MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-22 14:33:26+00:00
> So you are saying the Grok users publicized them (e.g. shared to anyone with the public link, then mailed the link via gmail)?

No, I explicitly said that the problem was the site owner (X/xAI) exposing private data to the public web, not an end user issue.

> How else would they be on the public web?

The most obvious way data users expect to be private that is in the custody of xAI and/or X (not really sure on exactly the division of responsibility between those two when it comes to Grok chats) would be available on the public web is one of those two companies fucking up and making it available publicly rather than restricting accesss. It something there are rrgular news items about firms with custody of data that should be peivate doing, and it is explicitly what I said upthread. Not sure where you got your elaborate Rube Goldberg scenario involving everyone other than the site owner with custody of the data.

> I'd be surprised x.ai freely aided a direct rival.

Yeah, direct aid to Google would be a lot weirder than them just fucking up privacy, which indirectly gets it on Google because Google crawls the public web.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-22 14:34:09+00:00
I provide a counter-example. In the city I live in, there is only one regional grocery chain, and they always have a bagger push your cart to your car for you. Was sort of annoying when I moved here 15 years ago. The parking lot has no corrals for carts, because the bagger always takes the empty cart back.

These carts have, for the last couple years (I don't remember when, exactly), the locks on the front left wheel. It can't be to "disable the carts if someone tries to take them out of the parking lot". That isn't an issue. Though I have not seen it in action, I suspect that if I tried to take a cart through the exit without somehow moving it past whatever device deactivates the lock would have the cart lock up and start skidding (though with the lock being on the front, anyone should be able to just pop a wheely with their body weight and keep on trucking).

That said, I don't claim that these are effective at loss-prevention, but sometimes those jackasses get crazy ideas in their heads and won't be dissuaded by common sense and reality and all those other naive things.
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-22 14:34:09+00:00
> What about when information is encoded into physical state? If I sample an entropy source and record each sample as magnetism on a disk, information becomes a physical phenomenon?

Something specific and technical

If we consider “information” a “vector”, a contextually significant magnitude[value] and dimensionality[scale for that kind of value]; bits themselves are derived from dubious sources. While zero entropy random numbers will behave ideompotently, changes in ambient temperature or power fluctuations during boot up or something may change the clock resulting in a different random seed. If you’re always taking random reads, it increases any drift the low entropy system has dependent upon environmental fluctuations, which is low yet not absent. Ideally one would read “entropicly” from an analog source needing lots of error correction to figure out what the bit renderings should be. Look at any signal specification and you will see what lengths the engineers went to for reliable signal decoding (patterns of voltage threshold with other tricks like checksums or parity).

Existential forms are in “balance”, they are not permanent or “real” in the continuity sense (ideas are shadows on the wall, whatever contours of perception made them.) physical reality is a noisy reading, your digital device cleans it up with filters, performs error correction and records its most confident value (which a magnet or static electricity or stray cosmic ray could upset.)

So after your 1 or 0 on the disk, you will always have to wonder if there was line noise when you took that reading, or if the external universe influenced anything since last check.

It is an endless cycle of reducing uncertainty and making the optimal resolve (which may be no interference!)

It is the pathological and neurotic mind driven to restlessness which compulsively acts when no action or less action is least disturbing to any pre-established natural order (natural dynamics heal themselves when you stop messing with them, etc.)

Life is miraculous because it creates all we have through patient time converting potential into embodied substance through work and vectors (protein folding through catalog curation, all full of error correction and lasting uncertainty). Life may be made a chaotic hell by those devilish busybodies trying to make things certain in a world best enjoyed through wonder.
by SamBam | 2025-08-22 14:34:12+00:00
That’s a great question — and one that highlights a subtle misconception about how LLMs actually work.

At first glance, it’s easy to compare them to a charismatic “know-it-all” who sounds confident while being only half-right. After all, both can produce fluent, authoritative-sounding answers that sometimes miss the mark. But here’s where the comparison falls short — and where LLMs really shine:

(...ok ok, I can't go on.)
by bigfishrunning | 2025-08-22 14:34:37+00:00
There's a glut of "talent", but most of them are attracted by the inflated paycheck and aren't actually talented. In the past, they would either get promoted to middle management where they can't do any damage, or burn out and find another career. Now they can fake it long enough to sink your company, and then move on (with experience on their resume!) to their next victim. Things are gonna be really ugly in 10 years.
by beAbU | 2025-08-22 14:34:44+00:00
Pretty wild that HOAs are not required to have audited books. Where I'm from HOAs are regulated by law, is registered as a legal entity, and therefore needs audited financials submitted to the tax man every year.

There is also a very powerful ombud created to mediate and resolve the kind of hoa horror story bullshit we often hear about online.
by Cyan488 | 2025-08-22 14:34:50+00:00
I agree with the side-project thing, where the code is only incidental to working on the real project. I recently wanted to organize thousands of photos my family had taken over decades and sprawled on a network drive, and in 5 minutes vibe-coded a script to recursively scan, de-dupe, rename with datetime and hash, and organize by camera from the EXIF data.

I could have written it myself in a few hours, with the Python standard docs open on one monitor and coding and debugging on the other etc, but my project was "organize my photos" not "write a photo organizing app". However, often I do side projects to improve my skills, and using an AI is antithetical to that goal.
by mrtranscendence | 2025-08-22 14:35:32+00:00
> Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before.

And why would your local plumber hire someone to produce this funny action trailer (which I'm not convinced would actually help them from an advertising perspective), when they can simply have an AI produce that action funny action trailer without hiring anyone? Assuming models improve sufficiently that will become trivially possible.

> Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis.

Well, first of all, if the audience is "the most niche of audiences", then I'm not sure how that's going to lead to a sustainable career. And again -- if I want to see my niche historical fantasy interests come to life in a movie about Grace Hopper fighting vampire Nazis, why will I need a filmmaker to create this for me when I can simply prompt an AI myself? "Give me a fun action movie that incorporates famous computer scientists fighting Nazis. Make it 1.5 hours long, and give it a comedic tone."

I think you're fundamentally overvaluing what humans will be able to provide in an era where creating content is very cheap and very easy.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-22 14:36:07+00:00
Aldi in the USA uses a coin system on their carts, you insert a quarter to unlock the chain. It's not so much about theft, if someone wanted a cart, a quarter is a cheap price to pay. They do it so that people bring the carts back to the corral at the front of the store to get their quarter back, instead of leaving them in the parking area. That way, the store doesn't need to hire someone to go out and gather the carts every 15 minutes.

In my view it's quite an inconvenience: who carries quarters around anymore? I rarely have any cash with me, let alone loose change.

I expect we'll soon see something where you make a small payment with your card or mobile pay app which is rebated when you return the cart.
by linsomniac | 2025-08-22 14:36:21+00:00
Absolutely, EVERYONE needs to figure out how to benefit from their mistakes rather than try to sweep them under the rug. This is one recurring theme I bring up with my kids: If you don't learn from your mistakes, you've made two mistakes. It is really hard to say "I messed up", but you can't live your life acting like you don't make mistakes. Learn from your mistakes, and then move on.
by anbotero | 2025-08-22 14:36:22+00:00
While PMs have their own share of quirks to work around with and your comment doesn't say they have no faults at all, I wholeheartedly agree with you here. I've worked as a developer, QA, systems operator, and a bunch of other positions. Holy cow, we are all full of ourselves (PMs included), but the disdain of a lot of developers towards the end user (sometimes PMs fault) is incredible. A bunch of nerds ignoring common people use cases and abilities. And it keeps happening and most still don't recognize what's happening.

I've worked as a Manager so I've had to deal (and collaborate) with this kind of misunderstanding, but it truly gets tiring when developers complain about users trying dumb things (for developers) over and over again, yet they themselves have learned nothing from previous encounters with this phenomenon and complain instead about stupid users (or PM, or company, or whatever).
by const_cast | 2025-08-22 14:36:28+00:00
But people say this about technology in software engineering time and time again.

VB? VBA macros in Excel? Delphi? Uhh... Wordpress? Python as a language?

Well you see these are just for prototypes. These are just for making an MVP. They're not the real product.

But they are the real product. I've almost never seen these been successfully used as just for prototyping or MVPs. It always becomes the real codebase and it's a hot fucking mess 99% of the time.
by LexiMax | 2025-08-22 14:36:30+00:00
> This is odd right?

It is. If anything, it reads like sour grapes over their tribe picking a different place to socialize.

Maybe this is controversial, but I think socializing should be a pleasant experience. If a social space doesn't pass a vibe check, find someplace else where you feel more comfortable. If these scientists feel more comfortable on BlueSky, more power to them.
by gavinray | 2025-08-22 14:37:12+00:00
There's a guy, Ken Stanley, who wrote the NEAT[0]/HyperNEAT[1] algorithms.

His big idea is that evolution/advancements don't happen incrementally, but rather in unpredictable large leaps.

He wrote a whole book about it that's pretty solid IMO: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_t... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNEAT
by titusjohnson | 2025-08-22 14:37:15+00:00
The problem with Art is Art is whatever the Artist says it is. There is no concrete definition of Art, it is wholy subjective to the perspectives of the creator and the appreciator. Comics & Manga certainly fall under the umbrella of art in a strict sense, they are first and foremost Comics & Manga.

Colloquially when people say Art they mean what they see in a museum, not what they can buy in the corner store. When I subscribe to a generic Art category I want to see artists showing techniques, cool paintings, breakdowns of how marble was carved, and most certainly not catgirl uwu. I might be interested in a post about how comics are made (high effort, interesting content), but I am not interested in a picture from issue #346 (low effort fandom attraction).
by bre1010 | 2025-08-22 14:37:48+00:00
I love C#, but have actually found LLMs to be quite bad a producing idiomatic code because the language is changing so fast and often they don't even know about the latest language(/blazor) features. I constantly have to undo my initial prompt and rewrite it to tell them that we don't use Startup.cs any more, only Program.cs, and Program.cs is a flat file and not a class.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-08-22 14:38:32+00:00
Seems like you don't remember the 80s, 90s or even early 2000s. Agile was a movement specifically designed to help represent the interests of development in organisations. Obviously business corrupted it over time but the industry before it was considerably worse.

MVPs exist to force business into better defining their requirements. Prior to Agile we'd spend years building something and then we'd deliver it, only for business to then "change their mind", because they've now just realised (now that they have it), that what they asked for was stupid.
by dsclough | 2025-08-22 14:38:35+00:00
Every time I’ve encountered this in Texas it is at the perimeter of the stores parking lot such that if you park in some of the furthest parking spaces your cart will be locked up when you try to return it to the corral.

I’ve always assumed it is to prevent literally stealing the carts themselves moreso than shoplifters trying to shoplift entire cartloads of stuff.
by stavros | 2025-08-22 14:38:41+00:00
I don't use SSDs, but the HDDs in my NAS started failing one by one after a few years. Whenever one failed, I just put a new one in, and that was it. ZFS rebalanced things automatically and I went on with my life.

It just sounds like you spent $3k to solve a problem you could have solved with $200...

Unrelatedly, does the name "Realms of Despair" mean anything to you?
by mellosouls | 2025-08-22 14:39:00+00:00
This "anecdotal" response gets quite old, where have you been to have missed the years of suppression of non-far-left voices in the 2000s?

Anyway, to get you started you can read some of the articles linked in my other response to a Quillette reader:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44985171
by piva00 | 2025-08-22 14:39:41+00:00
That's just an example of surfing on the incestuous hype, they created a vibe-coded tool that was bought by Wix to help vibe-code other stuff.

Is there any example of successful companies created mostly/entirely by "vibe coding" that isn't itself a company in the AI hype? I haven't seen any, all examples so far are similar to yours.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-22 14:39:51+00:00
Did you just attempt to link only to the one-star reviews and fail, because overall what that link actually leads to doesn’t show (overall) pretty bad reviews.

Or did you realize what you were doing and doing it as a way of advertising the site to people who were expecting it to be bad who would be surprised?

I mean, the site seems pretty dubious still either way, and I wouldn't trust trustpilot, but...
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-22 14:40:12+00:00
> I suppose me pointing out the flaws breaks the illusion of magic that people want AI to have.

My impression is rather: there exist two kinds of people who are "very invested in this illusion":

1. People who want to get rich by either investing in or working on AI-adjacent topics. They of course have an interest to uphold this illusion of magic.

2. People who have a leftist agenda ("we will soon all be replaced by AI, so politics has to implement [leftist policy measures like UBI]"). If people realize that AI is not so powerful, after all, such leftist political measures whose urgency was argued with the (hypothetical) huge societal changes that will be caused by AI will not have a lot backing in society, or at least not considered to be urgently implemented by society.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-08-22 14:40:23+00:00
Yeah, for those branded buttons on websites this isn't an alternative. They want all their JavaScript for collect information on the user, even if they don't press the button.

I believe this is to play with (mobile) browser's share button, while even there I don't get how this is supposed to work.

First: How does this figure out where I want to share to? And then: Would it have to load the shared-to page first, parse it to see if there is such a Tag and then interpret it?

Maybe I am missing something.
by newscracker | 2025-08-22 14:40:35+00:00
Here’s the link for anyone wanting to join the waitlist for Thundermail (the service):

https://www.thundermail.com/

I really hope this takes off well and provides some funding for the Thunderbird project too. Currently the only way to monetarily support Thunderbird is through donations (https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ ).
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-08-22 14:40:38+00:00
> Go was designed by some old-school folks that maybe stuck a bit too hard to their principles, losing sight of the practical conveniences.

It feels often like the two principles they stuck/stick to are "what makes writing the compiler easier" and "what makes compilation fast". And those are good goals, but they're only barely developer-oriented.
by alexpotato | 2025-08-22 14:40:48+00:00
Recent fascinating experience with hiring and AI.

- DevOps role

- Technical test involves logging into a server (via sadservers.com who are awesome)

- We tell the candidates: "The goal is to see if you can work through a problem on a Linux based system. It's expected you'll see some things you may never have seen before. Using Google and ChatGPT etc is fine if you get stuck. We just ask that you share your screen so we can see your search and thought processes."

- Candidate proceeds to just use ChatGPT for EVERY SINGLE STEP. "How do I list running processes?", "How do I see hidden files?", copy and pasted every error message into ChatGPT etc

Now, I had several thought about this:

1. Is this common?

2. As one coworker joked "I knew the robots were coming, just not today"

3. We got essentially zero signal on his Linux related debugging skills

4. What signal was he trying to send by doing this? e.g. I would assume he would realize "oh, they are hiring for people who are well versed in Linux and troubleshooting"

5. I know some people might say "well, he probably eventually got to the answer" but the point is that ChatGPT doesn't always have the answer.
by naasking | 2025-08-22 14:41:00+00:00
> Nothing in the statistical observation that variables tend to be correlated suggests we should somehow reject the moral perspective that that its desirable for a model to be based on causal rather than merely correlated variables, even if finding such variables is difficult or even, impossible to do perfectly.

Perfect is the enemy of good. That it would be desirable to construct a model based on causal variables is self-evident, but we don't have those, and if a correlative model can demonstrably improve people's material conditions, even if conditioned on variables you find "distasteful", what is your argument that such a model shouldn't be used?
by mrkeen | 2025-08-22 14:41:06+00:00
1) We regularly get given bad data that requires us to debug. Financial transactions whose description and/or dates change, unique Ids are sometimes present and sometimes missing.

2) We have those - support app for the support team, and when they kick it up to us backend devs, we also have our own tools to try to debug. No idea if they're correct or not. I'd need to compare the output of the tool to the prod db to verify. Furthermore we can do all the spying/privacy violating we want with the debug tools. We just can't debug when things go wrong.
by const_cast | 2025-08-22 14:41:13+00:00
Met a dev who couldn't understand the difference between git, the program, and github, the remote git frontend.

I explained it a few times. He just couldn't wrap his head around that there were files on his computer and also on a different computer over the internet.

Now, I will admit distributed VCS can be tricky if you've never seen it before. But I'm not kidding - he legitimately did not understand the division of local vs the internet. That was just a concept that he never considered before.

He also didn't know anything about filesystems but that's a different story.
by ramses0 | 2025-08-22 14:41:18+00:00
I've done a few (~5-10?) cavern dives in the Yucatan, kindof on a dare/challenge. I met a man who said "I've always wanted to go cave diving in the Yucatan, it looks so beautiful and peaceful, you should try it!" ...and I did, probably within the year.

For me it was a BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal), and I'm glad it kindof helped change or tighten my trajectory. SCUBA training is designed for you to succeed, and supposedly if you make it past your first 10 dives, you're much less likely to have any severe issues. For danger, each dive is equivalent to walking ~100 miles or biking ~50 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort#Leisure_and_sport

Some of the caverns are basically exactly like that scene from Star Wars where they land the Millenium Falcon in the mouth of the worm on the asteroid. It's pitch black, only your light is beaming around, there's little tiny flecks of "dust" in the absolutely clear water that you're floating in (seriously! it's like rain-water filtered through 50ft of limestone that's mostly undisturbed for centuries). Safe-ish if you're not dumb with a not-dumb buddy/guide, and focus on minimal impact. Take only memories, leave only bubbles.

There's a bit of a "science" component where you can see fossil remnants, or weird little fishies swimming around, and it is absolutely foreign, alien, and peaceful. I've experienced "halocline" (salt water under rain water, https://www.cenotetours.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/haloc... ) and thermocline (a coherent warm water "stream" flowing through regular water), seen turtles, puffer fish, sharks, urchins, octopus, and starfish (not in caves though!).

It's been years since I've done it, and I'd go through training/refresher again if I wanted to get back into it, and I'd really avoid "cave" diving (stupid tourist cavern routes that have 20-50 people per day are totally fine by me). It's a unique experience that supplements the general one (think: rock climbing / bouldering as an adjunct to hiking... "wow, I can do that too!")
by Tohsig | 2025-08-22 14:41:34+00:00
Definitely not just you. At my previous job we had a need to fetch private Go modules from Gitlab and, later, a self-hosted instance of Forgejo. CTO and I spent a full day or so doing trial and error to get a clean solution. If I recall correctly, we ultimately resorted to each developer adding `GOPRIVATE={module_namespace}` to their environment and adding the following to their `.netrc`:

``` machine {server} # e.g. gitlab.com login {username} password {read_only_api_key} # Must be actual key and not an ENV var ```

Worked consistently, but not a solution we were thrilled with.