MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-06 01:08:54+00:00
> e.g. AI therapy being substituted for real therapy, AI products displacing industrial design, etc.

That depends on the quality of the end product and the willingness to invest the resources necessary to achieve a given quality of result. If average quality goes up in practice then I'd chalk that up as a net win. Low quality replacing high quality is categorically different than low quality filling a previously empty void.

Therapy in particular is interesting not just because of average quality in practice (therapists are expensive experts) but also because of user behavior. There will be users who exhibit both increased and decreased willingness to share with an LLM versus a human.

There's also a very strong privacy angle. Querying a local LLM affords me an expectation of privacy that I don't have when it comes to Google or even Wikipedia. (In the latter case I could maintain a local mirror but that's similar to maintaining a local LLM from a technical perspective making it a moot point.)
by throw0101d | 2025-08-06 01:09:17+00:00
> It's the single worst moment in human history. Yes, those crimes were larger, but in terms of the worst instant of time, this has to take the cake.

The 9/10 March 1945 caused more death and damage as an individual event, even more than each of the atomic bombings:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-06 01:09:29+00:00
> Over the years, nearly everything on the vehicle has been replaced or repaired, and Campbell says the only original part is likely the body, and even that has had work done on it.

To me this makes it less interesting. I would be amazed if the original parts (outside of what gets replaced for maintenance) lasted that long. But it’s hard to judge how durable the car is when everything has been replaced
by jjk166 | 2025-08-06 01:09:44+00:00
I would not call 400 MPa "very low" that's better than the best structural steel. Further, the important thing is the specific strength. CFRP has a density 5 times lower than steel, meaning you can use 5 times as much for the same weight, bearing 5 times the load. A good steel has a compressive strength around 1000 MPa, the best superalloys have compressive strength around 1500 MPa, the same weight of CFRP can withstand the equivalent of around 2000 MPa.

Sure this is idealized, but so is the strength of steel.

The concern with carbon fiber is its potential for delamination, not its compressive strength. Titan's failure was after delamination.
by SergeAx | 2025-08-06 01:10:20+00:00
1. Sometimes you should prove that you are human first.

I think the line is drawn at "on my behalf". The silent agreement of the web is that humans are served content via a browser, and robots are obeying rules. All we need to support this status quo is to perform data processing by ML models on a client's side, in the browser, the same way we rip out ads.
by mvdtnz | 2025-08-06 01:10:46+00:00
> does it really make that much of an improvement over what we already had with search engines, online documentation and online Q&A sites?

This can't be a serious question? 5 minutes of testing will prove to you that it's not just better, it's a totally new paradigm. I'm relatively skeptical of AI as a general purpose tool, but in terms of learning and asking questions on well documented areas like programming language spec, APIs etc it's not even close. Google is dead to me in this use case.
by xgdgsc | 2025-08-06 01:13:24+00:00
The tradeoff between compilation time and programmer productivity and running speed is worth it compared with using any other language. You should consider most users don' t need to build an image . They just do things in the REPL with Revise.jl (which is fast). Or use a bit of PrecompileTools.jl to get good enough startup time (which isn' t complicated if you are the code writer). Package compiling works even large and slow is a bonus. https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html Julia still grows despite all those controversial articles for a reason.
by no_wizard | 2025-08-06 01:14:04+00:00
There's strong sentiment bubbling that supports AI driven layoffs are going to happen or are happening[0].

I'll say its okay to be reserved on this, since we won't know until after the fact, but give it 6-12 months, then we'll know for sure. Until then, I see no reason not to believe there is a culture in the boardrooms forming around AI that is driving closed door conversations about reducing headcount specifically to be replaced by AI.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/the-end-of-work-as-we-know-it-2000635294
by NoMoNemo | 2025-08-06 01:14:11+00:00
The LLM systems being what they are, you can ask google "how do tariffs work, using eighth grade words" and you get a very clear and correct explanation without the college level words.

In simple terms, think of a tariff like a special tax a country puts on goods it buys from another country. Here's how it works: When a country wants to import something, like cars from Japan or clothes from China, it has to pay an extra fee (the tariff) to its own government before those goods can come into the country. This extra fee makes the imported goods more expensive than products made in the country itself. Why do governments do this? To protect local businesses: By making foreign products pricier, the government hopes people will choose to buy things made in their own country, helping local businesses grow and create jobs. To make money: Tariffs can also be a way for the government to collect some extra cash. To get other countries to change their ways: Sometimes, countries use tariffs as a way to pressure other nations to follow certain rules or to stop unfair trade practices. Example Imagine a bicycle store in the US wants to import a bicycle from another country that costs $1,000. If the US has an 11% tariff on bicycles, the store would have to pay an extra $110 (11% of $1,000) to the US government, making the total cost to bring the bike in $1,110. This makes bicycles made in the US seem more affordable by comparison.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-06 01:14:42+00:00
> We'd be taking a step back of... maybe 5-10 years? Computers 10 years ago were not that much slower than they are today

There’s more to the world of computing than your laptop.

Stepping back to 10 year old GPUs and server CPUs would be a massive handicap on the country.

> Maybe it'd force the tech industry to start writing more efficient user-facing software instead of depending on the incremental advancements made by chip designers and semi fabs.

It’s not about the speed of your laptop loading Slack. Large scale compute is already squeezing as much performance as we can out of server hardware.
by duskwuff | 2025-08-06 01:14:43+00:00
> I doubt it would apply to PNG because of the length and content doesn't seem to be dictionary-friendly

Correct - I wouldn't expect this to be useful for PNG. Compression dictionaries are applicable in situations where a group of documents contain shared patterns of literal content, like snippets of HTML. This is very uncommon in PNG image data, especially since any difference in compression settings, like the use of a different color palette, or different row filtering algorithms, will make the pattern unrecognizable.
by jimmytucson | 2025-08-06 01:16:00+00:00
Pretty amazing this all started as MLB Advanced Media more than 20 years ago streaming baseball games on the internet before YouTube existed! When I joined, they were streaming NHL, MLS, WWE, HBO, and many others. Then they spun off and sold to Disney and became Disney+. I wonder if any lines of code from those very early days still get executed.

Regardless, this is terrible for sports fans. Disney will chop this up into “baskets” with one watchable thing padded with lots of other unwatchable-to-mildly-interesting stuff (college hockey from a single camera angle anyone?). Then, when you want to watch some event, you’ll open your ESPN Premium +- whatever app, get excited when you see the event on the home screen, only to be upsold to start your free trial of ESPN NFL++ Hulu Fans Only Bundle. The only solution is to boycott the whole damn thing, which is what I am doing, and I love having the extra cash for tickets to local minor league games, etc.
by benchly | 2025-08-06 01:16:05+00:00
Still makes me want to give up. I just started learning keyboard and playing with synthesizers in the last 6 months or so with the intention of making game music and it's tough to not feel like I'm wasting my time. Game devs will go with what they can afford and who can blame them? The output is not perfect, but if the GenAI can do this now, what will it sound like a year from now? Two? Really takes the wind out of the sails of us newbies.
by schiffern | 2025-08-06 01:16:24+00:00
"you'll have lakes, puddles, ditches, swamps, etc"

I do. That's where I put the dunks.

Lakes are usually okay as long as they have minnows or other mosquito-eating fish, but puddles and ditches are the places I focus on.

Fortunately I'm not near a real swamp, but I do have some swampy areas. I break each dunk into quarters and toss 1-3 per puddle, depending on size and funkiness. The package optimistically says four weeks, but I have my phone remind me every three. Good luck!
by NoMoNemo | 2025-08-06 01:16:59+00:00
"malignantly underinformed" I like that phrase :)

I asked Google to "explain tariffs in simple terms" and it sure did. A sixth grader would easily get it. Here's the response (and now I'm wondering whether a GenAI system could create a short animated video or slide deck that could become a TikTok):

Tariffs in simple terms

A tariff is like a special tax that a country places on goods it buys from other countries.

Imagine this You're buying a toy made in another country.

The government of your country might add a tariff to that toy's price when it enters the country.

This makes the imported toy more expensive than a similar toy made in your own country.

The company importing the toy pays this tax to the government.

However, they might then pass some or all of that cost onto you, the customer, by raising the price of the toy.
by db48x | 2025-08-06 01:17:04+00:00
Yea, Sonic.net is amazing. I definitely recommend them if you are in their service area. Sadly they have been really slow to expand their fiber service, probably because they started in San Francisco, home of the NIMBY.

Ziply Fiber is another ISP that I can wholeheartedly recommend. They have service all over the north west states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho (though still not _everywhere_). Like Sonic.net, their quality of service is excellent. No congestion, very limited downtime, no bandwidth caps. They’ve even posted pictures of the accidents that have caused downtime. Most recently that was damaged battery banks that released enough hydrogen gas to shut down and evacuate a central office. Before that it was a drill that took out a fiber bundle; cue pictures of the engineers splicing all the individual fibers back together.

We need more local ISPs, municipal or otherwise.
by ewoodrich | 2025-08-06 01:17:17+00:00
It's definitely interesting how the comments from right after the models were released were ecstatic about "SOTA performance" and how it is "equivalent to o3" and then comments like yours hours later after having actually tested it keep pointing out how it's garbage compared to even the current batch of open models let alone proprietary foundation models.

Yet another data point for benchmarks being utterly useless and completely gamed at this stage in the game by all the major AI developers.

These companies are clearly are all very aware that the initial wave of hype at release is "sticky" and drives buzz/tech news coverage while real world tests take much longer before that impression slowly starts to be undermined by practical usage and comparison to other models. Benchmarks with wildly over confident naming like "Humanity's Last Exam" aren't exactly helping with objectivity either.
by toast0 | 2025-08-06 01:17:46+00:00
Stucco mesh needs to have no gaps for its structural needs, it's commonly overlapped by 3-6 inches. And, depending on the surface, the mesh may embed into the ground, offering a ground connection (if poor)...

The mesh does have many openings, but they are around the size you mention, so it should be ok-ish.

Otoh, there's like doors and windows. I believe a partial faraday cage still significantly reduces signal strength though. It'a difficult to use cell networks in my parents' stucco house, but step outside and it's fine. But stucco is also very similar to concrete, so that could be it, too.
by sothatsit | 2025-08-06 01:18:05+00:00
Claude Code was the tipping point for me from "that's neat" to "wow, that's really useful". Suddenly, paying $200/month for an AI service made sense. Before that, I didn't want to pay $20/month for access to Claude, as I already had my $20/month subscription to ChatGPT.

I have to imagine that other professions are going to see similar inflection points at some point. When they do, as seen with Claude Code, demand can increase very rapidly.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-06 01:18:13+00:00
I try using an LLM for coding now and then, and tried again today with giving a model dedicated to coding a rather straight forward prompt and task.

The names all looked right, the comments were descriptive, it has test cases demonstrating the code work. It looks like something I'd expect a skilled junior or a senior to write.

The thing is, the code didn't work right, and the reasons it didn't work were quite subtle. Nobody would have fixed it without knowing how to have done it in the first place, and it took me nearly as long to figure out why as if I'd just written it myself in the first place.

I could see it being useful to a junior who hasn't solved a particular problem before and wanted to get a starting point, but I can't imagine using it as-is.
by dboreham | 2025-08-06 01:18:40+00:00
Problems like this will turn out to have simple solutions. Once we get past the idea of "inherited instinct" (obvious nonsense and easily proved to be so) the solution will be easier to see.

An example that might be useful: dragonflies lay their eggs in water. Since a dragonfly has like a 4-bit CPU you might be amazed at how it manages to get all the processing required to identify a body of water from a distance into its tiny mind, and also marvel at what sort of JPEG+++ encoding must be used to convey what water looks like from generation to generation.

But they don't do that at all: instead they have eyes that are sensitive to polarized light. The surface of water polarizes reflected light. So do things like polished gravestones. So dragonflies will lay their eggs on gravestones too.

One I like to ponder is: beavers building damns. Do they have an encoded algorithm that knows that they need to damn the river to have a place to live, by gnawing on trees, carrying them to the right place on the river bed, etc? Nope, certainly they don't have that. Perhaps they have teeth that grow so long that they hurt, motivating the animal to gnaw on something solid to wear them down. The only solid thing they have available is a tree.
by goopypoop | 2025-08-06 01:18:43+00:00
Alright mate, I'm not probing your defences. I'm just wondering how much peace of mind you get at a distance.

I mean, are you flying home if a misdelivered dog gets struck by lightning on your lawn?

And how urgent is a blank feed? If not "drop everything" (even though it's probably nothing) then what's the point?
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-06 01:20:01+00:00
> Can you explain how you don't find clear utility, at the personal level, from LLMs?

Sure. They don't meaningfully improve anything in my life personally.

They don't improve my search experience, they don't improve my work experience, they don't improve the quality of my online interactions, and I don't think they improve the quality of the society I live in either
by redundantly | 2025-08-06 01:20:05+00:00
I use LLMs to review what I write for professionalism, conciseness, consistency of tone, consistency of important details, and factual accuracy. I find that to be the most helpful.

I'm really just using the LLM as a sounding board. Sometimes i'll replace a sentence using the feedback, less frequently I might replace a whole paragraph, but mostly I just use the feedback to manually tweak what I wrote.
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-06 01:20:28+00:00
It's a good thing we, the enlightened of HN, can see through the bullshit clearly though. /s

With tariffs, it's entirely possible that the loss of blue collar jobs due to offshoring more than offsets the cheap toys those folks get to import in exchange. Especially when the cost of housing, education, and medical care is rising regardless. It's not uncommon to hear labor leaders rail against NAFTA and be pro-tariff[1] for this reason.

[1] https://uaw.org/tariffs-mark-beginning-of-victory-for-autowo...
by jerieljan | 2025-08-06 01:20:37+00:00
> quickly test and run different models in the cloud that you could run locally if you had the correct hardware.

I feel like they're competing against Hugging Face or even Colaboratory then if this is the case.

And for cases that require strict privacy control, I don't think I'd run it on emergent models or if I really have to, I would prefer doing so on an existing cloud setup already that has the necessary trust / compliance barriers addressed. (does Ollama Turbo even have their Trust center up?)

I can see its potential once it gets rolling, since there's a lot of ollama installations out there.
by dillydogg | 2025-08-06 01:21:17+00:00
Also, it's hard to comprehend how much the virus changes within one infected person. It's a common talking point in HIV seminars: the diversity of HIV strains in one infected individual exceeds that of flu worldwide in any given year [1]. Additionally, the parts of the virus that are more or less universally conserved (and thus are good targets for a vaccine) are hidden except for the moments where the virus binds the target cell. If I wanted to fabricate a difficult to vaccine pathogen, it would be very similar to HIV-1.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11714622/
by tikhonj | 2025-08-06 01:21:49+00:00
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me, AI/LLMs have been firmly in the "nice but forgettable" camp. Like, sometimes it's marginally more convenient to use an LLM than to do a proper web search or to figure out how to write some code—but that's a small time saving at best, it's less of a net impact than Stack Overflow was.

I'm already a pretty fast writer and programmer without LLMs. If I hadn't already learned how to write and program quickly, perhaps I would get more use out of LLMs. But the LLMs would be saving me the effort of learning which, ultimately, is an O(1) cost for O(n) benefit. Not super compelling. And what would I even do with a larger volume of text output? I already write more than most folks are willing to read...

So, sure, it's not strictly zero utility, but it's far less utility than a long series of other things.

On the other hand, trains are fucking amazing. I don't drive, and having real passenger rail is a big chunk of why I want to move to Europe one day. Being able to get places without needing to learn and then operate a big, dangerous machine—one that is statistically much more dangerous for folks with ADHD like me—makes a massive difference in my day-to-day life. Having a language model... doesn't.

And that's living in the Bay Area where the trains aren't great. Bart, Caltrain and Amtrak disappearing would have an orders of magnitude larger effect on my life than if LLMs stopped working.

And I'm totally ignoring the indirect but substantial value I get out of freight rail. Sure, ships and trucks could probably get us there, but the net increase in costs and pollution should not be underestimated.
by jjk166 | 2025-08-06 01:22:01+00:00
Internal bracing is to resist buckling. You need it as your cylinder gets longer (as military subs tend to be), but has nothing to do with the diameter. It's also good for torsional strength, which is not really a concern for a pressure vessel but is important for a ship that's going to be in the actual ocean. But for just resisting pressure, once your diameter exceeds 20 times the wall thickness, the relationship is linear.

You can get better efficiency with multiple spherical pressure vessels joined together over a cylindrical vessel, as spherical pressure vessels better distribute the loads than cylinders. This is done in some particularly deep diving military subs, which are then surrounded by an unpressurized cylinder for hydrodynamics.
by throw0101d | 2025-08-06 01:22:38+00:00
From a few weeks ago, see "Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy" / "AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics" (365 points by throw0101c 18 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 355 comments):

* https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609130
by grepfru_it | 2025-08-06 01:23:47+00:00
Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up.

My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the FreeBSD mailing list thinking I was going to change the world. Man, instead I come back to everyone chewing me a new one, calling my friend too dumb to use FreeBSD, and other things that was not rooted in reality. I didn’t even try to defend my patch, I had spent so much time evangelizing FreeBSD up to that point that it really made me question my support of the project.

Anyway fast forward like 5 years, I was telling the story to coworkers when I decided to look up the su source. shocked-pikachu someone took my patch and applied it (without attribution). I have since moved on from FreeBSD entirely and my open sourced works have never been so negatively picked apart again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by karim79 | 2025-08-06 01:24:40+00:00
I found this article a couple of hours ago, it's fun to see it here as a thread.

I live in Germany and I sent the article to my former manager. His response, verbatim, was this:

"This pisses me off so deeply".

I went on to muse about the "academic quarter hour" and that now "six minutes is now German standard lateness".

All in good faith, and hell of a lot of fun.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-06 01:26:13+00:00
> Like there's no real physics limits on how big you can make a satellite.

There absolutely are. Launch weight, heat dissipation, energy storage and output are a few of the engineering boundaries that must be respected. You can't bigger one without impacting all the others.

It also has to fit in the launch vehicle with whoever is sharing a ride with it.

Our theoretically ginormous satellite might not much improve capacity (in the cell it's servicing) due to limitation in the assigned spectrum. You can only divide up time and frequencies so far.

Whatever you're doing here, you will need to duplicate that to cover the nearby cells. Then multiply that by a region and that by a country and that by a planet. It takes a lot of satellites to cover a lot of area from a low-ish altitude.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-06 01:26:52+00:00
So if I'm reading this right, subjects wore a VR headset and had simulated avatars approaching into their personal-space, where some looked neutral, healthy-but-afraid, and some visibly-diseased. Another set of subjects had no VR exposure, but were given a flu-vaccine shot.

It seems seeing "diseased" humans, much like getting a flu-shot, correlates with an increase in certain immune-activity measures in blood.