MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brendang_sd | 2025-08-18 18:36:00+00:00
You knew what to look for, and were presumably logged into a device which showed you participants... now imagine if you were on the go, or not very technical so joined from a phone using a phone # and a meeting code... you'd never see it or be aware. I contend Otter knows exactly what they are doing and hopefully this lawsuit gets them to get a bit more transparent and law abiding.
by comex | 2025-08-18 18:36:47+00:00
As does Swift.

However, both languages have significant limitations on bidirectionality, mainly due to their embrace of dot syntax. If you write `foo.bar`, the compiler can't look up `bar` without first knowing the type of `foo`. So types cannot fully propagate backwards through such expressions (i.e. if the compiler knows the type of `foo.bar`, it cannot infer the type of `foo`).

There is an exception if the type is partially known: if the compiler knows that `foo` is of type `Vec<_>` (without knowing the type parameter), and also knows that `foo.pop().unwrap()` is of type `i32`, it can conclude that the type parameter is `i32`. But it couldn't do this if `foo`'s type were completely unknown.

This contrasts with more-traditional functional languages like Haskell and OCaml, where (to slightly oversimplify) there is no dependent name lookup. Instead of `foo.bar()`, you would write `bar foo`. This means the compiler doesn't need to know the type of `foo` to look up `bar`, improving bidirectionality. But in exchange you can only have one `bar` in scope at a time. (`bar` can potentially be a generic/typeclass function that works differently for different types, but you can't just have unrelated methods on different types that happen to have the same name. Or rather, you can, but if you do then you have to manually choose which one you want in scope.)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-18 18:36:59+00:00
That's not a real tension. There is no case where the inherent value of some commodity keeps its price high despite easy availability. That's the point of the "diamonds in the desert" thought experiment.

Inherent value provides a ceiling on the price of whatever it is.

Availability also provides a ceiling on the price.

If I give you two theorems that say C < 300 and also C < 10, why would you describe those as being "in tension" with each other?
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-18 18:37:08+00:00
Wasting your money too right?

I guess another angle on this is putting trust in people to comply with ROBOTS.txt. There is no guarantee so we should probably design with the assumption that our sites will be crawled however people want.

Also im curious about your use case.

>We have a faceted search that creates billions of unique URLs by combinations of the facets.

Are we talking about a search that has filters like (to use ecommerce as an example), brand, price range, color, etc. And then all these combinations make up a URL (hence bilions)? How does a crawler discover these? They are just designed to detect all these filters and try all combinations? That doesn't really jive with my understanding with crawlers but otherwise IDK how it would be generating billions of unique URLs. I guess maybe they could also be included in sitemaps but I doubt that.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-08-18 18:37:13+00:00
> Given the amount of hosting and storage needed to sustain this project. Nobody is getting rich off of donations.

They're getting donations as much as megaupload was getting donations for premium accounts...

People pay for higher bandwidth and no wait time, not to support the "cause". It's a farce to qualify this of donations.

And obviously people do get rich off of it, as you can see from the slew of file hosting services.
by Benjammer | 2025-08-18 18:37:27+00:00
Are you unaware of the concept of a junior engineer working in a company? You realize that not all human code is written by someone with domain expertise, right?

Are you aware that your wording here is implying that you are describing a unique issue with AI code that is not present in human code?

>What would have happened if someone without your domain expertise wasn't reviewing every line and making the changes you mentioned?

So, we're talking about two variables, so four states: human-reviewed, human-not-reviewed, ai-reviewed, ai-not-reviewed.

[non ai]

*human-reviewed*: Humans write code, sometimes humans make mistakes, so we have other humans review the code for things like critical security issues

*human-not-reviewed*: Maybe this is a project with a solo developer and automated testing, but otherwise this seems like a pretty bad idea, right? This is the classic version of "YOLO to production", right?

[with ai]

*ai-reviewed*: AI generates code, sometimes AI hallucinates or gets things very wrong or over-engineers things, so we have humans review all the code for things like critical security issues

*ai-not-reviewed*: AI generates code, YOLO to prod, no human reads it - obviously this is terrible and barely works even for hobby projects with a solo developer and no stakes involved

I'm wondering if the disconnect here is that actual professional programmers are just implicitly talking about going from [human-reviewed] to [ai-reviewed], assuming nobody in their right mind would just _skip code reviews_. The median professional software team would never build software without code reviews, imo.

But are you thinking about this as going from [human-reviewed] straight to [ai-not-reviewed]? Or are you thinking about [human-not-reviewed] code for some reason? I guess it's not clear why you immediately latch onto the problems with [ai-not-reviewed] and seem to refuse to acknowledge the validity of the state [ai-reviewed] as being something that's possible?

It's just really unclear why you are jumping straight to concerns like this without any nuance for how the existing industry works regarding similar problems before we used AI at all.
by ultrasaurus | 2025-08-18 18:38:37+00:00
We've talked with a ton of AI companies and I was surprised how much of the challenges were the usual challenges in any project. Just amplified by the rush to do AI right now, but I haven't seen anything as bad as "You couldn’t have customer calls, you couldn’t work on budgets, you had to only work on AI projects.”

Warning for gratuitous self promotion: https://humansignal.com/blog/9-criteria-for-successful-ai-pr...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-18 18:38:39+00:00
No, the alternative is whatever we do. We can say it will be unicorns and rainbows, but unless you have a unicorn-and-rainbow factory, saying that won't change the reality that it will be... something else.

We might be able to abolish or defund the police. The result won't be paradise, though, it will be Vigilance Committees. (Even "abolish and replace" is, I think, too much of a reach to be actually implemented.)
by kazinator | 2025-08-18 18:38:45+00:00
Pretty much every functional language is verb-initial, as are function calls as well as statements in most mainstream languages.

Verb-final languages like PostScript and Forth are oddballs.

Embedded verbs are a thing of course, with the largest contribution coming from arithmetic expressions with infix operators, followed by certain common syntax like "else" being in the of an "if" statement, followed by things like these Python comprehensions and <action> if <condition> syntactic experiments and whatnot.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-08-18 18:39:02+00:00
> Notably, the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. Cancer, another top killer, is only mentioned in the context of pushing new AI technologies at the National Institutes of Health. Poisonings, another top killer, are also not mentioned explicitly.

These people don't care for you. You are just Menschenmaterial to them, something to be be used, abused, exploited, then discarded.
by zachlatta | 2025-08-18 18:39:24+00:00
I run Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), a nonprofit where lots of high schoolers learn to code and build awesome projects together.

Here is how the ones who are successful do it:

1. They make small technical projects they're proud of, like this https://gabitzu3.github.io/MemeOS-v0.1/

2. They do it in a way where they make friends (ex. on the Hack Club Slack, on Discords, or by going to in-person events like https://daydream.hackclub.com which is an upcoming global game jam we're hosting)

3. They do it in a way where they go on memorable adventures (either physical - like traveling to hackathons, or intellectual - like trying to build a compiler from scratch)
by Lerc | 2025-08-18 18:39:29+00:00
That's essentially it. Learning what the chain rule does, and learning what it can be used for, and how to apply it.

Neither are really inventions, they are discoveries, if anything the chain rule leans slightly more to invention than backdrop.

I understand the need for attribution as a means to track the means and validity of discovery, but I intensely dislike it when people act like it is a deed of ownership of an idea.
by duxup | 2025-08-18 18:40:59+00:00
I'm working on some AI projects and I'm building in "what just happened" kinda interface so folks understand if the result is in fact is what they wanted.

Management types seem baffled by the idea we would want this, even if they come around the next hour and say "hey user did something can you tell me what happened".

Like guies ... it's not 100%...
by JCM9 | 2025-08-18 18:41:27+00:00
Most of these “we’re profitable on inference” comments are glossing over the depreciation cost of developing the model, which is essentially a capital expense. Given the short lifespan of models it seems unlikely that fully loaded cost looks pretty. If you can sweat a model for 5 years then the financials would likely look decent. With new models every few months, it’s likely really ugly.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 18:41:30+00:00
> Natural language is easy to do for a human and a hard computing problem.

You ever see someone learning a new language? They struggle hard on more complex sentences.

It’s easy for us because we’ve practised it so much.

> + * - 15 6 / 20 4 ^ 2 3 - + 7 8 * 3 2

To begin with, you’re missing an operator. I’ll assume another leading +.

+ + * - 15 6 / 20 4 ^ 2 3 - + 7 8 * 3 2

Now, if you use infix, you have to have at least some of the parentheses, in this case actually only one pair, given rules of operator precedence, associativity and commutativity:

(15 - 6) * 20 / 4 + 2 ^ 3 + 7 + 8 - 3 * 2

But you may well just parenthesise everything, it makes solving easier:

((((15 - 6) * (20 / 4)) + (2 ^ 3)) + ((7 + 8) - (3 * 2)))

And you know how you go about solving it? Calculating chunks from the inside out, and replacing them with their values:

((( 9 * 5 ) + 8 ) + ( 15 - 6 )) (( 45 + 8 ) + 9 ) ( 53 + 9 ) 62

Coming back to Polish notation—you know what? It’s exactly the same:

(+ (+ (* (- 15 6) (/ 20 4)) (^ 2 3)) (- (+ 7 8) (* 3 2))) (+ (+ (* 9 5) 8) (- 15 6)) (+ (+ 45 8) 9) (+ 53 9) 62

For arithmetic at least, it’s not hard. You’re just not accustomed to it.
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-18 18:42:22+00:00
> Ultimately, I think such a separation as you describe will be stable only when all natural resources are controlled by tier 1 and tier 2 gets by with either gifts or stealing form tier 1.

For that to happen tier 1 would have to buy all of the resources from tier 2. Would you sell your house and be homeless so that you can have a highly efficient humanoid robot? I don't think so. And sooner or later, what tier 2 would want from tier 1 is what they need to build their AIs, and then they'd be more similar to tier 1.
by ivape | 2025-08-18 18:42:38+00:00
Because it’s the closest thing to proof that people truly do live entirely different realities. Whoever you were staring at those shows at that age is simple not you now and can never be you again. It’s almost supernatural. If you follow this line of thinking, it’s possible to live entirely different existences, almost in another body (you can take that however far you want, reincarnation, life after death, being unplugged from the simulation, etc).

It’s a mystical way of asking “what exactly was the past really and how transient am I now at this exact moment?”.
by alistairSH | 2025-08-18 18:43:26+00:00
And why do they use them in the suburbs? And why do people express disdain for interconnected roads?

Because nobody wants hundreds of cars going 40mph+ buzzing past their house every day. And instead of taking the time/money to fix the root cause, people who can afford to do so build culdesac neighborhoods.

Edit - and to be clear, I don't blame any individuals for making that choice. We're kind of stuck with what we have for now - any change/progress will be slow and incremental. None of which means we shouldn't design better/safer neighborhoods/roads.
by Arnavion | 2025-08-18 18:43:42+00:00
>Just an example of systemd limitation is that systemd does not support musl, so if you want to build a tiny embedded sysroot, you already have some limitations.

OpenEmbedded has carried a patchset to build systemd against musl for use in Yocto for a long time.

postmarketOS already got approval from Poettering to make a musl-linked systemd more officially supported.
by cyberax | 2025-08-18 18:43:50+00:00
Please stop spewing nonsense.

> If you're not writing SQL, it doesn't mean that you're unable to cover 1% of the queries, it only means that you're leaving 99% of performance on the table.

Honestly? You're spewing bullshit. In most apps most of SQL is trivial. It's typically limited to simple joins (with indexes) with simple filters. Anything more complicated, and it's usually not suitable for OLTP. Heck, all our SQL is linted to not have full-table scans.

This kind of SQL is perfectly auto-generated by ORMs.

Those multi-page queries that required mystic DB knowledge for placing hints, burning incense, and paying $1000 per hour to Oracle consultants? They're entirely useless in modern software stacks. Because you can either keep the entire working set in RAM so these queries can be trivially rewritten, or you just won't use regular SQL for it.

> You can tell a bad programmer by their refusing to use views and materialized views.

You can tell a bad programmer by them using DB in a way that requires materialized views. It typically ends with moving app logic into SQL, and may even lead to "SELECT '<td>' + row.cust_name + '</td>'".
by ViktorRay | 2025-08-18 18:43:55+00:00
Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting!

I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.

I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.

Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.

But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.
by kace91 | 2025-08-18 18:44:27+00:00
I think it’s clear that these tools are going to get more expensive.

What is not clear to me is that they’ll get expensive enough to not be worth it for a company.

A good engineer costs a lot of money and comes with limitations derived from being human.

Let’s say AI manages to be a 2x multiplier in productivity. Prices for that multiplier can rise a lot before they reach 120k/year for 40 hours a week, the point at which you’re better off hiring someone.
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-18 18:44:31+00:00
I saw this channel from someone on hackernews if I recall correctly: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm7RTomLsZo5PAWk0CpK0...

It's what you describe: Someone using LLMs to code stuff. I didnt really end up watching it so I can't really speak to the content but it should be the type of thing you're looking for.
by dinvlad | 2025-08-18 18:44:35+00:00
Saw this too, but seems a little too good to be true tbh. I don't doubt it helped them, but it's just so hard to make these agents work reliably. And the more "rules" one accumulates, the less reliably they follow all of the rules and details. Heck, Claude can't even follow a single rule of not inserting comments everywhere.. Plus, code often ends up in a mess, without strict human oversight.

Perhaps I'm overlooking something though, it would be great to see more concrete details of their implementation, rather than this high-level inspirational description..
by gigatexal | 2025-08-18 18:44:52+00:00
Please spare me the tears. At risk groups, minorities, etc have over the years gained many protections and will continue to do so. You write as if crypto is the only thing around to save the lives of these folks when it's instead used for grey and black market things mostly.

I was hoping we could find common ground in destroying the margins the payment processors rake in ... and still do KYC while still knowing that crypto is otherwise used for quick gains and is more or less just a Ponzi scheme.
by seunosewa | 2025-08-18 18:45:05+00:00
The first self-announced vibe coder was a founder of OpenAI. So he had the knowledge.

He started to trust the code written by the models to a point where he didn't always read the code. This happens when you you have learned the exact limits of your models.

It's like a senior coder who knows the projects the interns can handle without close supervision, and those they can't.
by ecshafer | 2025-08-18 18:45:16+00:00
My wife wasn't a candidate for LASIK due to her eyes being so bad they would have had to burn off the entire cornea to fix it. But she got ICL surgery, which is when a new lens is inserted into the middle of an eye, similar to the surgery for cataracts. $9k out of pocket, but she has 20/20 vision now.
by neilv | 2025-08-18 18:45:34+00:00
People like this, because people like free stuff, and like to rationalize getting free stuff. Occasionally, someone who likes free stuff styles themself a freedom fighter, though their values do not otherwise seem to extend beyond getting free stuff.

Some AI company techbros like this data trove even harder, and limit their pretending to publicly saying things like "we're changing the world" (and "AI could be bad if you don't give us money and lock out competitors") but really only care about wealth and power.

Certain sanctioned countries that culturally value literature and science might also appreciate this. (This last category, I'm much-much more sympathetic to, and wish them well in their intellectual pursuits and appreciation of the humanities, though we should really find a better way to share that doesn't undermine Western economies and many people's livelihoods.)
by EvanAnderson | 2025-08-18 18:46:09+00:00
Aside: Going down the "memory lane" of Intel motherboard codenames was fun. Tuscon II, Anchorage, Atlanta, Seattle, Maui, etc.

I really enjoyed Intel's desktop boards. They weren't particularly flashy, and there were certainly "duds" in there (early MU440EX revs not handling Pentium II CPUs properly, the whole RAMBUS debacle) but in general Intel made a solid (and not at all flashy) board.

With Intel's manufacturing competency you could be assured every board would be consistent. If there was a defect (I'm looking at you, MTH in the 820 chipset) every board would consistently have the same defect.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-18 18:46:15+00:00
Interesting. But it would depend on how much of model X is salvaged in creating model X+1.

I suspect that the answer is almost all of the training data, and none of the weights (because the new model has a different architecture, rather than some new pieces bolted on to the existing architecture).

So then the question becomes, what is the relative cost of the training data vs. actually training to derive the weights? I don't know the answer to that; can anyone give a definitive answer?
by zer0zzz | 2025-08-18 18:46:19+00:00
I the one reason I use iOS is the built in chat is pretty good and has most all my friends and family and so between that and many of the other built in apps I can avoid needing so many third party apps.

So my scrolling fixation is mostly limited to the browser. One nice thing about meta is they ALL of their mobile webapps are terrible so they don’t get me, but YouTube shorts does very often. I wish there was a good way to block all shorts on YouTube through the browser.
by agloe_dreams | 2025-08-18 18:46:19+00:00
I meant mostly in the context of daily life tasks as a person with ADHD - so maybe a hair neurodivergent. My issue isn't that I don't wonder things, it is that indulging the wonder would interrupt me from accomplishing almost anything. I would not very highly functioning if I allowed for non-critical thoughts to interrupt the flow. When outside of trying to do specific things and in less focus-dependent tasks, I absolutely wonder and google and get lost on weird random topics.

I think I probably could have worded it more as "I rarely have questions worth knowing the answer to", where the cost of knowing answers is tied to the following rabbit holes and delays/forgotten tasks.
by braden-w | 2025-08-18 18:46:44+00:00
Hmm, we support prompts at both 1. the model level (the Whisper supports a "prompt" parameter that sometimes works) and 2. transformations level (inject the transcribed text into a prompt and get the output from an LLM model of your choice). Unsure how else semantic correction can be implemented, but always open expand the feature set greatly over the next few weeks!
by kingstnap | 2025-08-18 18:46:48+00:00
I think batteries aging as much as they do is a thing we will be able to solve. Dr. Jeff Dahn's talks on YouTube were really striking in how much a bit of chemistry and charging management gets you.

https://youtu.be/i31x5JW361k?si=JdjJD_Lzg4qsY84C
by dns_snek | 2025-08-18 18:46:53+00:00
> Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim.

That's a rather bastardized and twisted representation of copyright and fair use.

The "whole point" of copyright was to promote the authorship of original creative works by legally protecting the financial income of those authors. The "whole point" of fair use was to make exceptions in cases where it's clear that the usage doesn't result in a market substitute and deprive original authors of their income.

The end-goal of LLMs is to ingest all of that original content and reproduce it with expert-level accuracy, promising to be the know-all, end-all product. If wildly optimistic predictions of LLM proponents turn out to be correct then they will never buy a book again, they will have no reason to. And this is precisely what the copyright was designed to protect authors against.
by dynm | 2025-08-18 18:47:02+00:00
I'm confused. Usually a "natural experiment" is a chance event that affects some random subset of a population. Here, they seem to be using "natural experiment" to refer to the event that someone decides to move to a different city. But obviously the subset of people in Amarilllo, TX who decide to move to New York, NY are going to be somewhat different than the subset who don't. So isn't this confounded?

It's really strange that they just jump into the paper and keep saying "natural experiment" over and over again without any justification that they actually have one. They do eventually get to this in the "Selection effects in relocation and mobile app usage" section, but I think they really downplay the seriousness of the issue.
by akomtu | 2025-08-18 18:47:12+00:00
Unlike previous technologies, chatbots know what users think at the most intimate level. Chatbots know, but currently cannot make sense of this knowledge. The near term goal, I believe, is to build simple, but accurate models of the users psyche to serve them ads better. Instead of crude labels like "user 456 loves cars", corpos will have a compact psyche model of that user that will predict his reactions with 95% accuracy. This model will know that user better than he knows himself. And for a brief moment in history, while AI is good enough to predict us, but not replace us, the adtech corpos will make bank.