MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-27 21:01:46+00:00
> Clueless human, but what stops a company from ignoring these laws from certain states?

The threat of lawsuits.

> How is this enforceable if a company doesn't have any infrastructure within that state?

If you are intentionally doing business in a US state, and either you or your assets are within the reach of courts in the US, you can probably be sued under the state's laws, either in the state's courts or in federal courts, and there is a reasonable chance that if the law is valid at all, it will be applied to your provision of your service to people in that state. Likewise, you have a risk from criminal laws of the state if you are personally within reach of any US law enforcement, through intrastate extradition (which, while there is occasional high-profile resistance, is generally Constitutionally mandatory and can be compelled by the federal courts.)

That's why services taking reasonable steps to cut off customers accessing their service from the states whose laws they don't want to deal with is a common response.
by MBCook | 2025-08-27 21:01:47+00:00
I agree. If you’re using a lot of cloud services (Google Docs, iCloud Drive, Spotify, etc) you can get by without a lot of storage these days.

But even if 8 GB of RAM holds you today, will it hold you five years from now?

Or are you going to have to get rid of the computer much faster and buy another one by then.

Whereas simply doubling the RAM would likely extend the life a significant amount.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-08-27 21:01:55+00:00
Wait until TIL how fonts and font foundries have been more or less crudely recasting typefaces for several hundred years. Since headlines were placed on the first print text.

I dunno, in this orange site context it makes perfect sense that one would assume interest, however thin.

Typography designer missus next to me is rolling her eyes at this - not a fan of Dinamo font work =)
by rcxdude | 2025-08-27 21:02:02+00:00
How realistic it is depends on how big your dependencies are (in total LOC, not 'number of packages' - something I think gives rust's ecosystem a bad rap, given the tendency for things to be split into lots of packages so the total amount of code you pull in can be minimised). For many projects the LOC of dependencies utterly dwarfs the amount of code in the project itself, and it's pretty infeasible to review it all.
by schwartzworld | 2025-08-27 21:02:38+00:00
It's bad at

- Actually knowing things / being correct - Creating anything original

It's good at

- Producing convincing output fast and cheap

There are lots of applications where correctness and originality matter less than "can I get convincing output fast and cheap". Other commenters have mentioned being able to vibe-code up a simple app, for example. I know an older man who is not great at writing in English (but otherwise very intelligent) who uses it for correspondence.
by xantronix | 2025-08-27 21:02:43+00:00
As an artist, I do not dread AI's artistic capabilities from a philosophical standpoint because its apparent "humanity" is a distilled average entirely divorced from the contexts in which its stolen art inputs are provided. In this way, it is categorically devoid of meaning.

As a software developer, I dread AI's capabilities to greatly accelerate the accumulation of technical debt in a codebase when used by somebody who lacks the experience to temper its outputs. I also dread AI's capabilities, at least in the short term, to separate me and others from economic opportunities.
by bawolff | 2025-08-27 21:02:44+00:00
> Reading it I have no idea if "support for volunteers" means supporting wikipedia editors, corporate, donations

I think its pretty clear that "support for volunteers" does not mean corporate.

I too would like more detailed budgets, but we do have some info here.

> Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations

The list of large donors is public https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu... there are only 27 who gave > $50000. Which ones do you think Wikipedia is giving biased coverage to?

I'd also point out that there is a wall of separation between editors and the foundation.

> all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed

Discussion about epoch times at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... my understanding is the concern is around them promoting conspiracy theories without evidence not their political alignment.
by uberman | 2025-08-27 21:03:03+00:00
Most local tax, certainly the lion's share of property taxes go to public schooling and services like fire fighters, sanitation, police, public works, and park and rec.

Could we privatize all those things or set usage fees? Probably. Where I live many things like your well, sceptic system, garbage collection are privatized but that only works when one lives in the country. It would be impossible to privately implement most public services in urban settings. I don't think I would want to live in a city where trash collection was left up to the individual to work out how to address. Even then, you are going to end up paying for these services somehow right? In fact, I would rather my county work out a bulk trash collection contract likely at a discount and tax me for it based on the number of bedrooms I have than leave that to me to figure out with a bill I have to manage every month.

Your mileage may vary as they say but while I hate paying tax, I do enjoy the services they support and I don't see them as any kind of theft.
by lostmsu | 2025-08-27 21:03:28+00:00
This is the dumbest question ever. I guess you need to ask 1B+ LLM users.

But hey, I already know you'd say you personally would never use it for these purposes.

Moreover, of the two of us you appear to have "shareholder" mentality. How profitable are volunteers serving food to homeless people? I guess they have no value then.
by petralithic | 2025-08-27 21:03:46+00:00
Haven't these arguments been the same since Stable Diffusion came out? Someone (A) will say what you said, then someone else (B) will say, well humans remix as well, A: no that's different because we're humans not machines, B: there is no need to prefer a biological substrate over a silicon one; A: AI will produce the same result over and over, B: not if you change the temperature and randomize the seed.

It's tiresome to read the same thing over and over again and at this point I don't think A's arguments will convince B and vice versa because both come from different initial input conditions in their thought processes. It's like trying to dig two parallel tunnels through a mountain from different heights and thinking they'll converge.
by MichaelZuo | 2025-08-27 21:04:00+00:00
It’s just natural that nobody wanted to pay for outdated machines and tooling in developed countries.

Labor costs, permits, fees, etc., means that buying used just doesn’t make sense unless it’s almost free.

Whereas developing countries were willing to pay a lot more, sometimes as much as 50 cents on the dollar compared to brand new equipment and they would send a team to rip it out too.

I’ve heard that applied to almost everything too heavy to move by forklift during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
by tekacs | 2025-08-27 21:04:09+00:00
It's very 'batteries-included', for one thing - when a novice wants to code, I recommend them Zed because it'll just handle and manage LSPs for them for a variety of languages. Meanwhile with VSCode step 1 of installing and using it for e.g. Rust is to go and install a random extension (and the VSCode store, whilst sorted by popularity, can be intimidating / confusing for a novice, who might install a random/scammy extension). The 'recommended extensions' thing helps, but it's still subpar.

It has some other niceties – I love how if you Cmd+Shift+F to search across the project, that you get a multi-buffer [1] - I often use that for larger manual refactors for a ton of places in my codebase.

But honestly... as others have said, speed is just _such_ a strong feature for my taste - it makes a world of difference compared to VSCode, because in VSC I'll be typing vim commands, the editor will fail to keep up and it'll do the wrong thing - whereas in Zed it's fast enough that I never really run into stalls.

[1]: https://zed.dev/features#multi-buffers
by nurple | 2025-08-27 21:04:09+00:00
I've crashed an RC helicopter because of a similar software issue. Rotorflight is an OSS flight controller, and it has an internal mode for tracking if the vehicle is on the ground or not that isn't always quite accurate at the margins. If you're touching the ground and it's not in ground-handling mode, the I-term in the PID loop winds up really quickly (because the input isn't producing the expected rotation rate) and flips your model on its side.

Betaflight (flight controller for drones, which rotorflight is based on) has a similar function called "air mode" which is common to either disable or set to a switch for aerobatic drones so that they'll still have full rotation rates at zero throttle.
by aaroninsf | 2025-08-27 21:04:26+00:00
Genuine response: it is hard for me to read this sort of screed, and not wonder,

are the authors genuinely or merely performatively ignorant?

Ignorant, to be precise, of the often comical extent to which they very obviously construct—to their own specification and for their purposes—the object of their hostility...?

While dismissing—in a fashion that renders their reasoning vacuous—the wearying complexity of the actually-observable complex reality they think they are attacking?

One of the most obvious "tells" in this sort of thing is the breezy ease with which abstract _theys_ are compounded and then attacked.

I'm sorry, Anthony; there is no they. There is a bewildering and yes, I get it, frightening and all but inconceivable number of actors, each pursuing their own aims, sometimes in explicit or implicit collusion, sometimes competitively or adversarially...

...and that is but the most banal of the dimensions within which one might attempt to reason about "AI."

Frustration is warranted; hostility towards the engines of surveillance capital and its pleasure with advancing fascism is more than warranted; applications of AI within this domain and services rendered by its corporate builders—all ripe and just targets.

But it is a mistake that renders the critique and position dismisable to slip from specifics to generalities and scarecrows.
by sindriava | 2025-08-27 21:04:32+00:00
I can't speak for you but I'm certainly not qualified to opine on the predictions so I won't address the 20% figure since I don't find it relevant.

> data centers account for 1% to 2% of overall global energy demand

So does the mining industry. Part of that data center consumption is the discussion we are having right now.

I find that in general energy doesn't tend to get spent unless there's something to be gained from it. Note that providing something that uses energy but doesn't provide value isn't a counterexample for this, since the greater goal of civilization seems to be discovering valuable parts of the state space, which necessitates visiting suboptimal states absent a clairvoyant heuristic.

I reject the statement that energy use is bad in principle and pending a more detailed ROI analysis of this, I think this branch of the topic has ran its course, at least for me :)
by MiddleEndian | 2025-08-27 21:04:37+00:00
I've never had an iPhone and I'm sure it's even more locked down, but I've always felt like my Android phones worked for Google rather than for me.

Always some new notification to be disabled (or cannot be disabled without ADB). The Play Store "helpfully" refuses to install some software on my phone that doesn't meet the minimum specs or whatever. Can't remove protected applications from phones (such as Facebook on some Samsung phones). For all its talk about being open source, it's certainly always been more locked down than a Windows PC or a Mac.

At least Windows Phone did almost nothing, which was more relaxing lol
by mrandish | 2025-08-27 21:04:38+00:00
Although I agree with most of the article's points, I'm not an AI hater. But that's only because AI doesn't incite enough emotion in me to be "hate". It's more apathy or antipathy at worst. I concede that AI can occasionally be useful and, as a technologist, I admit early on there were some 'gee whiz' moments but the constant hype has grown annoying.

Frankly, it's gotten kind of boring and more recently it's to where I don't even like talking about it anymore. Of course, the non-technical general public is split between those who mistakenly think it's much 'smarter' or more capable than it is and those who dismiss it entirely but often for the wrong reasons. The disappointing part is how deeply polarized many of my more experienced technical friends are between one of those two extremes.

On the positive side there's endless over-the-top raving about how incredible AI is and on the negative side overwhelming angst over how unspeakably evil and destructive AI is. These are people who've generally been around long enough to see long-term trends evolve, hype cycles fade, bubbles burst and certain world-ending doom eventually arrive as just everyday annoyance. Yet both extremes are so highly energized on the topic they tend to leap to some fairly ungrounded, and occasionally even irrational, conclusions. Engaging with either type for very long gets kind of exhausting. I just don't think AI is quite as unspeakably amazing as the ravers insist OR nearly as apocalyptic as the doomers fear - but both groups are so into their viewpoint it borders on evangelical obsession - which makes hard for anyone with an informed but dispassionate, measured and nuanced perspective to engage with them.
by I_dream_of_Geni | 2025-08-27 21:04:46+00:00
Speaking of Airbus, They 'lost' 3-4 different aircraft (from 1988 to 2015) which crashed during development, or, spectacularly during their first airshow. Never slowed down their customers at ALL, and to this day, Boeing has never lost one new commercial airliner in those same circumstances. Yet, Boeing gets all the hate. smh
by more_corn | 2025-08-27 21:05:20+00:00
It’s not hard to add a function that says “is this conversion about suicide? If so escalate to an intervention pathway.” You could even do it as an out of band batch process so it doesn’t increase latency.

OpenAI didn’t put in the simplest, smallest, easiest protection. (You could do it with a tiny LLM, batch up the conversion on a five minute interval with a cron job.) I could implement it for less than the operations team spends on lunch today. And certainly less than OpenAI will spend bringing their in-house council up to speed on the lawsuit.

Suicide is a crisis and it’s possible to intervene, but only if the confidant tries. In this case it was a machine with insufficient safety controls.

Fixing ChatGPT will 100% lower the suicide rate by exactly the amount of people who confide in ChatGPT about suicidal thoughts and who receive successful intervention. I can’t tell you what that number is ahead of time but I assure it’s nonzero.
by godelski | 2025-08-27 21:05:33+00:00
This felt like a very weird read to me. As someone who is very pro writing flexible software.

IME getting LLMs to write flexible code is not easy and one of my biggest turnoffs for coding agents. The code they tend to produce is usually more standardized and lacking of context. It'll "work" but that doesn't mean it "works".

And I think almost everyone is aware of malleable software, it isn't very niche. If you took a programming class your teachers probably told you to write functions and make them small and self contained. A lot like the Unix Philosophy[0].

One thing I find different about this style is that it tends to shift time away from writing lines of code to planning. Which, again, the planning part is what the LLMs tend to be weak at[1]. You can't plan everything but a benefit of flexible code is that you can adapt to new challenges and requirements. It's a good style because a constant in software development is that the requirements by the end of the project (does it end?) are going to be different from those you started with. If your code is inflexible then you have to hack around your existing code. But if it is flexible you add the new routines and leverage existing ones as much as possible. But for that to happen the existing routines should be decently singular in purpose. Function call overhead tends not to be the bottleneck but if the profiler says they are then yeah, fuse functions as need.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

[1] I find their strengths are in writing generic routines, helping narrow in on fuzzy or difficult to describe things that are hard to google, helping you get up to speed on a novel codebase, ditto for a library or language, or simply just throw away code. But not for things where foresight is necessary. But yes great when your job is to glue things together. It's just that if you're doing a lot of gluing there's probably a better way
by sho_hn | 2025-08-27 21:05:48+00:00
I tried to avoid it with the "vibe" bit, because I'm not actually offended by someone remixing a typeface, and I'm also professionally aware of some of the finer points of font licensing.

What I am responding negatively to is the communication style of this announcement. There's a lot of myth-making here, and calling it a revival, to aggrandize what just comes down to "we really like Arial for what we do, and we wanted a cleaned-up version of it that we own and could host on the web".

For one, if it was a true, spirited revival it'd be nice if it was a revival for anyone else as well, given how widely available Arial is. But as far as I can tell, they haven't published it for outside use anywhere, so it may well perish with the single website it's found on. Actual Arial will handily outlive this.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-27 21:06:12+00:00
Last year I ported a virtio-host network driver written in Rust, entirely changing its backend, interrupt mechanism and converting it from a library to a standalone process. This is a complex program that handles low-level memory mappings, VM interrupts, network sockets, multithreading, etc.

What’s remarkable is that (a) I have very little Rust experience overall (mostly a Python programmer), (b) very little virtio experience, and (c) essentially no experience working with any of the libraries involved. Yet, I pulled off the refactor inside of a week, because by the time the project actually compiled, it worked perfectly (with one minor Drop-related bug that was easily found and fixed).

This was aided by libraries that went out of their way to make sure you couldn’t hold them wrong, and it shows.
by nayajunimesh | 2025-08-27 21:06:34+00:00
Hey, this comment was actually very helpful. While running benchmarks, I noticed my union validator was consistently underperforming, and your insight about try/catch deoptimization made it much easier to pinpoint the issue. I ended up updating the validation logic to not use try catch frivolously and I saw significant performance improvement.

For benchmarks, I forked Zod, which already included benchmarks comparing Zod 4 against Zod 3. Here are the results (in README.md) if you're interested:

https://github.com/nimeshnayaju/zod

I noticed significantly better performance than both Zod 3 and Zod 4 across most validation scenarios (especially validations that involved rules like min/max length, etc), with the exception of simple object parsing.

I also forked another benchmark suggested in a different comment if you're interested (I noticed similar results).

https://github.com/nimeshnayaju/valibot-benchmarks
by Palomides | 2025-08-27 21:06:55+00:00
so here's the thing, artists like making the art, skipping the making leaves you with nothing

most artists I know are against AI because they feel it is anti-human, devaluing and alienating both the viewer and the creator

some can tolerate it as a tool, and some (as is long art tradition) will use it to offend or be contrarian, but these are not the common position

if I were a spherical cow in a vacuum with infinite time, and nobody around me had economic incentives to make things with it, I could, maybe, in the spirit of openness, tolerate knowing some people somewhere want to use it... but I still wouldn't want to see its output
by taylodl | 2025-08-27 21:08:28+00:00
Also, nice job further diminishing the role of pharmacists. I suppose RFK Jr. is too ignorant to know that pharmacists actually know medicine? They're not just pill counters (which, strictly speaking, is what a pharmacy tech does, not a pharmacist). In fact, your pharmacist is more knowledgeable about your medicines and your condition than your doctor.
by 827a | 2025-08-27 21:08:32+00:00
The idea that these things cause “minimal” environmental harm is utterly laughable. It’s Orwell-level doublespeak. Am I seriously to believe that Musk wants to run 50M H100 in the coming years, an amount that might equate to 60GW of power draw on the low end, roughly equal to 10% of the entire US power draw, and that won’t have significant environmental consequences?

Of course, they hide the truth in plain site: inference is a drop in the ocean compared to training.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-27 21:08:43+00:00
> In that Santa Monica movie theater, showing my ID was a simple, controlled transaction: one person looked at it for three seconds, handed it back, and forgot about it. The information never left that moment. But online, that same verification process transforms into something far more risky.

This is the fundamental problem, yes. I will never provide my ID online for this reason. If this locks me out of online stuff, so be it. The risk is just too great.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-27 21:09:30+00:00
It is not possible then to pass a value (not a reference) and not implement or derive Copy or Clone, if I understand you correctly. That was my impression earlier. Other languages let you pass a value, and I just don't mutate that, if I can help it. I usually don't want to pass a reference, as that involves syntactical "work" when wanting to use the referenced thing in the callee. In many other languages I get that at no syntactical cost. I pass the thing by its name and I can use it in the callee and in the caller after the call.

What I would prefer is, that Rust only cares about whether I use it in the caller after the call, if I pass a mutable value, because in that case, of course it could be unsafe, if the callee mutates it.

Sometimes Copy cannot be derived and then one needs to implement it or Clone. A few months ago I used Rust again for a short duration, and I had that case. If I recall correctly it was some Serde struct and Copy could not be derived, because the struct had a String or &str inside it. That should a be fairly common case.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-27 21:09:34+00:00
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that you have no issues with these wiki pages:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_George_W._Bu...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_con...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_religion_conspi...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_contro...
by nayajunimesh | 2025-08-27 21:09:48+00:00
Hey, I did some benchmarks if you're interested - benchmarks results are in the README.md.

https://github.com/nimeshnayaju/zod (Fork of Zod's repo which already included benchmarks comparing Zod 4 against Zod 3, so I simply integrated my validation library)

https://github.com/nimeshnayaju/valibot-benchmarks (An unofficial benchmark from another user comparing Valibot against Zod)