MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Fomite | 2025-08-06 05:07:49+00:00
I'd assert it's not really a good start. The problem is largely rooted in scarcity - that there are very grants, and jobs, etc. that need to be competed for, and maybe it's worth it to you to overlook those couple outliers. You are after all pretty sure you're right, and they don't really mess anything up, and if you get this paper out, you'll have that good faculty job, and you'll do good work, etc...

Funding collapsing is just going to incentivize that. To be as competitive as possible for increasingly scarce resources. You won't be able to run that replication study, or document that code, or let a grad student spend six months chasing down that odd result, because the funding for all that just got cut.
by wahern | 2025-08-06 05:08:56+00:00
For the larger drones, yes, Ukraine is seeing success with SPAAGs: https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/07/20/ukraine-drone-defense...

For the smaller drones it's an even more rapidly evolving, high-tech arms race. AFAIU, over the past year most of the battlefield drones have switched to kilometers-long fiber optic tethers to avoid electronic jamming. I dunno what all the defensive measures are, but one is using other drones to cut the cable. I think they may also be using directed energy weapons, now, though not sure how widespread that is.
by h4ny | 2025-08-06 05:11:00+00:00
I did read that and it doesn't change what I said about your comment on HN, I was calling out the fact that you are making a very bold statement without having done careful analysis.

You know you have a significant audience, so don't act like you don't know what you're doing when you chose to say "TLDR: I think OpenAI may have taken the medal for best available open weight model back from the Chinese AI labs" then defend what I was calling out based on word choices like "conclusions" (I'm sure you have read conclusions in academic journals?), "I think", and "speculation".
by finaard | 2025-08-06 05:11:16+00:00
Personally I find MCP a bit limiting - I'm using Emacs bindings, and then provide LLMs elisp functions to call.

I posted a demo here a while ago where I try to have it draw turtle graphics:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013939

Since then I've also provided enough glue that it can interact with the Arch Linux installer in a VM (or actual hardware, via serial port) - with sometimes hilarious results, but at least some LLMS do manage to install Arch with some guidance:

https://github.com/aard-fi/arch-installer

Somewhat amusingly, some LLMs have a tendency to just go on with it (even when it fails), with rare hallucinations - while other directly start lying and only pretend they logged in.
by maxdo | 2025-08-06 05:11:21+00:00
The drone cost in hundreds of dollars , low hundreds , even optic one cost $300-400 at manufacturing.

Train a soldier is hundreds of thousands.

Manufacturing , both Ukraine and Russia , generally speaking technological midgets, producing as of today millions a year. Ukraines projected output is around 4 millions in 2025

China can easily produce tens of millions. Even if 1 out 4 hit your target , that’s any army of any size in the world obliterated without new recruits.
by HKH2 | 2025-08-06 05:12:09+00:00
> Is there something lost, when it's not the adult telling the child a bedtime improv story? (IME, kids love this.)

Kids use their imagination because they're encouraged to do so. It's somewhat of a challenge to find the cusp between what is plain and what is incomprehensible (think of the ZPD but for creativity).
by simonw | 2025-08-06 05:12:32+00:00
My main goal with that benchmark is to see if it can produce HTML and JavaScript code that runs without errors for a moderately complex challenge.

It's not a comprehensive benchmark - there are many ways you could run it in ways that would be much more informative and robust.

It's great as a quick single sentence prompt to get a feeling for if the model can produce working JavaScript or not.
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-06 05:12:33+00:00
Yes, this, precisely. Our increasingly dystopian present features a fair amount of Big Brother, but Brave New World's soma is what drives and enables it, along w/ aspects of Gilliam's "Brazil"....

There is also so much that's womderful and amazing and positive. No light w/out darkness, "no mud, no lotus", etc. -- which IMHO it's increasingly important to focus on, deliberately.
by mbac32768 | 2025-08-06 05:12:40+00:00
The skepticism people have towards metabolic dysregulation models of obesity is too much.

We know for a fact the inverse happens: girl starves herself for years to slim down to become a ballerina, eventually decides it's not worth it and tries to stop being so dangerously thin and... can't. She never feels hungry. Every time she eats she can only stomach a few bites before pushing it away. Just eat ice cream? Instant puke. She cannot gain weight no matter what.

Obviously she broke her metabolic system and she obviously did it through diet.

Yes it's possible for some skinny people to gain weight. But that doesn't mean every skinny person simply can decide to be fat just by eating. It's like climbing Mount Everest for some skinny people to put weight on, even if they really desperately want to.

I don't think the situation with obese people is all that different.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-06 05:12:52+00:00
OSHA requires the building to be habitable, to have relatively narrow temperature and humidity bands for an office building. it requires on-site bathroom facilities. You can't just locate your employees in an uninsulated warehouse with a hole in the ground out back to do office work, not if you don't want the feds up your ass.

If we, as a society, decide that burning tons of fossil fuels to go to and from buildings just to do the same computer stuff we can do at home is actually bad for society... Is it outside the purview of government to disincentivize offices completely?

"We already know what you are, we're just negotiating on the price."
by astrange | 2025-08-06 05:13:05+00:00
Having a long memory about this, the reason Lisp died out even though it was supposedly the best programming environment ever, is that Lisp programmers (called "Lisp weenies" at the time) were so unbelievably emotionally abusive that nobody believed them about it or wanted to interact with them. You couldn't ask them for help with anything without them calling you a moron who should kill yourself.

(The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".)

That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-06 05:13:08+00:00
There's no point in regretting a situation where you believed in the good faith of other people.

If you do that, you will eventually lose with depression or other heavily overfitted reactions.

I build open source for myself, and for myself first. Not for others, not for appreciation, not for "likes" or similar.

I don't expect anything in return. If you want to be part of it, start to contribute. But with everything in life, trust has to be earned slowly over time.

Having said that, I always believe in the good of people. Though I am pretty sad and disappointed how some parts of the internet made me their artificial enemy because I don't submit to social pressure and couldn't care less about the chan folks.

Always remember: The loudest on the internet are not the most.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-08-06 05:14:11+00:00
The problem is not the cameras, it's the contracts.

The very simple solution is to prohibit camera companies getting a cut of ticket fines, direct funds to the state coffers, and mandate cameras can only be installed after proving via paperwork with photos that the stretch of road has proper signage.

Red light cameras? They drastically reduce t-bone impacts (which have high rates of serious injury and death) while slightly increasing rear-end collisions (which have very low injury rates and were the fault of the drivers speeding and following too closely, and/or driving distracted.) Not the fault of a traffic camera...
by dave_universetf | 2025-08-06 05:14:56+00:00
I wrote MetalLB, a bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes, because I needed one for myself. It gained some popularity because for a couple years, it was the only way to get working L4 LB outside of clouds. These days I believe a couple of the CNIs added support for external BGP peering and integration with k8s's LB machinery, but that came years later.

As a result, I became network troubleshooting tech support for a large chunk of people trying to run kubernetes on bare metal. If you've not looked at k8s's networking, debugging even your own cluster's networking is a nightmare, never mind debugging someone else's over slack, while (usually) simultaneously having to give them a crash course in intermediate/advanced networking stuff like asymmetric routing and tracing packets through netfilter so that you can then tell them that networks can't do the thing they wanted and no amount of new features I can add will change that.

Meanwhile companies selling bare metal k8s services started bundling MetalLB, but kept sending their customers to my bugtracker instead of taking some of the load themselves.

The experience burned me out severely. It's been several years and I still have a visceral negative reaction to the idea of open-sourcing code I wrote, and when I infrequently do they come with a fairly blunt "contributions no welcome" message and a disabled issue tracker. I handed over the keys to MetalLB a long while back now. I hope the new maintainers and the project are doing okay.

I'll mention a positive of that time as well, to balance it out: as an experiment I opened a pinned issue asking happy users to drop me a note (https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/5), and many did. It was nice occasionally getting a notification that wasn't a complaint or demand for support. At one point someone left me a note that it was being used to support research projects at NASA JPL and DARPA. That was pretty neat.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-06 05:15:02+00:00
To paraphrase Randall Munroe, “it’s not literally illegal to do this” is the weakest possible defense of something.

I sure as hell can tell people not to have an opinion. That is my constitutional right. If someone has strong beliefs about something and votes accordingly, and they don’t put in the effort needed to find out the basic facts about the matter, then they are stupid and that’s bad.
by ses1984 | 2025-08-06 05:15:32+00:00
The side effects of adderall are pretty bad. If I'm on a dose that's high enough to suppress my appetite, then I get a very bad crash in the evening. I start to feel like if I want to enjoy life after work, I need to take another adderall to feel normal. That disrupts sleep, and then things start to get really bad.
by wainguo | 2025-08-06 05:17:02+00:00
Haha this hits home.

Just renewed a 10-year domain to build a tiny website screenshot tool for my non-tech friends. No login, no tracking, just “paste URL → get image.” https://websitescreenshot.online, Will anyone use it? Probably not. But I love it anyway.

Most of my side projects end up as ghost towns too, but each one leaves a trail of git commits, lessons, and a bit of joy.

Keep building. We’re all in the same club.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-06 05:17:30+00:00
These things are popping up all over the place now that the recovery funds from feds are gone. My city just implemented them and it’s a shitshow.

It’s hard to argue about it because many people are sick of post-Covid driving behavior. Most traffic enforcement ceased during the pandemic and was slow to resume. I made a few trips from upstate to lower Manhattan in under two hours - you could just set the cruise at 95 and go.

In my state, I think it will undercut complete streets and traffic calming in road engineering. One major avenue in my city is being reconstructed, I’m curious as to whether the city will allow the engineering changes to the road that will improve it and cost $750k-$1M of annual ticket revenue.

There’s also the never mentioned surveillance issue. Most devices log 30 days of video and LPR every vehicle.
by bruce511 | 2025-08-06 05:18:03+00:00
As it stands right now, if the code was under a GPL license, nothing stops them paying the author to get it under another license.[1]

Sure, they could offer a job as payment for said license, or just pay cash.

This approach would be "necessary" (for some definition of necessary) for GPL code, but isn't necessary for MIT code.

[1] this assumes there's 1 (or nearly 1) copyright owner. If there are multiple contributors, and no CUA in place, this approach is generally not possible.

Personally, and different people have strong feelings on this both ways, with GPL code I'd get contributors to sign a CUA. It keeps the door open for commercial opportunities like this, especially if the code is "mostly yours".
by robotapertama | 2025-08-06 05:18:07+00:00
Amen to that. I would have said a “sizeable population” instead. If you cannot outrun a cassowary, you deserve to get eaten. Another reason why I refuse to believe that obesity is a genetically predisposed disease because that gene would have been eliminated a long time ago from our nomadic days by the sabre tooth lions and packs of hyenas.
by userbinator | 2025-08-06 05:18:16+00:00
A robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations[...]it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize.

We've had formant synths for several decades, and they're perfectly understandable and require a tiny amount of computing power, but people tend not to want to listen to them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth

https://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam (try it yourself to hear what it sounds like)
by jaimex2 | 2025-08-06 05:19:36+00:00
It's all fun and games till the LLM can't fix the issue it created. It can regurgitate and mash up all the blog tutorials that exist online but eventually it'll come across a new problem and it'll be sweet out of luck.

Vibe coding is great for Shanty town software and the aftermath from storms is equally entertaining to watch.
by lutusp | 2025-08-06 05:20:13+00:00
> ... Randi was a positively harmful influence on logic, so I feel justified in pointing out that Randi was a force for irrationality.

You mean, by posting a one million dollar paranormal challenge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_...) that offered a million dollars to anyone who demonstrated a paranomal effect in scientifically valid laboratory conditions? And who opened the contest to over a thousand candidates, all of whom failed?

Sorry -- that's not how a scientist defines irrationality. In essence, Randi's challenge was, "Put up or shut up." A thousand put up, none succeeded, and since then they won't shut up -- which, in fairness, is their right. Meanwhile, no rational person misses the irony that the complainers produce everything but evidence.

In discussions about, for example, dark matter, personalities don't matter, because we have evidence. By contrast, in debates about the paranormal, personalities are everything, because of a perfect evidence vacuum.

Remember, when you bring up Randi, you're acknowledging a spectacular evidence vacuum. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
by knowitnone2 | 2025-08-06 05:20:23+00:00
No matter how good or fast you are, you will never beat the LLM. What you're saying is akin to "your math is faster than a calculator" and I'm willing to bet it's not. LLMs are not perfect and will require intervention and fixing but if it can get you 90% there, that's pretty good. In the coming years, you'll soon find your peers are performing much faster than you (assuming you program for a living) and you will have no choice but you do you.
by jona777than | 2025-08-06 05:21:44+00:00
One of my favorite use cases includes simple tasks like generating effective mock/masked data from real data. Then passing the mock data worry-free to the big three (or wherever.)

There’s also a huge opportunity space for serving clients with very sensitive data. Health, legal, and government come to mind immediately. These local models are only going to get more capable of handling their use cases. They already are, really.
by Fomite | 2025-08-06 05:22:02+00:00
'It's debatable whether or not they'll achieve that, but if you actually look at what the goal is, the investment makes sense.'

The first clause of that sentence negates the second.

The investment only makes sense if the the expectation of success * the investment < the payoff of that goal.

If I don't think the major AI labs will succeed, then it's not justified.
by cthalupa | 2025-08-06 05:22:05+00:00
This is such an absurd statement.

If changing your habits was much easier then we wouldn't need these medications and the world wouldn't keep getting fatter. People have known how to not be fat for a long time, yet the obesity rate has been rising worldwide, even in countries that have traditionally been skinny.

It's not like fat people on the whole are ignorant of how to become not-fat and never attempt to do so.
by pamelafox | 2025-08-06 05:22:14+00:00
Lol, yes, the dragon's torso turned into a man. That man does show up earlier in the story - I think perhaps the model so closely associates dragon stories with stories of men, it just desperately wanted to add one in? The text itself never actually mentions the man/dragon/torso.

If Gemini added a reflection step to its book drawing routine, I think the model could easily notice the errors, and generate images to correct them - the errors do not seem unsurmountable.

Given that, I'm assuming Amazon is or will soon be filled with decently illustrated somewhat amusing stories.
by parineum | 2025-08-06 05:22:19+00:00
Now all the money that went to to public safety initiatives from the general fund can go elsewhere. Money turns out to be fungible.

Any time a tax/fee/fine is earmarked for something, it doesn't mean that thing gets more funding. It'll get the same funding but it won't come from the general fund. It's a cruel lie to get people to vote for things they think will get the government to actually serve them.
by troyastorino | 2025-08-06 05:22:59+00:00
Put a comment on this below, but the claim is highly misleading...consumer spending is ~$5 trillion, AI investment is ~$100 billion. The graph is looking at something like contribution to GDP growth (not contribution to GDP), but that is even misleading b/c if you don't adjust for seasonality, H1 consumer spending is almost always lower than H2 consumer spending of the previous year (because Q4 always has a higher level of consumer spending).

(comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804528 )
by Animats | 2025-08-06 05:23:29+00:00
The Ukrainians report that about 70% of their kills are now by drones. Current Ukrainian drone production rate was 1.7 million last year. Target for this year is above 4 million.[1] Russian comment: “Their reconnaissance drones are in the sky 24/7, and any movement on our part is immediately met with a massive wave of [first-person-view] drones.”

Tactics when you have large numbers of expendable drones are totally different from the old days of snooping around with a few drones.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/12/45-million-...
by esseph | 2025-08-06 05:23:59+00:00
This is not true.

The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.

A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.

If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.

Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.

Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.

People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.

Edit:

I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-06 05:24:17+00:00
Ehhh... I wouldn't use it for anything important right now. It often screws up by truncating code files then asking itself "where did all those functions go?" and having to rewrite them from scratch.

When it works, it's great though. I've used it to vibe-code some nice little desktop apps to automate things I needed and it produced way more polished UI than I would have spent the time doing, and the code is pretty much how I would have written it myself. I just set it going and go do some other task for 10 mins and come back to see what changes it made.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-06 05:24:49+00:00
I work on a product that uses AI to write interactive stories and I think it's a perfect description.

People hear my product "writes stories" and always ask why the site doesn't have any features to share a full story: because it wouldn't make sense.

It'd be like listening to a stream of every song a person has ever played for themselves. Maybe they didn't write the songs, but they chose them based on the moment. Sometimes they start a song and skip half way because they already got the emotion, sometimes they repeat the saddest part 10 times.

They weren't trying to build a playlist for others to consume, it was for them, and only they could have come up with it.