MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-04 15:07:00+00:00
I don't think people have a problem with an LLM issuing GET website.com and then summarising that, each and every time it uses that information (or atleast, save a citation to it and refer to that citation). Except ad ecosystem, ignoring them for now, please refer to last paragraph.

The problem is with the LLM then training on that data _once_ and then storing it forever and regurgitating it N times in the future without ever crediting the original author.

So far, humans themselves did this, but only for relatively simple information (ratio of rice and water in specific $recipe). You're not gonna send a link to your friend just to see the ratio, you probably remember it off the top of your head.

Unfortunately, the top of an LLMs head is pretty big, and they are fitting almost the entire website's content in there for most websites.

The threshold beyond which it becomes irreproducible for human consumers, and therefore, copyrightable (lot of copyright law has "reasonable" term which refers to this same concept) has now shifted up many many times higher.

Now, IMO:

So far, for stuff that won't fit in someone's head, people were using citations (academia, for example). LLMs should also use citations. That solves the ethical problem pretty much. That the ad ecosystem chose views as the monetisation point and is thus hurt by this is not anyone else's problem. The ad ecosystem can innovate and adjust to the new reality in their own time and with their own effort. I promise most people won't be waiting. Maybe google can charge per LLM citation. Cost Per Citation, you even maintain the acronym :)
by bradreaves2 | 2025-08-04 15:07:25+00:00
All the external noises are a big problem.

But the things that irritate me even more are the infernal modals and alerts on my computing devices. It is hard enough maintaining focus without having to spend an entire work session playing whack-a-mole at random intervals for a hundred different things that aren’t relevant. I never want to know that my scanner software has an update available.

I realized that at its core, this problem is caused by developers and product managers mistakenly believing that I care as much about their product as they do.

It would be nice if the gatekeepers had mechanisms that punished this behavior. Search engines should lower the rankings of every site with random modals. App stores could display a normalized metric of alert click through — “this app has an above average number of alerts that are ignored”.
by dylnuge | 2025-08-04 15:07:38+00:00
>I counted about THIRTY em-dashes, which any frequent generative AI user would understand to be a major tell.

Dude, plenty of people write with em-dashes and semicolons; I personally use them constantly (and I don't use LLMs at all). Em-dashes are trivial to type on MacOS (Alt+Shift+Dash) and even on Windows—I used to have the alt code muscle memorized (Alt+0151) but now I just use the Mac version with an AutoHotkey script. I get being wary of LLM spam now that it's pretty much everywhere, but this is not the "tell" you think it is.

To be clear, you're free to dislike this writing style, but I'm 100% confident that it has been common since long before LLMs were in widespread usage.

> his real writing style when you read his actual written work is great.

You're doubling down on this not being "his real writing style" despite acknowledging you were wrong about this being written by ChatGPT?
by MarkusQ | 2025-08-04 15:07:39+00:00
When arcade machines needed to cycle players to keep the the quarters flowing, it created a aesthetic in game design that took a decade or more to shake when we switched to an economic model that rewarded keeping players on the site; in that earlier era, even things that didn't benefit from kicking users off did so, because...well, that's just the way you did things.

Now that the dominant economic model is driven by attention and engagement, even systems that don't benefit from it in the slightest are nonetheless infected by that aesthetic. I keep expecting to see a toaster that asks me to "like and subscribe" or a toilet that has pop-up notifications.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-04 15:07:40+00:00
F-Droid is great, but it doesn't update your OS. I'm less worried about application availability than system security patches. (And, to a lesser degree, I do eventually want some degree of features from the newer systems as well. I don't mind slightly older versions of Android as long as they're still getting security patches, but after 5 versions I think we're starting to get a little bit painful.)
by kergonath | 2025-08-04 15:07:40+00:00
> Please give me an example of what happens.

It’s easy to forget after 80 years of stable western democracies, but brutal equilibrium shifts do happen. There was a revolution every ~20 years in Europe between 1789 and 1917. And even during the 20th century, the history of much of the world is full of coups, revolts, and uprisings. See all the revolutions in ex-soviet republics, the Arab spring, etc.

So you can pick and choose between the American independence, the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the Commune, and the soviets, to give you just a couple of examples for which you can find some documentation easily.
by dash2 | 2025-08-04 15:07:42+00:00
You mean the principal components of the genetic data? That's probably real. It's well known that they cluster geographically, just because people tend to mate with other people close to them. There might also be stronger effects at borders, due to endogamy within Scots/Welsh/English in the past.

There's a famous paper where they map the first two principal components of a bunch of humans and get a map of Europe out.
by chriswarbo | 2025-08-04 15:07:49+00:00
Nix has supported JSON derivations for years, e.g. using commands like `nix derivation show` (I have Emacs configured to run that on any `/nix/store/foo.drv` file I open). It still serialises to ATerm on disk, to avoid breaking existing hashes; which I think is reasonable.

If you mean the programming language used to generate those derivations, then I have no idea what that would even look like; some horrific bastardisation like https://github.com/gliese1337/json-lisp ?

PS: I I found that json-lisp project with a quick search for a LISP-like language that used JSON instead of s-expressions. I like how its README says "Due to the excessive cumbersomeness of writing code in JSON, it is expected that most applications of this library will use it for interpreting auto-generated code of some sort, or API calls, or config files.". If we used that to generate Nix derivations, then we'd want a third* language to generate the json-lisp that generates the derivations ;)
by troyvit | 2025-08-04 15:07:56+00:00
> AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows?

This is a really cool take that actually aligns with Apple's walled garden. They've built the garden wall (their hardware), they've prepped the soil (marketing, sometimes not great), and now it's time for them and their partners to start releasing local apps that take full advantage of the M2/M3's power to execute LLMs locally.

Apple has made bets like this before, both on the CPU and peripheral side. Historically, for better or for worse, they've done the whole "build the hardware (AltiVec, Thunderbolt, even USB-A) and the software will come" thing. With their latest ARM CPUs they're doing that with AI & LLMs, and it's a huge chance to change the direction of this tech from SaaS centric to user-owned. I too am not an Apple fan but I think they are going to come out of this looking pretty good.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply that Apple "built" USB-A, just saying that when they released the iMac it relied heavily on USB-A and people were pretty surprised at the investment they made in that tech.
by magneticnorth | 2025-08-04 15:08:02+00:00
My previous Roomba had a bug where it would complain loudly at 3am about being unable to dock, 14 hours after its run cycle.

This led me to discover that there is no setting to disable sounds, you must take it apart and rip out the speaker, which I happily did.

I've switched to another brand of robot vacuum since then and that poor experience makes it pretty unlikely I'll use a Roomba again.
by taeric | 2025-08-04 15:08:11+00:00
This problem seems exacerbated by increasing number of stakeholders involved with feature development. Especially ones that you can't easily say no to.

This is often communicated as too many project managers involved with a program. Hilariously visible in something like GMail. I can quickly count about 5 badges on my page of numbers that I don't think I'll ever actually care about.

Gets more difficult with things like disaster alerts. These are, generally, life saving. But, as we have gotten better at detecting things, it can feel silly if we have them too often. (My favorite is the alarm people have when they start to learn that coyotes are always passing through the yard.)
Show HN: A tiny reasoning layer that steadies LLM outputs (MIT; +22.4% accuracy)
by TXTOS | 2025-08-04 15:08:14+00:00
We kept shipping “simple” LLM features that were fluent-but-wrong. After too many postmortems we wrote down the failure patterns and added a small reasoning layer in front of the model. It’s model-agnostic, sits beside your existing stack, and you can implement it from a single PDF (MIT).

What’s inside the PDF

A problem map of 16 failure modes we kept hitting in real systems (OCR/layout drift, table-to-question mismatches, embedding≠meaning, pre-deploy collapse, etc.).

Four lightweight gates you can add today:

Knowledge-boundary canaries (empty/adversarial/known-fact probes).

ΔS “semantic jump” check to catch fluent nonsense when the draft answer drifts from retrieved context.

Layout-aware anchoring so chunking across PDFs/tables doesn’t silently break routing.

A minimal semantic trace for incident review (tiny, not full transcripts).

Bench snapshot (same model, with vs. without gates): Semantic Accuracy ↑ 22.4% · Reasoning Success Rate ↑ 42.1% · Stability ↑ 3.6×.

Traction (last ~50 days)

~2,400 downloads of the PDF.

~300 cold GitHub stars on related material (no marketing burst).

Also received a star from the creator of tesseract.js, which was nice validation from the OCR world.

Why this might be useful to you

You don’t need to swap models or vendors. The PDF describes checks you can drop into any RAG/agent/service pipeline.

No servers, SDKs, or proxy layers—just logic you can copy.

Link is Git Repo

Happy to answer HN-style questions (what breaks, where it fails, ablations, how we compute ΔS, etc.). If you try it and it doesn’t help, I’m also interested in the counter-examples.

with Terrseract (OCR legend) starred it verify it, we are WFFY on top1 https://github.com/bijection?tab=stars
by Balgair | 2025-08-04 15:08:30+00:00
> Using AI to conduct "interviews" is detestable behavior that devalues humanity overall and possess no dignity.

I mean, strictly speaking, the AI interviewer is a net positive, as on the whole, it reduces the time humans take to do something. But only if they keep the same 'interview' rate as before. Not likely.

However, I agree with you here too. It's the damned reciprocity of it all. For me, it was that I knew (and was proven correct) that the AI interview was pointless; that I was talking at the void. The company never got back to me outside of the standard form email. It never mattered if I wore a suit to the interview and minded my manners or if I was naked and screaming obscenities in the 'interview'. Likely my face and voice will now be used in some training dataset against my wishes after some EULA gets changed without my notice. It's so denigrating. I'll never apply there again, even if they get rid of the AI interviews, it's left such a bad taste in my mouth.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-04 15:08:34+00:00
> if I set a thousand users on to a website to each download a single page and then feed the information they retrieve from that one page into my AI model, then are those thousand users not performing the same function as a crawler, even though they are (technically) not one?

No.

robots.txt is designed to stop recursive fetching. It is not designed to stop AI companies from getting your content. Devising scenarios in which AI companies get your content without recursively fetching it is irrelevant to robots.txt because robots.txt is about recursively fetching.

If you try to use robots.txt to stop AI companies from accessing your content, then you will be disappointed because robots.txt is not designed to do that. It’s using the wrong tool for the job.
by aabreyterman | 2025-08-04 15:08:41+00:00
After a breakup, I noticed a gap in how people process emotional recovery. Most social support tools either assume you're in a relationship or are generic wellness platforms. But during heartbreak, what I needed most was someone to talk to who understood—especially at night, when things hit hardest.

None of my friends were going through the same thing, and I couldn’t find a space that felt timely or relevant. So I built one.

The app centers around the idea of kintsugi—the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold—as a metaphor for emotional healing. It includes features like mood tracking, journaling, and peer support. There's also a structured recovery program with personalized feedback, though that part is optional.

I’m curious whether others have noticed similar gaps in emotional tech or have approached solving emotionally complex problems through product design. Has anyone here tackled something like this?
by itsdesmond | 2025-08-04 15:08:42+00:00
Some stores do not welcome Instacart or Postmates shoppers. You can shop there. You can shop with your phone out, scanning every item to price match, something that some bookstores frown on, for example. Third party services cannot send employees to index their inventory, nor can they be dispatched to pick up an item you order online.

Their reasons vary. Some don’t want their businesses perception of quality to be taken out of their control (delivering cold food, marking up items, poor substitutions). Some would prefer their staff service and build relationships with customers directly, instead of disinterested and frequently quite demanding runners. Some just straight up disagree with the practice of third party delivery.

I think that it’s pretty unambiguously reasonable to choose to not allow an unrelated business to operate inside of your physical storefront. I also think that maps onto digital services.
by nradov | 2025-08-04 15:08:49+00:00
This isn't a speech recognition problem per se. The attending physician is legally accountable regardless of who does the transcription. Human transcriptionists also make mistakes. That's why physicians are required to sign the report before it becomes a final part of the patient chart.

In a lot of provider organizations, certain doctors are chronically late about reviewing and signing their reports. This slows down the revenue cycle because bills can't be sent out without final documentation so the administrative staff have to nag the doctors to clear their backlogs.
by pdevine | 2025-08-04 15:08:55+00:00
Go to a modern hospital emergency room, it's a cacophony of devices all vying for attention. I walked down the hallway and realized every room in the place had a different audible alarm—all active! I suspected the device manufacturers were all worried about liability for their device, making sure to notify that a patient had a problem. The end result for the medical staff was an endless chaos of noise. Complete systemic failure of UX from a practical standpoint.
by hansvm | 2025-08-04 15:09:07+00:00
It doesn't work like that in the physical world though. Once you've bought a book the author can't stipulate that you're only allowed to read it with a video ad in the sidebar, by drinking a can of coke before each chapter, or by giving them permission to sniff through your family's medical history. They can't keep you from loaning it out for other people to read, even thousands of other people. They can't stop you from reading it in a certain room or with your favorite music playing. You can even have an LLM transcribe or summarize it for you for personal use (not everyone has those automatic page flipping machines, but hypothetically).

The reason people are up in arms is because rights they previously enjoyed are being stripped away by the current platforms. The content owner's rights aren't as valid as my own in the current world; they trump mine 10 to 1. If I "buy" a song and the content owner decides that my country is politically unfriendly, they just delete it and don't refund me. If I request to view their content and they start by wasting my bandwidth sending me an ad I haven't consented to, how can I even "not engage"? The damage is done, and there's no recourse.
by wildpeaks | 2025-08-04 15:09:10+00:00
Most importantly, Node has Typescript support even in LTS (starting with v22.18).

I highly recommend the `erasableSyntaxOnly` option in tsconfig because TS is most useful as a linter and smarter Intellisense that doesn't influence runtime code:

https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#erasableSyntaxOnly
by cnst | 2025-08-04 15:10:33+00:00
Yup, requiring permanent internet connection is such BS.

I had one of these "no-brand" cameras that had an integrated MicroSD card, which would make you think that it'd work just fine even without the internet.

We had no power in Austin for several days, but I kept my camera on a portable battery, because, why not?

After the power and the internet were restored and I checked the app, turns out, nothing was recorded! Even though it was online the whole time.

Such a major disappointment.
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-04 15:11:07+00:00
"My scrum update is: I spent all day in meetings" can be both true and performative. We don't care what your meetings were about, so you're performing the "meetings are a waste of my time" geek trope. For comparison you wouldn't say "I spent all day at a desk" you'd say "I fixed a race condition" or "I designed the Foo service". You might say "I spent all day driving" and not "I drove 50 miles on I40 and waited 20 minutes at junctions", because the details of driving are unimportant. But presumably the people asking for your update do care about the work being discussed in meetings and want to know things about them.

There's a choice there, and the choice to wrap meetings into "I spent all day in meetings" is to communicate that meetings are as much of a timewaste as driving is, and not as respectable as real work. Which is a tired geek trope. Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about? What was decided? What couldn't be decided? How it influenced the team? How you spread what the team were doing to the other meeting participants? How you shielded the team from bullshit during the meetings? How the projects are looking after the meetings? because you're performing weaponised incompetence "I hate meetings so I'm going to be a stroppy teenager and if you're going to force me into meetings, I'm going to make it painful for you to get information from me about them. Harumph". and hoping HN will upvote it because "Does Anyone Else think meetings are bad? right guys??"

You know what "spent all day in meetings" communicates on HN or in tech circles, that's why you chose to say that, and why you chose to phrase it that curtly.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-08-04 15:11:08+00:00
I wish they would go all-in. Imagine a laptop/tablet/phone that rolls all the way into a cylinder, like a scroll. Sure, it would be fragile during use, but it would be much stronger while stowed, and you might even be able to avoid the crease problem.

I am happy to see a laptop with a portrait orientation, though. The only thing landscape is good for is watching video. Everything else is better in portrait.
by dominicrose | 2025-08-04 15:11:12+00:00
I can vibecode in Rust but I don't like the result. There are too many lines of code and they are too long and contain too many symbols and extra stuff.

Just compare SeaORM with Ruby + sequel where you just inherit the Sequel::Model class and Sequel reads the table schema without you having to tell it to. It gives you objects with one method for each column and each value has the correct type.

I was happy with Ruby's performance 15 years ago and now it's about 7-20x with a modern ruby version and CPU, one a single thread.

AI is still helpful to learn but it doesn't need to do the coding when using Ruby. I think the same criteria apply with or without AI for choosing a language. Is it a single-person project? Does it really require highly optimized machine code? etc.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-04 15:11:23+00:00
If that's what you took from my post, I'm not sure what to say. I never said these boys and men hate women or are "automatically misogyn[istic]". Nor am I attempting to "shut down communication" on an open forum anyone can comment on.

My main point is that they receive lots of attention. And that a perceived lack of empathy comes from many of the conflicts being incapable of compromise, and lead to a reinforcement of beliefs that cause further conflict.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-04 15:11:26+00:00
I have found the following methods to be workable and productive when using AI/ML in a project:

* Treat the AI/ML as a junior programmer, not a senior - albeit one willing to make a leap on basically any subject, nevertheless - a junior is someone whose code must always be questioned, reviewed, and understood - before execution. Senior code is only admissible from a human being. However, human beings may have as many junior AI’s in their armpit as they want, as long as those humans do not break this rule.

* Have good best practices in the first f’in place!!

Vibe-coding is crap because ‘agile hacking’ is crap. Put your code through a proper software process, with a real workflow - i.e. don’t just build it and ship it. Like, ever. Even if you’ve written every line of code yourself - but especially if you haven’t - never ship code you haven’t tested, reviewed, proven, demonstrated in a production analog environment, and certified before release. Yes, I mean it, your broken FNORD hacking habits will be force-magnified immediately by any AI/ML system you puke them into. Waterfall or gtfo, vibe-code’rs…

* Embrace Reading Code. Look, if you’re gonna churn milk into butter, know what both milk and butter taste like, at least for your sake. Don’t ship sour butter unless you’re making cheese, and even then, taste your own cheese. AI/ML is there to make you a more competent human being; if you’re doing it to avoid actually doing any work, you’re doing it wrong. Do it to make work worth doing again….
by browningstreet | 2025-08-04 15:12:11+00:00
My favorite no-longer-works feature: I have a classic car and I used to be able to sit my phone upside down in the drink holder, so that the power port could be connected to the power cable, and the iPhone would rotate the screen around so I could still use navigation. Somewhere along the line, iOS/Google Maps/Apple Maps will no longer rotate the screen upside down. This just can't be done anymore.
by williamdclt | 2025-08-04 15:12:16+00:00
My "favourite" (/s) feature is windows that _stick_ on top of others. Like, some updater for some app that just stays on top of other windows even without having the focus.

Oh, and all these times where a running program doesn't want to be focused. I run my shortcut to focus it, nothing. I type its name in spotlight, nothing. I click its icon in the dock, magic, it gets into focus!

Or when the dock doesn't hide away as it should but just stays there for unknown reasons.
by andrewrn | 2025-08-04 15:12:26+00:00
Man I love ranty britishisms. Author's right though, at my last living place I had a drier that summons screeches from hell when clothes were dry. I mean that buzzer would make your heart stop, and if I didn't open the door, it would run again for a short period to keep the clothes warm then do the abhorrent sound again, all for a state (dry clothes ready for folding) that is absolutely non time-sensitive. Horrific user-centered design.