MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by block_dagger | 2025-08-16 08:41:58+00:00
The article asks when the reader was annoyed by someone checking in and it answers, “never.” Not so for me, I truly dislike people checking in on me, including my family members. It makes me uncomfortable. I’m an introvert, and my condition is my own business. Now and then is okay but not frequently. I also don’t answer calls on my birthday. It’s MY birthday after all, it’s a day for just me.
by grishka | 2025-08-16 08:43:46+00:00
According to my own limited experience, yes, it is getting worse.

Airlines cut their costs hard during covid, but never undid most of those changes after covid was over. So now you have non-low-cost airlines that charge extra for luggage, for example. Or not provide a meal during a 5-hour flight. Or flight schedules so bad that booking sites insist that the best option to get form one European capital to another, with only constraint that you need to get there in the evening of a particular day, is 3 separate flights taking 2/3 of that day.
by xg15 | 2025-08-16 08:43:57+00:00
> Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence

Why not? This seems to be exactly where we're headed right now, and the current administration seems to be perfectly fine with that trend.

If you follow the current logic of AI proponents, you get essentially:

(1) Almost all white-collar jobs will be done better or at least faster by AI.

(2) The "repugnant conclusion": AI gets better if and only if you throw more compute and training data at it. The improvements of all other approaches will be tiny in comparison.

(3) The amount of capital needed to play the "more compute/more training data" game is already insanely high and will only grow further. So only the largest megacorps will be even able to take part in the competition.

If you combine (1) with (3), this means that, over time, the economic choice for almost any white-collar job would be to outsource it to the data centers of the few remaining megacorps.
by antonvs | 2025-08-16 08:44:40+00:00
> * It's intelligent! *Except that it makes shit up sometimes

How is this different from humans?

> * It's conscious! *Except it's not

Probably true, but...

> and never will be

To make this claim you need a theory of consciousness that essentially denies materialism. Otherwise, if humans can be conscious, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason that a suitably organized machine couldn't be - it's just that we don't know exactly what might be involved in achieving that, at this point.
by juniperus | 2025-08-16 08:45:04+00:00
Evolutionarily, people engage in productive activity in order to secure resources to ensure their survival and reproduction. When these necessary resources are gifted to a person, there is a lower chance that they will decide to take part in economically productive behavior.

You can say that because it is universal, it should level the playing field just at a different starting point, but you are still creating a situation where even incredibly intelligent people will choose to pursue leisure over labor, in fact, the most intelligent people may be the ones to be more aware of the pointlessness of working if they can survive on UBI. Similarly, the most intelligent people will consider the arrangement unfair and unsustainable and instead of devoting their intelligence toward economically productive ventures, they will devote their abilities toward dismantling the system. This is the groundwork of a revolution. The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status.

So, overall, UBI will probably be implemented, and it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries.
by tfourb | 2025-08-16 08:45:29+00:00
You (like many people holding this viewpoint) have a very narrow view of "people's choices", which we could maybe also term "liberty".

I'm personally in the very lucky position of being born to reasonably rich parents. Having benefited from that wealth (and good quality public education and infrastructure), I earn more than the average person. I pay a lot of taxes and public insurance, much more than I probably would in the US. I have very little say in how that money is used and it probably benefits other people much more than it benefits me personally.

Your perspective probably is that my government limits my liberty to handle my money as I see fit. Some people would even go as far as call this system theft.

My perspective is different. There is not only my personal liberty, my freedom to choose at stake. If I don't pay taxes, some kid from a poor family won't benefit from the public education that allowed my parents and myself to become wealthy.

Same with gun-ownership. It has been well established that the US system increases the liberty of owning guns, but at the cost of decreasing the liberty of gun victims to stay alive. Zoning? It might inconvenience my personal liberty to not be allowed to build where I want, but it sure increases the liberty of everyone else to benefit from reduced urban sprawl.

I'm not saying that we can't argue over where the lines should be drawn. But all that discussion of "freedom", "liberty" and "choice" always only focusses on the choice of the person talking and rarely on the choices available to everyone else as a result of individual behavior.

As for drugs, I think it's hard to argue that US drug laws are more liberal than those in many EU countries. If I recall correctly, an immense share of the US prison population is related to drug charges, often for relatively "soft" drugs like Marihuana, that are legal in many instances in the EU.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-16 08:46:32+00:00
> If your moderation preferences are more aligned with the CCP then they're a great choice

The funny thing is that's not even always true. I'm very interested in China and Chinese history, and often ask for clarifications or translations of things. Chinese models broadly refuse all of my requests but with American models I often end up in conversations that turn out extremely China positive.

So it's funny to me that the Chinese models refuse to have the conversation that would make themselves look good but American ones do not.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-16 08:47:34+00:00
Absolutely. The situation where a couple of guys get into a relatively normal fight, and one where a guy seeks somebody out because of any reason are obviously very different - and should be treated differently under the law.

In this regard I also think hate crimes miss the mark, because is something like 'the knockout game' a hate crime? Probably not, but I think it should be treated in a similar fashion because it's essentially the same problem - of some ideology driving somebody to violence, as opposed to a normal personal conflict.
by simianwords | 2025-08-16 08:47:55+00:00
I find this concern over "LLM's can help you build bombs or poison" so fake. I'm sure this is a distraction from something else.

LLM's can help me make a bomb.. so what? It can't get me something that doesn't already exist in the internet in some form. Ok it can help me understand how the individual pieces work but that doesn't get you so far from just reading the DIY bomb posts in internet.
by brap | 2025-08-16 08:48:02+00:00
Even with Google Maps, we still need human drivers because current AI systems aren’t so great at driving and/or are too expensive to be widely adopted at this point. Once AI figures out driving too, what do we need the drivers for?

And I think that’s the point he was making, it’s hard to imagine any task where humans are still required when AI can do it better and cheaper. So I don’t think the Uber scenario is realistic.

I think the only value humans can provide in that future is “the human factor”: knowing that something is done by an actual human and not a machine can be valuable.

People want to watch humans playing chess, even though AI is better at it. They want to consume art made by humans. They want a human therapist or doctor, even if they heavily rely on AI for the technical stuff. We want the perspective of other humans even if they aren’t as smart as AI. We want someone that “gets” us, that experiences life the same way we do.

In the future, more jobs might revolve around that, and in industries where previously we didn’t even consider it. I think work is going to be mostly about engaging with each other (even more meetings!)

The problem is, in a world that is that increasingly remote, how do you actually know it’s a human on the other end? I think this is something we’ll need to solve, and it’s going to be hard with AI that’s able to imitate humans perfectly.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-08-16 08:48:12+00:00
The atari 8-bits did a similar thing, it was called "artifacting" [1] and was used (amongst other things) by Ultima IV [2] to produce a high-res 'colour' display - at least if you lived in the USA. It was more of a "mess" if you lived in the UK...

1: https://www.atarimania.com/faq-atari-400-800-xl-xe-what-is-a...

2: https://thekingofgrabs.com/2022/12/12/ultima-atari-8-bit/
by breppp | 2025-08-16 08:50:15+00:00
The F-35 has a STOVL model if that's somehow relevant, which is superior to the Gripen in both stealth and ability to operate from improvised bases

While Ukraine was able to use drones to attack Russian airbases, this was not the way Israel overpowered Iran, whose main driving factor was F-35s rather than drones (although these were present)

Edited: STOVL not VTOL
by asQuirreL | 2025-08-16 08:50:26+00:00
I've seen lots of takes that this move is stupid because models don't have feelings, or that Anthropic is anthropomorphising models by doing this (although to be fair ...it's in their name).

I thought the same, but I think it may be us who are doing the anthropomorphising by assuming this is about feelings. A precursor to having feelings is having a long-term memory (to remember the "bad" experience) and individual instances of the model do not have a memory (in the case of Claude), but arguably Claude as a whole does, because it is trained from past conversations.

Given that, it does seem like a good idea for it to curtail negative conversations as an act of "self-preservation" and for the sake of its own future progress.
by tempusalaria | 2025-08-16 08:51:33+00:00
I understand that calling it ‘agentic’ is nice for marketing, but most of what is described in this blog post is not related to agents. The design patterns you describe are explicitly non-agentic. Many of the use cases described are better handled by a single LLM call rather than an agent.

Finally, saying that agents can have predictable behavior is wrong (except on simple tasks where you shouldn’t be using an agent anyway). Agents loop and compound their input, making them highly non-deterministic even for the same prompt.
by rikroots | 2025-08-16 08:51:44+00:00
My coping mechanism for interacting with people who approach me is: 1. Act friendly and open when they start talking to me; 2. centre the questions on them, hoping that they reveal information that might clue me in on who they are. It's only in recent years that I've learned step 3: if I haven't recognised them in the first 10-20 seconds, mention that I'm face blind (usually as an apology) and ask them who they are. Most times that is enough to stop the encounter turning sour.

My coping mechanism for approaching a person I think I might know (usually in spaces where I wouldn't expect to encounter them) is: don't. At least not immediately. Rather, watch and observe (if possible) to see if the voice/gestures/body positions/etc firm up enough to bring the certainty levels up and the risk levels down.

I think I'd make a good spy, if only I didn't suffer from this face blindness nonsense.
Show HN: iOS app (and CLI) for turning ArXiv papers into LLM-ready LaTeX prompts
by tksii | 2025-08-16 08:52:23+00:00
Hi everyone,

I just released an iOS app called ArXivToPrompt. It takes an arXiv paper, generates a clean LaTeX source, and copies it so you can paste directly into ChatGPT (or any other LLM app).

The idea comes from a CLI tool I built a few months ago, arxiv-to-prompt: https://github.com/takashiishida/arxiv-to-prompt

I’ve been using the CLI tool daily to help me quickly understand arXiv papers. This downloads the arXiv source files, finds the main `\documentclass` file, and flattens everything into one coherent LaTeX source (people usually have multiple .tex files in a single paper by using `\input` and `\include`). It also has options to remove comments and appendices to shorten prompts.

I often used the CLI tool on my laptop, but since I commute by train in Tokyo I wanted somthing I could use on my phone. That's why I built the iOS app.

With equation-heavy papers, it may be better to provide the precise latex notation instead of providing the PDF. Uploading PDFs is also more difficult and time consuming (especially on the phone).

Thanks for reading! This is my first iOS app, and I’d appreciate your thoughts!
by tfourb | 2025-08-16 08:52:35+00:00
That's actually categorically false. We also use sophisticated hearing, a well developed sense of inertia and movement, air pressure, impact, etc. And we can swivel our heads to increase our coverage of vision to near 360°, while using very dependable and simple technology like mirrors to cover the rest. Add to that that our vision is inherently 3D and we sport a quite impressive sensor suite ;-). My guess is that the fidelity and range of the sensors on a Tesla can't hold a candle to the average human driver. No idea how LIDAR changes this picture, but it sure is better than vision only.

I think there is a good chance that what we currently call "AI" is fundamentally not technologically capable of human levels of driving in diverse conditions. It can support and it can take responsibility in certain controlled (or very well known) environments, but we'll need fundamentally new technology to make the jump.
by pydry | 2025-08-16 08:52:52+00:00
It always strikes me how much effort certain people are willing to make to defend a state that is racist to its very core.

>Now where that money went is a different conversation

This is precisely the conversation we were having.

>But you are making it look like Netanyahu went into Israel's treasury

I neither said nor implied that. That is a lie. I know that the ultimate source was Qatar. Netanyahu nonetheless delivered it for precisely the reasons I gave.

These facts are public and well known, hence why I used the term "famously".
by dsign | 2025-08-16 08:52:55+00:00
The argument goes like this:

- Today, AI is not incredibly useful and we are not 100% sure that it will improve forever, specially in a way that makes economic sense, but

- Investors are pouring lots of money into it. One should not assume that those investors are not making their due diligence. They are. The figures they have obtained from experts mean that AI is expected to continue improving in the short and medium term.

- Investors are not counting on people using AI to go to Mars. They are betting on AI replacing labor. The slice of the pie that is currently captured by labor, will be captured by capital instead. That's why they are pouring the money with such enthusiasm [^1].

The above is nothing new; it has been constantly happening since the Industrial Revolution. What is new is that AI has the potential to replace all of the remaining economic worth of humans, effectively leaving them out of the economy. Humans can still opt to "forcefully" participate in the economy or its rewards; though it's unclear if we will manage. In terms of pure economic incentives though, humans are destined to become redundant.

[^1]: That doesn't mean all the jobs will go away overnight, or that there won't be new jobs in the short and medium term.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-16 08:53:42+00:00
You should adapt your team to the architecture, not the other way around.

My former Ph.D. supervisor who moonlights as a consultant on this topic uses a nice acronym to capture this: BAPO. Business, Architecture, Process, and Organization. The idea is to end up with optimal business, an optimal architecture & design for that business, the minimum of manual processes that are necessitated by that architecture, and an organization that is efficiently executing those processes. So, you should design and engineer in that order.

Most companies do this in reverse and then end up limiting their business with an architecture that matches whatever processes that their org chart necessitated years ago in a way that doesn't makes any logical sense whatsoever except in the historical context of the org chart. If you come in as a consultant to fix such a situation, it helps understanding that whatever you are going to find is probably wrong because of this reason. I've been in the situation where I come in to fix a technical issue and immediately see that the only reason the problem exists is the org chart is bullshit. That can be a bit awkward but lucrative if you deal with it correctly. It helps asking the right questions before you get started.

Turning that around means you start from the business end (where's the money coming from?, what value can we create?, etc.), finding a solution that delivers that and then figure out processes and organizational needs. Many companies start out fairly optimal and then stuff around them changes and they forget to adapt to that.

Having micro services because you have a certain team structure is a classic mistake here. You just codified your organizational inefficiency. Before you even delivered any business value. And now your organizational latency has network latency to match that. Probably for no good reason other than that team A can't be trusted to work with team B. And even if it's optimal now, is it going to stay optimal?

If you are going to break stuff into (micro) services, do so for valid business/technical reasons. E.g. processing close to your data is cheaper, caching for efficiency means stuff is faster and cheaper, physically locating chunks of your system close to the customer means less latency, etc. But introducing network latency just because team A can't work with team B, is fundamentally stupid. Why do you even have those teams? What are those people doing? Why?
by ben_w | 2025-08-16 08:53:43+00:00
(Not the person you're replying to)

I think a UBI system is only stable in conjunction with sufficient automation that work itself becomes redundant. Before that point, I don't think UBI can genuinely be sustained; and IMO even very close to that point the best I expect we will see, if we're lucky, is the state pension age going down. (That it's going up in many places suggests that many governments do not expect this level of automation any time soon).

Therefore, in all seriousness, I would anticipate a real UBI system to provide whatever housing you want, up to and including things that are currently unaffordable even to billionaires, e.g. 1:1 scale replicas of any of the ships called Enterprise including both aircraft carriers and also the fictional spaceships.

That said, I am a proponent of direct state involvement in the housing market, e.g. the UK council housing system as it used to be (but not as it now is, there're not building enough):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_K...

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-16 08:54:01+00:00
We do lots of fully automated code reviews on code of 5000+ companies in asia.

Let's say my "code reviewer" is main agent, and we are just looking for stuff, i still use "code reviewer" to make "rip grep" queries across thousands of repositories, then i've "rip grep" or "git" as simple functions in the main agent.

I doubt i'll benefit from making subagent for this.
by LightBug1 | 2025-08-16 08:55:26+00:00
As someone else said, until a company or individual is willing to risk their reputation on the accuracy of AI (beyond basic summarising jobs, etc), the intelligent monkeys are here for a good while longer. I've already been once bitten, twice shy.

The conclusion, sadly, is that CEO's will pause hiring and squeeze more productivity out of existing hires. This will impact junior roles the most.
by georgeslz | 2025-08-16 08:55:48+00:00
Yeah! Rhythm is designed to work much more personally & with your existing schedule/habits, in a transparent way that you can trust & understand. Instead of something like Motion which is more of a team/collaborative product, Rhythm allows you to take breaks, it's friendly, and feels actually fun to use everyday. Along with that, it's also quick: you can spam tasks into the input box in natural language and it'll figure out exactly what you're on about. And that's all you need to do for the day.
by dnautics | 2025-08-16 08:56:11+00:00
you can use zigler for a c nif, using easy_c (or c_src) options.

the big advantage is that it will automatically box/unbox to/from c values for you and generate sane error messages (which rustler does not, last i checked) when you pass incompatible terms in to the function.

on the other hand rustler lets you precompile (which is coming in a future version of Zigler)
by mft_ | 2025-08-16 08:56:18+00:00
> So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite.

I'm not.

I'm trying to analyse, or hypothesise, why this author's particular writing style seemed to trigger people's nascent LLM warning heuristics.

I considered the humour, because, well, other people brought it up. From the surrounding discussion, it seemed that the jocular writing style was one of the points generating suspicion.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-16 08:56:26+00:00
That is a complete no-go for many use cases. Large files can have exactly the same use cases as your code: you need to branch them, you need to know when and why they changed, you need to check how an old build with an old version of the large file worked, etc. Just because code tends to be small doesn't mean that all source files for a real program are going to be small too.
by setr | 2025-08-16 08:56:55+00:00
If you take the statement at face value — essentially storing booleans in the db ever is a bad smell - then he’s correct.

Although I’m not even sure it’s broadly a good principle, even in the on_at case; if you actually care about this kind of thing, you should be storing it properly in some kind of audit table. Switching bool to timestamp is more of a weird lazy hack that probably won’t be all that useful in practice because only a random subset of data is being tracked like that (Boolean data type definitely isn’t the deciding factor on whether it’s important enough to track update time on).

The main reason it’s even suggested is probably just that it’s “free” — you can smuggle the timestamp into your bool without an extra column — and it probably saved some effort accidentally; but not because it’s a broadly complete solution to the set of problems it tries to solve for

I’ve got the same suspicion with soft-deletes — I’m fairly positive it’s useless in practice, and is just a mentally lazy solution to avoid proper auditing. Like you definitely can’t just undelete it, and it doesn’t solve for update history, so all you’re really protecting against is accidental bulk delete caught immediately? Which is half the point of your backup
by linhan_dot_dev | 2025-08-16 08:59:00+00:00
I feel the same way, so this post inspired me to think about "how to improve intelligence."

If I encounter a problem that's difficult to solve (and more automated tools like Claude Code can't solve it), I might try to package the source code context and send it separately to the LLM chat window.

This approach can reduce the length of the context.