MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rileymat2 | 2025-08-08 16:37:50+00:00
> July 10: AWS sends verification request. 5-day deadline (including weekend).

> July 14: Form expired. I contact support. Simple question: “What do you need from me?”

> July 16-20: Four days of silence. Then: “We’re escalating to the appropriate > team.”

> July 20: New form finally arrives.

> July 21: I submit ID and utility bill (clear PDF). Response time: 10 hours.

> July 22: AWS: “Document unreadable.” The same PDF my bank accepts without question. > July 23: Account terminated. My birthday gift from AWS.

If I understand the timeline, how were they going to verify themselves properly?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-08 16:38:10+00:00
> only going to end the dollar as a reserve currency

Probably not, at least not as a medium of exchange and thus unit of account.

It is likely to deindustrialise America, given tariffs make material inputs more expensive. But Wall Street doesn’t use material inputs; it gains, and with it, so do America’s capital markets. With them, the dollar. (In use. Its value will likely become more volatile. I also expect Treasuries to become less attractive as a long-term store of value.)
by strange_quark | 2025-08-08 16:38:16+00:00
This just seems like goalpost shifting to make it sound like these models are more capable than they are. Oh, it didn't "hallucinate" (a term which I think sucks because it anthropomorphizes the model), it just "fabricated a fact" or "made an error".

It doesn't matter what you call it, the output was wrong. And it's not like something new and different is going on here vs whatever your definition of a hallucination is: in both cases the model predicted the wrong sequence of tokens in response to the prompt.
by BizarroLand | 2025-08-08 16:39:22+00:00
I personally feel like we're more on the path to the Altered Carbon-esque cyberpunk dystopia, only it will be clean and pretty and white and gleaming and only the "elect" will actually have full independent cognitive function.

Everyone else will be animal farm brainwashed into caring more about celebrities and sports and war and arguing online with strangers about pointless topics and politics while they eat their slop and work their meaningless jobs to keep the engine of civilization moving forward in a way that benefits the wealthiest, and AI will ultimately become the old school Andy Griffith cop that seems all nice and kind and helpful but will T-1000 sell us out to its true masters without remorse or hesitation no matter what.
by mindslight | 2025-08-08 16:39:29+00:00
It must be nice to be in Trumpist lala land, where it's always someone else's fault.

Trust of our institutions, scientific and other, had been deliberately destroyed by anti-intellectual political hacks over the past few decades. Some from appealing to regressive religious fundamentalism, but much just shameless ignorant grandstanding of painting the complex world as unfair. And it's mostly those same hacks who are now supporting the wanton burning of our societal institutions while continuing to whitewash it as "conservatism".

Sorry, the fault here lays entirely with the fascists - most especially with the people supporting them who should have known better.
by echelon | 2025-08-08 16:39:31+00:00
I know this is sarcasm, but a misstep like this by OpenAI will harm their future funding and hiring prospects.

They're supposed to be in the lead against a company 30x their size by revenue, and 10,000x their might. That lead is clearly slipping.

Despite ChatGPT penetration, it's not clear that OpenAI can compete toe to toe with a company that has distribution on every pane of glass.

While OpenAI has incredible revenue growth, they also have incredible spending and have raised at crazier and crazier valuations. It's a risky gamble, but one they're probably forced to take.

Meanwhile, Meta is hiring away all of their top talent. I'll bet that anyone that turned down offers is second guessing themselves right now.
by rustystump | 2025-08-08 16:39:31+00:00
I think the llm wall was hit a while ago and the jumps have been around finessing llms in novel ways for a better result. But the core is still very much the same it has been for a while.

The crypto level hype claims are all bs and we all knew that but i do use an llm more than google now which is the there there so to speak.

This does feel like a flatlining of hype tho which is great because idk if i could take the ai hype train for much longer.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-08-08 16:39:36+00:00
I don't think you're making contact with what the other commenter is saying. Explaining that a health insurer makes a little over $100 in profit per person over the course of a year is meant to disprove the argument that removing profit from the health insurance system is all it will take to make everything affordable. Philosophical arguments around the economic value of a life is separate from how to reduce costs of a healthcare system in a mixed market economy.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-08 16:39:37+00:00
You can control it in the chat page, at least (User name at lower left->Settings). I use this:

Answer concisely when appropriate, more extensively when necessary. Avoid rhetorical flourishes, bonhomie, and (above all) cliches. Take a forward-thinking view. OK to be mildly positive and encouraging but NEVER sycophantic or cloying. Above all, NEVER use the phrase "You're absolutely right." Rather than "Let me know if..." style continuations, list a set of prompts to explore further topics.

That last bit causes some clutter at the end of each response, not sure if I'm going to keep it. But it does do a good job at following these guidelines in my experience. The same basic instructions also work well in ChatGPT and Gemini.

Does Claude Code not support anything like this?
by bombcar | 2025-08-08 16:40:23+00:00
> Anyone who has gotten caught though likely wasn't because of any flaws in Tor (or said exit nodes) but because of other lapses in OpSec.

There have been some cases where some consider the "other lapses in OpSec" to be parallel construction to disguise a Tor vulnerability/breach, and others where the government has declined to prosecute because they'd have to reveal how they know.

If Tor were compromised, we'd likely not know. It's highly likely that it's fine for "normal people" things.
by Nizoss | 2025-08-08 16:40:32+00:00
I have been using Claude Code with TDD through hooks, which significantly improved my workflow for production code.

Watching the ChatGPT 5 demo yesterday, I noticed most of the code seemed oriented towards one-off scripts rather than maintainable codebases which limits its value for me.

Does anyone know if ChatGPT 5 or Copilot have similar extensibility to enforce practices like TDD?

For context on the approach: https://github.com/nizos/tdd-guard

I use pre/post operation commands to enforce TDD rules.
by spauldo | 2025-08-08 16:40:59+00:00
The rand(3) thing isn't about repeatability across implementations. Normally if you call srand(3) with the same seed, you get the same sequence of numbers from rand(3). It's useful for testing and debugging. OpenBSD ignores srand(3) altogether. The reasoning is that there are enough cases of people improperly seeding the PRNG that it's worth breaking POSIX to mitigate possible vulnerabilities.

I personally don't have an issue with their choices - they're completely in line with OpenBSD's mission of producing a secure OS. I'd be less pleased to see that sort of thing in other systems like NetBSD, though.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-08 16:41:17+00:00
> People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow.

If they have savings they can buy stock. Nobody is sentenced to have savings only.

> with the ownership class accruing profit that they receive by virtue of ownership.

Anyone can buy stock with less than $100 and thereby join the ownership class.
by 7bit | 2025-08-08 16:41:25+00:00
> If an email thread comes in that's longer than a few paragraphs, you're going straight to Copilot.

Not even that. Clearly someone was involved with an issue until I got involved. Whoever involved me need to explain the goal and the issue to me, then I can help. And that's the point. Someone wants MY help, so that SOMEONE needS to help me understand the history of it. And if that SOMEONE is unwilling to put in the time to do that, so why should I?
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-08-08 16:41:45+00:00
Insurance is for unexpected expenses that (a) you cannot foresee and (b) would be catastrophic to your finances

I do not agree with that view, and I'm not sure that is how it is used in the US at least. In the US, for many people, health insurance is the only realistic means to obtain any healthcare, not just catastrophic care.

I get injured at least annually due to mostly-outdoor physical activities, and have a chronic health issue or two, so the prospect of paying thousands of dollars out of pocket before my insurance even kicks in, doesn't sound great (and wasn't, when I had HDHPs for years).

I think the issue is that pretty much everything which isn't preventative care is considered "catastrophic" under this logic (because it requires paying hundreds or thousands out of pocket), even non-major issues, so "catastrophic" happens a lot.
by ricardo81 | 2025-08-08 16:42:03+00:00
I'd never used Tor, though had to scrape a bunch of things that required different IPs. I figured their endpoints were already tarred.

With the porn block in the UK though, the "New Private Window with Tor" in Brave is very convenient.

Maybe not for long, or maybe not. I guess websites don't need to comply beyond a certain point.

There are tons of "residential proxy" and whatnot type services available, IP being a source of truth doesn't seem to matter much in 2025. The Perplexity 'bot' recent topic being an example of that.

Basically if you want to access any resource on the web for a dollar a GB or so you can use millions of IPs.
by 0x457 | 2025-08-08 16:42:04+00:00
Yes, I can, and I do, I'm pointing out that compressing an entire conversation history into a single message is so lossy that I might as well start a new session.

Yes, I can also tell any agent to commit more often, but that's again not what I'm saying. I'm saying version control can be integrated way deeper into agent workflow.
by bko | 2025-08-08 16:42:16+00:00
It's pretty incredible a model like Genie can deduce the laws of physics from mere observation of video. Even fluid dynamics which is a notoriously difficult problem. It's not obvious that this would happen or would even be possible from this kind of architecture. It's obviously doing something deep here.

As an aside, I think it's funny that the AI Doomer crowd ignores image and video AI models when it comes to AI models that will enslave humanity. It's not inconceivable that a video model would have a better understanding of the world than an LLM. So perhaps it would grow new capabilities and sprout some kind of intent. It's super-intelligence! Surely these models if trained long enough will deduce hypnosis or some similar kind of mind control and cause mass extinction events.

I mean, the only other explanation why LLMs are so scary and likely to be the AI that kills us all is that they're trained on a lot of sci-fi novels so sometimes they'll say things mimicking sentient life and express some kind of will. But obviously that's not true ;-)
by poulsbohemian | 2025-08-08 16:42:45+00:00
>>I see it happen all too often, farmer dies, kids don’t want to do anything with the land

Often they've moved away to The Big City and don't have any connection or the skills, and often too there just isn't a meaningful return in the crop to justify the lifestyle change or added responsibilities of management.

>>For many farmers, this transition has become a valuable secondary source of income and allowed them to continue or expand their operations.

I think every American should read the book The Crazies by Amy Gamerman that was just published, that talks about this issue. Illustrates a lot of what's really going on in our country.
by echelon | 2025-08-08 16:43:39+00:00
Genie 3 just had the Sora treatment.

Lots of press for something by invitation only.

This probably means it takes an incredible amount of resources to power in its current form. Possibly tens of H100s (or TPUs) simultaneously. It'll take time to turn that from a wasteful tech preview into a scaleable product.

But it's clearly impressive, and it did the job of making what OpenAI did look insignificant.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-08 16:43:44+00:00
I'm currently working with a state governor's office on this policy. Their state needs more state workers, but comp is of course limited by tax revenue. So, my suggestion to them was: allow state workers to work remote as long as they're within the state. This keeps the income tax in the state, should be fine with the masses (the workers are still state residents), but enables these workers to put roots down in more rural areas that need workers for their tax base but couldn't otherwise attract industry or for profit entities who will pull up stakes and bail as soon as a better deal is on offer. These workers also, in theory, should have longevity due to the benefit of a stable government job they can work remotely. Good for retention, good for folks who want to ride such a job into retirement or need the flexibility (parents, caregivers, etc).

The federal government is not competent or sophisticated enough at the moment to enable something like this unfortunately (except in small pockets where telework has long been codified into worker agreements, such as the USPTO). Also can't rely on companies for such a program, due to their incentives and lack of worker protections around remote workers.

(this is not to say rural america won't continue to be hollowed out as young people move for economic opportunity or for locales where healthcare systems are not collapsing, but it gives some economic potential to people who need it while enabling state governments to attract talent as ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US)
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-08 16:44:03+00:00
> your annual physical

... should not be covered. This is a predictable, moderate expense. You can plan and save for it, or even skip it. An annual physical is of debatable value for a young, healthy person. Insurance is for unpredictable, financially devastating expenses that you cannot avoid.

If predictable stuff like annual physicals is covered, the "insurance" is just an inefficient savings account.
by commandar | 2025-08-08 16:44:14+00:00
It's going to depend heavily on your usage.

I use Copilot because work is paying for it and it can be made usable, but requires being really deliberate about managing context to keep things on the rails. It's nice that it gives you access to a pretty decent selection of models, though.

At home, I'm mostly using the $100 Claude plan. It's definitely not cheap, but I've found it has a pretty decent balance for my casual experiments with agentic coding.

Another option to seriously consider is setting up an account with OpenRouter and just tossing some cash into your bucket on occasion. OpenRouter lets you arbitrarily make API requests to pretty much any model you want. I've been occasionally tossing $10 or so into mine and I'll use it when I've hit my usage limits with Claude or if I want to see how another model will attack a particular task.

FWIW, I use Roo code for all of this, so it's pretty easy for me to switch between models/providers as I need to.
by rhelz | 2025-08-08 16:44:31+00:00
Here is the secret decoder ring needed to understand what is going on: "too expensive" is a code word for "too old." It's just simple age discrimination.

As long as my beard wasn't grey, I had no problem getting job offers. Once I got a new job in 14 hours.

Now, even if you get a phone screen, they can see your grey beard, and you never hear back from them.
by bignorthchris | 2025-08-08 16:44:58+00:00
Just launched my podcast and this VC basically predicted the death of his own industry.

On Wednesday I dropped the first episode of my new podcast "Human Work After AI" and honestly, I'm still processing what my first guest told me.

I sat down with Vlad Cazacu, who's spent years as a VC doing 120+ deals, then flipped to the other side and built an AI fundraising platform (called Flowlie - definitely check it out) that's helped founders raise over $600 million. I figured he'd have some good insights on how AI is changing the game.

What I didn't expect was for him to casually explain how his entire former industry might just... disappear.

He walks me through this thought experiment: what if we put AI avatars in pitch meetings? Both sides. AI founder pitching to AI investor. And when I'm like "okay but that's weird," he just shrugs and goes "well, if both sides are automated, what exactly do VCs do anymore?"

The man has a point. His take? 99% of VCs basically just shuffle money from limited partners to founders. No real value add. An algorithm could probably do it better.

But here's what's wild: his own platform automates literally everything about fundraising (research, intros, follow-ups, the whole mess) except the actual human meeting. Not because they can't build that tech, but because he thinks the moment you remove humans from relationship-building, you break something fundamental.

Also learned that pre-seed rounds now need the kind of revenue that used to get you a Series A three years ago. AI made it easier to build stuff, so investors just raised their standards. Classic.

Anyway, if you're curious about where all this AI stuff is actually heading (spoiler: it's messier than the LinkedIn thought leaders want you to think), the full conversation is worth a listen.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-08 16:45:23+00:00
> Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.

That's a cultural and societal problem, not a technology problem. The motivations (profit) are wrong, and don't lead to true innovations, only to financialization.

So long as people need to pay to eat, then information will also want to continue to be paid for, and our motivations will continue to be misaligned with true innovations, especially if said innovations would make life easier but wouldn't result in profit.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-08 16:45:32+00:00
The monetary (note: monetary) value of anything and everything is determined by when the minimum value which a seller accepts to sell it for is equal to the maximum value a buyer accepts to buy it for.

If you by some hacker magic know of any way to circumvent this fundamental logic, then you will become the richest man in history within less than a year, since you will then buy for less than anybody is willing to sell for and sell for more than anybody is willing to buy for.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-08 16:45:32+00:00
> income inequality distribution

Money in a capitalist society is not distributed, it is created.

The elephant in the room is the amount of money vacuumed up by the government which then disappears. Remember the Fire Aid for the LA fires victims? They raised $100m which disappeared without a trace. Then there's all that money for the California bullet train. Still no track laid.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-08-08 16:45:47+00:00
So far from my testing I have found Claude Code with Sonnet 4 better than Cursor + GPT-5 still. I started exact same projects at the same time, and it seemed Claude Code was just more reliable. It was just much slower in terms of setting up the project and didn't setup the project up as scalably (despite them highlighting that in the demo), and when I tried to instruct it to set it up DRY, modular, etc it kind of didn't just go where I wanted it to, while Claude Code did.

It was a game involving OOP, three.js. I think both are probably great at good design and CRUD things.
by poulsbohemian | 2025-08-08 16:46:59+00:00
>You do not need cable tv or home internet.

I get your point and I generally agree with everything you've written, but I'm a bit at a loss on the home internet thing... our society is entirely tied to our connectivity at this point, so are you simply recommending people use their internet-connected mobile devices and forego another home provider? With you on the cable thing - even the streaming providers that were supposed to save us have become prohibitively expensive at this point.
by rustystump | 2025-08-08 16:47:33+00:00
Interesting thread. I think the key around hallucinations is analogous to compilers. In order for output to be implicitly trusted it has to be as stable as a compiler. Hallucinations mean i cannot yolo trust the output. Having to manually scan the code for issues defeats the fundamental benefit.

Compilers were not and are not always perfect but i think ai has a long way to go before it passes that threshold. People act like it will in the next few years which the current trajectory strongly suggests that is not the case.
by mtts | 2025-08-08 16:47:36+00:00
Interestingly, this is what the EU is. After WW2 it was decided to set things up so that European countries no longer could wage war against each other. Hence starting out with coal and steel (no war without those).

In such a setup, lack of democratic oversight is not a bug but a feature. It prevents democratically elected but possibly not entirely stable governments from doing something stupid. The drawback, of course, is that it also prevents democratically elected and intensely well meaning governments from doing the right thing if the supranational entity does not wish to facilitate that right thing.

This setup works (after a fashion) for a group of small and fairly weak countries, but for a single large and powerful country like the US there simply isn’t a supranational entity powerful enough to reign it in.
by echelon | 2025-08-08 16:47:51+00:00
I really don't like this analogy, and I really don't like the premise of this article.

Writing software is only so scalable. It doesn't matter all of the shortcuts we take, like Electron and JavaScript. There are only so many engineers with so much time, and there are abundantly many problems to solve.

A better analogy would be to look at what's happening to AI images and video. Those have 10,000x'd the fundamental cost savings, time savings, and personnel requirements. It's an industrialization moment. As a filmmaker who has made several photons-on-glass films, this is a game changer and lifts the entire creative industry to a level where individuals can outdo Pixar.

That is the lens with which to look at what AI will do to software. We're going from hand-carving stone wheels to the Model T.

This is all just getting started. We've barely used what the models of today offer us.
by jvreeland | 2025-08-08 16:47:56+00:00
I think I broadly agree with this. I am super frustrated that everythign always wants me to search for things. As an example Finders default search while looking at a folder is the whole machine instead of a filter in the directory you are viewing in seems totally insane to me. It's almost like they don't want me to know where my files are.

I can understand that it's a result, to a degree of cloud services and peoples primary mode swapping to opening and app and opening recents or searching instead of opening a file to open an app but it does mean that you're at the mercy of what I experience as some pretty crap search algorithms that don't seem to want you to find the information you're looking for. I keep encountering searches that rank fuzzy matches over exact matches or aren't stable as you continue to complete the same word and I just don't understand how that's acceptable after being pointed out if search is what I'm supposed to be using.