MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ineedasername | 2025-08-21 22:43:17+00:00
>If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you.

Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing.

For the second half of your comment it sounds like you’re saying you got results that were too good to be AI- that’s a bit “no true Scotsman”, at least without more detail. But implementing an algorithm, even a complex one, is very much something an LLM can do. Algorithms are much better defined and scoped natural language, and LLMs do a reasonable job of translating to languages. An algorithm is a narrow subset of that task type with better defined context and syntax.
by XorNot | 2025-08-21 22:43:58+00:00
Yes but the claim is those are hard to track details, and then what's described is a timeline of consistent interaction with the money which you're now planning to claim you have no knowledge of.

And some of those interactions are taxable events - e.g. if you are exchanging out of cryptocurrency denominations, then by US tax law as a US citizen that was a taxable event.

[1] https://www.blockpit.io/tax-guides/crypto-tax-usa
by imiric | 2025-08-21 22:44:17+00:00
Programming and vibe coding are two entirely separate disciplines. The process of producing software, and the end result, is wildly different between them.

People who vibe code don't care about the code, but about producing something that delivers value, whatever that may be. Code is just an intermediate artifact to achieve that goal. ML tools are great for this.

People who program care about the code. They want to understand how it works, what it does, in addition to whether it achieves what they need. They may also care about its quality, efficiency, maintainability, and other criteria. ML tools can be helpful for programming, but they're not a panacea. There is no shortcut for building robust, high quality software. A human still needs to understand whatever the tool produces, and ensure that it meets their quality criteria. Maybe this will change, and future generations of this tech will produce high quality software without hand-holding, but frankly, I wouldn't bet on the current approaches to get us there.
Show HN: Precisionconvert.io – Professional unit converter for engineers
by TaxFix | 2025-08-21 22:44:18+00:00
I built this after getting frustrated with existing converters that are either ad-heavy or lack precision controls. Designed specifically for professionals who need accuracy in their calculations.

Key technical decisions: - Single HTML file for fast loading and offline capability - Vanilla JavaScript (no frameworks) for maximum performance - PWA implementation for mobile/desktop use - Precision controls up to 15 decimal places - Specialized units for cooking, scientific, and historical conversions

Built it in 24 hours using Claude Code and deployed on Netlify. The challenge was balancing simplicity with professional features that justify premium pricing.

Tech stack: HTML5/CSS3/JS, Stripe for payments, Netlify Functions for backend processing.

Would love feedback on the technical approach and the specialized unit categories. What units would be most valuable for your work?

Happy to answer questions about the rapid development process or specific implementation details.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-21 22:44:26+00:00
It is worth familiarizing oneself with VISA rules in other countries and how they enforce them, before the automatic outrage.

Let's take The Netherlands as an example to get a feel.

- Pronouncement of undesirability: https://ind.nl/en/pronouncement-of-undesirability

- Entry bans: https://ind.nl/en/entry-ban

If you have ever had to apply for a Schengen Visa to enter the EU, then you will know how strict the EU is (even hotels want to see your passport and record it).
by bruceb | 2025-08-21 22:44:37+00:00
Hundreds of thousand of foreigners were given work permits by the previous administration. You can see all the companies they highlight in the report here. Many do hire foreign workers: https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/executive_exce...

Clearly there foreign workers at Starbucks or there would not be protests: According to the popular videos circulating over the Internet, Starbucks halted a few minutes of their services across the nation as a form of protest against the recent “illegal deportation of immigrants.” "We are stopping work for a few minutes to read a statement in protest of actions against our fellow workers," Starbucks Workers United members at the Ellicott City location in Maryland said in a statement during their strike on April 1.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/glob...?
by brookst | 2025-08-21 22:44:37+00:00
A technology's long term value has absolutely zero relationship to whether there is a bubble at any moment. Real estate has had many bubbles. That doesn't mean real estate is worthless, or that it won't appreciate.

Two propositions that can both be true, and which I believe ARE both true:

1. AI is going to change the world and eat many industries to an even greater degree than software did

2. Today, AI is often over-hyped and some combo of grifters, the naive, and gamblers are driving a bubble that will pop at some point
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-21 22:44:37+00:00
Oh, I believe that while LLMs are a dead end now, the applications of AI in vision and physical (i.e. robots with limbs) world will usher in yet another wrecking of the lower classes of society.

Just as AI has killed off all demand for lower-skill work in copywriting, translation, design and coding, it will do so for manufacturing. And that will be a dangerous bloodbath because there will not be enough juniors any more to replace seniors aging out or quitting in frustration of being reduced to cleaning up AI crap.
by olyjohn | 2025-08-21 22:44:48+00:00
I always go to a cashier. Every damn time the self checkout is open, there are two or three employees standing around doing nothing while one runs around fixing all the errors and does all the ID checks. If those people has just been in a regular checkout area, all those customers waiting at self checkout would have been out of the store already. Self checkout is a fucking joke 90% of the time.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-08-21 22:45:20+00:00
As a thought experiment, consider what it would take to make CEO pay gap even BIGGER, in addition to stock-based comp* and buybacks, which are mentioned in headline. Here's what one might do:

- Reduce unions

- Outsource and automate labor

- Slow minimum wage increases

- Consolidate power via M&A (you mentioned this)

- Cut back on benefits like healthcare, pensions and paid leave

- Promote "guru culture": indispensable, iconic leaders like Jack Welch, Steve Jobs etc

- Shift economy towards high-margin industries (tech, finance, pharma) and away from lower-margin ones (retail, manufacturing)

Turns out all of these have been happening since the 70s. So this result should not be surprising.

*Important note that the 1993 Clinton tax bill made it so corporations could no longer deduct the full amount of top executive salaries as a business expense. Only up to $1 million. UNLESS the amount beyond $1 million was performance-based (leading to stock option comp boom).
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-21 22:45:24+00:00
> in particular, really doing it right requires linear types, but this wasn't appreciated when Rust 1.0 shipped and it's not a backwards-compatible change, so by 2018 it was off the table.

It was pretty much off-the-table well before that, because a usable implementation of linear types requires being able to ensure the absence of panics. (A panic must unwind the stack, which amounts to automatically running drop implementations.) The two issues are quite closely linked, and hard to address in isolation.
by alecco | 2025-08-21 22:45:39+00:00
Being busy acts like a pacemaker. All people I know with big families don't have mid-life crisis. They do get overwhelmed at times. But most have some hobby or passion. Sports, cars, wood-making, or side projects. Kids make you realize time goes by. It's harder to accept life moving on if you are alone. And you are more likely to fall for negative habits. In general, of course there are outliers at both ends of the curve.

In old-style charities people with families are a majority. But the fashionable new and ephemeral NGOs are usually full of singles (mostly posing). Again, in general.

And I should listen to my own advise. You are right. I am just another guy and shouldn't give advice on life to complete strangers, on the internet. Good night.
by thewanderer1983 | 2025-08-21 22:46:00+00:00
I used to watch her show a few years back. I enjoyed her willingness to point out the failings of the scientific community. Things like lying by omission around the cold fusion energy levels being generated. Certain cosmological areas ignoring the need for empirical validation of their mathematical models etc. This was during that post-covid window where science was the institutions not the the method, skepticism was anti-science. Scientists were being portrayed as angels not humans, that don't suffer from the same failings as the rest of humanity... Anyway it was refreshing.

It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
by efreak | 2025-08-21 22:46:07+00:00
Add a rule to your adblocker for the image, then. The main site appears to have it at `anubis.techaro.lol/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/happy.webp?cacheBuster=v1.21.3-43-gb0fa256`, so a rule for `||*/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/$image` ought to work for ublock origin (purely a guess regarding wildcards for domain, I've never set a rule without a domain before)
by stevage | 2025-08-21 22:46:46+00:00
I've been thinking about this a bit in the context of a current, very complex and challenging side project.

When I first began, I tried vibe coding the backend, but found the feeling of disconnect from "my" code too uncomfortable so abandoned that approach.

I've been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to help me learn unfamiliar technologies, but perhaps because of its fallibility with DuckDB, I've been spending a lot of time in the documentation and writing my own queries, and I think I'm going through enough cognitive difficulty to be learning properly.

There was one time when I'd spent probably at least a day trying to optimise a query in Postgres (yes, two database technologies, don't ask) without much success, and ChatGPT completely solved it in about 10 minutes. Incredible result, helped me learn some useful techniques. There are so many rabbit holes on this project it's nice not to have to go down every single one by myself.

On HN there's often this split between anti-AI and AI evangelists but there really is a lot of space in the middle: judicious use of AI for specific purposes, managing the risks and benefits, etc.

(Side note...did the OP really mention the highly discredited broken windows theory?)
by antod | 2025-08-21 22:47:22+00:00
It predates EGA. Most/all 8bit BASIC systems were top left, and they got it from somewhere earlier. Spreadsheets are top left, as are lots of other apps graphical or otherwise. The web (CSS, SVG etc). OpenGL etc etc.

CRTs scanned downwards, most people read downwards.

I would say that nearly everything in the real world (outside math) especially computer related uses top left as an origin.
by delichon | 2025-08-21 22:47:32+00:00
In terms of energy use it's more like 4% of the population uses 16% of the resources. Still 4 to 1, but not 19 to 1.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87

Per capita, that rate puts the US in 10th place.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-21 22:48:08+00:00
> Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place.

All software is ill designed in the first place. Even software I write to solve my own problems will usually do a poor job of solving that problem on the first iteration.

There is a reason old engineers say: "Plan to throw the first one away. You will anyway."
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-21 22:48:19+00:00
In general I don't think Google or Apple need AI.

In practice though their platform is closed to any other assistant than theirs, so they have to come up with a competent service (basically Ben Thomson's "strategy tax" playing in full)

That question will be moot the day Apple allows other companies to ingest everything's happening on device and operate the whole device in reaction to user's requests, and some company actually does a decent job at it.

Today Google is doing a decent job and Apple isn't.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-21 22:48:21+00:00
The author’s definitions suggest you should have “Applied” in your title, which I like, but my impression is that “applied” roles so vastly outnumber “creation of models” roles globally that it’s actually the latter that would benefit from a modifier. For now, you have to rely on context (mostly the nature of the company’s primary output) when trying to interpret something like a job posting or an acquaintance’s title.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-21 22:48:32+00:00
> attended an anti-Israel protest

The test may not be arbitrary. How the test was chosen is. A CAPTCHA is an objective test; forcing everyone in high school to take one is arbitrary.

(Also, to my knowledge, mere attendance wouldn’t constitute a lawful reason to eject. Material support would have to have been offered, e.g. fundraising for Hamas.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-21 22:48:39+00:00
> is in saying things like attending a protest constitute grounds for deportation absent any published rules or guidance to this effect.

The law is clear that if you support a terrorist group, your visa application can be denied or your current visa revoked.

If we take Hamas for example, they are designated a terrorist group by: European Union, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Paraguay, United Kingdom, United States, Organization of American States, Switzerland[1]

If you are in the US on a non-immigrant visa (you are a guest) and you go to a rally in support of Hamas, I struggle to understand why it would be controversial that the US can revoke your visa ("your permission to be in the US").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-08-21 22:48:40+00:00
I’m reaching the same conclusion… I have been subscribing to LLMs for a couple of years, and trying to find the right balance and workflow that gets the best out of human and machine.

I now think TDD can play a big part. I don’t have much of a background in unit testing. For a recent TypeScript utility mini project, I took an outside-in approach using mocks where necessary. This started as a prototyping and modelling phase, getting the design right before committing to implementation code. This was about refining the types and function signatures, and mocking the components that didn’t exist at that point. The LLM didn’t have involvement at this stage, as it was about the problem domain, the shape and flow of the data. Moving on from there, I was able to save a lot of time because SuperMaven in Cursor had enough context and understanding at that point to make very precise guesses about what I wanted, so I could tab autocomplete through a reasonable amount of boilerplate implementation code. I was also able to get away with writing a couple of happy path tests for most components, and get the agentic LLM to generate sad path tests. Most of which I kept, including one that smoked out a flaw in my design.

That’s essentially the process I’m gravitating towards. Human begins the process, models the design, sets the constraints, and then the LLM saves time in a limited and supervised way whilst being kept on a short leash.
by curiousgeorgio | 2025-08-21 22:49:08+00:00
What's funny is that the people who hate on America the most tend to also have a strong belief in American exceptionalism without realizing it. "America is the worst!" in one breath, while in the next breath saying "Everyone deserves to live in America".

What I see missing most in discussions around immigration is what it does to the home countries of the people trying to move to the United States. I know a lot of families who have come into the country from Mexico, and I don't blame them - I'd probably do the same. But if you look at the towns they're leaving (which I've done many times), it's creating a vacuum of good, hard-working people. As a result, crime and drug lords fill the vacuum, making it even more unsafe.

If you ask a lot of those people (which I've done), they'd really like to stay in their home countries - provided that there weren't growing concerns over crime. As Americans, why do we have to act like this is the only place in the world where people can be successful, and the only safe haven? What if we instead supported those countries and encouraged their brightest and best citizens to stay so that their communities can thrive?

I love immigrants, and I also love a lot of the countries they're coming from. I just wish we could stop pretending that everyone needs to move to the United States to be happy, productive, or successful.

And yes, markets tend to be affected by supply and demand, the labor market included. If you have an almost unlimited supply of people looking for work and willing to work at very low wages, of course we're going to see wages stagnate.
by taeric | 2025-08-21 22:49:22+00:00
I could just be wrong. Nor am I aiming for exaggerated effect, though. I legit have grown to feel that people will get a car if they can afford it. Pretty much everywhere. As I said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.

This is related with the housing discussions. People have somewhat convinced themselves that cheap standalone houses are the goal. Which, I suppose there is no reason that can't be the goal. But compare average home size in pretty much any US city with some of these walkable cities you have in mind.

When I do that, I start asking how related those two things are. And I'm growing rather convinced that people have built up a mental idea that they can live with all of the benefits of both worlds, without contending with the contrast between them.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 22:50:05+00:00
Worth noting that SVG manipulation via JSX support (such as in React) can be incredibly useful in practice. I used this to add markers and highlights over scanned documents in the past, as well as bar charts, line graphs etc... all without having to add in massive module libraries. Most charting libraries are excessively large when you just want to show/chart a little data.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 22:50:14+00:00
Forbes is simply wrong.

Henry Singleton who founded Teledyne is known as the buyback king because he used his high-flying stock in the 1960s to snap up tons of smaller electronics companies, and when his stock crashed to $8 during the years of stagflation, snapped up millions with buybacks. In the end, he had used his stock as a currency to acquire dozens of companies at what essentially became 80% discounts.

http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Dr.-Single...

A very good very in-depth PDF read about him if you're interested in this type of thing.
by martinald | 2025-08-21 22:51:24+00:00
This is a really basic way to look at unit economics of inference.

I did some napkin math on this.

32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale.

These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this).

So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month.

40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these.

You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month.

Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-21 22:51:28+00:00
I think what I've heard is: The buyback is part of a larger scheme where execs / board members can pump the price of the stock, and then make themselves money either through bonuses tied to rising stock prices, or through dumping their own shares once the market price goes up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_repurchase#Criticism

The vibe is that there's a vicious cycle of "Customers are not brand-loyal, let's make our products shitty, hollow out the brand, and then liquidate everything to enrich ourselves" and "Why should I be loyal to any brand when brands that were institutions in my parents' time, like Sears and Craftsman, are hollowing out their brands and making everything shitty for a quick buck?"

Feels like everything has become a market for lemons, and the hand of Moloch has realized that if something isn't a market for lemons, it would be more profitable if it was.

In my head there's a piece of red string connecting this to the Internet Whalefall phenomenon - The Internet used to feel like (again, vibes are all I have for this) a place where the savvy early-adopter techie could be rewarded for their skill at installing any web browser but IE, with secret information shared by other elite techies, about which brands were good and how to get things done cheaper.

But now that Eternal September post-2007 has Pokemon-mega-evolved into Eternal 2007, everyone just buys reviews and nothing online is trustworthy. All the whale meat is eaten and those picking at the bones are left starving.

This led to my personal heuristic of just taking recommendations from people or orgs I meet in person. "Do you like that brand of clothing? How is that USB hub treating you? Where did you buy this?" It's a natural hedge against "I could have _told_ you not to buy that piece of crap" and it's also mathematically similar to best-of-two-random-choices load balancing. Just pick any service or product that one real human halfway-likes.
by simoncion | 2025-08-21 22:51:35+00:00
> ...awarding him a pile of stock options if he hits certain metrics is not pay, is not comparable to W2 income, does not hit his bank account...

Are you certain that they are options, and not RSUs? The bonus plan described in the SEC filing [0] seems to indicate that the stock offered is not options.

My RSUs absolutely counted as wages once they vested, and I was absolutely able to turn them into cash in my bank account (as would have been the case with stock options that were worth something).

[0] <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/829224/0001193125242...>
by icedchai | 2025-08-21 22:51:38+00:00
Those collapses were great buying opportunities.

During the pandemic, I bought energy stocks near the bottom. Remember when the price of oil went negative? I was watching CNBC at the time. I felt either the world was ending and none of this mattered anyway, or it was a great time to buy. The fund I bought (VDE) is now up almost 150%. And I'm getting a great dividend, relative to my initial investment.

I got good deals on AMZN, GOOG in 2022. Bought them all under $100. I got a good deal on AAPL, too.

The banking problems in 2023 was a good time to get into bank stocks. I started averaging into a regional bank fund and it's done quite well.

My advice to the average retail investor is simple: don't panic.