MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by batuhankucuk | 2025-08-06 07:50:45+00:00
First, a word will appear on your screen. You’ll have 3 seconds to memorize it before it disappears. Then… it’s your turn to find the letters in the exact order!

This simple yet powerful game trains your memory while helping you learn over 60,000 words in 11 different languages.

It’s brain training meets language learning — fun, challenging, and effective!
by maxglute | 2025-08-06 07:50:53+00:00
TBH once these platforms become deployed, noncombatants are signing their own suicide note even being close to battlefield. I imagine rules of engagement, expectations on civilians will simply change/devolve, i.e. most you can expect from "responsible" users is some map coordinates for murder bot no man's land where they shouldn't be. This without even mentioning we'll likely also see loitering drones hibernate as proximity mines / area denial munitions if they don't find targets. It will get very, very messy.
by triknomeister | 2025-08-06 07:50:57+00:00
I was going to write a very snarky reply, but you seem much more experienced than me, so I thought about it a little bit. My point remains, but the snark goes away. And I'm in Germany and people wait 5 minutes before starting. In all regular seminars, people start at 5 past. It's because it is assumed that people have another meeting or seminar till the hour before. Same with meetings. Only in conferences do people start at the dot.

I think it is when systems fail, people stop responding to systems, and this is what is happening in Germany right now.
by Thorrez | 2025-08-06 07:50:59+00:00
Who would TSMC buy the shares from?

Would they buy existing shares from investors? Would they really find enough investors willing to sell shares at market price? I doubt it. There would be a lot of investors that would rather hold than sell at market price. Market price is the current minimum price an investor is willing to accept. Not the price that all investors are willing to accept.

Would they buy new shares issued by Intel? That seems more likely to me. That would be a bailout to Intel.
by larodi | 2025-08-06 07:51:08+00:00
Precisely my point, and there is little if any evidence, there is anyone among the big players who puts peoples' rights before else by respecting licensing agreements before scrapping for training.

Indeed, Reddit sold their data the other thay GPT2 was announced, and it was very apparent why everyone closed their APIs in 2021-2023. Wonder what Aaron would've said about it.

Now we have walled gardens of information where people are allowed to plant, but never own the blossom.
by watwut | 2025-08-06 07:51:13+00:00
Yeah, no, completely deregulated medical device and prescriptions market would be disaster.

> And with this new era of technology

Our current era of technology is allowing us to generate automated bull-shitters. Which is fine for some applications, but not for the ones where people can be actually harmed.

Nothing about our current era generates trustworthy systems. And both our business leaders and culture of elite technical people is the one where being sociopathic is an advantage. We created this world, but we do not have to pretend it is somehow meant to be helpful.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-06 07:51:25+00:00
I think Ozempic is just a symbol of what modern life looks like. Obesity is a problem that 100% could be solved with a cultural shift (see Japan), but instead we decide to use medicine. It's like, humanity at large grew such big brains because there was evolutionary pressure to be intelligent, but now we're using intelligence to remove that pressure. Which would make sense if we redirected that intelligence to something else, but we don't.

I think the reason why we don't see aliens is that intelligent life isn't sustainable long-term, and there's a long list of reasons why intelligence leads to self-destruction.
by bsder | 2025-08-06 07:51:47+00:00
> The WHY2025 badge was designed to be powered by 2 Li-Ion 18650 battery cells connected in parallel.

Wait, what?

I was under the impression that Lithium batteries were really difficult to put in parallel without a LOT of engineering work.

The discharge curve for Lithium batteries is super flat. If you put them in parallel, even a small differential between the two means that one battery will completely discharge simply trying to bring the voltage of the other up to match. This is very different from the discharge curve from alkaline which has a nice slope and the batteries can equalize without burning up very much of their capacity.

These don't look like they're matched in any way. The connection between them doesn't like very big--I suspect a non-trivial voltage drop if one battery tries to empty into the other.

If you need the power, it's much better to put them in series and use a buck converter to bring the final value where you want it.

This seems more like a fundamental engineering flaw rather than a fault in the boards (although, to be fair, the creepage and clearance don't look great).
by siva7 | 2025-08-06 07:52:49+00:00
This story feels after all the years still awkward. Many people at Google don't have anything that impressive on their resume like being the creator of homebrew. Commentary like "Google looks only for computer scientists, so you need to have studied CS" is so out of touch that i sometimes questions if these people ever worked in a big corporation. There are thousands of different roles, many multiple times suited for that guy. I suspect the people who vetoed didn't like that guy for some other reasons.
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 | 2025-08-06 07:53:12+00:00
As others have kind of pointed out, using "outside our DC" processing for corporate data is a non-starter for many companies.

These companies are left to choose between self-hosting models, or a vendor like MS who will rent them "their own AI running in their own Azure subscription", cut off from the outside world.
by exmadscientist | 2025-08-06 07:53:14+00:00
> The WHY2025 badge was designed to be powered by 2 Li-Ion 18650 battery cells connected in parallel. The cells provided to visitors are of the "unprotected" kind

...I am going to put on my "client-facing consultant" hat for a moment, which means skipping the expletives, and just say that not only is this a Very Bad Design, it is such a Very Bad Design that someone should really have noticed this and not let it happen.

Because this really is a Startlingly Bad Idea.
by tirant | 2025-08-06 07:53:18+00:00
Because people are choosing deliberately to get pleasure to eat unhealthy stuff instead of being healthy. And that’s a reasonable thing to do. Immediate pleasure trumps future hypothetical gains.

And it’s exactly the same situation with financial education, debt, university degrees, or in general any long term endeavors that requires the sacrifice of the immediate pleasure.

Of course, we still have a non trivial percentage of people that suffer from eating disorders, and use food as a way to emotionally regulate themselves because that’s what they learned as children (child is unhappy, give him a candy…).
by outlore | 2025-08-06 07:53:44+00:00
it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post:

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
by farseer | 2025-08-06 07:53:53+00:00
Failure: Wanted to automate a workflow. Couldn't get AI to extract information from 500 word text and format it into a table. This was done via API and I had specified about 10 clear rules. Tweaking the prompt/rules would solve the bugs but introduce new ones. The errors were random and did not repeat in multiple trials. Model used was OpenAI GPT4o, however to be fair Google Gemini fared much worse.
by spauldo | 2025-08-06 07:55:23+00:00
Automation costs a lot. The projects I work on are almost always in the millions of dollars,band they're far from being considered "big" projects. The hardware manufacturers will sell you equipment that runs for thirty years. Companies are reluctant to replace working systems.

I replaced a PLC a couple years ago. The software to program it wouldn't run on my laptop because it used the win16 API. It used LL-984 ladder logic, and most people who were experts in that have retired. It's got new shiny IEC-compliant code now, and next they're looking at replacing the Windows 2000 machines they control it with. Once that's done, it'll run with little to no change until probably 2050.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-06 07:56:13+00:00
I wasn’t talking about non-pharmaceuticals, and neither were you. Non-pharmaceuticals don’t go through clinical trials, and they mostly don’t require any pre-approval. So that’s clearly just trying to pad your list.

Benzodiazepines do not have effects that only suddenly show up after 10-20 years of use. The serious side effects/withdrawal show up with a few months of heavy use, sometimes sooner. They’re also actively prescribed (with some appropriate caution), so a really weird one to lead with.

There are actually quite a few drugs still widely prescribed today that cause similar QT prolongation to terfenadine (e.g. quetiapine). The difference is they are for more serious conditions where the other options have similarly serious side effects, and terfenadine has to compete with Benadryl. No reason to have to get periodic EKGs just to keep your sinuses decongested in allergy season.

> Of the 528 new drugs approved over the period of interest, a total of 22 (4.2%) were eventually withdrawn. Between 3.9% and 4.4% of the drugs approved in each 5-year period were eventually withdrawn (χ2 = 0.04, p = 0.99 for difference among 5-year periods). The median time between approval and withdrawal was 1271 days (interquartile range 706–2876).[0]

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you just didn’t care to read the paper once you assumed it agreed with you and did not selectively quote on purpose. From the same paper:

> Of the 22 drugs withdrawn, 11 first had a serious safety warning and 11 did not (Table 2). The median time between the Notice of Compliance and withdrawal was 1271 days (interquartile range 706–2876).

So, the percentage you quoted was double what we were actually talking about here. On top of that, I don’t think you finished reading what you did quote; the median time to withdrawal was < 5 years, and if you actually look at the table only two drugs with serious safety issues actually hit the 10-20 year range you mentioned.

> those users could have chosen lifestyle intervention

We’ve been trying all kinds of “lifestyle interventions” for a long time, from doctors telling people to exercise to semi-organized campaigns of body shaming. It hasn’t worked for the vast majority of people in practice. So unless you have some actually novel idea here, you’re essentially trying to get people to switch from a drug that works to the power of positive thinking. Good luck with that.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-06 07:56:18+00:00
Reports (caveat: biased, pro-ukranian reports) are though that Russian soldiers barely get any training, I doubt they are worth that much. Even at the start of the war, there were stories that they had to buy their own shoes.

At this point it's not even so much about scale, but about intelligence - finding viable or valuable targets. A million FPV drones won't do much good if your enemy is >100 kilometers away. The Ukranian front line is over 1000 kilometers long, but viable targets are easily a hundred kilometers from that either side. And that's just around the front lines, picking off individual soldiers or hardware won't stop this war, not when thousands are recruited and trained every month. Which is why Ukraine has done some deep strikes, taking out trains, infrastructure, refineries, air bases, etc. If they can take out the Shahed drone production facility too, that'd be a huge blow. But again, it wouldn't stop this war, just slow down attacks on civilians.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-06 07:56:40+00:00
It's been this way for a while. There is even outright fake science in biotech that I mentioned years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125867

But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.

In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.

e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...

The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.

Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.

If a thing is true, it is true.
by cprecioso | 2025-08-06 07:56:55+00:00
I was thinking about this the other day. I think it might just be a thing of Google looking for a different thing than what made his open source project famous.

Without no knowledge of the details further than mxcl's tweet; probably any performance issues even on simple code, get infinitely multiplied when running at Google's scale, slogging the thing, on Google's dime. From what I've seen of him, mxcl is good at designing a really approachable product, and on running an open source project. But homebrew is really slow, even on the latests Macs, even for basic cases.

To me it seems then that he'd be more fit for a product owner/manager position than an engineering one, and that could be the root of his not-hiring.
by lisper | 2025-08-06 07:57:03+00:00
You don't even have to change the laws. Just changing the social norms would be enough. At the moment our social norms are that the ends justify the means. If you make money, or produce something that looks like a breakthrough, that is all that matters. How you did it, or whether the thing you did has actual value, matters not at all. As long as you've provided yourself with plausible deniability, that's good enough.

I know this because I've been the beneficiary of this system on multiple occasions, and it makes me sick. This is not the kind of world I want to live in.
by ben_w | 2025-08-06 07:58:25+00:00
Teachers:

IIRC, it may be better to have the same number of real humans focussing on fewer pupils. Even when they're using VLMs as assistants.

Students:

While humans max out at a higher skill level than VLMs, I suspect that most (not all!) people who would otherwise have finished education at their local mandatory school leaving age, may be better off finishing school as soon as they can use a VLM.

But also #1: There's also a question of apprenticeships over the current schooling system. Robotics' AI are not as advanced as VLMs, so while plumbing will get solved eventually (and a tentacle robot arm with a camera in each "finger" is clearly superior to our human arms in tight spaces), right now it still looks like a sane thing to train in.

But also #2: Telling who is and isn't getting anything out of the education system is really hard; not only in historical systems like the UK's old eleven-plus exams, but today after university graduation when it can sometimes take a bit of effort to detect that someone only got a degree for the prestige and didn't really learn anything.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-08-06 07:59:35+00:00
Anthropic probably gets tens of thousands of applications. They seem to have filled their queue before even reviewing this particular candidate. Unfortunate but just reality.

Always always always try to get into direct contact with the actual hiring manager. Blog author had a friend of a friend let them know a relevant role was open. The correct move is NOT to blindly apply. It’s to ask for an intro to the engineering manager responsible for the role.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-06 07:59:53+00:00
Isn't that how it goes nowadays too? The US pulled out of Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation and... didn't actually change anything there, the regime went back to the one from before.

I don't think that at this point there's ever any winning a war, not unless you brainwash three generations (NK) or genocide the population and remove any trace of them like in Gaza at the moment. And that's a relatively small stretch of land.
by codeflo | 2025-08-06 08:00:52+00:00
> People want your software to have more features, have fewer bugs, and not be exploited. So you and every one of your competitors are on an update treadmill. If you ARE stable, you'll probably fall off. If you are on the treadmill you are accumulating code, features, bug fixes, until you either get off or a faster competitor emerges.

Runners on treadmills don't actually move forward.
by graemep | 2025-08-06 08:01:01+00:00
I do not think you can equate making prisoners work with slavery. Other countries do the same, and it is not regarded as slavery in general.

If people were sold into slavery as a punishment (so they became some one else's property) as some ancient societies did, then that would clearly be slavery.

The most shocking thing about prisons in the US is how common prison rape is, and the extent to which it seems to be regarded as a joke. The majority of rapes in the US are prison rapes. How can that not be anything but an appalling problem?

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

Rape is also something slaves are casually subject to in most slave societies. It was definitely accept that Roman slave owners were free to rape men, women and children they owned.
by benzible | 2025-08-06 08:01:27+00:00
A friend of mine is maintainer of an open source service used (at least, at one time) by all of the major social media platforms as a load-bearing piece of their infrastructure (intentionally keeping it vague). My friend was invited to interview at one of the biggest and was rejected after having a bad whiteboard session. Of course they immediately replaced my friend's service (ha!)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-06 08:01:47+00:00
I think that everyone should read this blog post

"Overall I am overjoyed enigo is used in Claude Desktop and I tell everyone who listens to me about it :P. It's so cool to think that I metaphorically created the arms and legs for Claude AI, but I can't help but wonder if the rejection letter was written by a human or Claude AI. Did the very AI I helped equip with new capabilities just reject my application? On the bright side, I should now be safe from Roko's Basilisk. "

I also felt like this way that did they just AI in their interviewing process?

And I have a special love towards open source.

And I personally might be happy too that a company is using my work ,but in the name of the holy licenses, Companies are just exploiting the free nature of this and the fact that it seems like not even a human looked at the person for such job, who created a library that they are using it for free...

I was thinking of creating some code in MIT license, but I am going to create a code of AGPL except if you sponsor me on github or a special one time license which can grant you MIT.

People might say that I am not fostering the open source community, but I am not giving corporations free labour so that they can be billionaires.

I once saw someone write a software with the exact same idea (AGPL + gh sponsor me to get MIT) and the people in HN were pitchforking him, that's the harsh reality of the world. People want absolutely free labour.

I think open source needs to ask, Have we become the modern peasants in the name of our altruism?
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-06 08:01:48+00:00
Good article. It kind of makes me question how long we can go down this path though. Like surely we can't keep adding to css and the dom api's for 20 more years? How much bloat will we accumulate before we start over?

I hate to say it, but perhaps the browser needs a completely new standard designed for shipping applications? Something akin to what's discussed in the article - a simple but robust layout system built with a flexbox-like API and let us bind shaders to elements. We don't need css if we have shaders. And I don't think adding more and more features to current api's is gonna solve problems long term.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-06 08:01:56+00:00
Thanks, interesting that there are a lot more typescript things that wouldn't be covered by the proposal besides enums (class/fields modifiers, function overloading, declare keyword, namespaces).

Meaning the proposal would only really be useful for fairly small projects. It would be nice to have bundlers not need to do any transpilation at all while in dev mode, but this will not get us 100% there (even for non-JSX projects).
by nicksbg | 2025-08-06 08:02:12+00:00
As someone that works in HR, the incompetent HR combined with using AI for ATS ( or not knowing how to use ATS at all) is one of the core problems when it comes to losing quality candidates and is to blame for this. It should be illegal to hire HR from any education other than law, psychology, management and economy background. That way the responsibility would be larger, the ROI on HR would be higher (because the retention of the candidates and the quality of the candidates). Simply paying and promoting people with any educational background in a HR role is a waste of money which also creates problem for the company and not just employees.
by lisper | 2025-08-06 08:02:41+00:00
I can tell you from personal experience that organizing a "fake" conference is beyond trivial. All you need is a topic that is narrow enough that all of the attendees know and like each other. I was an attendee at several such conferences back when I made my living publishing papers, and I was astonished at how easy it was to publish bullshit as long as it was the right venue, and how borderline impossible it was to publish anything that I considered to have actual value. (In my career I published dozens of conference papers, but only one journal paper and one book chapter.)

In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.
by pistoriusp | 2025-08-06 08:02:59+00:00
I wrote this last week:

> We spent a decade rebuilding the browser by hijacking routing, manually syncing state, rebuilding forms and transitions in JavaScript to match native app expectations. Now the browser has caught up. It's time to stop the hacks and build on the web again, but properly.

We've been "holding the browser wrong" for the past 10 years.