MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yawnxyz | 2025-08-27 20:22:56+00:00
I think this is similar to how some people hated electricity when it first came out, and today, it's very hard to find someone who absolutely hates and avoids electricity.

Many of same concerns and objections people raised about electricity can be applied to AI (everything under the sun back in the day became "electrified" just like AI today; most of those use cases were ridiculous and deserved to be made fun of)

But I think more concerningly though, people like this don't sound like they're a "real" hater- they're positioning themselves in some kind of social signaling kind of way.

I was (and still is) a social media hater, and this person is clearly a child of the social justice / social signaling days of social media, and their entire personality seems to have been shaped by that era, and that's something I'm happy to blame on the tech industry.
by mingus88 | 2025-08-27 20:23:06+00:00
I’ll bet call center workloads stick.

That whole industry is literally just a sweatshop for English language speakers who just follow scripts (prompts) and try to keep customers happy.

Seeing as how so many people volunteer to make meaningful relationships with LLMs as it is, it has to be more effective than talking to a “Bill” or “Cheryl” with a heavy South Asian accent.
by rcxdude | 2025-08-27 20:23:14+00:00
If the title was clickbait, it'd have gone with 'may have already been reached', given those confidence intervals. The middle of those ranges is well within 'mid-century', and 'may' is a pretty important qualifier. I think it's a pretty good summary. (as for AMOC vs Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream is a part of the AMOC and the more well-known term for 'the thing that keeps Europe warm', so it's probably the better thing to include in a headline for anyone but specialists).
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-27 20:23:36+00:00
Not to be confused with IBM's ACP: Agent Communication Protocol. C here being Client. https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome

Implemented by langchain, https://github.com/langchain-ai/agent-protocol

Threads for ongoing work, runs for stateless one-shots, long term memory. And a discovery system. No affiliation, just fun to see what folks have in their APIs.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-27 20:23:37+00:00
> Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright...

This paragraph really pisses me off and I'm not sure why.

> Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms

Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training?

> the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output

Im uneducated here, honestly. I don't ask a lot of race-based questions to my LLMS I guess

>the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides

There is constant active rhetoric around the sycophancy, and ways to reduce this, right? OpenAI just made a new benchmark specifically for this. I won't deny it's an issue but to act like it's being ignored by the industry is a miss completely.

>the problems with consent and copyright

This is the best argument on the page imo, and even that is highly debated. I agree with "AI is performing copyright infringement" and see constant "AI ignores my robots.txt". I also grew up being told that ANYTHING on the internet was for the public, and copyright never stopped *me* from saving images or pirating movies.

Then the rest touches on ways people will feel about or use AI, which is obviously just as much conjecture as anything else on the topic. I can't speak for everyone else, and neither can anyone else.
by aspaviento | 2025-08-27 20:24:03+00:00
And let's not forget that people call "art" to more things than the popular masterpieces. A guy sold an invisible sculpture¹ clamming it was art. If things like this can be called art, whatever AI makes can be called art too.

1: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-o...
by traes | 2025-08-27 20:24:25+00:00
Come on now. You know he's not talking about small machine learning models or protein folding programs. When people talk about AI in this day and age they are talking about generative AI. All of the articles he links when bringing up common criticisms are about generative AI.

I too can hypothetically conceive of generative AI that isn't harmful and wasteful and dangerous, but that's not what we have. It's disingenuous to dismiss his opinion because the technology that you imagine is so wonderful.
by daveguy | 2025-08-27 20:24:52+00:00
There are millions, if not hundreds of millions (probably less than a billion), of free adults living around the world without subscriptions. Many in the US too (250k is a low estimate) of thousands to a mi, don't require subscriptions to live. You asked "Don't we all need subscriptions to stay alive." To which, the answer is clearly no as proved by all the people doing it. I'm really not sure how that's even complicated or confusing. People have subscriptions because it's convenient, not "to stay alive".

https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/the-guide...
by alphazard | 2025-08-27 20:25:12+00:00
> production of wind energy is crucial for meeting science-based climate goals

What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?

I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.
by whitehexagon | 2025-08-27 20:25:28+00:00
I'm also 'agAInst' this trend. Mainly because it feels like a dangerous step further along the path towards conscious GAI.

But there is too much money and greed involved to stop this now. The only thing I can do is avoid any product or service that mentions AI, chatGPT, .ai domain, smart, agent etc. etc.

It feels like we are on a cliff edge, just before every government builds in a dependency on this nightmare technology. Billions more will be wasted whilst the planet burns.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-27 20:25:43+00:00
> And PHB's all know that picking up nickles in front of the steamroller is how you get to the C-suite.

Blaming it on PHB's is a mistake. There were no engineering classes in my degree program about failsafe design. I've known too many engineers who were insulted by my insinuations that their design had unacceptable failure modes. They thought they could write software that couldn't possibly fail. They'd also tell me that they could safely recover and continue executing a crashed program.

This is why I never, ever trust software switches to disable a microphone, software switches that disable disk writes, etc. The world is full of software bugs that enable overriding of their soft protections.

BTW, this is why airliners, despite their advanced computerized cockpit, still have an old fashioned turn-and-bank indicator that is independent of all that software.
by mrsilencedogood | 2025-08-27 20:26:51+00:00
"This is the best argument on the page imo, and even that is highly debated. I agree with "AI is performing copyright infringement" and see constant "AI ignores my robots.txt". I also grew up being told that ANYTHING on the internet was for the public, and copyright never stopped me from saving images or pirating movies."

I think the main problem for me is that these companies benefit from copyright - by beating anyone they can reach with the DMCA stick - and are now also showing they don't actually care about it at all and when they do it, it's ok.

Go ahead, AI companies. End copyright law. Do it. Start lobbying now.

(They won't, they'll just continue to eat their cake and have it too).
by criddell | 2025-08-27 20:26:58+00:00
Why? There are already all kinds of web sites that do this kind of thing. Monodraw's unique selling point is that it's a native Mac app that takes advantage of the Mac UI and it's done well so the UX is top notch.

If you don't care about making the best possible app that you can, go ahead and do it in the browser. You will get something that's probably good enough and runs everywhere. But it's going to use more battery, more memory, and more bandwidth and not feel like a Mac app. Plus (IMHO) it's less fun to develop for the browser.
by fzeroracer | 2025-08-27 20:27:30+00:00
No, we can absolutely reject it and destroy it at a fundamental level. LLMs are deeply unprofitable and only exist because of insane amounts of money being set on fire by the richest assholes you know to support stochastic parrots. Otherwise the sheer resource cost would've devoured the companies multiple times other.

The goal by all of these companies is to force you to pay for and eat the slop. That's why they keep inserting it into every subscription, every single app and program you use, and directly on the OS itself. It's like the Sacklers pushing opioids but directly in the open, with similar effects on vulnerable people.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-27 20:27:30+00:00
The sources bother me. When I get some answer related to programming and I am not so sure about it I check the docs, a good link to the docs would be a great help.

Microsoft copilot should do better because it is attached to a search engine but it sucks at giving citations. Often it gives the right answer and a totally wrong citation which is frustrating.

Google's AI results in the search are so bad I try not to look at them at all. If I ask some simple question like "Can I use characters in my base to do operations in Arknights?" I get a wrong answer, citation or not.

So far as context my take with agentic coding assistants is that if you let the context get longer it will eventually get confused and start going in circles. Often it seems to code brilliantly at the beginning but pretty soon it loses the thread. The answer to that is just start a new session, if there is something you want to carry over from the old session you should cut and paste it into the documentation and tell it to look at it.

So far as bias I'd say that truth is the most problematic concept in philosophy, simply introducing the idea of "the Truth" (worse than just "the truth") impairs the truth. See 9/11 Truther.

Look at Musk's misadventures with Grok. I'd love to see an AI trained with a viewpoint like "principled conservative" but that's not what Musk wants. One moment he's BFF with Donald Trump, next minute Trump is one of Epstein's pedophiles. To satisfy Musk it would have to always know if we are at war with Eurasia or Eastasia today.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-27 20:27:59+00:00
> depends how fasts it is moving - but it's all moving at the same speed. The last chip will get less cooling than the first chip, proportional to the amount of cooling the previous chips received. Delta T doesn't lie.

The watts of cooling per chip will be the same. The last chip in the loop will be a little warmer, but not by much in a reasonable setup. The difference in temperature between each chip and the water running across it will be the same.

And if you take a weak water supply and then split it to run in parallel, you can end up with a significant heat gradient across each waterblock which doesn't sound great either. If you have 4 high power chips please don't limit them to .25 liters per minute each.

> Whether it's significant or not, I can't know - but you want it to be significant, otherwise it's less efficient.

Keeping your fluid cool is good for long term reliability. And if you're doing that, then every block is getting cool fluid and the other details about loop layout won't matter.
by myhf | 2025-08-27 20:28:00+00:00
Do you think that the more refined version is somehow less of an insult to life itself? It wasn't a statement about how refined the art style is. It's about the meaning and intentionality that goes into deliberate communication, and how tools designed specifically to skip over the decision making and deliberation are removing the most important part of the result.

Look at all the AI-written and AI-illustrated articles being published this year. Look at how smooth the image slop is. Look at how fluent the text slop is. Higher quality slop doesn't change the fact that nobody could be bothered to write the thing, and nobody can be bothered to read it.
by dazzaji | 2025-08-27 20:28:18+00:00
Synthi is an open web tool that instantly summarizes and synthesizes Hacker News threads and their linked articles, grouping every point of view by topic.

[Live demo here: https://prototypejam.github.io/synthesize/](https://prototypejam.github.io/synthesize/)

Why I Built This:

I love the deep discussions on HN, but I never have time to read a long article and a 400-comment thread. The tipping point for building this was when I nearly burned through my monthly API credits on another service just trying to synthesize a few threads! I needed my own tool.

How It Works:

1. Paste any HN thread URL into Synthi. 2. It instantly detects it and fetches the linked article. 3. Click "Full Analysis" for a unified, topic-based synthesis (with attribution to the article or the commenter). 4. Export the result, bookmark it, or listen to it (the output is text-to-speech friendly).

Key Features:

* Smart HN workflow: Auto-detects HN links for a one-click analysis. * Works with any URLs: Can also synthesize any two articles or pieces of text. * 100% client-side: All processing happens in your browser. No backend, no tracking. * Open source (MIT License): The code is yours to inspect, fork, and use.

The Code: [https://github.com/prototypejam/synthesize](https://github.com/prototypejam/synthesize)

A Note on the API Key:

Synthi is a "Bring Your Own Key" app. You'll need a Google Gemini API key, which is stored securely in your browser's local storage and never sent anywhere else.

For now, it's Gemini only, largely because the free tier on Google AI Studio is incredibly generous and a great way to get started. I'm considering adding support for other models like Claude or OpenAI via OpenRouter in the future.

I've been using this every day and I hope it's useful to some of you too. All feedback is welcome!
by asa400 | 2025-08-27 20:29:15+00:00
I'm not sure how what you're describing is different from passing an immutable/shared reference.

If you call `foo(&value)` then `value` remains available in your calling scope after `foo` returns. If you don't mutate `value` in foo, and foo doesn't do anything other than derive a new value from `value`, then it sounds like a shared reference works for what you're describing?

Rust makes you be explicit as to whether you want to lend out the value or give the value away, which is a design decision, and Rust chooses that the bare syntax `value` is for moving and the `&value` syntax is for borrowing. Perhaps you're arguing that a shared immutable borrow should be the default syntax.

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding!
by saubeidl | 2025-08-27 20:29:33+00:00
> It's their market.

It's not. That's the entire point. The EU Single Market is the EU's. No trying to take it away, that is exactly what this is all about.

We, the European people, are the ones that have set up the world's largest market of well-off consumers. Apple is the one that is trying to subdivide it and create a walled-off area where they don't have to follow our rules.
by petralithic | 2025-08-27 20:29:43+00:00
Which artists care about coding AI like Copilot? All the ones I talked to simply do not care. Regarding economic means, I asked them whether they'd care if they lived in a post scarcity society where they could make art all day and not have to worry about their material needs being met, ie they're rich, and it turns out if that were the case, they didn't care about what people did with AI, be it image generation or code generation.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-27 20:29:59+00:00
There are definitely 100-line chunks of code I wouldn't want to rewrite from scratch. They also tend not to be the sort of thing that needs a lot of updates, so a copy/paste job ought to do the job.

The big advantage with a dependency manager is that you don't have to find all of the dependency's dependencies, figure out the right build settings, etc. That's super helpful when it's huge, but it's not really doing anything for you when it's small.
by mrbigboka | 2025-08-27 20:30:07+00:00
I’ve been freelancing for a while, and one of the biggest pains was the admin side of the work.

For every client I had to track time in one app, make reports in another, then create invoices somewhere else. It felt like I was spending more time jumping between tools than actually working.

That’s why I built Tracksy as a side project. It lets me track sessions per client/project and then export a clean PDF report with an invoice included — all in one place.

I just put together a quick demo video (see above). Right now I’m looking for 3–5 freelancers who would use this seriously and share feedback. I’ll give them lifetime free access.

Curious what you think: does this solve a real problem you’ve faced? Or is there something you’d expect to see that’s missing?
by nahuel0x | 2025-08-27 20:30:20+00:00
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.

"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

"Anything you like..."

"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
by eaglelamp | 2025-08-27 20:30:50+00:00
If you dig deep enough isn’t the same thing true of people like yourself? Do you truly believe that the large language models we currently have, not some fantasy AI of the distant future, are emotional and intellectual beings? Or, are you more interested in the short term economic gains of using them? Does this invalidate your beliefs? I don’t think so, most everyday beliefs are related to economic conditions.

How could a practical LLM enthusiast make a non-economic argument in favor of their use? They’re opaque usually secretive jumbles of linear algebra, how could you make a reasonable non-economic argument about something you don’t, and perhaps can’t, reason about?
by didibus | 2025-08-27 20:31:13+00:00
I love this article, I'm not an AI hater personally, but I doubt an AI could have written it. And in a way, that's as compelling of an argument as the content of the article itself.

Honestly, the first paragraph is packed full with good talking points, there's definitely a lot of ignoring of the cons of AI happening, I try to remember how I felt when social media first appeared, but I recall loving it, being part of all the hype, finding it amazing, using it all the time...
by mikeyouse | 2025-08-27 20:31:20+00:00
They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy. Building a wind turbine today has about the same all-in "LCOE" as running existing nuclear plants. Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.

Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-27 20:31:29+00:00
The first question that I always want answered when learning of a new font is how much of Unicode it covers. It a question rarely answered by "We have made a new font." blurbs, though.

Yes, yes; it's aesthetically pleasing, satisfies some set of geometric rules that you say fonts should satisfy, and smells of fresh lemons or whatever. But I want to know what happens when I put a diacritic on that letter "a". Is my system going to fall back to a different font?

Given that there are WGL4 and Unicode variants of Arial, it is a particularly apposite unanswered question here.
by hex4def6 | 2025-08-27 20:31:39+00:00
Of course it's here to stay. There are models that are --right-now-- great at text-to-speech, speech-to-text, categorization, image recognition, etc etc. Even if progress stopped now, these models would be useful in their current state.

Your argument could just as easily be applied to social networks ("are you still using friendster?") or e-commerce ("are you still using pets.com?). GPT3 or Kimi K2 or Mistral is going to become obsolete at some point, but that's because the succeeding models are going to be fundamentally better. That doesn't mean that they weren't themselves fit for a certain task.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-27 20:32:04+00:00
For what it's worth: one of the reasons Google has a datacenter in Iowa (of all places) is that there's a windfarm out there making up something like 60% of the local power generation. That makes the power super cheap (and with all the land they have, that windfarm can continue to scale).

If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."
by exoverito | 2025-08-27 20:32:50+00:00
Needless to say, most humans are unoriginal parrots too, one need only look at the prevalence of memetic desire. Few are capable of artistic genius like Picasso.

One technical definition of empathy is understanding what someone else is feeling. In war you must empathize with your enemy in order to understand their perspective and predict what they will do next. This cognitive empathy is basically theory of mind, which has been demonstrated in GPT4.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z

If we do not assume biological substrate is special, then it's possible that AIs will one day have qualia and be able to fully empathize and experience the feelings of another.

It could be possible that new AI architectures with continuously updating weights, memory modules, evolving value functions, and self-reflection, could one day produce truly original perspectives. It's still unknown if they will truly feel anything, but it's also technically unknowable if anyone else really experiences qualia, as described in the thought experiment of p-zombies.
by scfast | 2025-08-27 20:32:59+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the maker of Testronaut.

It’s an AI-powered testing framework that runs “missions” through a real browser (via Playwright). The goal is to reduce the brittleness of end-to-end tests by letting an agent adapt to small UI changes while still producing a clear pass/fail report.

Right now it works for simple flows like login/signup, outputs step-by-step reports with screenshots, and installs locally via CLI (`npx testronaut`). Still early, so I’d love feedback on where this might (or might not) fit into your workflows.

Happy to answer questions — thanks for checking it out!
by rcxdude | 2025-08-27 20:33:09+00:00
Maybe you want that, but I generally want the version of the application that the devs have tested the most. I've dealt with many issues due to slight differences between dependency versions, and I'd rather not provoke them. (That said, I do like debian for boring infrastructure, because they can keep things patched without changing things, but for complex desktop apps, nah, give me the upstream versions please. And for things I'm developing myself the distro is but a vehicle for a static binary or self-contained folder)