MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by koverstreet | 2025-08-13 14:42:36+00:00
Funny, because "don't break userspace" is one of the principles I've been citing.

Things always degenerate when it turns into power struggles and people are going "No, I decide!".

"Make sure thinks work" is the underlying principle, and it's based on that that the code should have been, and was merged.

But then the personality conflicts and power struggles came out, and there's no need for that.

- You don't go overriding a subsystem maintainer without a clear justification; if the patch in question has a good reason for being there and can't affect the rest of the kernel, there's a really high bar to clear. This has been an issue for the XFS folks in the past.

- We have to be able to have technical and policy discussions without it degenerating into "I don't trust you and you need therapy". That's just childish. The private discussions got really ugly on this one.

And, regarding bcachefs still being marked as experimental: I'm being much more conservative with the experimental label than btrfs or ext4 were. Your data is safer on bcachefs than btrfs, today: you're not going to lose a filesystem, repair is thorough and robust and complete.

You may still hit hiccups, which is why the experimental label is there, but robust and complete repair and rock solid multi device have been reason enough for a lot of people to switch already.
by xrd | 2025-08-13 14:42:49+00:00
I love uv and really feel like I only need to know "uv add" and "uv sync" to be effective using it with python. That's an incredible feat.

But, when I hear about these kinds of extras, it makes me even more excited. Getting cuda and torch to work together is something I have struggled countless times.

The team at Astral should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
by Strom | 2025-08-13 14:42:50+00:00
Britain, or at the very least England, is also well known for its extreme politeness culture. Also, it's not that the US has a culture of genuine politeness, just a facade of it.

I have only spent about a year in the US, but to me the difference was stark from what I'm used to in Europe. As an example, I've never encountered a single shop cashier who didn't talk to me. Everyone had something to say, usually a variation of How's it going?. Contrasting this to my native Estonia, where I'd say at least 90% of my interactions with cashiers involves them not making a single sound. Not even in response to me saying hello, or to state the total sum. If they're depressed or in an otherwise non-euphoric mood, they make no attempt to fake it. I'm personally fine with it, because I don't go looking for social connections from cashiers. Also, when they do talk to me in a happy manner, I know it's genuine.
by II2II | 2025-08-13 14:43:22+00:00
> I mean look at the first plane, then first air-jets: it’s understandable to assume we would travel the galaxy in something like 2050.

To someone who did not understand what flight is, perhaps. For anyone who understood the laws of physics, no. A similar thing can be said of Moore's Law. The main difference is we likely exceeded the rational expectations derived from Moore's Law (though that was based more on computer performance, rather than the actual expression of Moore's Law in terms of transistor count) while the more rational expectations of flight (routine supersonic, perhaps even suborbital) are still flights of fancy. But that is more a product of cost than technical ability. Simply put, we figured out how to make semiconductors extraordinarily inexpensive. Flight is still expensive.
by Festro | 2025-08-13 14:43:23+00:00
Personally not really using AI directly with our kids but perhaps I can provide some insight to some areas. I've formally studied child language acquisition and have a toddler learning to read.

Early childhood development and storybooks is all over the place. The most successful books for kids are typically created by well-informed individuals or artist/writer combos who are better at the creative side than the education side but they're still pretty good at both.

The work of Julia Donaldson stands out as a leader in the field. She's responsible for the Gruffalo, The Snail and the Whale, Tiddler, and loads more. She's also got a series called Songbirds that are far more basic in their prose, but designed for early reading education. It's in those books that you'll see more method to the madness, with themed consonant and vowel pairings to hammer home elemental lessons for the youngest minds.

AI is chewing up a vast corpus of data that may contain snippets, tracts, or entire children's books, as well as studies and advice on child education. Its output will be a best match guess at what you prompt it, but it is unlikely to be a focussed educational tool like the Songbirds series is. Simply put: AI's strength will be a quick creative story crafted to a child's personal interests that can compete with even the most popular storybooks, but it might lack the nuance of stage-specific educational content.

That being said prompts can go a long way if you're prepared to do your own research and structure your instructions to narrow the output enough.

Another thing to be careful about is the pragmatic information in source data that will lack the weightings the AI needs to use appropriately. Things like dialect. If you use a storybook to teach vocabulary and pronunciation you can run into spelling and rhyming issues and more. We're British and read books from US relatives to our toddler and a book about Maine might try rhyming "on" with "dawn". In the UK that makes mum and dad sound like a rural country type from the South East, which neither of us are. The AI will be aware of phonetics, but is unlikely to weight it highly enough to produce your accent-specific rhymes, especially if they're not standard.

Another trap is to actually craft your kid's content to their interests, at least early on. Creative content is better opening their experience up as broadly as possible. But that's easy to mitigate. If they like dinosaurs, but their book on counting features mermaids, then use AI to make a dino-themed counting book. Just don't make everything dino-themed.

Extra aside - bedtime stories purposefully feature themes around sleep, contain more 'shhh' sounds, and repetitive sequences. Quite literally designed to send kids to sleep. But that muddies the AI waters when you want an output that engages the reader for educational purposes.
by roscas | 2025-08-13 14:43:34+00:00
This is a huge problem. Most of them make it really hard or impossible to delete personal data.

Facebook and Google are examples of those when you will never be able to delete anything. Something things you can hide, but they will never ever delete it.

I remember Facebook having that on the "pause" page, when you tried to delete your account. It said something like you cannot delete it, but pause it. And about 10 years later I enter my account and in the same second, all data appeared. Then I paused it again, but delete does not apply to Facebook or Google.
by cyprien_g | 2025-08-13 14:43:41+00:00
Completely agree with you. I live in Montpellier, France, and we have had free public transportation for a year and a half, and it's very good. I definitely use my car less and take public transport more often.

Everyone, including people without cars, pays for the roads through taxes; it is only fair to do the same for public transport.
by komali2 | 2025-08-13 14:44:22+00:00
It appears that 200,000 people live in Geneva, and daily there are 700,000 "boarding passengers" in Geneva, which I take to mean that if someone transfers a bus, they get counted twice. That said, I suspect based on these numbers that the vast majority of the population are also public transit users.

https://opendata.tpg.ch/pages/accueil/
by azangru | 2025-08-13 14:44:28+00:00
Someone in a comment below posted a link to Adobe Spectrum design system [0]. You will find similarly shaped tooltips in Shoelace [1], or shadcn [2]. The Popper library has it [3]. Github's design system has it (they call it popover) [4]. It's an extremely common design pattern.

[0] - https://spectrum.adobe.com/page/tooltip/

[1] - https://shoelace.style/components/tooltip

[2] - https://ui.shadcn.com/docs/components/tooltip

[3] - https://popper.js.org/docs/v2/modifiers/arrow/

[4] - https://primer.style/product/components/popover/guidelines/
by bigmadshoe | 2025-08-13 14:44:45+00:00
This is called a "needle in a haystack" test, and all the 1M context models perform perfectly on this exact problem, at least when your prompt and the needle are sufficiently similar.

As the piece above references, this is a totally insufficient test for the real world. Things like "find two unrelated facts tied together by a question, then perform reasoning based on them" are much harder.

Scaling context properly is O(n^2). I'm not really up to date on what people are doing to combat this, but I find it hard to believe the jump from 100k -> 1m context window involved a 100x (10^2) slowdown, so they're probably taking some shortcut.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-13 14:44:47+00:00
They actually feel like they were trained to be both extremely humble and at the same time, excited to serve. As if it were an intern talking to his employer's CEO. I suspect AI companies executive leadership, through their feedback to their devs about Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on, are unconsciously shaping the tone and manner of their LLM product's speech. They are used to be talked to like this, so their products should talk to users like this! They are used to having yes-man sycophants in their orbit, so they file bugs and feedback until the LLM products are also yes-man sycophants.

I would rather have an AI assistant that spoke to me like a similarly-leveled colleague, but none of them seem to be turning out quite like that.
by philistine | 2025-08-13 14:44:54+00:00
That’s ultimately for the courts to decide but what’s at issue is not the control of Chrome itself but wether Google is allowed to offer a browser. Any browser.

People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they can’t shout open-source and it no longer applies. Google could probably keep spending engineer hours working on Chromium, but wouldn’t be allowed to offer it bundled with its products, and have it on their own website.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-13 14:44:57+00:00
The definitions are certainly a bit circular:

> Politico used Lean Left language to describe Jan. 6: “damning findings,” “deadly riot,” “violent siege,” “threat to democracy,” “insurrection,” “Trump’s crusade.”

> A category on the website was labeled “Insurrection Fallout," which is Lean Left framing of Jan. 6; a reviewer in the center noted a "heavy anti-Trump focus."
by asoneth | 2025-08-13 14:45:02+00:00
> Western strain of extreme pacifism

While there certainly are some Western hackers who eschew all military applications because of their extreme pacifism, the examples in the article (e.g. pro-Palestinian activists) are not necessarily pacifist. I'd describe them more as out of alignment with their country's current governments, or perhaps actively aligned against them.

And given recent (and not-so-recent) behavior of the US government, I don't think it's irrational for hacker in the US to conclude that their own government presents a greater threat to their freedom than Putin or Xi. (I don't necessarily agree, I just don't think it's an irrational conclusion.)
by rudedogg | 2025-08-13 14:45:07+00:00
All that feels like specialized stunts like IBM’s Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.

The rate of improvement has slowed significantly. And chasing benchmarks is making everything worse IMO. Opus 4.1 is worse than Sonnet 3.7 to me :/.

I think the future will be:

1. Ads and quantization/routing to chase profits

2. Local models start taking over. New companies will slide in without the huge losses and provide what Claude/OpenAI do today at reasonable margins

3. Apple/Google eat up lots of the market by shipping good-enough models with iOS/Android
by immibis | 2025-08-13 14:45:30+00:00
In most cases filters based on the "from" address are enough. Sometimes the subject is also needed.

Unsubscribe from marketing emails you don't care about. The USA, surprisingly, has a law where if they don't have an unsubscribe link at the bottom, the CEO of that company goes to jail. I presume this law only passed because politicians got annoyed by spam. Use it.

Sometimes you do want them but want them to be out of sight (e.g. emails from digi-key about new products). Then filter them.

You can use email aliases if you want to. If you have your own domain you can use any address you like and even if they're not separate mailboxes you can use the "to" address for filtering. Gmail provides unlimited free aliases: yourname+anything@gmail.com is an alias for yourname@gmail.com and so is y.ou.r.n.ame@gmail.com (for sites that are aware of the + aliases).
by bee_rider | 2025-08-13 14:45:47+00:00
Definitely smarter people than me have thought about this already, but I’ve been trying to think about human language and how thoughts form in my head lately. How does thinking feel to you?

I feel like thoughts appear in my head conceptually mostly formed, but then I start sequentially coming up with sentences to express them, almost as if I’m writing them down for somebody else. In that process, I edit a bunch, so the final thought is influenced quite a bit by how English ends to be written. Maybe even constrained by expressability in English. But English has the ability to express fuzzy concepts. And the kernel started as a more intuitive thing.

It is a weird interplay.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-13 14:46:19+00:00
> I'd want to have a couple extra layers of fail-safes, and probably a human overseer with a kill switch

This is the sort of feel-good rule making that stifles an economy.

Driverless tractors exist. They’ve been deployed across the world. We have real-world data about their safety and precisely zero cases where they ran into schools because they got lost.

There is a legitimate safety debate that can be had. But it should pit data against data, not hypotheticals.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-13 14:46:24+00:00
I wont argue that the racist aspect of the justice system isn't entwined with it, and with wider society in certain ways, but I still stand by it being more classict by far than simply racist. To claim only racism doesn't entirely address certain problems that could maybe be fixed, and it also runs the risk of ignoring when certain racial groups that don't fit into most ideas of racism are also heavily harmed by police and the entire apparatus above them. As I said, there are cities in the U.S. where police, prosecutors, judges and many other criminal justice officals are largely black or of some visible minority, and in these cities, the civilian victims of their procedures and biases, suffer no less, despite often being of the exact same ethnic makeup. I don't see how one can reconcile that with just racism unless one also discusses the issue of tremendous classicm, and I'd argue, also bureaucratic/police self-exceptionalism, with strong authoritarian tendencies, regardless of race.

Spreading the net a bit wider, you can also look at the recent and massive ICE crackdowns on illegal migrants (and sometimes US citizens along the way). Just by looking at photos of these incidents, you quickly note that many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc, enforcing draconian crackdowns against other visible minorities. That's not simply something you can label under racism and be done with defining it. Other systemic factors are at work there.
People can exploit your social media pictures and so I've made a tool
by Gravyt1 | 2025-08-13 14:46:45+00:00
For a few weeks now, I've been working on a small website, a simple but useful project, which I thought would be accessible to everyone. This site is qualitative enough for me to pay particular attention to. It allows me to better understand how to gain visibility on a project created/bootstrapped by myself. This site is not revolutionary, far from it, and most of the front-end code is done by lA. Its main objective is to bring together several privacy protection tools. In particular, for the moment, a tool for viewing and deleting metadata that supports many types of documents. Why? Because many people are unaware that files shared online contain sensitive information:

Photos -> GPS location, date, device model

Docs -> author's name, editing history, comments

Attacks can exploit this data for OSINT, tracking habits, feeding AI models, or even identity theft.

Unlike other tools, it doesn't store any files. I'd like to make the source code available or make the application front-end-only in the future. For now, everything is processed server-side and then immediately returned, without backup, using Python Pillow. So everything is on temporary variables and is cleared at the end of the process.

Eventually, I plan to add a lightweight API, other privacy-related tools, and possibly educational content.

Today, I am looking for new people to use my website, but also contributors in the sense that I created a product hunt page. If you like the idea, test the website it will be kind from you or upvote this post (:: !

Thank you (:

My project: https://www.removemd.com/
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 14:46:52+00:00
> If they don't find a way to make LLMs do significantly more than they do thus far...

They only need two things, really: A large user base and a way to include advertising in the responses. The market willing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars will soon follow.

The businesses are currently in the user base building stage. Hemorrhaging money to get them is simply the cost of doing business. Once they feel that is stable, adding advertising is relatively easy.

> and some kind of "moat" to prevent DeepSeek and the like from undercutting them*

Once users are accustomed to using a service, you have to do some pretty horrendous things to get them to leave. "Give me your best hamburger recipe" -> "Sure, here is my best burger recipe [...] However, if you don't feel like cooking tonight, give the Big Mac a try!". wouldn't be enough to see any meaningful loss of users.
by Swizec | 2025-08-13 14:46:53+00:00
I know things are bad, we all know things are bad. But first you’ve got to get mad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug

Here’s the thing: We’re in the complaining stage. It doesn’t hurt enough yet. When it does, we’ll stop complaining and do something.

Complaining is a good first step! That’s how it starts.
by burkaman | 2025-08-13 14:46:59+00:00
https://www.dir.ca.gov/title8/3441.html

It says: "All self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. This shall not prohibit the operator occupying or being stationed at a location on the vehicle other than the normal driving position or cab if controls for starting, accelerating, decelerating and stopping are provided adjacent and convenient to the alternate position."

So you do explicitly need to be physically on the vehicle at all times while it's moving.

It has further rules for remotely operating "Furrow guided self-propelled mobile equipment" (which is not how modern autonomous tractors work), but even for those you need to be actively watching it and have immediate access to steering and braking controls.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-13 14:47:03+00:00
Maybe I misunderstand, but I'm pretty sure they offer an option for cheaper API costs (or maybe its credits?) if you allow them to train on your API requests.

To your point, pretty sure it's off by default, though

Edit: From https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/data-contr...

Share inputs and outputs with OpenAI

"Turn on sharing with OpenAI for inputs and outputs from your organization to help us develop and improve our services, including for improving and training our models. Only traffic sent after turning this setting on will be shared. You can change your settings at any time to disable sharing inputs and outputs."

And I am 'enrolled for complimentary daily tokens.'
by ghostfoxgod | 2025-08-13 14:47:26+00:00
I don't know how easy is it from where you are from, but a friend of mine lost his dad during covid second wave, and it took him months to get just get access to his dad's bank accounts.

Seems very scary, there might be so many things that he doesn't even know about. I tried searching for this, and it seems like there are billions of dollars left in dormant accounts because no one claimed it, majorly because the person's family don't even know how to access those or worse are not even aware about it.
by Bender | 2025-08-13 14:47:47+00:00
- The shorter the domain, the easier to advertise it on radio and TV and less likely people spell it wrong ending up at the wrong place - such as a squatted or watering hole domain.

- Shorter is easier to remember.

- Shorter is easier to type on a cell phone.

- Shorter is easier to type when inebriated - not always a good thing.
by maxehmookau | 2025-08-13 14:47:50+00:00
Agreed. I still think we're seeing layoffs due to _overhiring_ in 2020. AI makes a nice excuse when laying these people off because CEOs can say their huge investments in AI are starting to pay off because they don't need the humans.

Turns out, they never needed those humans in the first place.

That doesn't answer the other side of the problem though, that it's so hard to find work right now, even for folks who would typically be very easy to employ.
by garyrob | 2025-08-13 14:47:52+00:00
It appears that Cal Newport has decided to be the one to most publicly initiate the inevitable Trough Of Disillusionment stage of the Hype Cycle. I'm not sure it'll last very long, though, considering (for starters) Google DeepMind's gold medal at the recent International Math Olympiad. Also, while he criticizes the cost-cutting measure which is ChatGPT 5, he doesn't even mention ChatGPT 5 Pro, which is performing excellently.
by duped | 2025-08-13 14:47:52+00:00
I know electricians that were working within days of being hired with no experience. Apprenticeships are entry level jobs, not minimum certifications. They're also used to gatekeep positions by the unions. It has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the position is "skilled" or not.

And the answer really is that they're both skilled. Neither is more or less unless you're getting much more specific about the roles.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-13 14:47:54+00:00
Well, there is "well read" and "educated" which aren't the same thing. I started reading when I was three and checked out ten books a week from the public library throughout my youth. I was well read in psychology, philosophy and such long before I went to college -- I got a PhD in a STEM field so I didn't read a lot of that stuff for classes [1] I still read a lot of that stuff.

Perhaps the reason why Stanford and Oxford students are impressed by that stuff is that they are educated but not well read which has a few angles: STEM privileged over the humanities, the ride of Dyslexia culture, and a shocking level of incuriosity in "nepo baby" professors [2] who are drawn to the profession not because of a thirst for knowledge but because it's the family business.

[1] did get an introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument and took a relatively "woke" (in a good way) Shakespeare class such that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troilus_and_Cressida is my favorite

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/