MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fzwang | 2025-08-08 14:28:02+00:00
I talked to a number of people who used AI to start their business in the early stages.

Some of the positive things I see is that vibe coding is pretty powerful for non-technical people. If you adopt the AI-as-floor-raiser mindset, it removes a major barrier for experimentation for people who don't know how to program. Some go a bit overboard and think they don't need engineers at all, but they eventually realize they still do. People either throw out the vibe coded prototypes or had to rebuilt them "properly". Some technical folks appreciate having this option available to non-tech people, as it shortens the experimentation cycle and acts like a filter to weed out bad ideas. One interesting new dynamic is that we could be seeing a new wave of fast-follower builders, where a good engineering team can replicate vibe-coded products quickly, in a way that's more durable and without reliability issues.

Using LLMs for market research is pretty mixed. The good cases seems to be using it for writing generic routine stuff, ie things that are not core to your business/product, but just need to exist. The bad is somehow expecting ChatGPT to identify novel business ideas. It seems like one of the major benefits of chatbots is actually forcing you to write down your ideas. For example, some of the LLM generated "ideas" are pretty generic and run of the mill stuff you'd find anywhere. But it was interesting to review the prompts and chat history, as a human reviewer, to get a sense of what the person is trying to ask. For example, when I work with students, it's great to see their chat/prompt history to "reveal" their thinking process. It works the same w/ entrepreneurs vetting ideas. It'd be interesting to have a highly hallucinogenic model just as an idea mixer.
by NotGMan | 2025-08-08 14:28:09+00:00
1) After how many years of 2.5% annual donation would their own wealth drop until they thenself become poor?

Donating 2.5% means that you get poorer and poorer over time unless you can make more than that per year back. 2.5% of wealth also means non-liquid assets such as house, how do you donate that? Get credit?

If you are middle class and your house etc is eg 1M$ net worth you are giving 25k$ per year. At 0.5M net worth its 12.5k$ per year.

2) You assume that those people would know how to handle that money well. We see what many poor people do with money: buy trash like soda with food stamps that makes them even more ill and causes them more financial burden due to poor health.

Are you sure that money would be well spent, or is it better to invest in better technology that will benefit everyone?

3) Why would hard working responsible middle class people give their money to those that buy cola with it? Mass revolt, people care about their families only.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-08-08 14:28:29+00:00
More state-loving propaganda from big government afficionados.

I want a minimal government enforcing both internal and external property and ensuring private property rights are respected. And that's it.

The government debt is in the tens of trillions. Government deficit is more than a trillion.

No, more government and more government-loving propaganda is not what's needed.
by pc86 | 2025-08-08 14:28:36+00:00
Paying taxes is good, lawful, even patriotic. Also good and lawful is moving a company somewhere where you'll pay less in taxes and can grow faster and hire more people (and is at worst patriotically neutral).

An exit tax is a country saying "oh no that's bad, so instead of looking at our tax structure and seeing why you're leaving and trying to address that, we're going to charge you >3 years of profit as a punishment." It's simply saying that if our taxes are too high for you we're going to charge you even more to try to stop you from leaving.

You can think it's a good thing if you don't understand economics but it's hard to frame it as anything other than Germany punishing corporations for leaving.
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-08 14:28:37+00:00
This is truly amazing. I love it!

Found a minor nit — the entry for “shoe” is at 3500 BCE and links to the Wikipedia article for “sandal”. But the Wikipedia article for “shoe” [1] indicates that the earliest shoes (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-08 14:28:46+00:00
> And given we lack the technical ability to fully understand global warming

I'm sorry, what?

We have total understanding of global warming: 1) CO2 traps heat, we know that from basic lab experiments, and 2) we're pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which we know from countless data points, both historical and contemporary.

When it comes to the basic fact of global warming, that's all you need to know.

Everything after that is forecasting impacts and associated trend lines.
by tayo42 | 2025-08-08 14:29:53+00:00
I don't think making the prompt smaller is the only goal. Instead if having 1000 tokens of general prompt instructions you could have 1000 tokens of specific prompt instructions.

There was also a paper I saw that went by that showed model performance went down when extra unrelated info was added, that must be happening to some degree here too with a prompt like that
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-08-08 14:30:19+00:00
All correct points that do not impact the core of the argument. It is all of it, in aggregate, that improves life expectancy. If you read literature, people who were older than 40 or 50 were 'wise old men', and 80 was a rare Methuselah, who was described as 100s of years old. Thanks to statins, and various cancer treatments, and stints, and blood thinners, and many other remedies, living to 80 is not rare, and most people who live beyond it can best be described as people who listen to their doctor and take their meds on time.
by mksaunders2 | 2025-08-08 14:30:33+00:00
LibreOffice developer | Preferably full-time | Remote

Love LibreOffice development? Want to turn your passion into a paid job? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community.

To improve the user interface of LibreOffice, the office productivity suite for over 200 million users around the globe, we’re searching for a developer (m/f/d) to start work (from home) as soon as possible. This is what you’ll do:

* Work on the LibreOffice codebase (mostly C++)

* Focus on LibreOffice’s user interface, in the way it is rendered and laid out

* Fix bugs, implement new features, and improve the quality of the UI code in LibreOffice while working together with the design team and other contributors

* Document what you do, actively share knowledge in public with volunteers and contributors via blog posts, workshops and conference talks, so other developers and users have an easier time learning about your work

Full listing: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/08/07/join-the...
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-08-08 14:30:48+00:00
I would really ask HN about how you manage "feature bits" (like the BugFix_123456::IsEnabled()in TFX ) .

I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen).

There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
by integralid | 2025-08-08 14:31:06+00:00
>the only time you know it's not the same thing is if you go offline or have bad connectivity.

So, like most of the non-first world? Hell, I'm in a smaller town/village next to my capital city for a month and internet connection is unreliable.

Having said that, the website was usable for me - I wouldn't say it's noticeably fast, but it was not show either.
by dbreunig | 2025-08-08 14:31:16+00:00
I’m aware of LoRA, Civitai, etc. I don’t think they are “widely known” beyond AI imagery enthusiasts.

Krea wrote a great post, trained the opinions in during post-training (not during LoRA), and I’ve been noticing larger labs doing similar things without discussing it (the default ChatGPT comic strip is one example). So I figured I’d write it up for a more general audience and ask if this is the direction we’ll go for qualitative tasks beyond imagery.

Plus, fine-tuning is called out in the post.
by anonymars | 2025-08-08 14:31:20+00:00
Don't forget that they need to spend a few sentences in the lede describing that they're a 50x MVP who is happy to help and make sure to upvote the answer because otherwise they won't be a 51x MVP

Like, can I please go back to paying for Windows again so you can afford to not make it such a piece of crap? I know the tech elite always sneered at MS/Windows but trust me, it wasn't this bad.
by me-vs-cat | 2025-08-08 14:31:26+00:00
> ...the fact that the [AGI] can/will work on the issue 24/7...

Are you sure? I previously accepted that as true, but, without being able to put my finger on exactly why, I am no longer confident in that.

What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't try to answer that. I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you, and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level. -- Marvin to Arthur Dent

(...as an anecdote, not the impetus for my change in view.)
by self_awareness | 2025-08-08 14:31:35+00:00
> If every household above the poverty line donated 2.5% of their net worth annually to people living below the poverty line, we could erase poverty instantly.

For a day.

A lot of people below the poverty line would spend all the money on trips and luxuiry goods. And would be right back where they've started.

Also, the question is why would anyone want to work, if you would be given money for free even if you don't work anywhere (I mean, you're below the poverty line)?
by Based-A | 2025-08-08 14:31:59+00:00
I definitely agree, I should have specified that it's said that way to avoid getting trapped in the weeds when talking with the average person, not when discussing actual policy implementation.

The next paragraph in my original comment starts to touch on how a LVT is somewhat inherently resistant to abuse by bad actors. Unlike financial accounts and spreadsheets and tax filings, you can't distort or hide your land, what's on it, and what's around it. If someone claims that their land is worthless, but there's hotels and amusement parks or maybe even a new large outlet mall being built nearby, it's easy to see that that claim isn't valid. I'd even say that it'd be relatively easy to penalize those assessors who intentionally misvalue land.

Of course, the caveat is in how the system is implemented like you mentioned. And while I'd love to say that there are workarounds and fixes and stopgaps to prevent for every edgecase a LVT presents, but I can't because we're only starting to see states and municipalities entertain the idea of LVT.
by phkahler | 2025-08-08 14:32:28+00:00
Sounds like he doesn't want non-citizens to be counted. I'd rather they get counted, but maybe not used for determining seats in congress. It's kind of important to know how many people are present in an area and how that changes over time. Deporting illegals (like it or dislike it) is a separate thing from knowing how many people are in a state. Come to think of it, even if you're in favor of the deportations, you gotta have accurate data to know where to deploy resources. This desire to fake the data is just bizarre.
by pwillia7 | 2025-08-08 14:33:00+00:00
Wan 2.2 is a video model people have been using to do text to image recently that I think solves this problem way better than Krea in the base model. -- https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1mf521w/wan_22_tex...

As others have said, you can fine-tune any model with a pretty small data set of images and captions and make your generations not look like 'AI' or all look the same.

Here's one I made a while back trained on Sony HVS HD video demos from the 80s/90s -- https://civitai.com/models/896279/1990s-analog-hd-or-4k-sony...
by inshard | 2025-08-08 14:33:06+00:00
Moving to windows from ChromeOS or MacOS really makes you notice how many basic UX quality of life improvements Windows simply lacks. From inability to paste tables from PPTs into text input fields but ability to do the same from xlx to having multiple desktops show different active app icons and window where you can’t share a window in a different desktop from a MSTeams call running on a different desktop pane. It’s really impressive how much the business world tolerates their crappy UX in the pretense of trying to work with a serious platform. And don’t get me started on the forced updates and the need to run some crazy VPN UX for security. This is not a serious OS.
by unshavedyak | 2025-08-08 14:33:27+00:00
Honest question, but it sounds like you're describing that if ~11% (based on the parent numbers) of people weren't very poor the economic system would fail? Eg inflation would spiral out of control? (i assume spiral since they'd have more money, but money would be worth less, there by making them have less effective spending power - thereby needing them to have more money, etcetc.)

If so, sounds like morally something is fundamentally wrong if we require poor people to function. But i'm not an economist, so i've got zero feedback here.
by ben_w | 2025-08-08 14:33:36+00:00
Right now the deeper problem is that nobody really knows how to reliably and deliberately make AI that's aligned with anything human-like.

As in: it's basically a nice happy accident that LLMs are only sycophantic/fawning and don't normally (ahem, Grok) try to undermine us all like edgy internet trolls.

If we could make them follow even exactly 6 (for sake of argument, no more, no less) of Anton LaVey's Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth*, and do so reliably instead of the ethics equivalent of a shrug and "LGTM, merged", this would be a big development and make people a lot more comfortable about open models that can do decent work with chemistry or biology.

* https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/
by chownie | 2025-08-08 14:34:09+00:00
If anything, we're not responding to this enough.

If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti-human) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's increasingly the only novel work we do between gluing other people's code together.
by gooseus | 2025-08-08 14:34:19+00:00
Neat, but it still fails my Forth simulator test, albeit a bit better than the last time. I hope they didn't have to raise the temperature of the ocean by too much to get these marginal improvements that definitely aren't even close to the kind of "general intelligence" you could get from training a clever child or monkey with 500 calories of sweets.

https://chatgpt.com/share/689525f4-20f0-8003-8bf6-f1f21dde6b...

You know what would be more impressive? If it said "Hey, I'm actually not designed to simulate a Forth machine accurately, I'm only going to be able to approximate it (poorly)). If you want an accurate Forth machine you should just implement this code: [Simple Forth Implementation]".

Or better yet, it could recognize when it was being asked to "be" a machine, and instead spin up a side process with the machine implementation and redirect any prompts to that process until a "STOP" token is reached.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-08 14:35:16+00:00
Yes, it's the approach and principle of the interaction. If {{software}} asked to opt-in to collect anonymized/generic information, for what purpose(s), and how it was being stored/anonymized to "vote" for feature use/maintenance and how it was definitely not going being used, like not being sold to data-brokers, then I might say "yes".

Opt-out shows disrespect and that {{user}} is the product.
by cnst | 2025-08-08 14:35:19+00:00
You have to use a browser extension or a non-mainstream browser, like Brave, in order to be able to control JavaScript per-site.

The benefits can be huge, however. For example, many paywalls would stop working, meaning, you get to see the entire content without it being blocked by the paywall, because many paywalls are implemented through JavaScript, thus, they can't block anything if you don't have JavaScript.

It'd also block all those annoying cookie dialogs, too. You still have to be able to re-enable it per-site, otherwise, you won't be able to use many sites, because some require JavaScript for login/rendering and other stuff.
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-08 14:35:36+00:00
See the sibling comment from AlexandrB. Altman and tons of other hype men in tech do this thing where they make outrageous promises, then retcon as “just jokes” whichever ones don’t come true, so that they can never be disproven. It’s a swindle made all the more irritating by the enablers like you who go “why did you take the joke seriously?” to get cred on the internet while helping the scam continue.

Or to put it another way, do you think Altman denounced all the hype (and subsequent investment dollars) he got because of the “AGI achieved internally” post? Did he say to anyone “hey, that was a meme post, don’t take it seriously”? Or did he milk it for all it was worth before only later quietly climbing down from that when it was no longer paying dividends. Again, duplicitous and disingenuous behavior.
by simonw | 2025-08-08 14:35:51+00:00
The graphs were nothing to do with model hallucination, that was a crap design decision by a human being.

The Bernoulli error was a case of a model spitting out widely believed existing misinformation. That doesn't fit my mental model of a "hallucination" either - I see a hallucination as a model inventing something that's not true with no basis in information it has been exposed to before.

Here's an example of a hallucination in a demo: that time when Google Bard claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope was first to take pictures of planet outside Earth’s solar system. That's plain not true, and I doubt they had trained on text that said it was true.
by Krssst | 2025-08-08 14:36:10+00:00
Individual people have to have access to those AGIs to put them to use (which will likely be controlled first by large companies) and need food to feed themselves (so they'll have to do whatever work they can at whatever price possible in a market where knowledge and intellect is not in demand).

I'd like to believe personal freedoms are preserved in a world with AGI and that a good part of the population will benefit from it, but recent history has been about concentrating power in the hands of the few, and the few getting AGI will free them from having to play nice with knowledge workers.

Though I guess maybe at some points robots might be cheaper than humans without worker rights, which would warrant investment even when thinking cynically.
by ntauthority | 2025-08-08 14:36:13+00:00
> because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug

There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption.

Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted.

Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
by freedomben | 2025-08-08 14:36:15+00:00
> but it all feels like we're sane washing this administration

This is not a defense of the admin or their actions, but if there's something we should have learned well over the past 100+ years of history, it's not to assume insanity on the part of people who disagree with you. It feels good to assume that we are so correct that anyone disagreeing with us must be insane, but it's a deeply unproductive (and often counter-productive) way to interact with people.

Personally, I think they think that places like the BLS are stacked with "deep state" people that are trying to sabotage the current administration. I think that's mostly absurd, but they don't, and without evidence either way it's a matter of opinion (I personally lean heavily on things like Hanlon's Razor and trying to gauge "likeliness" rather than assuming the best or worst). If you believe as they do, then cleaning house is not only good but necessary, so the actions aren't insane. If we don't try to (in good faith) understand their beliefs/motivations, and just assume they are just randomly pulling triggers, not only will we only further entrench partisan divides (nothing alienates somebody more than feeling they aren't being properly understood), but we hinder our own ability to predict and prepare for the future.
by emushack | 2025-08-08 14:36:35+00:00
Wow. I'm at a loss for words with this comment.

So, in case you aren't from America, you might not know this: the food that is the cheapest also happens to be the food that is the least nutritious. Americans who are poor cannot afford fresh vegetables, fruit, meats and gym memberships. They can afford cheetos.

It is quite the spurious correlation to say that obesity causes hunger. Just wow.
by Epa095 | 2025-08-08 14:36:44+00:00
It could, at least temporarily. But there is no reason to belive it won't stabilise again.

Increased demand without increased production will increase prices. But then producers will follow, and production will increase, and prices will stabilise.

Increased tax on the rich and distributing it to poor moves a tiny bit of the combined 'voting power' we have over production as consumers to the poor, so there will be slightly less luxury cars produced and slight more food.
by staplung | 2025-08-08 14:36:56+00:00
Mitnick's hack probably wouldn't work today but I don't know the specifics of who he was listening into nor with which gear he was using. Most P25 networks these days are set up with trunking, so the conversations hop around a bunch of frequencies at random. Holding down the transmit button would do nothing to interfere with the conversation taking place. Even with sophisticated gear you wouldn't be able to who was transmitting at any given time so you'd have to be willing to jam all the frequencies in a group.

Of course, P25 systems are still sometimes set up without trunking so in some situations it might work.