MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danpalmer | 2025-08-22 02:53:42+00:00
This may well be true, but my point is more that Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg seem almost uniquely unable to turn the startups into great new businesses, when compared with the other big tech companies.

Amazon added cloud and prime, Microsoft added cloud, xbox, 365, Google added Chrome, Android, cloud, Youtube, consumer subscriptions, workspace, etc. Netflix added streaming and their own content, Apple added mobile, wearables, subscriptions.

Meta though, they've got an abandoned phone platform from years ago, a half-baked Metaverse that is being defunded, a small hardware business for the Quest, a pro VR headset that got defunded, a crypto business that got deprioritised, and an LLM that's expensive relative to open competitors and underperforms relative to closed competitors... which the tide appears to be turning on as the AI bubble reaches popping point.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-22 02:54:02+00:00
If a business spends $40B to try to develop a new line if business, that is a business expense. If you are claiming that Meta’s R&D for virtual reality was not a legitimate business expense, but purely for Zuckerberg’s personal satisfaction, then good luck proving that.

Or are you arguing for a tax on revenue, instead of profit?

>are trivially available for a billionaires pet project.

What could this even mean? That it is trivial to become a majority owner of a business with enough cash flow to be able to spend $40B on R&D? If so, then you we live in different universes.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-22 02:54:39+00:00
And like VR?

And like...LLAMa?

Maybe also like adding ads in WhatsApp cause we gotta squeeze our users so we can spend on... AI gurus?

Meta has not had a win since they named themselves Meta. It's enjoyable to watch them flail around like clueless morons jumping on every fad and wasting their time and money.
by benlc | 2025-08-22 02:54:54+00:00
Interestingly I'm experiencing the opposite as you. Was mostly using Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT 4.1 through copilot for a few months and was overall fairly satisfied with it. First task I threw at GPT 5, it excelled in a fraction of the time Sonnet 4 normally takes, but after a few iterations, it all went downhill. GPT 5 almost systematically does things I didn't ask it to do. After failing to solve an issue for almost an hour, I switched back to Claude which fixed it in the first try. YMMV
by pixl97 | 2025-08-22 02:55:13+00:00
I mean yea, I'm from bumfuk nowhere farmland where there was nothing close. Of course that meant a lot in the late 70s where you might get 3 channels on the TV. We were very disconnected from the world back then.

That's no longer true. Everyone has a cellphone pretty much everywhere. You don't think of hoodlum stuff while bored, you watch a livestream of it and think "I could do that too".

We live in a much different world now.
by voidhorse | 2025-08-22 02:55:16+00:00
Precisely. There is nothing inherently wrong with LLMs and "agent" systems. There are certain classes of problems that they might be great for solving.

The problem is that the tech industry has devolved into a late-capitalist clown market supported on pure wild speculation and absurd "everything machine" marketing. This not only leads to active damage (see people falling into delusional spirals thanks to chat bots) but also inhibits us from figuring out what the actual good uses are and investing into the right applications.

Radical technology leads to behavior change. Smart phones led to behavior change, but you didn't have to beg people to buy them. LLMs are leading to behavior change but only because they are being forcibly shoved into everyone's faces and people are co-gaslighting each other into the collective hysteria that to not participate is to miss out on something big, but they can never articulate what that big thing actually is.
by Aunche | 2025-08-22 02:56:08+00:00
> If you asked a US economist whether they thought zero interest rate policy (2008-2022) was a good idea, they'd think you were talking about a communist society with a desperate government trying to manufacture growth.

I think you missed some words. Did you mean economists from the Cold War? By economic illiteracy, I don't mean economic opinions I think are stupid, but refusal to acknowledge economics altogether. If Milton Friedman rises from the dead, he could read the Fed's rationale for keeping interest rates low. He may vehemently disagree, but he would at least acknowledge there is an argument to be made.

On the other hand, there has been no thought whatsoever put into the implications of a tax that specifically targets companies with a exec to worker pay gap. There is no economic argument for why stock buybacks are bad for workers. There are arguments for why they're bad for investors, but somehow I doubt that the authors of the article are worried about those people.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-22 02:57:01+00:00
If they had used AI, their PRs might have been more understandable / less buggy, and ultimately I would have preferred that.

Sure, and if they had used AI pigs could depart my rectum on a Part 121 flight. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Submitting AI slop does not demonstrate any knowledge of the code in question even if you do understand the code.

To address your claim about AI slop improving the output of these mythical 10x coders: doubtful. LLMs can only approximate meaningful output if they've already indexed the solution. If your vaunted 10x coders are working on already solved problems you're likely wasting their time. If they're working on something novel LLMs are of little use. For instance: I've had the pleasure of working with a notoriously poorly documented crate that's also got a reputation for frequently making breaking changes. I used DDG and Google to see if I could track down someone with a similar use case. If I forgot to append "-ai" to the query I'd get back absolutely asinine results typically along the line of "here's an answer with rust and one of the words in your query". At best first sentence would explain something entirely unrelated about the crate.

Potentially LLMs could be improved by ingesting more and more data, but that's an arms race they're destined to lose. People are already turning to Cloudflare and Anubis en masse to avoid being billed for training LLMs. If Altman and co. had to pay market rate for their training data nobody could afford to use these AI doodads.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-22 02:57:04+00:00
That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

It reminds me of "Posted"[0] signs that I've seen in lots of places in the southern US. Growing up in the Northeast, we didn't have such things[1].

[0] "Posted" is shorthand for "Private Property. No Trespassing." I get that the word "posted" means "I posted the sign. Pay attention or you might get arrested or shot." But I have no idea how the latter got shortened to the former. It's also an interesting regionalism, although not specifically related to legal codes and their taxonomy.

[1] Where I grew up we just had "No Trespassing" or "Private Property" signs.

Edit: expanded footnote [0].
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-22 02:57:43+00:00
It's everyone's problem, because monopolies and oligopolies are rampant on the web and give wildly disproportionate market power to platform owners. That's why none of the domestic alternatives to Youtube are able to serve anything other than niche markets. If you as a consumer try to boycott Youtube you are simply cut off most user-generated video content. You can't not know this.
by mhh__ | 2025-08-22 02:57:47+00:00
That's not really how LLMs are used, unless we're planning on classing gitignores as IP

LLMs are interesting because they can combine things they learn from multiple projects into a new language that doesn't feature in any of them, and pick up details from your request.

Unless you're schizophrenic enough to insist that you never even see other code it's just not a realistic problem

Honestly I've had big arguments about this IP stuff before and unless you actually have a lawyer specifically go after something or very obviously violate the GPL it's just a tactic for people to slow people they don't like down. People find a way to invent HR departments fractally.
by meltyness | 2025-08-22 02:58:01+00:00
I find Rust pretty cohesive and consistent in its semantics. Accomplishing different tasks involves less sugar than other languages like this article seems to focus on.

Generally all of the interfaces conform to the patterns in the mem module. If you want to understand the structure of everything else unambiguously it would be best to start there: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/
by jrvarela56 | 2025-08-22 03:00:37+00:00
This seems misguided. The human submitter is accountable for the code submitted. Doesn’t matter if the AI built it, a contractor in another timezone, or ten thousand monkeys typing away.

Github provides a profile but it’s not meant to make this kind of assessment. Basically a trust badge/metrics of some sort you could check before engaging with someone’s PR.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-22 03:00:47+00:00
True, but the experiments are engineered to give results they want. It's a mathematical certainty that the performance will drop off here, but is not an accurate assessment of what is going on at scale. If you present an appropriately large and well-trained model with in-context patterns, it often does a decent job, even when it isn't trained on them. By nerfing the model (4 layers), the conclusion is foregone.

I honestly wish this paper actually showed what it claims, since it is a significant open problem to understand CoT reasoning relative to the underlying training set.
by asa400 | 2025-08-22 03:02:51+00:00
Abstraction. Not having to know all the innards (or even names) of each until you want to. It's all there if you want to, but stuff like uv (or cargo, or go's toolset) greatly simplifies 3 scenarios in particular: starting a new project, joining an existing project, and learning Python for the first time.

All 3 scenarios benefit from removing the choice of build tool, package manager, venv manager, formatter, linter, etc., and saying, "here, use this and get on with your life".
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-22 03:03:17+00:00
Here in Michigan, my water price is also about 5% of my electric bill. Which is also small, we barely used the AC this summer.

Water billing here is (frustratingly) not progressive: the first thousand gallons costs the same as the tenth or hundredth thousand gallons. It's cheap, we're surrounded by fresh water on the surface and you can stick a well down through 80-100 feet of glacial sand and gravel and get drinkable water basically anywhere.

I was surprised to learn that 70% of my township's municipal water is used by only 15% of the households: basically, those that irrigate their lawns daily.
by js2 | 2025-08-22 03:03:51+00:00
I was curious about the "US Thermal Power Plant Water Use By County" graph which has a very dark square in the SE corner of NC. It's Brunswick County. I guess it's due to the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunswick_Nuclear_Generating_S...

The water supply in Brunswick County is terribly polluted by PFAS (courtesy of DuPont, not the power plant):

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/drinking-water-crisis-north-car...
by pixl97 | 2025-08-22 03:04:04+00:00
Walmart is pretty political too.

https://corporate.walmart.com/purpose/esgreport/governance/e...

>Walmart works with policy makers and public safety officials to ensure we are providing a safe workspace for our associates and a safe, enjoyable shopping experience for our customers. The nature of retail crime varies across our stores and geographies, and includes complex organized retail crime. Walmart works closely with our trade associations to support efforts to pass laws (such as the Combatting Organized Retail Crime Act) that ensure these crimes incur meaningful penalties, and that law enforcement have resources to appropriately prosecute these crimes.

Needless to say the can help sway local elections based on how they push certain political figures.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-22 03:05:57+00:00
Requests that need a CORS preflight will fail with any browser from the last 20 years, yes. The private IP addresses are not any more vulnerable than `www.google.com` is from `www.notgoogle.com` for cross-origin policy (subdomain-sensitive policies have a small extra vulnerability). But you’re right that doing this kind of thing without nefarious intent is an insane edge case and it should be opt-in. People spray `Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *` like it’s DDT in the 50s and half ass security in general when it’s on an intranet, so an extra guardrail is still worth it.
by tzs | 2025-08-22 03:07:07+00:00
I can see how TSA is an imposition on a large number of average citizens. The Internet is telling me that in recent years (except during COVID) about half of Americans flew in the past year [1], which would mean each year about half of Americans have to deal with the TSA.

But with money laundering and KYC I'm having trouble remembering ever having to deal with them. What are situations where the average citizen finds them an imposition?

I vaguely remember being asked what the sources were for the money in my IRAs, but don't remember who asked or what I was doing with them. Maybe it was during an application for a home equity line of credit? Anyway, whatever it was I just told them (rollover from a 401k, money from my salary, and earnings from investments held in the IRAs) and they didn't ask for any proof or anything.

[1] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/air-travelers-in-america-an...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-22 03:07:09+00:00
> People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.

Is it though? The entire bottom 50% of the population paid something like 3% of total federal income tax, by intentional design of the tax system. Babysitters don't owe any significant amount of taxes whether they report it or not and under some circumstances (e.g. EITC) their effective rate can even be negative. Forcing them to report the income can't seriously be the justification for all of this mass surveillance.

> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.

That doesn't have anything to do with physical cash. You could do the same thing by borrowing at a negative rate and investing the money in any security/asset/commodity. Which is why negative interest rates are crazy and never really happened.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-22 03:09:02+00:00
> Dismissal is a common reaction when witnessing AI’s rate of progress. People struggle to reconcile their world model with what AI can now do, and how.

By probabilistic pattern matching. Next.

> Every model update doesn’t necessarily mean a complete rewrite every time, but it does force you to fundamentally rethink your assumptions each time, making a rewrite a perfectly plausible hypothesis.

Translation: our crap is unreliable and will introduce regressions that you have to manage. It can regress so much that anything you built on this has to be redone. Next.

> I strongly believe that when it comes to AI, something is happening. This time it does feel different.

Said the guy working for the company that is selling you this stuff. Next.
Show HN: Lumo – a tiny fluffy virtual pet you can play with in the browser
by rand_num_gen | 2025-08-22 03:09:21+00:00
This is Lumo, a tiny fluffy virtual pet that lives in your browser.

You can feed it, tickle it, or just say hi — it reacts naturally, more like a living toy than a game character.

Play here: https://yw.app/ujtA8IZ

## Why I made this

I wanted to experiment with combining AI-generated assets (image-to-video via Google Flow) and a lightweight state machine in JavaScript to simulate natural pet-like behaviors. Instead of giving direct commands, you just interact — and Lumo reacts.

## How it works

- Assets were generated with image-to-video (idle, happy, annoyed, etc.). To make the animations feel more natural, I used the Frames-to-Video mode — for example, I set both the start and end frames to the idle state, so transitions between different behaviors look smoother.

- A JS state machine switches animations and reactions. For example, the default state is the idle animation. If you touch Lumo once, it becomes curious and shows the corresponding behavior (animation). If you touch it again, it turns happy.

- Everything runs client-side in the browser.

## What’s next

This is just a small experiment right now. I’d love to hear feedback:

- What feels fun or missing in the interaction?

- What other “pet-like” behaviors could make it more alive?

- Anyone else here experimenting with AI video assets for interactive projects?

Thanks for checking it out
by slv77 | 2025-08-22 03:10:31+00:00
All of the other items you mentioned are things that society attempts to regulate against as well. And while there are an infinite number of ways to exchange value it stays between those involved. If the drug dealer is happy to trade heroin for house painting the damage is self limiting.

Once it’s converted to money it’s everyone’s problem. I can’t avoid my mortgage interest helping supporting the dealer who is supplying the addicts who are stealing my stuff. The harder I work, the worse it gets.

The controls may not be effective but I think they are necessary. I wouldn’t want to live in most countries where money laundering dominates financial activity.
by danielhanchen | 2025-08-22 03:10:39+00:00
I added it since many people who used Unsloth don't know how to compile llama.cpp, so the only way from Python's side is to either (1) Install it via apt-get within the Python shell (2) Error out then tell the user to install it first, then continue again

I chose (1) since it was mainly for ease of use for the user - but I agree it's not a good idea sorry!

:( I also added a section to manually compile llama.cpp here: https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/troubleshooting-and-faqs#how-...

But I agree I should remove apt-gets - will do this asap! Thanks for the suggestions :)
by pxc | 2025-08-22 03:11:00+00:00
It seems Unsloth is useful and popular, and you seem responsive and helpful. I'd be down to try to improve this and maybe package Unsloth for Nix as well, if you're up for reviewing and answering questions; seems fun.

Imo it's best to just depend on the required fork of llama.cpp at build time (or not) according to some configuration. Installing things at runtime is nuts (especially if it means modifying the existing install path). But if you don't want to do that, I think this would also be an improvement:

- see if llama.cpp is on the PATH and already has the requisite features - if not, check /etc/os-release to determine distro - if unavailable, guess distro class based on the presence of high-level package managers (apt, dnf, yum, zypper, pacman) on the PATH - bail, explain the problem to the user, give copy/paste-friendly instructions at the end of we managed to figure out where we're running

Is either sort of change potentially agreeable enough that you'd be happy to review it?
by jimkri | 2025-08-22 03:11:04+00:00
> Attack the Person, Not the Science

This article and this quote are something I have also noticed recently.

I've been working on researching AI and trying to visualize more data structures to help connect ideas, and I want to bounce ideas off of people to make sure I'm truly comprehending things. I've been trying to have conversations to talk more in depth, but I haven't been able to get anyone to read a research paper. That doesn't stop anyone from telling me something about what I have been researching without reading the research or comprehending it. Everyone feels empowered with AI. But when asked to debate the merits of their ideas, everyone I have asked has said people won't stick to the debate. I think you pointed it out clearly. People can't debate a topic they truly don't know.
Ask HN: How do most dry theory writers struggle to get started?
by zywoo | 2025-08-22 03:12:18+00:00
I’m an independent researcher working on political modeling and some philosophical theory. Every essay I publish disappears without notice. I’ve decided not to chase current events just to get clicks.

The problem isn’t quality of discussion, it’s that nobody even opens the articles. What else can someone in my position do?
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-08-22 03:14:17+00:00
I'm actually unconvinced you could do without `Copy`. It's both in the core of the language and essentially required for stuff like shared references to work correctly. Copying could be replaced by a keyword instead of happening implicitly, but that's different from removing the concept entirely from Rust.

The rest, sure, you could do without (reborrowing can't be emulated but I don't think it's strictly necessary to write real code). I'd add catchable exceptions and the use of traits instead of explicit modules as things that I think tremendously complicate the language semantics and are almost certainly not strictly necessary to achieve Rust's language goals.
by jcz_nz | 2025-08-22 03:14:51+00:00
Most of the commenters here have zero connection to reality eh.

For the uninformed: if you cannot complete KYC or proof of wealth checks, you do not lose your money.

The institution you're trying to transact will just will not work with you. They might not for any number of other reasons: adverse media, dodgy transaction history, etc. etc. etc.
by jacobaustin123 | 2025-08-22 03:14:55+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to write this reply. Agree with "in the previous part of this series" comment. I'll try to find a way to highlight this more.

What I'd like to add to this page is some sort of highly clear glossary that defines all the terms at the top (but in some kind of collapsable fashion) so I can define everything with full clarity without disrupting the flow. I'll play with the HTML and see what I can do.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-22 03:15:54+00:00
I've wanted to bring back the console electronics. To that end I have built a few things along similar lines for myself.

A couple of thinner "speaker tables" with a small subwoofer + plate amplifier built in and a pair of full-range drivers. Not really a full console but does keep the wires to a minimum [1]. Just add an amp and sound source. (Sub is down-firing and underneath — so not visible.)

I built a taller version with storage for albums underneath (now we're getting closer to a console stereo [2]. (Sub is also down-firing.)

Additionally I built one for the TV that has a mid (full range) driver as well. With the integrated sub it's fully 3.1 with no external wires [3]. (Like previous, sub is also down-firing.)

FWIW, the "cavities" allowed for the drivers within the body of the furniture were designed to match the drivers in terms of volume (usually sized for a bass port as well). So there was a little more thought than to just slap speakers on a box.

[1] https://imgur.com/nqTy6Bi

[2] https://imgur.com/RIVRfea

[3] https://imgur.com/a1tbhB1

Tried to find a build photo — this is the taller stereo version being built. Full-range drivers on each end, dual subs left-center, bass port in center, plate amplifier (for sub only) right-center: https://imgur.com/ZZtP2qp
by corv | 2025-08-22 03:17:44+00:00
I've replaced my OrbStack usage entirely with Podman Desktop and have zero issues with it, unlike with OrbStack.

In particular the 1TB VM disk image OrbStack uses wreaks havok with deduplicating backups. Their disk cache also caused me hours of debugging why my assets weren't up-to-date.

Admittedly the OrbStack GUI is super snappy tho.