MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thedudeabides5 | 2025-08-12 19:13:49+00:00
Eliezer Yudkowsky, shows little interest in running one. He has consistently been distant from and uninvolved in rationalist community-building efforts, from Benton House (the first rationalist group house) to today’s Lightcone Infrastructure (which hosts LessWrong, an online forum, and Lighthaven, a conference center). He surrounds himself with people who disagree with him, discourages social isolation.

Ummm, EY literally has a semi-permanent office in Lighthouse (at least until recently) and routinely blocks people on Twitter as a matter of course.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-12 19:14:32+00:00
Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question

Yes?? It's not like a school exam where the questions are secret until you see it in the voting booth, and even if it were, you should still read the question carefully. I'm all for things being written as clearly as possible but at some point you have to acknowledge that voters have a responsibility to think about what they're voting for.
by keybored | 2025-08-12 19:14:34+00:00
^ Comment on the Nth 100+ GitHub Down thread (every thread is like that).

Maybe everyone here is just using it as an excuse to chatter about forges or GitHub being down too much etc. and it has no impact. But if it does and people are honestly fretting they can mirror their repos. Then no one needs to worry that much (except for their cursed CI setups) the next time it happens.

And that’s a benefit of peer-to-peer repos right there.
by chasd00 | 2025-08-12 19:15:05+00:00
One thing to think about is many software devs have a very hard time with code they didn't write. I've seen many devs do a lot of work to change code to something equivalent (even with respect to performance and readability) only because it's not the way they would have done it. I could see people having a hard time using what the LLM produced without having to "fix it up" and basically re-write everything.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-08-12 19:15:24+00:00
It'll let me keep a folder in sync, automatically, across multiple machines. There's no faffing with accounts, it has a GUI simple enough for me to talk entirely non technical people through setting it up and it doesn't matter if one of more of the endpoints is behind NAT.

Once running, it's just a case of copying or editing files in a folder and they're everywhere else. No manual intervention, no trying to remember which computer has the latest copy, it doesn't get upset if I throw terabytes of media at it, it doesn't get upset if I `git init` inside multiple folders and suddenly I have my coding projects ready to go on whatever laptop I pick up.

It also does some nice additional bits, like making it possible to have machines that store a copy of the data but never have decryption keys, so I can use a cheap VPS without worrying about it having a plain-text copy of my data. There's also the ability to store multiple revisions of changed files, should you want it. It's also, at the end of the day, actual plain files on your filesystem which can save a lot of headaches.

It also does a pretty good job of finding the best path to a different box. It shares IPs (that you run the service on), so same lan, different vlan, via a VPN, via a double nat'd someone else's wifi; it doesn't care and usually does the right thing (and is configurable if you wish/need).

The comparison isn't rsync. SyncThing is a host-your-own dropbox/onedrive/other alternative without a requirement for a provider, accounts, fees or your data belonging to someone else, and stunningly low barriers to entry/usage by non technical people.
by qwertox | 2025-08-12 19:15:32+00:00
> desperately need LLMs to maintain extremely effective context

Last time I used Gemini it did something very surprising: instead of providing readable code, it started to generate pseudo-minified code.

Like on CSS class would become one long line of CSS, and one JS function became one long line of JS, with most of the variable names minified, while some remained readable, but short. It did away with all unnecessary spaces.

I was asking myself what is happening here, and my only explanation was that maybe Google started training Gemini on minified code, on making Gemini understand and generate it, in order to maximize the value of every token.
by maxglute | 2025-08-12 19:15:36+00:00
It's talking about querying youdao, which is more translation service. Offline translation < online translation, i.e. I don't want to fallback to local google offline translate language package unless I have no data. I don't use stardict, but it should be completely expected functionality if translating more than words like dictionary.

This entire article should be, Chinese translation program sends clipboard data to it's own website and chinese translation services, but on http.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-12 19:15:47+00:00
If you have a reliable way to get 100+ experienced programmers agree on a single style company-wide, please share =)

With a tool like black, taking it into use is a binary selection of yes/no.

Just fiddling with an .editorconfig (https://editorconfig.org) setup for a single project can take WEEKS to decide what bits to flip in which position
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-12 19:15:51+00:00
The way I see it, prices are too high. War is one thing, but it's abroad and the restrictions have been minimal. But interest rates went from <1% to 4.5% without valuations going down or profits going up. This means that investors are pricing companies as if though interests rates can be lowered. I don't think they can, because inflation in the US already quite high despite the 4.5% interest rates and with these tariffs upon that, it probably can't be lowered. For this reason I think companies should be priced using the 4.5% interest rate as a best guess, maybe 4% works, maybe 3.5%, but they're current priced as if though the interest rate is is <1%.

Tesla has a P/E ratio something like 26 times what other well-run automotive companies have. Boeing has a price like Airbus, despite no profits, etc.

Commercial real estate prices have gone down, and that's reasonable, but you've had both the interest rate increases and this WFH+hybrid remote thing becoming common, and since the interest rates have gone up from such a low level I think this is still overvalued, because 1% -> 2% should in theory mean halving the value if the rent is constant, and it went <1% to 4.5%.

I think it's a miracle that there hasn't been a crash. I wonder what weird things have been going on that have ensured that there hasn't been one yet. So I think your perspective is strange. The situation is absolutely crazy, and has been for years, but that doesn't make it not crazy.
by swyx | 2025-08-12 19:15:55+00:00
i think "one person unicorn" is good clickbait but is too egotistical/founder centric and unrealistic. it takes a team, everyone needs help, founding engineers/designers/ops/PMs/domain experts can all contribute a ton that a founder doesnt have.

my proposal for this term is "Tiny Teams": https://latent.space/p/tiny
by sunrunner | 2025-08-12 19:16:23+00:00
How much of Minecraft as people think of it in its early days had already been done by the time Mojang was formed? It's sort of a Game of Theseus type question, at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".

I'm thinking about https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_pre-Classic as the Ur-Minecraft.

Edit: Added the missing words
by lenkite | 2025-08-12 19:16:40+00:00
In India where a social media post pissed off someone. It was sarcastic criticism - no threats, no slurs). But won't get into details, sorry. (Also arrested a few times for participating in mass protests against corruption, but that was in a large group, so wasn't all that stressful.)

I also had bad luck when traveling to the US. Got detained by the CBP - I think because I accidentally sneezed on the officer and pissed him off. (Either that or I looked like some terrorist). Had to stay in a cell for more than a day. I wasn't even questioned!

Thankfully, nothing happened after that. Was good to catch up on sleep though, since there was nothing to do.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-12 19:16:48+00:00
User input is a notoriously thorny area.

If you aren't sanitizing and checking the inputs appropriately somewhere between the user and trusted code, you WILL get pwned.

Rails provides default ways to avoid this, but it makes it very easy to do whatever you want with user input. Rails will not necessarily throw a warning if your AI decides that it wants to directly interpolate user input into a sql query.
by mdasen | 2025-08-12 19:17:11+00:00
I'm not the person who proposed the auction, but I read it as "let the companies compete for the H1-B visas in an auction," not about the workers buying their way into the US.

For example, if CheapoCorp is looking to replace reasonably well paid US workers with H1-B workers, they won't bid much for the visas. CheapoCorp isn't trying to get good talent from overseas. They're trying to save money, push down wages, have a workforce that they can mistreat (since they can't easily leave the company given their immigration status requires employment), etc.

By contrast, if a company is looking to hire great engineers or scientists from overseas because they're in a growing industry with a shortage of workers, they would be willing to pay a lot more to get the H1-B visas. They're not looking to save $20,000/year on someone's salary. They want top talent.

When companies are trying to replace their workforce with lower-paid foreign workers who can't complain (lest they lose their job and with it their immigration status), that's not what the H1-B system was designed for. It certainly is how some companies are using it. If you're on an H1-B and lose your job, you have 60 days to find a new job or you're gone. That's going to make you a much more compliant employee. You have little leverage to negotiate raises, you aren't likely to quit even if they're overworking you, they can pass you over for promotions and you'll quietly accept it.

But if the employer is competing in an auction for H1-B visas, they're more likely to be companies that are seeking out top talent rather than seeking out workers they can underpay and mistreat.
by twic | 2025-08-12 19:18:01+00:00
From another piece about the Zizians [1]:

> The ability to dismiss an argument with a “that sounds nuts,” without needing recourse to a point-by-point rebuttal, is anathema to the rationalist project. But it’s a pretty important skill to have if you want to avoid joining cults.

[1] https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationali...
by lysecret | 2025-08-12 19:18:16+00:00
Just wow. My greatest respect! Also an incredible write up. I like the take-away that an essential ingredient to a search engine is curated and well filtered data (garbage in garbage out) I feel like this has been a big learning of the LLM training too, rather work with less much higher quality data. I'm curious how a search engine would perform where all content has been judged by an LLM.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-12 19:18:21+00:00
I saw a figure yesterday showing that current AI data center investment exceeds all consumer spending in terms of GDP. This is important, because consumer spending is normally 2/3rds of GDP. This means consumer spending isn't great, and data center investments probably can't sustain this pace forever. It's also not clear that there will be a return on these investments (one that flows to the specific companies seeing the investment.)
by SkyMarshal | 2025-08-12 19:18:27+00:00
From another discussion, Intel's board members:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44842991

Frank Yeary, managing member Darwin capital advisors

James Goetz, partner Sequoia Capital

Andrea Goldsmith, dean of engineering Princeton University

Alyssa Henry, former square CEO

Eric Meurice, former CEO ASML

Barbara Novick, cofounder BlackRock

Steve Sanghi, CEO microchip

Gregory Smith, former CFO Boeing company

Stacy Smith, chair of Autodesk

Dion Weisler, former CEO HP
by dennisy | 2025-08-12 19:18:51+00:00
Also another view is that developers below a certain level get a positive benefit and those above get a negative effect.

This makes sense, as the models are an average of the code out there and some of us are above and below that average.

Sorry btw I do not want to offend anyone who feels they do garner a benefit from LLMs, just wanted to drop in this idea!
by 30minAdayHN | 2025-08-12 19:19:02+00:00
I agree with your broader point about companies abusing H1-Bs. But I'm not sure if the abuse happens through hiring at lower wage. For example, if you look at FANG, they pay as much for an H1-B as they would pay any other employee. Where is this perspective that you can hire someone at lower wage because they come with H1-B? Would love understand the loophole.
by notahacker | 2025-08-12 19:19:14+00:00
I agree with the religion comparison (the "rational" conclusions of rationalism tend towards millenarianism with a scifi flavour), but the people going furthest down that rabbit hole often aren't doing what they please: on the contrary they're spending disproportionate amounts of time worrying about armageddon and optimising for stuff other people simply don't care about, or in the case of the explicit cults being actively exploited. Seems like the typical in-too-deep rationalist gets seduced by the idea that others who scoff at their choices just aren't as smart and rational as them, as part of a package deal which treats everything from their scifi interests to their on-the-spectrum approach to analysing every interaction from first principles as great insights...
by cnst | 2025-08-12 19:19:16+00:00
But the golden ticket requires 5mil. Even in the US, even the most talented engineers, probably wouldn't have that much until after 5 to 10+ years of work, and outside of the US, earning that much money as an engineer is probably next to impossible before well over 40+. (And, even then, if all you have is just the 5mil, would you really part with that much money just for a visa?)
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-12 19:19:30+00:00
Because it's not like it is surrounded by countries with lax gun laws. You can't buy a semi-automatic rifle or a handgun and a pile of ammo with the same ease in, say, Belgium that you can in West Virginia. Like, which country in Europe do you think has the laxest gun laws, for comparison? Having lived in both Europe and the US, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US.
by lillecarl | 2025-08-12 19:19:47+00:00
I'm currently unemployed in the DevOps field (resigned and got a long vacation). I've been using various models to write various Kubernetes plug-ins abd simple automation scripts. It's been a godsend implementing things which would require too much research otherwise, my ADHD context window is smaller than Claude's.

Models are VERY good at Kubernetes since they have very anal (good) documentation requirements before merging.

I would say my productivity gain is unmeasurable since I can produce things I'd ADHD out of unless I've got a whip up my rear.
by unoti | 2025-08-12 19:19:59+00:00
> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. > How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now.

Every success story with AI coding involves giving the agent enough context to succeed on a task that it can see a path to success on. And every story where it fails is a situation where it had not enough context to see a path to success on. Think about what happens with a junior software engineer: you give them a task and they either succeed or fail. If they succeed wildly, you give them a more challenging task. If they fail, you give them more guidance, more coaching, and less challenging tasks with more personal intervention from you to break it down into achievable steps.

As models and tooling becomes more advanced, the place where that balance lies shifts. The trick is to ride that sweet spot of task breakdown and guidance and supervision.
by mgh95 | 2025-08-12 19:20:00+00:00
A "world-leading PhD in a critical field" should come under an O1-A visa (see: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...):

"O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)"
by cs702 | 2025-08-12 19:20:24+00:00
Hmm... I wonder if the same pattern holds for people.

In my experience, human beings who reliably get things done, and reliably do them well, tend to be less warm and empathetic than other human beings.

This is an observed tendency, not a hard rule. I know plenty of warm, empathetic people who reliably get things done!
by _mlbt | 2025-08-12 19:20:50+00:00
It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.

Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-12 19:20:51+00:00
If you've been with HN for awhile, or you search the archives, similar topics to "Is the AI booming turning into an AI bubble" kept popping up long before CHatGPT came out. And this was DNNs, and it was same people (e.g. Hinton and his students) who were at the forefront of that also. And no, their previous projects didn't go bust.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-12 19:20:55+00:00
I remember reading this for years before the dot com bubble imploded, years before the housing bubble impoded, and months before the market woke up to the fact that COVID existed. (At least governments decided to print that last one away.)

On a more serious note, the fundamental issue in the first two crashes was that the markets stopped being able to rationally price things. My view is that this doesn't always mean there will be an immediate crash. It just means that when the inevitable downturn does happen, nobody will be able to figure out the correct pricing for anything -- and so a correction turns into a catastrophe.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-08-12 19:21:06+00:00
I don't want to be Captain Obvious, but it wasn't like there was a long era of assembly computing, and then it was stopped being used as higher-level languages took over.

To put thing in perspective, Fortran was invented in 1954, Lisp 4 years later. In the following decades, the assembly language was being used along in various ways. And it is still being used in certain applications.
by xphos | 2025-08-12 19:21:12+00:00
Nit pick here but ...

I think CUDA shouldn't be label as SIMD but SIMT. The difference in overhead between the two approaches is vast. A true Vector machine is far more efficient but with all of the massive headaches of actually programming it. CUDA and SIMT has a huge benefit in that if statement actually execute different codes for active/inactive bins. I.e different instructions execute on the same data in some cases which really aids. Your view might also be the same instructions operate on different datas but the fork and join nature behaves very different.

I enjoyed your other point though about the comparsions of machines though
by jraph | 2025-08-12 19:21:50+00:00
AI was over-hyped. I remember how "AI" felt like marketing bullshit at the lab when I was there between 2015 and 2020.

Generative AI took it at the next level though. There is no comparison.

The meaning of AI has brutally changed. It used to refer to ML, deep learning and all these things. Now, it is a synonym of generative AI.
by MeIam | 2025-08-12 19:21:55+00:00
- The pandemic did in fact tank the market - Wars never tank the market and they jack up the military industry so no one would have said that - High interest rates did tank the market once last year already and in the past because it provides for risk free gains - Tariffs did tank the market so Trump played the reversal games - Will AI tank the market? It will if it creates unemployment.

Diversifying does not stop the tanking. It will reduce the risk related to poor choices all at once
by garbthetill | 2025-08-12 19:21:58+00:00
I think its possible, but i just need some clarification, does outsourcing some of the work still count as a one person company? mobile games, High end fashion have good profit margin, so one person could generation 100s of million of revenue a year

also whatsapp had ~50 employees b4 meta acquired them for billions, imagine what one can do now with aws, ai agents etc erlang/elixir is the only language that made me believe that I could make services that 100s of millions of people could use with no worries and with all the iaas options out there, i wouldnt have to care about managing it and just throw money in the furnace for scale
by fredfoobar | 2025-08-12 19:22:09+00:00
Yeah, there's plenty of abuse with H1B with those consulting companies operating out of India and shipping people overseas, I don't believe many of them would qualify for the H1B. That said, many folks who come here to study and get hired by companies (usually, for their specialization in a masters degree for most foreign students) also apply for a H1B.

I don't understand your "low wage" argument though, aren't there laws against it currently? they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
by chasd00 | 2025-08-12 19:22:17+00:00
> Your analogy would be much better with giving workers a work horse with a mind of its own.

i think this is a very insightful comment with respect to working with LLMs. If you've ever ridden a horse you don't really tell it to walk, run, turn left, turn right, etc you have to convince it to do those things and not be too aggravating while you're at it. With a truck simple cause and effect applies but with horse it's a negotiation. I feel like working with LLMs is like a negotiation, you have to coax out of it what you're after.
by nickperry12 | 2025-08-12 19:22:41+00:00
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Remote: Preferred, open to hybrid and on-site

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Express, Ruby, Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Vectors DBs, Debezium, Kafka, Docker, AWS, RAG, Embeddings, Chunking

Résumé/CV: Available upon request

Email: nick.perry604@gmail.com

Hi there, my name is Nick and I'm a software engineer with 3+ years experience developing fullstack web applications. Most recently, I've been interning with Mastra AI, an open-source TypeScript Agent framework, where I've introduced a new sentence-based chunking strategy with intelligent boundary detection, and a chunking strategy for semantic markdown with hierarchical section merging. I value empathy and great communication, and I'm looking for a team that's willing to set egos aside to achieve our goals. If this sounds like a great fit, I'd love to hear from you!
by lolive | 2025-08-12 19:22:48+00:00
There is a boardgame called [at least in France] “The Gang” where a team of 3-6 players play a noTalk noMoney cooperative variant of TexasHoldEm. It is REALLY nice !

https://www.tabletopfinder.eu/en/boardgame/61182/the-gang

[note: from my description, it might seem unclear that this game is ALL about friendly communication and deciding altogether with a very limited set of informations. My nearest definition of a kid-compliant version of poker :)]
by Apes | 2025-08-12 19:22:52+00:00
It’s not hard to imagine a loophole here:

• Someone with a lot of money wants to get U.S. residency.

• They set up or work with a shell company that “hires” them under the H-1B program.

• That company uses part of their payment to win the visa auction.

• Once in the U.S., the “employee” does whatever they want — the job is just window dressing.

This is essentially what’s happened in other visa categories when money alone becomes the main filter.