MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-08-21 17:43:23+00:00
"Simpler" here is at least partly comparing to explicit calls to the .format method, which was added all the way back in 2.6.

%-style interpolation supports many of these features, they just weren't as well known or discussed back then. The % style is also more complicated because of the weird edge cases (like trying to interpolate a single value which is a tuple).
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-08-21 17:43:34+00:00
Sabine's early video's seemed pretty sincere, and had a lot of valid points.

But later, I think the pressure of creating constant content, and moving into non-expert areas, has gotten just as pop-sci as anybody else.

Still think she is on another level from Eric who will throw out any crazy idea he can if someone will listen.
by nerevarthelame | 2025-08-21 17:43:42+00:00
To set appropriate goal posts, it shouldn't just the total water/energy usage from start to finish: it's that, relative to the local regions they're being extracted from. Are those local regions at risk of being overused?

Focusing on water, Google does reports on their total water withdrawal at all their data centers. It was around 10 billion gallons per year in 2024. That's around 0.03% of water usage in the US (that's just for rough context - not all of Google's data centers are in the US). I don't think that's an eye-popping amount.

But when you consider that more than 1 billion gallons came from Council Bluffs, IA, you have to make sure that's being done responsibly, and that the local ecology can support it. Google admits that 28% of their water use comes from sources with "medium to high risk of depletion or scarcity." [0]

[0]: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2025-e...
by iamleppert | 2025-08-21 17:43:48+00:00
Just finished ripping out Databricks at one of my clients, and have several more queued up. Folks can't wait to get as far away as they can, and as fast as they can from any of their offerings. Poor performance, bad product, bad UX: hard to get even decent logs out of the damn thing, and it's incredibly overpriced.

They told a good story and had a good sales team, but the writing is on the wall for them.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-21 17:43:56+00:00
That tax is certainly disappointing, but I'm confident based on modeling that this will not materially impair uptake necessary to drive out a majority of remaining fossil generation in Pakistan (imports are ~15-17GW of solar PV per year as of 2024, peak demand is ~30GW). Batteries are up next. Total current coal capacity is 8.45GW, fossil gas 17.4GW per Electricity Maps and Ember Energy.

Perhaps an opportunity to use carbon credits or a similar funding method to negate these import tariffs to keep the deployment going at speed. Philanthropy or NGO dollars don't have to pay for all of the clean energy imports, just enough to equalize the import tariffs to zero.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PK/72h/hourly

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/pakistan/

https://uploads.renewablesfirst.org/Pakistan_Electricity_Rev...

https://bsky.app/profile/evcurvefuturist.com/post/3lsyf4gruh...
by turnsout | 2025-08-21 17:44:07+00:00
I had an experience recently where the chatbot gathered details about my problem, but then referred me to a knowledgebase article. I just replied "human" and it connected me with a human, but the AI must have given them a detailed summary, because they joined the chat, said "I understand the issue, let me see what I can do," and then two minutes later, said "I went ahead and fixed that for you on the backend."

One way to look at that anecdote is "the AI failed." Another way is "the AI made the human agent about 100% more efficient." I'm pretty sure CS agents don't love gathering basic info.
by l3onl1ur | 2025-08-21 17:44:20+00:00
> I guess you are in a tough position because you are trying to provide real world examples of a category you are hoping to define, but in this case, perhaps it's best to wait for some clear real world examples instead of muddying the waters like this. I fear that reading this, most people would conclude that outcome-based billing is just a way to define your usage-based pricing, rather than something that needs a platform like Skope.

You're right in that the cases of real-world examples are rare, but I believe it's only in software. The concept of outcome-based pricing have always existed throughout different work for a long, long time – think about test-prep service that promises to only need to pay if you get X score, real-estate agent that carry commission as a % of sale price, etc.

I think this instills confidence in something like this and makes me wonder why such pricing models haven't been applied to tech yet.
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-21 17:44:21+00:00
This is an extremely tricky question.

The practical and readily-observable-from-output answer is "No, they cannot meaningfully identify spam or misinformation, and do indeed just accept the results as gospel"; Google's AI summary works this way and is repeatedly wrong in exactly this way. Google's repeatedly had it be wrong even in the adcopy.

The theoretical mechanism is that the attention mechanism with LLMs would be able to select which parts of the results are fed further into the results. This is how the model is capable of finding parts of the text that are "relevant". The problem is that this just isn't enough to robustly identify spam or incorrect information.

However, we can isolate this "find the relevant bit" functionality away from the rest of the LLM to enhance regular search engines. It's hard to say how useful this is; Google has intentionally damaged their search engine and it may simply not be worth the GPU cycles compared to traditional approaches, but it's an idea being widely explored right now.
by olalonde | 2025-08-21 17:44:23+00:00
You missed the point. The point was that there are many ordinary and mundane reasons why you wouldn't be able to prove the full chain of custody for the BTC you acquired in 2012. It would be a real practical concern if you are a law-abiding person. If you're a criminal, it's not much of a concern since laundering money is relatively easy.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-21 17:44:41+00:00
> "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down."

I mean, this is basically how all R&D works, everywhere, minus the strawman bit about "single fiscal year", which isn't functionally true.

And this is a serious career tip: you need to get good at this. Being able to break down extremely ambitious, many-year projects into discrete chunks that prove progress and value is a fundamental skill to being able to do big things.

If a group of very smart people said "give us ${BILLIONS} and don't bother us for 15 years while we cook up the next world-shaking thing", the correct response to that is "no thanks". Not because we hate innovation, but because there's no way to tell the geniuses apart from the cranks, and there's not even a way to tell the geniuses-pursuing-dead-ends from the geniuses-pursuing-real-progress.

If you do want to have billions and 15 years to invent the next big thing, you need to be able to break the project up to milestones where each one represents convincing evidence that you're on the right track. It doesn't have to be on an annual basis, but it needs to be on some cadence.
by hinkley | 2025-08-21 17:44:42+00:00
Not just juniors. Industry is full of senior and some staff engineers who see discipline as a waste of time.

The number of things I do in a day that half my coworkers see as a waste of time until they enjoy the outcomes is basically uncountable at this point.

If something is a “waste of time” it’s possible that you’re just lousy at it.

Self reflection is a rarer commodity than it should be. And most of the tasks you list either require or invite it.
by nerdjon | 2025-08-21 17:44:48+00:00
They also end it with trying to sell their service around AI which further devalues it, and even trying to give it a name like "AppleStorm".

I think some of the points are valid, but I think the over emphasis on Siri vs Private Cloud is massively overblown. That to me is just the nature of a transition like this and eventually more if Siri will likely fall under "Apple Intelligence" since it makes sense that they would have a single platform on the backend.

Then there is this header:

> "End-to-End Encryption? I’m Not Sure"

Well.. it is still end to end encrypted. Nothing about using Siri to dictate it changes that since you know... your on one of the ends. It is like saying that me taking a screenshot of the conversation somehow broke E2E.

That isn't to say that the concern here is not valid, but there are so many examples of things being twisted and manipulated to get you to use their product that I have a hard time really understanding what is an issue and what isn't.

Like ok you made an app using SiriKit using Apple's recommended settings (which may be recommended for a reason). But do you have the ability to have them not go to apple's servers if you configure it a certain way... it seems the author just ended with "Well it happens when I made this app" and never looked further.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-21 17:45:04+00:00
That sounds well and good, but Unity forced my last company into the more expensive license unilaterally and with no discussion. They doubled our costs just because they can.

At this point, we should all treat Unity like we do Broadcom. Utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs because they will shake you down and leave you with a lesser product for no reason other than blind greed.

Nothing Unity does will ever recover the goodwill they nuked for money
by jacques_chester | 2025-08-21 17:45:10+00:00
It's not for everyone. Some people have excellent reasons why it isn't workable for them. Others have had terrible experiences. It takes a great deal of practice to be a good pair and, if you don't start by working with an experienced pair, your memories of pairing are unlikely to be fond.

However.

I paired full-time, all day, at Pivotal, for 5 years. It was incredible. Truly amazing. The only time in my career when I really thrived. I miss it badly.
by pyrale | 2025-08-21 17:45:11+00:00
> If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential.

You sure have a weird definition of it.

To make a quantitative claim, I'm not sure anyone would die immediately if Nvidia disappeared overnight, except maybe for a few traders. The potential long term casualties would likely be related to it possibly triggering a stock market crash, rather than first-order consequences of the company no longer delivering products.

Obviously, the disappearance of a company intimately related to logistics would be harder to mitigate.

> You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve

The crux of your confusion seems to be that you don't make a distinction between "deserve" and "need". Food and entertainment are both things everyone deserves, but only food is required for everyone to make it to the end of the month.
by duxup | 2025-08-21 17:45:28+00:00
>Figures from classified IDF database listed 8,900 named fighters as dead or probably dead in May, as overall death toll reached 53,000

53k, wow.

I don't know what they're doing except just wiping out people, relatives, livelihoods... and just creating more desperate people who will think extremist groups have the answers.
by dang | 2025-08-21 17:45:44+00:00
I understand the provocation, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

Your GP comment was great, and probably the thing to do with a supercilious reply is just not bother responding (easier said than done of course). You can usually trust other users to assess the thread fairly (e.g.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44975623).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bpt3 | 2025-08-21 17:45:48+00:00
Google and the like aren't borrowing money to light on fire with their misguided attempts at new products, they're supplying it themselves from their highly profitable core business lines. Therefore their failure to produce returns aren't an indictment of current interest rates.

What they probably should start doing is paying a meaningful dividend to shareholders because they've repeatedly demonstrated they aren't capable of producing additional shareholder value with new product/business lines, but I don't see that as very likely in the near to medium term.

That's because it's more risky for the careers of the decision makers to hand cash back to shareholders and say they don't know what to do with it than it is to lay claim to some moonshot with a < 1% chance of success.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-21 17:45:52+00:00
It might be because its in their interests to do so.

It is our problem that needs fixing, so we can just wait untill either they redirect us to the right person with the right knowledge who might be one of the higher ups in the call centers. Or we just quit the call. Either way, it doesn't matter to the company.

Plus points that they don't have to teach the frontline customer service more details too and it could be easier for them to onboard new people / fire old employees. Also they would have to pay less if they require very low specifications.

man I remember the is 0.001 cent = 0.001 $ video /meme of verizon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpZg-Ua5ao
by microtonal | 2025-08-21 17:45:53+00:00
Same here (Western Europe). I can't recall the last time we had a power outage that was not caused inside the house.

All power cables except for long-distance transport are underground though, which probably helps a lot and might account for the difference to a large extend.

(Our microwave oven did trip our residual-current circuit breaker a few weeks ago, never encountered that before, only 'fuse switch'-flips. Sadly that was the end of the device after 16 years.)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-21 17:45:58+00:00
How unfortunate would it be if people actually read the report

https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

> While only 40% of companies say they purchased an official LLM subscription, workers from over 90% of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every single person used an LLM in some form for their work. In many cases, shadow AI users reported using LLMs multiples times a day every day of their weekly workload through personal tools, while their companies' official AI initiatives remained stalled in pilot phase.

Corporate initiatives are failing, but people are using LLMs like crazy at work. This story is not the bombshell it's made out to be, in fact it could even go in the other direction.
by iLemming | 2025-08-21 17:46:01+00:00
Both CL and Elisp are arguably more functional than Javascript in several key ways - Immutable data by convention, First-class function from the start (js added this later), powerful higher-order function are more idiomatic, lexical closures, FP culture that goes back decades. JS has caught up in some aspects - arrow functions, array methods, const, libs like Rambda.

I think, Lisp in general is very flexible - you can write imperatively, or you can do more FP; if you need object-orientation - you have it, polymorphic dispatch - sure why not?, etc., etc.
by mavilia | 2025-08-21 17:46:18+00:00
> At which point you now have to do it yourself, but you know the codebase less well than if you'd hand written it.

Appreciate you saying this because it is my biggest gripe in these conversations. Even if it makes me faster I now have to put time into reading the code multiple times because I have to internalize it.

Since the code I merge into production "is still my responsibility" as the HN comments go, then I need to really read and think more deeply about what AI wrote as opposed to reading a teammate's PR code. In my case that is slower than the 20% speedup I get by applying AI to problems.

I'm sure I can get even more speed if I improve prompts, when I use the AI, agentic vs non-agentic, etc. but I just don't think the ceiling is high enough yet. Plus I am someone who seems more prone to AI making me lazier than others so I just need to schedule when I use it and make that time as minimal as possible.
by staplers | 2025-08-21 17:46:25+00:00
If apple can figure out how to carve out a privacy/individual-focused ai model that avoids the classic centralized data-harvest/training they could runaway with a large portion of the market.

So many people understand the benefits ai can bring to our lives with automations, search, etc but so many are also aware of the dangers lurking beneath the surface and causes anti-ai sentiment (for good reason).

They can be mutually exclusive but aren't generally.
Show HN: Telescopo – View any file beautifully on your Mac
by k_badcommand | 2025-08-21 17:46:39+00:00
Hi HN! I'm the developer of Telescopo, a universal file viewer for macOS.

I built this because I was tired of keeping different apps around for different file types. Preview for PDFs, Marked for Markdown, Xcode for code files, random apps for EPUBs. Telescopo handles 70+ formats in one native app.

Technical highlights:

- Metal acceleration for buttery smooth scrolling/zooming even with 1000-page PDFs - Syntax highlighting for 40+ languages with function detection - Renders Mermaid/PlantUML diagrams inline in markdown files - Real tabs and multi-window support (surprisingly rare in document viewers) - Instant loading - no progress bars, even for massive documents - 100% native Swift/AppKit, no Electron or web views

The interesting challenge was making disparate formats feel cohesive. A Python file, PDF, and EPUB need completely different rendering approaches, but the user should feel like they're using one consistent app.

Includes three themes - light, dark, and an animated cyberpunk mode (I know, but it's actually great for late night documentation reading).

Pricing: $4.99 one-time purchase, no subscriptions.

Would love feedback from the HN community. Already adding LaTeX support based on early feedback. What formats do you deal with that never seem to have good viewers?

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/telescopo-universal-viewer/id6...

Happy to answer questions about the Metal implementation or building native Mac apps in 2025!
by nucleardog | 2025-08-21 17:48:02+00:00
> Just put some sensible request limits per hour per ip, and be done.

I have no personal experience, but probably worth reading like... any of the comments where people are complaining about these crawlers.

Claims are that they're: ignoring robots.txt; sending fake User-Agent headers; they're crawling from multiple IPs; when blocked they will use residential proxies.

People who have deployed Anubis to try and address this include: Linux Kernel Mailing List, FreeBSD, Arch Linux, NixOS, Proxmox, Gnome, Wine, FFMPEG, FreeDesktop, Gitea, Marginalia, FreeCAD, ReactOS, Duke University, The United Nations (UNESCO)...

I'm relatively certain if this were as simple as "just set a sensible rate limit and the crawlers will stop DDOS'ing your site" one person at one of these organizations would have figured that out by now. I don't think they're all doing it because they really love anime catgirls.
by zahlman | 2025-08-21 17:48:04+00:00
I don't know why people look at paragraphs of documentation that explain the exact results in strange edge cases (which have to exist because of the underlying complexity; in this example, Python can't change how IEEE-754 works, nor the original C printf specifier they're emulating) and conclude that this proves some strange and unexpected complexity was introduced.

When documentation isn't this thorough, people complain about that, too.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-21 17:48:30+00:00
>The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots.

I think a large fraction of those repetitive requests are covering up gaps in the customer portal/whatever by doing data entry the customer could be doing.

Like "if you need your address changed call support" type stuff.
by lawlessone | 2025-08-21 17:48:30+00:00
Deepmind where experimenting with this https://github.com/google-deepmind/lab a few years ago.

Having AI agents learn to see, navigate and complete tasks in a 3d environment. I feel like it had more potential than LLMs to become an AGI (if that is possible).

They haven't touched it in a long time though. But Genie 3 makes me think they haven't completely dropped it.
by tombert | 2025-08-21 17:48:51+00:00
Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field. I know a lot of engineers like that (and I'm certainly guilty of that kind of thinking sometimes though the jury is still out on if I'm extremely talented).

I have no doubt at all that she understands her niche of physics better than most other humans on the planet, but that doesn't really translate to most other fields. I stopped watching her after I saw her video on transgender stuff and then another video basically acting like we can't trust any kind of academic science.

I also have no idea why the hell she thinks it's a good idea to try and simp for Eric Weinstein who, as far as I can tell, hasn't made any significant contribution to physics and primarily exists to add an air of credibility to right-wing talking point. I will admit that I don't know enough about physics to talk shit about his weird unified field theory attempt, but I do know actual physicists who said it was pretty silly.

Again, I am sure that Eric Weinstein is good at a specific niche of physics, he does have a real PhD from a good school, but he's using that status to try and branch out into stuff he has no fucking clue about.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-21 17:49:34+00:00
My company gets a bunch of product listings from our clients and we try to group them together (so that if you search for a product name you can see all the retailers who are selling that product). Since there arent reliable UPCs for the kinds of products we work with, we need to generate embeddings (vectors) for the products by their name/brand/category and do a nearest-neighbor search. This problem has many many many "old school" ML solutions to it, and when i was asked to design this system I came up with a few implementations and proposed them.

Instead of doing any of those (we have the infrastructure to do it) we are paying OpenAI for their embeddings APIs. Perhaps openAI is just doing old school ML under the hood but there is definitely an instinct among product managers to reach for shiny tools from shiny companies instead of considering more conservative options
by xp84 | 2025-08-21 17:49:45+00:00
> they just can't seem to figure out what to do with it.

That's the funny thing about Siri. It has since Day 1 insisted on being exclusively online-only, processing on the server - even for commands that the pre-Siri Voice Control could do fully locally on an iPhone 3Gs such as "Call Steve" or "Turn Wi-Fi on"

That decision always surprised me, and it's surprising that Siri's never improved given that unlike Apple Intelligence it is not limited to on-device nor to PCC.

For all the scorn directed lately at the "Apple Intelligence" team for not shipping anything they promised, I have to hand it to JG's team for at least building a local processing capability plus having PCC instead of just one server-side thing and a "Trust Me Bro" like Siri.

If we're lucky, they'll build new Siri stuff from scratch using local + PCC, and finally push the old Siri stuff into the scrapyard where it belongs.