MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b112 | 2025-08-26 19:54:28+00:00
I can accept a bit of form-letter from help desks, or in certain business cases. And the same for crafting a generic, informative letter being sent to thousands.

But as soon it gets one on one, the use of AI should almost be a crime. It certainly should be a social taboo. It's almost akin to talking to a person, one on one, and discovering they have a hidden earpiece, and are being prompted on how to respond.

And if I send an email to an employee, or conversely even the boss of a company I work for, I won't abide someone pretending to reply, but instead pasting junk from an AI. Ridiculous.

There isn't enough context in the world, to enable an AI to respond with clarity and historical knowledge, to such emails. People's value has to do as much with their institutional knowledge, shared corporate experiences, and personal background, not genericized AI responses.

It's kinda sad to come to a place, where you begin to think the Unibomber was right. (Though of course, his methods were wrong)

edit:

I've been hit by some downvotes. I've noticed that some portion of HN is exceptionally AI pro, but I suspect instead it may have something to do with my Unabomber comment.

For context, at least what I gathered from his manifesto, there was a deep distrust of machines, and how they were interfering with human communication and happiness.

Fast forward to social media, mobile phones, AI, and more... and he seems to have been on to something.

From wikipedia:

"He wrote that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering."

Again, clearly his methods were wrong. Yet I see the degradation of US politics into the most simplistic, team-centric, childish arguments... all best able to spread hate, anger, and rage on social media. I see people, especially youth deeply unhappy from their exposure to social media. I see people spending more time with an electronic box in their hand, than with fellow humans.

We always say that we should approach new technology with open eyes, but we seldom mean this about examining negatives. And as a society we've ignored warnings, and negatives with social media, with phones, and we are absolutely not better off as a result.

So perhaps we should use those lessons, and try to ensure that AI is a plus, not a minus in this new world?

For me, replacing intimate human communication with AI, replacing one-on-one conversations with the humans we work with, play with, are friends with, with AI? That's sad. So very, very, very sad.

Once, many years ago a friend of mine was upset. A conservative politician was going door to door, trying to get elected. This politician was railing against the fact that there was a park down the street, paid for by the city. He was upset that taxes paid for it, and that the city paid to keep it up.

Sure, this was true, but my friend after said to me "We're trying to have a society here!".

And I think that's part of what bugs me about AI. We're trying to have a society here!, and part of that is communicating with each other.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-08-26 19:54:32+00:00
People dislike the word slop because it sounds harsh.

But what’s unique today becomes slop tomorrow, AI or not.

Art has meaning. Old buildings feel special because they’re rare. If there were a thousand Golden Gate Bridges, the first wouldn’t stand out, as much.

Online, reproduction is trivial. With AI, reproducing items in the physical world will get cheaper.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-08-26 19:54:39+00:00
Ok, so we're on the same page as to what we're referring to, but, to be clear, that 50% claim is incorrect[1], it's much lower than that.

Who is claiming that more than 50% of people are "less happy than average"? That's not a disorder. I'm fairly certain that the DSM doesn't make a claim like that, does the APA? It feels straw-manish.

I know that it's hard to diagnose these more intangible issues, but they are still very important regardless. If more than 50% of people in a society were unhappy, isn't it possible that the society is making them that way and it's not something wrong with the scale?

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3105841/
by worik | 2025-08-26 19:54:52+00:00
> I refuse to associate with Republicans i

I understand

I urge you to reconsider

The purpose of the policies are to create division that can then be exploited.

So fight them by building bridges and maintaining relationships

It is hard work, but it is the most effective way to fight these people who would sacrifice general peace and prosperity for the sake of their personal greed
by hrq | 2025-08-26 19:54:55+00:00
I believe something similar is happening in drug development right now. It may take less than 5, 10, 15 years to see the impact to the US. But from someone who has a vantage point to see it across many parts of the industry, including having seen the evolution of Intel / TSMC, I think it is a very similar story. Right now is like 2007 (or maybe even a bit later) for therapeutics. In the future, we will look back on this year as the year we gave it up.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-26 19:55:20+00:00
You can get a very safe ECE 22.06 rated helmet for $100-150. The more expensive helmets are lighter, more comfortable, have cool designs, and nice stuff like transitions visors or Pinlock anti-fog, but aren't really any safer until you get into FIM fhpre-02 rated helmets for MotoGP racing. (fhpre-01 is functionally identical to ECE 22.06)

The days of having to shell out $600 for an Arai or Shoei for superior protection are past us.
by xp84 | 2025-08-26 19:55:48+00:00
"Hi, this is Casey."

-Casey

If anyone does not listen to ATP, I cannot recommend that show enough. I'll add that you do have to have at least a tolerance for certain of the 3 hosts' assumptions, namely that one should be an Apple user for life. Not that they go easy on Apple, but they seem to be dedicated lifers no matter how bad Apple gets.
Ask HN: How are you attributing your AI usage when developing software?
by hartleybrody | 2025-08-26 19:55:48+00:00
I have started a convention of prefixing a commit message with "prompt:" for commits that are entirely AI generated (which I have read through and approved) and then I make my own manual changes and iterations in subsequent commits.

I feel like this is a reasonable attempt at disclosure, but it also seems like it's lacking. I usually include a summary, not the entire prompt (how would I included tool use?) I don't say which models or "agent" was used (cursor sidebar chat vs calude code, etc). Not sure if this matters though?

How have you been managing this in your own workflows?
by etiam | 2025-08-26 19:56:50+00:00
Oh, and it's probably worthwhile pondering what the viruses will do if this mechanism comes into widespread use.

While I was looking for the reference above this also came up:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200210144854.h...

when bat cells quickly release interferon upon infection, other cells quickly wall themselves off. This drives viruses to faster reproduction

Quite a way from whole-animal physiology in the referenced research, by all means, but it's a fair point, right.
by donkeybeer | 2025-08-26 19:57:38+00:00
Quality is to an extent a personal function, each person may have a different idea of what factors to consider in quality. But the word here is personal, I find it highly unpleasant when a state uses its might so transparently to force these choices.

You should also not discount price. You can afford to, I can afford to buy something more expensive because we consider some other aspects of the item more important. Again, if you had said this in terms of simply propping up a local even if less efficient industry alive, it makes sense, redundancy is a concept I can understand of course, I could have accepted it even if I don't agree fully. But I feel if it is presented as making the life of lower and middle classes easier, it is a total lie since they will be impacted most by these price increases. Some T-shirt firm in America will start earning more, but then where do the people of that firm spend it on? The other firms are also now higher priced if we fully commit to such extreme and wide ranging tariff programs. I am sorry if I come across as a bit vigorous in this, but I have seen how it is in high tariff countries so I have a strong feeling on this matter.
by throwanem | 2025-08-26 19:57:39+00:00
Oh, of course. And you personally verified their licensure, no doubt.

But the point is that there is licensure for electricians, who have maintained enough of a guild to defend the value - semantic, yes, but ultimately economic - of the term. That title matters the way this author wants "web developer" to, but "web developer" hasn't, doesn't, and never will again, and that's certainly not going to change in consequence of this author's fundamental misapprehension of genericization as a concept - not the legal principle with respect to trademark, but the underlying human behavior by whose recognition the establishment of that principle was informed.

edit: It doesn't improve the argument, either, to footnote in a refusal to defend it on its basis. If the claim holds for a role demanding no formal qualification, why defend it on the back of a comparison with a role which does so require? If the argument is that "web developer" should require qualification, why not say so outright? - preferably in about 2005, when it last would have had a chance to matter. Frankly I'm amazed this guy has been making a go of it for so long, but I guess he must have had to be a lot hungrier, to have stayed in a line I gave up now nearly 15 years ago for want of seeing any future there.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-26 19:57:48+00:00
The navigation is very nice and snappy. It gets out of the way. Most UIs for browsing and navigating material feel constricted, like you're handling some kind of radioactive material through those thick gloves mounted directly into the fume hood.

Other than that, I had forgotten what a shameless exercise in marketing these magazines were. You were basically buying a book of ads. Even the articles feel like copy under the thin veneer of "Oh, look at this cool thing!".
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-26 19:57:55+00:00
> I'm not saying this model can't work. It could work under two restrictions ...

I mean, this is fundamentally the same issue that banks have. You cash out the money you have a bank at any time you like, but the bank can't demand back the loans it issues. As long as enough people don't decide to move out at the same time, they should be fine and not get a "bank run". Also it says in the article that they all have a long wait-list, so they should be able to fill your spot pretty quickly (even if the current tenant doesn't find a replacement tenant).
by jawiggins | 2025-08-26 19:58:17+00:00
The US Government wanted companies to build fabs in the US so it offered them money to do it. Intel, which was one of those companies, but not the only one, took them up on the offer and was paid to begin construction on a fab in the US.

Normally when we pay businesses to do things we don't demand equity stakes in the businesses afterwards.

Notably, the biggest shareholders in Intel appear to be retirement funds of Americans - so Trump has just pilfered some money from the retirement accounts of Americans.
by atq2119 | 2025-08-26 19:58:30+00:00
> Basically anything that requires a massively parallel computation on undeterminable states that are only clear in hindsight.

If only. This description makes it sound as if quantum computers could help efficiently solve all problems in NP, which is not believed to be true.

Those "undeterminable" states need some non-trivial algebraic structure so that destructive interference of states can do its magic in a quantum computer. Finding such a structure is incredibly difficult, if it exists at all.
by tomByrer | 2025-08-26 19:58:48+00:00
eh, you're cool, don't worry about the naysayers

While yea it is nice to directly deliver to HTML (I've done it many times), reality is most UI is in other framework languages. Plus I think a strong use-case is making output / browsing inside UI AI interfaces, which are also likely in a framework.

You provided enough for others who really care to add a direct-to-HTML plugin/fork if they so choose. Many of us want to use frameworks.
by coldpie | 2025-08-26 19:59:00+00:00
> that doesn't explain the deliberate kneecapping of R&D, health, and academia

I think it does, those are all efforts to destroy trust in qualified experts. It's impossible for everyone to understand everything, so we have to trust experts. But the experts correctly point out that Republican policies are actually harmful to their own voters. So, Republican media bought into a ton of conspiracy theories, which are centered around exploiting difficult-to-understand systems and promoting "do your own research" type conspiratorial thinking. Once your voters no longer trust the experts, you can sell them anything you want, namely policies that move wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
by delusional | 2025-08-26 19:59:03+00:00
I hope I made it clear that the us decision make does seem to be driven by an "us or them", sometimes called "transactional" mindset. It's accurate to describe (at least the stated) rationale as "us or them".

What I don't like is when we start using the terminology if "winning" a trade war. A trade war, like an actual war, has no winners. We are all going to be poorer, both materially and culturally, from hurting each other.

So yes, the current American administration (which is currently a legitimate democratic representation of the American people) has started a trade war meant to inflict pain on everybody that doesn't align with them. The answer to that isn't "well actually the trade war is going to backfire and the whole world is going to be stronger than you" its "you're going to pay for this too. However much you hurt us, and it is non-zero, you are also going to hurt yourself. Not because I'm going to hurt you, but because we are all part of one system of trade".
by timr | 2025-08-26 19:59:16+00:00
> Current administration is not aligned with labor and poor people are the one who will pay the most.

You might want to tell labor. I just listened to an hour-long podcast with the Teamsters leader, where he revealed that over half of their members supported Trump in the most recent election:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-unions-went-for-tr...
by nativeit | 2025-08-26 19:59:24+00:00
He develops and iterates on an overlay for license plates that are invisible to human eyes, but render Flock cameras (and similar tech) unable to reliably interpret the images they collect.

It largely eliminates mass-scale tracking and location collecting, while leaving the ostensibly intended utility of license tags to law enforcement and broader society unaffected.

Edit: added specificity to the topic sentence
by keyringlight | 2025-08-26 19:59:32+00:00
Right now I wonder if a browser or chrome embedded framework (and then when applications that use it update past the cut-off version) is the 'killer app' that motivates upgrades. The CEF cut-off for win7/8/8.1 was when their extended support periods ended, and presumably they upgraded the underlying SDK they to rely on features not present pre-win10, and presumably oct 2028 (+3 years) is when the same will happen again
by falcor84 | 2025-08-26 19:59:55+00:00
> it's slightly annoying to have to write your own emails.

I find that to be a massive understatement. The amount of time, effort and emotional anguish that people expend on handling emails is astronomical. According to various estimates, email-handling takes somewhere around 25% of the work time of an average knowledge worker, going up to over 50% for some roles, and that most people check and reply to emails on evenings and over weekends at least occasionally.

I'm not sure it's possible, but it is my dream that I'd have a capable AI "secretary" that would process my email and respond in my tone based on my daily agenda, only interrupting for exceptional situations where I actually need to make a choice, or to pen a new idea to further my agenda.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-26 20:00:30+00:00
With my current project (a game project), I full-vibed as hard as I could to test out the concept, as well as get some of the data files in place and write a tool for managing the data. This went great, and I have made technology choices for AI-coding and have gained enough skill with AI-coding that I can get prettttty far this way. But it does produce a ball-of-mud pattern and a lot of cruft that will cause it to hit a brick wall.

Then I copied the tool and data to a new directory and fully started over, with a more concrete description of the product I wanted in place and a better view of what components I would want, and began with a plan to implement one small component at a time, each with its own test screen, reviewing every change and not allowing any slop through (including any features that look fine from a code standpoint but are not needed for the product).

So far I'm quite happy with this.
by xp84 | 2025-08-26 20:00:35+00:00
I'm sure whoever pitched this 'dedicated' feature in Cupertino had to make sure to state that customers would purchase a new iPhone for this role rather than... shudder reuse an old device. As we all know, Apple has a deep and abiding desire that the vast majority of used iPhones be shredded[1].

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/94386/the-truth-about-apples-fre...
by strange_quark | 2025-08-26 20:00:45+00:00
Anthropic is the worst about this. Every product release they have is like "Here's 10 issues we found with this model, we tried to mitigate, but only got 80% of the way there. We think it's important to still release anyways, and this is definitely not profit motivated." I think it's because Anthropic is run by effective altruism AI doomers and operates as an insular cult.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-08-26 20:00:50+00:00
I feel that "billion dollar companies wanting to milk as much labor from poor countries as they can" is one of the only forces in the world that will actually take the time to go out and look for African Einsteins instead of just giving the jobs to their friends and neighbors.

It doesn't follow that because I said you can find people without important work in low-GDP countries, that there is no important work there. If you've ever been in one though, there are always people whose job seems to be "watching a single goat" and would be much better off training AIs to identify cats.
by azemetre | 2025-08-26 20:00:58+00:00
For this analogy to hold, wouldn't there have to be some way to withhold all people from applying to a job? Why would a company want to do this if it just increases the cost of hiring? What is the benefit to paying more for a workforce when you can just hire people normally.

The alternative could be like a $2000 fine per listing violation. To make it worthwhile to enforce, offer half the fine as a tax credit that can be claimed anonymously after an investigation.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-26 20:01:04+00:00
He misunderstands Go const. It's not Javascript "thou shalt not re-assign this variable", Go constants are literally constants, values known at compile time, and a call to strconv.Atoi isn't something that can be used in a constant expression. Think of Go constants as giving a name to a literal value, `const ANSWER = 42`, the answer now behaves exactly like writing 42 at every place of use.

https://go.dev/ref/spec#Constants

https://go.dev/ref/spec#Constant_expressions
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-08-26 20:01:15+00:00
Because Microsoft is not a reliable partner;

Just recently:

- they removed dotnet hotreload overnight for it to become gated behind a visual studio license

- they forced jetbrains to stop shipping the dotnet debugger in their IDE overnight, screwing their plan for their IDE Rider, they had to write a debugger from scratch

- their language server is still closed source and VS only

1. https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/microsoft_net_hot_rel...

2. https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nu...
by r0ze-at-hn | 2025-08-26 20:01:24+00:00
TikTokification of the browser by AI is the killer feature, not writing an email. When on a page it automatically suggests the next site(s) to visit based on my history and the page I am on. And when I say killer, this kills google search by pivoting away from the urlbar and provides a new space to put ads. Spent years in the browser space, on Chrome, DDG, Blackberry and more developing browsers, prototype browser and features and this feature is at the top of my list of how AI can disrupt the browser, which disrupts Google's business core model. About 2 years ago I wrote a private blog for friends about how the browser as we knew it was dead. If anyone from the claude team is curious to chat send me a DM.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-26 20:01:33+00:00
It roughly goes like this: if phenomena can be truly emergent, which is to say that the phenomena is causally independent of the underlying physical system, then its reasonable to say that the emergent behavior is not determined by the physical law of the underlying system.

Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.
by os2warpman | 2025-08-26 20:01:51+00:00
>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.

My library had two forms of microfiche.

One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)

The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.

In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.
by nickserv | 2025-08-26 20:02:06+00:00
Exactly. Well not exactly. The desalinization plant produces brine (very salty water) as a waste product. Rather than disposing of it directly, they use the brine to generate electricity. This electricity is then used partly to run the desalinization plant.

As an imperfect car analogy, the way a turbocharger uses energy from the exhaust to inject energy into the intake, in the form of compressed air.

Neither is a perpetual motion engine, but both make the useful work more energy efficient.
by michaelt | 2025-08-26 20:02:58+00:00
Sometimes alternative markets have lower margins, as they need different products and lower prices.

America's average net salary is $53,000 and Portugal's is US$19,000.

If your TV factory can't ship to America for the time being, you might need to retool and make more 43" screens and fewer 85" screens. You'd prefer to be making the higher margin products, but at least you keep work coming in and keep your workers fed.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-26 20:03:00+00:00
Sure, just look at the examples in TFA like finding emails that demand a response or doing custom queries on Zillow.

You probably are just going to grant it read access.

That said, having thought about it, the most successful or scarier injections probably aren't going to involve things like crafting noisy destructive actions but rather silently changing what the LLM does during trusted/casual flows like reading your emails.

So I can imagine a dichotomy between pretty low risk things (Zillow/Airbnb queries) and things that demand scrutiny like doing anything in your email inbox where the LLM needs to read emails, and I can imagine the latter requiring such vigilance that you might be right.

It'll be very interesting and probably quite humbling to see this whole new genre of attacks pop up in the wild.