MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-05 20:35:26+00:00
> I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.

This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-08-05 20:35:27+00:00
I wouldn’t stop at 16GB right now.

24 is the lowest I would go. Buy a used 3090. Picked one up for $700 a few months back, but I think they were on the rise then.

The 3000 series can’t do FP8fast, but meh. It’s the OOM that’s tough, not the speed so much.
by srhtftw | 2025-08-05 20:35:35+00:00
Yes this shift to React is really annoying. Github also stopped working on older browsers.

My leisure laptop is an older macbook with firefox 78.15.0esr and a little over a year ago I stopped being able to view github files and issue discussions with it. I can still view READMEs most of the time but now I have to use chromium or another computer to actually read code without cloning the repo.

I know they could easily generate JS for older browsers if they cared to set the esbuild target.
by aubanel | 2025-08-05 20:36:00+00:00
From experience, it's much more engineering work on the integrator's side than on OpenAI's. Basically they provide you their new model in advance, but they don't know the specifics of your system, so it's normal that you do most of the work. Thus I'm particularly impressed by Cerebras: they only have a few models supported for their extreme perf inference, it must have been huge bespoke work to integrate.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-08-05 20:36:01+00:00
MS salespeople presumably already have weekly or monthly meetings with all the people with check-cutting authority, and OpenAI doesn't. They're already an approved vendor, and what's more the Azure bill is already really really big, so a few more AI charges barely register.

It's the same reason you would use RDS at an AWS shop, even if you really like CloudSQL better.

This is the main reason the big cloud vendors are so well-positioned to suck up basically any surplus from any industry even vaguely shaped like a b2b SaaS.
by llmtosser | 2025-08-05 20:36:20+00:00
Distractions like this probably the reason they still, over a year now, do not support sharded GGUF.

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/5245

If any of the major inference engines - vLLM, Sglang, llama.cpp - incorporated api driven model switching, automatic model unload after idle and automatic CPU layer offloading to avoid OOM it would avoid the need for ollama.
by deepsun | 2025-08-05 20:36:32+00:00
I don't think that works anymore, UN can only issue "deep concerns" (c).

The real prevention starts when the collective body deploys troops (or authorize the deployment). The last such real deployment, authorized by UN, was for Iraq (Saddam Hussein), who really could start the WW3. But you know how it's portrayed now by authoritarians, so I doubt we will see any real action from UN anymore until the WW3 happens.
by jleyank | 2025-08-05 20:36:56+00:00
Post-covid, there seems to be more pet give-backs as people realize they don't have the financial or time resources to take care of them. So shelters are swimming in the things (as far as I can tell). If they're going to be put down, this would let them be put to some use other than a landfill.

"They want to bury my pets in a landfill." is a click-worth headline also. Reader beware.
by greenavocado | 2025-08-05 20:37:39+00:00
That's because people have allowed the accumulation of power and control by Big Tech. Features in and capabilities of end user operating systems and browsers are gate kept by a handful of people in Big Tech. There is no free market there. Winners are picked by politics, not merit. Switching costs are extreme due to vendor lock in and carefully engineered friction.

The justification for WebP in Chrome over JPEG-XL was pure hand waving nonsense not technical merit. The reality is they would not dare cede any control or influence to the JPEG-XL working group.

Hell the EU is CONSIDERING mandatory attestation driven by whitelisted signed phone firmwares for certain essential activities. Freedom of choice is an illusion.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-08-05 20:37:47+00:00
I don't consider that anything good. Design is just about making new products faster, which is a bad thing as it accelerates consumerism. And medical scans? That might help maybe a thousand extra people at the cost of gigagwatts of energy used that is polluting the entire planet.

To me, all of those positives are dwarfed by negatives.
by rwmj | 2025-08-05 20:38:07+00:00
They could do the China[1] / EU[2] strategy of announcing they'll do it, but never following through with it. When your opponent has the attention span of a drunken gnat, it's a surprisingly good strategy.

[1] https://archive.ph/sAFWP

[2] https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/fossil-fool
by windsignaling | 2025-08-05 20:38:35+00:00
On the contrary, I'm confused about why you're confused.

This is a well-known and documented phenomenon - the paradox of choice.

I've been working in machine learning and AI for nearly 20 years and the number of options out there is overwhelming.

I've found many of the tools out there do some things I want, but not others, so even finding the model or platform that does exactly what I want or does it the best is a time-consuming process.
by kelnos | 2025-08-05 20:39:11+00:00
If you're looking for a coding assistant, get Claude Code, and give it a try. I think you need the Pro plan at a minimum for that ($20/mo; I don't think Free includes Claude Code). Don't do the per-request API pricing as it can get expensive even while just playing around.

Agree that the offering is a bit confusing and it's hard to know where to start.

Just FYI: Claude Code is a terminal-based app. You run it in the working directory of your project, and use your regular editor that you're used to, but of course that means there's no editor integration (unlike something like Cursor). I personally like it that way, but YMMV.
by kulahan | 2025-08-05 20:39:14+00:00
The reason we can't have whatever nice things you want is because California doesn't want to spend the money on that nice thing, and it has to maintain a budget, unlike nations. Including a $40 Billion project on a budget makes many, many other things go away. Even if it's just temporarily to help pay for the construction of the service, the point stands.

So imagine if France couldn't go into debt - only the EU can. France wants a giga-train suddenly, so they ask for it. The current leader of the EU isn't a fan of more trains, so he turns it down. France goes back to its people and says "we can build the giga-train if we do XYZ", and people vote based on whether or not they want XYZ or the giga-train more.

I think it's possible you just might want things different from what others want. That study a while back which showed most Americans want cheap public transit so that everyone else gets off the road and gives them more space lives rent free in my head. Nobody wants these stupid trains.
by danbruc | 2025-08-05 20:39:21+00:00
Well, what is the difference, the ad budget fraction of the price is like a tax. I think given a choice most people would prefer to get their stuff a bit cheaper and not contribute to the ad budget. But we pay it and then the companies hand the money out to various parties to display ads creating the possibility of running a business on ad revenue. And in many cases I can ignore ads, I can not look at billboards, I can switch to a different channel during the commercial break, I can flip over the ad pages in newspapers and magazines but they still get paid. Only on the internet have we decided to only pay for ads when somebody actually looks at them. I just asked for the same thing on the internet, pay for the inclusion on the website, whether someone actually sees it or not. Not sure how that is socialism and wealth redistribute.
by db48x | 2025-08-05 20:39:32+00:00
Actually it’s mostly because we’ve spent the last few decades turning math into compression. Starting with MP3s in 1991 there’s a whole history of amazing improvements to audio and video codecs. We’ve made extremely rapid progress even though the process has frequently been weighed down by ridiculous software patents.

But that said, there’s nothing stopping video streaming services from offering higher bitrates if they think it’s worth it. After all, the FCC standard for broadband is 100Mbps, not 16Mbps. That’s a lot of headroom if you want better quality.
Ask HN: Why isn't email a government service?
by peterlk | 2025-08-05 20:39:35+00:00
I'm wondering if any of the folks here were "there" when there were battles about this (if there ever were any). Email seems to me like a good candidate for a government-provided electronic service. Even if management were contracted out to a private entity, providing emails to all residents of a geography (city/province/state/etc.) seems like a useful thing for government to do. You could use it as an official means of communication to residents, and provide a baseline for digital presence of your citizens. Email standards are now very mature and stable (enough so for every SME to be constantly iterating on their security abstractions). Why doesn't government provided email seem to exist anywhere? Universities do it. Why not government?

I can speculate about all kinds of reasons that this didn't happen, but I was too young to have watched the city council meetings where this might have been discussed. Does such a thing exist in China? Finland? Norway? The Netherlands? Anywhere?
by imiric | 2025-08-05 20:39:56+00:00
I can relate. It's exhausting.

The main challenge over the next decade as all our media channels are flooded with generated media will become curation. We desperately need ways to filter human-created content from generated content. Not just for the sake of preserving art, but for avoiding societal collapse from disinformation, which is a much more direct and closer threat. Hell, we've been living with the consequences of mass disinformation for the past decade, but automated and much more believable campaigns flooding our communication platforms will drastically lower the signal-to-noise ratio. We're currently unable to even imagine the consequences of that, and are far from being prepared for it.

This tech needs strict regulation on a global scale. Anyone against this is either personally invested in it, or is ignorant of its dangers.
by observationist | 2025-08-05 20:39:59+00:00
They might have access to any given machine, but they lack the broad scope of general surveillance. If they want to get you, just like most of the other nation state level threats, you will get got. For other threat models, the US works pretty well.

I guarantee that nobody cares about or will be surveilling your private AI use unless you're doing other things that warrant surveillance.

The reason big providers suck, as OpenAI is so nicely demonstrating for us, is that they retain everything, the user is the product, and court cases, other situations can unmask and expose everything you do on a platform to third parties. This country seriously needs a digital bill of rights.
by altairprime | 2025-08-05 20:40:20+00:00
Crypto wallet malware is widespread, SSH and AWS key theft is a regular and successful target of Python module malware, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791058 is the most recent post (yesterday) I can find, suggesting 200,000 impacted in a single malware instance. On average there are hundreds to thousands a year, but I don’t know their theft volume.

How many need to be impacted before the interests of user security should be given precedence over the interests of user liberties? Is there a hard line amount or is it fuzzy? Is it in the thousands, millions, or billions?

You’re definitely asking an excellent line of questioning, in my view. IS all of this Passkeys crap worth it? Will it make a significant and meaningful difference? That has to be a set of questions that the W3C has presumably studied, and if you’re lacking for sources to begin research, I would check their drafts and discussions first.

I’m not the right person to look for studies pro/con to your viewpoint, though: this topic, as with most social morality topics, is essentially academic to me — which is one of the great joys of being asocial, as I love that academia, but also means that I can’t construct a working theory of mind to support someone else’s viewpoint, pro or con, without it being uncanny valley broken and weird. I see a lot of people upset about this topic and it’s transparent enough for me to lay it out plainly, and I care about people en masse and I want to see these discussions progress beyond “this sucks” reflexive disregard and towards - for examples - “is there any better way technically”, “what led to the sacrifice of liberty deemed acceptable”, and “is it appropriate to be so cynical about human beings when they’re their own biggest enemy”.
by andai | 2025-08-05 20:40:27+00:00
Fascinating, thanks for sharing. Are there any specific kind of problems you find this helps with?

I've found that LLMs can handle some tasks very well and some not at all. For the ones they can handle well, I optimize for the smallest, fastest, cheapest model that can handle it. (e.g. using Gemini Flash gave me a much better experience than Gemini Pro due to the iteration speed.)

This "pushing the frontier" stuff would seem to help mostly for the stuff that are "doable but hard/inconsistent" for LLMs, and I'm wondering what those tasks are.
by neutronicus | 2025-08-05 20:40:33+00:00
We may be at different levels of "large" (and "gnarly") - this code-base has existed in some form since 1985, through various automated translations Pascal -> C -> C++.

Just by virtue of Rust being relatively short-lived I would guess that your code base is modular enough to live inside reasonable context limits, and written following mostly standard practice.

One of the main files I work on is ~40k lines of code, and one of the main proprietary API headers I consume is ~40k lines of code.

My attempts at getting the models available to Copilot to author functions for me have often failed spectacularly - as in I can't even get it to generate edits at prescribed places in the source code, follow examples from prescribed places. And the hallucination issue is EXTREME when trying to use the big C API I alluded to.

That said Claude Code (which I don't have access to at work) has been pretty impressive (although not what I would call "magical") on personal C++ projects. I don't have Opus, though.
by epolanski | 2025-08-05 20:40:40+00:00
I wouldn't say they all quit, but they ultimately have to settle in less prestigious and less funded labs/universities.

I've met countless great scientists in Italy which were ultimately wasted as professors and achieved little as scientists.

I'm not saying that teaching isn't important, but it's a skill completely unrelated to being a good scientist, there's no overlap at all.
by dillutedfixer | 2025-08-05 20:40:40+00:00
Like you, I am just a hobbyist making beats in my room. No expectations of ever being a real musician. But when I'm jamming and I create a beat and synth line, start adding other instruments and really get a song going, there is a feeling that I get that an generated song will never ever ever be able to recreate for me. It's like a rush, an almost a euphoric tingling (and no I'm not on drugs) that happens that almost feels like a runners high. No output from a prompt-driven AI algorithm would ever do that to me. That's the value I see in making art for arts sake, for practicing a craft and for trying to just get better at something for the sake of getting better at it.
by paulhodge | 2025-08-05 20:40:46+00:00
Mainly working on a dev tool / SaaS app right now. The PII is user names & email.

On the security layer, I wrote that code mostly by hand, with some 'pair programming' with Claude to get the Oauth handling working.

When I have the agent working on tasks independently, it's usually working on feature-specific business logic in the API and frontend. For that work it has a lot of standard helper functions to read/write data for the current authenticated user. With that scaffolding it's harder (not impossible) for the bot to mess up.

It's definitely a concern though, I've been brainstorming some creative ways to add extra tests and more auditing to look out for security issues. Overall I think the key for extremely fast development is to have an extremely good testing strategy.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-05 20:41:35+00:00
> I'm not reading two entire manuals to find the citations you're referring to and should've cited yourself.

C-f that PDF for "array". For the other manual, I linked the TOC. It's right there on the page (arrays and hash tables, and you can follow up with structures and objects) and there's no reason to read the entire manual. I figured most people knew how to use a table of contents, I apologize if I expected too much from you.
by xg15 | 2025-08-05 20:41:52+00:00
I think it's more the waste of space in it all. Encoding data in base64 increases the length by 33%. So base64-encoding twice will blow it up by 33% of the original data and then again 33% of the encoded data, making 69% in total. And that's before adding JSON to the mix...

And before "space is cheap": JWT is used in contexts where space is generally not cheap, such as in HTTP headers.
by jackcosgrove | 2025-08-05 20:42:09+00:00
I'm not sure the comparison is apples to apples, but this article claims the current AI investment boom pales compared to the railroad investment boom in the 19th century.

https://wccftech.com/ai-capex-might-equal-2-percent-of-us-gd...

> Next, Kedrosky bestows a 2x multiplier to this imputed AI CapEx level, which equates to a $624 billion positive impact on the US GDP. Based on an estimated US GDP figure of $30 trillion, AI CapEx is expected to amount to 2.08 percent of the US GDP!

Do note that peak spending on rail roads eventually amounted to ~20 percent of the US GDP in the 19th century. This means that the ongoing AI CapEx boom has lots of legroom to run before it reaches parity with the rail road boom of that bygone era.
by kulahan | 2025-08-05 20:42:35+00:00
Right, so exactly like I said, it's very simple. If you want to lose weight, reduce calories.

If you add extra modifiers like "I want to feel great while doing it" and "I want to lose weight while sedentary" and "I want to continue eating whatever stupid thing I want" and "I need to be able to scroll tiktok for at least 3 hours, leaving no time for cooking", it gets much more complicated.

Side note: LOL at "but if you're craving food you might get fired!!1!" - this is professional victimhood at its finest.
by kev009 | 2025-08-05 20:42:49+00:00
The "Don’t Let Me Go" and "Yellow Bus Jam" examples made me laugh out loud. This kind of thing would be great for a cyberpunk game that dynamically generates a reality, with (unintentional?) faux pas and jank.

If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
by cb321 | 2025-08-05 20:42:54+00:00
I wouldn't reply except you mentioned this unboxing twice and I think people might get the wrong idea. I almost never use ref T/ref object in Nim. I find if you annotate functions at the C level gcc can even autovectorize a lot, like all four central moments: https://github.com/c-blake/adix/blob/3bee09a24313f8d92c185c9... - the relevance being that redoing your own BLAS level 1/2 stuff is really not so bad if the backend is autovectorizing it for you, and full SVD/matrix multiplying/factorizing can be a lot of work. Anyway, as per the link, the Nim itself is just straight, idiomatic Nim.

Parallel/threads is some whole other can of worms, of course. It is unfortunate that the stdlib is weak, both here and for numerics, and for other things, and that people are as dependency allergic as in C culture.

Anyway, "easier to optimize" is often subjective, and I don't mean to discourage you.
by snarf21 | 2025-08-05 20:43:26+00:00
A lot of them are "eating" them in the margins of the unreasonable "inflation" increases they used to see how much the public was willing to pay for their products. (Normally, this would be okay in a functioning capitalist market except we've let way to many companies gain a monopolistic position with no real market competition to force a reasonable middle ground between profit and elastic demand.)
by Fomite | 2025-08-05 20:43:33+00:00
Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably work. better."

I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.
Show HN: My Agentic Newsletter Project
by ilrein | 2025-08-05 20:43:43+00:00
Friends keep asking how I stay so unreasonably up to date on AI. Truth is: I doomscroll, but productively. I bounce between a bunch of sites, skim like a gremlin, and try to connect the dots.

Then I had a thought: what if I had little AI reporters do that for me?

So I built them. Four agents, each with a beat:

1) Hacker News Agent — Sniffs out top stories, Ask HN, and Show HN before they go nuclear. 2) GitHub Agent — Tracks trending repos across every language. Finds the tools you’ll pretend you discovered first. 3) Reddit Agent — Lurks in r/Ollama, r/accelerate, r/singularity, and much more subreddits. Catches the real talk from the trenches. 4) ArXiv Agent — Reads dense research so you don’t have to. Turns “theorem 3.2” into “here’s why this matters.”

Then the Editor Agent steps in. It merges the reports, kills duplicates, spots patterns across platforms, and spins it into a narrative that actually makes sense.

Result: zero fluff, maximum signal. Every morning: hand-picked stories, with quick, smart analysis on why they matter and how they connect.

Two weeks and many coffees later: BAAM — Ilia’s Corner is alive. A daily newsletter powered entirely by agents.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-08-05 20:43:50+00:00
how much faster does an engine on rocket fuel go, than one not on rocket fuel?

The article in question[0] has the literal tag line:

> My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

how much saner is someone who isn't nuts to someone who is nuts? 10x saner? What do the specific numbers matter given you're not writing a paper?

You're enjoying the click bait benefits of using strong language and then acting offended when someone calls you out on it. Yes, maybe you didn't literally say "10x" but you said or quoted things in exactly that same ballpark and its worthy of a counter point like the OP has provided. They're both interesting articles with strong opinions that make the world a more interesting place so idk why you're trying to disown the strength with which you wrote your article.

[0] : https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/