks and similar in Florida with their families. And/or with their older children visiting NYC. The combined pressure of the wives and their children, will knock sense in their thick skulls quickly. In the sense of - being stupid is not cost free. Atm it's cost free for them, and costly for me.
by commandlinefan | 2025-08-11 18:47:07+00:00
That reminds me of one of my favorite vulnerabilities. A security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike managed to register an SSL cert for .com by submitting a certificate request for the domain .com\0mygooddomain.com. The CA looked at the (length prefixed) ASN.1 subject name and saw that it had a legitimate domain, they accepted it, but most implementations treated the subject name as a C-delimited string and stopped parsing at the null terminator.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-11 18:47:15+00:00
it's not black and white. Unlimited growth is bad but negative population growth unchecked means the end of modern civilization as we know it.

Right now we have negative population growth and it is not controlled negative growth. We did not intend for this to happen nor does anyone know how to stop it. So logically speaking; If the background context and status quo remains the same expect this trend to continue past criticality.

Even before that imagine not being able to find a job, product prices rising. Hardships, starvation. Ever watch the movie Children of men?