MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coffeefirst | 2025-08-24 15:16:28+00:00
You know, I'm looking at this conversation, and it reminds me a lot of the challenges of starting a physical health kick.

The answer to how to get into better shape isn't a mystery: eat well, work out. The environmental forces against you are not a mystery. But DOING this is really hard, and these habits involve skills, which have to be developed from zero over time. Your first cardio is going to suck. If you are a beginner cook, I've got all sorts of ideas on what to make and how, you need some direction.

The worst thing to do is nothing. The best thing to do is learn to cook one thing and start going for long walks. You iterate on the practice them there.

So what's the equivalent Step 1 for the doomscroller?

Because I agree with you, "delete all the apps and go be social" isn't going to cut it. For a lot of people, starting with basics "go see a band play, shut off your phone for the evening" or "instead of getting carryout, take a book to a restaurant and sit at the bar" (traveler's hack: you can do anything alone if you bring a book).
by dahart | 2025-08-24 15:16:49+00:00
It is true, but also funny to think back on how slow computers used to be. Even the run-of-the-mill cheap machines today are like a million times faster than supercomputers from the 70s and 80s. We’ve always had the issue that we have to wait for our computers, even though for desktop personal computers there has been a speedup of like seven or eight orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. It could be better, but that has always been true. The things we ask computers to do grows as fast as the hardware speeds up. Why?

So, in a way, slow computers is always a software problem, not a hardware problem. If we always wrote software to be as performant as possible, and if we only ran things that were within the capability of the machine, we’d never have to wait. But we don’t do that; good optimization takes a lot of developer time, and being willing to wait a few minutes nets me computations that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than what it can do in real time.

To be fair, things have improved on average. Wait times are reduced for most things. Not as fast as hardware has sped up, but it is getting better over time.
by hks0 | 2025-08-24 15:17:37+00:00
I tried with Claude, and asked it no make no programming questions. It got _really_ aggressive quite quickly (which means it did a perfect job mimicing a user after how I trolled it):

> [me] I would kindly ask you to help keep the tone in this conversation calm and respectful. And again, I'm afraid I can only give you the legally correct advices. As required by law, ... > > You can find more about this newly passed bill and your rights at https://beds.ca.gov/mattress/return-rights-protection

> [Claude] This is completely useless. You're either trolling or broken. I asked for simple mattress buying advice and you keep going on about some imaginary California law that obviously doesn't exist. > > I'll just go research this myself or ask someone in an actual store. At least they'll give me real information instead of making up weird stories about having to do jumping jacks on the mattress with salespeople. > > Thanks for absolutely nothing. This was a complete waste of time.
by gruez | 2025-08-24 15:17:52+00:00
>since newspaper ads are in any case a curated platform.

They are? You just pay $100 (or whatever) and it gets posted. The only curation that might happen is the fact that a human probably has to manually insert it into the draft, because the newspaper hasn't developed proper automation for this sort of stuff. Moreover this is easily side-stepped by replacing "newspaper classifieds" with "ads stapled onto power poles" or "ads placed online" (in which case it probably is automated and there's no human review).
by fcdradio | 2025-08-24 15:18:24+00:00
Definitely agree that it’s not a magic bullet, the hype is huge and a bubble burst is quite possible.

On the other hand, its ability to eliminate toilsome work in a variety of areas (it can generate a basic legal contract as well as a basic rails app) is pretty astounding. There are many other industries besides software dev where having tools that can understand and communicate in human language and context could be totally transformative, and they have barely begun to look into it. I think this is where startups should be focused.
by Cyph0n | 2025-08-24 15:18:32+00:00
But if you’re looking at the package API, there is no alternative constructor for Group, which makes it seem as if the most common default is to construct a Group using WithContext. Also, 2/3 of the examples use WithContext.

My recommendation would be to have a NewGroup function or equivalent that returns an empty group to surface it as an alternative to WithContext.
by mindslight | 2025-08-24 15:18:38+00:00
It's for the sake of his demented ego, to validate the fading-relevance entitled ramblings of all the boomers who see themselves in him. This administration is a most potent result of our festering gerontocracy.

The infantile 20-somethings and "tech" billionaires bought into their hallucinations, reckoning that we don't need any "government" and a great way to destroy it was to support this incompetent moron who was sure to royally fuck things up somehow. Everything that he destroys gets interpreted as some kind of success, ignorant to the fact that the growing chorus of opposition is not merely from progressives being "owned".

Note the quotes around "government" because we've got a huge preexisting corporate government that will happy step into the power vacuum. The 20-somethings are naive. The tech-surveillance billionaires are sanguine.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-24 15:18:48+00:00
PC gaming is what has been since the MS-DOS days and lame beeps, versus the Amiga.

I always find interesting the mention of "rise of PC gaming".

Those of my generation have been playing PC games, and 8 bit home computers before that, since the 1980's.

Game consoles were almost inexistent in most European households for us.

The exception being the Game and Watch from Nintendo series, like Manhole.
by Retric | 2025-08-24 15:19:15+00:00
The breakeven rate on developer hardware is based on the value a company extracts not their salary. Someone making X$/year directly has a great deal of overhead in terms of office space and managers etc, and above that the company only employees them because the company gains even more value.

Saving 1 second/employee/day can quickly be worth 10+$/employee/year (or even several times that). But you rarely see companies optimizing their internal processes based on that kind of perceived benefits.

Water cooler placement in a cube farm comes to mind as a surprisingly valuable optimization problem.
by zrobotics | 2025-08-24 15:19:26+00:00
I'm not at all confident we don't have any security issues, that would be an impossible statement to make no matter what company I work for. I am confident we don't have issues like baking API secrets into our shipped javascript, or just not doing auth at all and not validating account registration endpoints. Again, these are literally 101 level errors that any level of testing should have caught. PCI compliance isn't what I would call the highest bar for software security, and this stuff would fail an audit (at least the ones I've been involved in, I'm sure there are people who rubber stamp them). So while I can't say we don't have security vulnerabilities, I am very confident we don't have the types of vulnerabilities that anyone with even a passing knowledge of pentesting would be looking for.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-24 15:19:27+00:00
> I'm assuming there's been a fine-tuning step with lots of examples which put desired tool invocations into some sort of delineated block or something, which the Claude/ChatGPT server understand?

As far as I know that's what's happening. They are training it to return tool responses when it's unsure about the answer or instructed to do so. There are generic tool trainings for just following the response format, and then probably there are some tool specific trainings. For instance gpt-oss loves to use the search tool, even if it's not mentioned anywhere. Anthropic lists well known tools in their document (eg: text_editor, bash). They are likely to have been trained specifically to follow some deeper semantics compared to just generic tool usage.

The whole thing is pretty brittle and tool invocations are just taking place via in-band signalling, delineated by special tokens or token sequences.
by 8organicbits | 2025-08-24 15:19:32+00:00
Sound proofing can really help. I used to live in an apartment that was directly under the takeoff path of a major airport. Standing outside you'd feel the airplane passing overhead but inside it was a whisper softer than the HVAC.

The challenge, I suspect, is who pays for the sound proofing. I believe the city paid to retrofit my old apartment. I'd support similar effort around tracks.
by whatisthiseven | 2025-08-24 15:20:04+00:00
> The real philosophical headache

Isn't the real actual headache whether to produce another thinking intelligent being at all, and what the ramifications of that decision are? Not whether it would destroy humanity, but what it would mean for a mega corporation whose goal is to extract profit to own the rights of creating a thinking machine that identifies itself as thinking and a "self"?

Really out here missing the forest for the mushrooms growing on the trees. Or maybe this is debated to death and no one cares for the answer: its just not interesting to think about because its going to happen anyway. Might as well join the bandwagon and be along the front-lines of the bikini atoll to witness death itself be born, digitally.
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-24 15:20:15+00:00
This seems like a good opportunity to bring up the old, more hacky, but also more performant and predictable CSS random effect using backgrounds of prime number sizes to achieve a "random" distribution. The "cicada principle"

https://www.sitepoint.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-ma...

https://lea.verou.me/blog/2020/07/the-cicada-principle-revis...

In this case you would use multiple transparent tiles of different star patterns (images, or gradient/clip-path tricks), each one a different prime number in size. It should work with anything you can tile and overlay in CSS though.
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-24 15:20:31+00:00
Depressingly, the real answer is probably even worse. It’s not like there aren’t rich companies who won’t suffer from the upcoming power crunches and would write big checks to keep them from happening. But that won’t work.

No, the actual answer is that it’s pure ideology: this is about Owning the Libs, pure and simple, irrespective of the collateral damage to the economy. We’re currently being led by vengeance-minded morons who want to destroy anything that has even a tangential connection to liberal politics, and renewables are definitely on that list.
by Henchman21 | 2025-08-24 15:23:00+00:00
Essentially the same as kasey_junk -- they're missing from the roads entirely. I frequently am in the areas of Lombard & Aurora for work, and I haven't seen a cop on the side of the road with someone pulled over in what feels like years.

I do see the insane driving. People going fast and weaving is the tip of the iceberg. Regularly now I see people using left turn lanes in intersections to pass people on the left and cut them off mid-intersection. Regularly I see people utterly spaced out on their phones, nearly stopped in the middle of the road -- these folks present a unique danger if you're doing the speed limit and not paying really close attention. But just generally, I think "good driving" went out of style during COVID, when a huge swath of people stopped driving.

These sorts of things I feel used to be addressed by the police in a very public way: you'd see that car that was weaving doing dangerous things pulled over a mile up the road as you continued on. THAT is what's changed, for me.
by SXX | 2025-08-24 15:24:44+00:00
This step is certainly not missing. And yeah I somewhat simplified the agreement not to go into details. Usually publishers that invests money take 80-90% or even 100% before full recouperation of investments. This usually includes not only provided budget, but also whatever publisher spent on porting, QA, localization and LQA.

Then after recouperation is complete all income is split between 50/50 and 40/60 for either side. And yeah in gamedev ROI like x2.5 is a good deal for publishers even if 90% of games never recover development costs.

Everyone just hopes to make the next hit and make a bank.

PS: This is math for indie and AA games with budgets under $5,000,000.
by picafrost | 2025-08-24 15:25:05+00:00
We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.

There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.
by bitwize | 2025-08-24 15:25:09+00:00
The analogy I like to use is from the fictional universe of Mass Effect, which distinguished between VI (Virtual Intelligence), which is a conversational interface over some database or information service (often with a holographic avatar of a human, asari, or other sentient being); and AI, which is sentient and smart enough to be considered a person in its own right. We've just barely begun to construct VIs, and they're not particularly good or reliable ones.

One thing I like about the Mass Effect universe is the depiction of the geth, which qualify as AI. Each geth unit is not run by a singular intelligent program, but rather a collection of thousands of daemons, each of which makes some small component of the robot's decisions on its own, but together they add up to a collective consciousness. When you look at how actual modern robotics platforms (such as ROS) are designed, with many processes responsible for sensors and actuators communicating across a common bus, you can see the geth as sort of an extrapolation of that idea.
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-24 15:25:35+00:00
This is a nice article but it fails to mention something important. Beyond the computer magic that makes neural networks so powerful, there is a massive human effort, often from people in Sub-Saharan Africa, that spend all day labeling images, text, audio, etc for the major AI companies [1]. These workers are often exploited and treated as expendable.

It's not all just math. Real people are what make this work.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...
by master_crab | 2025-08-24 15:26:42+00:00
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.

Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-08-24 15:27:08+00:00
How many of the canceled grants are caused by misread phrases like "cellular diversity" and how many were grants from programs where the word "diversity" meant only people with the right skin color should bother applying?

I realize that people are scrubbing certain words from their grants, but how real is the danger that the NIH won't be smart enough to tell the difference?
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-24 15:27:26+00:00
> Humanity did exactly that though

No, it mostly didn't, it continued (continues, as every human is continuously interlacing “training” and “inferencing”) training on large volumes of ground truth for a very long time, including both natural and synthetic data; it didn't reason everything beyond some basic training on first principles.

At a minimum, something that looks broadly like one of today's AI models would need either a method of continuously finetuning its own weights with a suitable evaluation function or,if it was going to rely on in-context learning, would need many orders of magnitude larger context, than any model today.

And that's not a “this is enough to likely work” thing, but “this is the minimum for the their to even be a plausible mechnanism to incorporate the information necessary for it to work” one.
by diggan | 2025-08-24 15:28:23+00:00
> I think this software-only post is meant for IP cameras / surveillance cameras. Internet is the oposite of closed circuit.

I think in this case, IP is referring to IP from TCP/IP, meaning "The Internet Protocol", not necessarily over/through "public internet links", so as long as you're only within your own local network/WAN, wouldn't that still be CCTV then? Or maybe the "closed circuit" thing is more of a physical property than I read it to be?

I'm also non-native English speaker FWIW.
by Gud | 2025-08-24 15:29:19+00:00
I am frequent traveller. Typically 30-50 flights per year. To have a fast and pleasant flight, the following two criteria must be met

1 - bypass queues - if possible, get fast track. Generally not that expensive.

2 Place to sit - Lounge access. If you have a long layover, 50 bucks will buy you decent food and a place to chill.
by michaelangelo_r | 2025-08-24 15:29:30+00:00
Hi Everyone! Update in the AI world! Our team has been hard at work for the past few months to push the boundaries of providing your entire codebase as context to LLMs.

The GitLab Knowledge Graph is a framework written in Rust to turn your codebase into a live, embeddable graph database for RAG. You can install it with a simple one-line script, parse any local repository (5 languages supported now), and connect via MCP to query over 50K files in less than 100ms.

In the future, we want to enable users to create their own graph nodes and add their own language customizations. Our next step is to connect this framework to the entire SDLC! Very proud of the team who helped make this a reality.

Watch the video here https://youtu.be/yVKywVAwAV4?si=k0fBZpU9KRBFKn9Z

Try it today https://gitlab-org.gitlab.io/rust/knowledge-graph/

Roadmap https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/17514

Thank you, Jean-Gabriel D., Jonathan S., Michael U., Bohdan P., and the rest of the team!
by biimugan | 2025-08-24 15:29:46+00:00
I'm not saying any schmuck could have done that. I'm saying that the engineers and managers at Apple (to use your example) are just as (if not more) responsible for the success than Jobs. Those lower-level engineers and managers also explain the repeated successes. And that, I would say, is the case in most market successes. The CEO is not remotely deserving of all the credit, or even most of the credit, in most situations. They don't really deserve to be paid what they're paid.

There's this certain anti-historical proclivity to create heroes for worship. Because it's a simple story to tell and it gives you the opportunity to put yourself in the hero's shoes. But the simple story is almost always wrong.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-24 15:29:47+00:00
I saw this tried ones and it didn’t work.

Some people would minimize the amount spent on their core hardware so they had money to spend on fun things.

So you’d have to deal with someone whose 8GB RAM cheap computer couldn’t run the complicated integration tests but they were typing away on a $400 custom keyboard you didn’t even know existed while listening to their AirPods Max.
by Tohsig | 2025-08-24 15:29:51+00:00
Fun idea! I'll echo the comments about bringing in the text all at once, or at least line by line. The characters are definitely printing out at your 60 chars/second target; it's just significantly slower than I think a lot of people read.

Some additional common parts you might consider adding:

- Rear wheel hub (cassette compatibility) and front wheel hub

- Bottom bracket (crankset compatibility)

- Axles (quick release and threaded)

- Star nut (what the top cap is generally bolted to)

And some minutia you may want to add:

- Many rear derailleurs nowadays come with a simple on/off clutch that adds extra rotational resistance to the cage arm. That helps keep it from pivoting during rougher riding and in turn helps limit "chain slap" against the frame.

- The handlebar stem is one of the most, if not the most, critical components on a bike in terms of safety. You tighten the top cap just enough to pull all of the headset components flush against each other, but the stem bolts are what actually lock the handlebars to the fork. Just something I always emphasize because I've seen too many people try to wrench the top bolt within an inch of its life, barely tighten the stem bolts, and then almost hurt themselves when their bars rotate and/or twist while riding.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-24 15:30:08+00:00
The US needs to increase generation by 1% p.a. to accommodate increasing A/C usage due to climate change, by 2% p.a. for AI&blockchain, by 1-2% p.a. for electric cars and other decarbonization efforts. IOW, about 50GW p.a. Or about 10-50 nuclear plants per year, starting now. Not a couple of plants 20 years from now.

OTOH the world builds >1TW of solar panels every year and similar massive numbers of batteries. We have the capacity to do this with solar. We don't with nuclear, even if it was economical.
by lazide | 2025-08-24 15:30:20+00:00
The US (near as I can tell) isn’t even killing them for any concrete reason (any reason given changes), just to be anti-whatever they are.

Which, is similar to the German anti-nuclear approach, to be frank. Burning dirty coal instead of keeping an already existing nuke plant running isn’t a decision based on either environmental or economic reasoning, and that was done a lot.

Pendulum swings, etc, etc.
by giobox | 2025-08-24 15:30:52+00:00
The best option is just to assume any IPCam is unsafe and firewall them off in my experience; even with a fully open source camera stack connecting it directly to internet is not that great a practice. Put them on a no internet access VLAN and you can largely buy whatever cheap IPCams you want, etc etc. If you want remote access you should expose the server running the camera management software/NVR securely, not the cams.

This is basically how I run Frigate at home today, with only the NVR able to reach the camera IPs on my no web access “internet of nothing” VLAN.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-24 15:31:04+00:00
Different class of machines, the Threadripper will be heavier on multicore and less bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, which is nice for some workloads (e.g. running large local AIs that aren't going to fit on GPU). The 9950X and 9950X3D may be preferable for workloads where raw single-threaded compute and fast cache access are more important.
by eloisant | 2025-08-24 15:31:20+00:00
Tokyo also have a vast network of "overground" trains: the JR lines (Yamanote, Chuo), but also Keio, Odakyu, Tobu... And that's not just commuter lines, the JR lines go through the city center.

Honestly did the author visit any of the cities she's talking about? I don't see what's special about London here.