MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by betterhealth12 | 2025-08-06 02:51:30+00:00
I resonate with this in a major way. A couple of times now we have received feedback around the product, branding etc when I've gone from not even considering any changes to the new direction being fully implemented within the product in 48H. This was unthinkable when you were part of a "machine" within a larger enterprise however nimble it may have been. The internal friction that comes up whenever you're thinking about a product change - because of the PTSD from the drawn out discussions in my prior roles - almost needs to be unlearned and coaxed out!
by saurik | 2025-08-06 02:53:00+00:00
Which, presumably, is the reason they removed 4.5 from the API... mostly the only people willing to pay that much for that model were their competitors. (I mean, I would pay even more than they were charging, but I imagine even if I scale out my use cases--which, for just me, are mostly satisfied by being trapped in their UI--it would be a pittance vs. the simpler stuff people keep using.)
by EthanHeilman | 2025-08-06 02:54:00+00:00
> to reduce to a reasonable equilibrium point such as for example the prescribed (and arbitrary) 500 million and live more like other biological organisms of the Earth planet

This is not how other biological organisms work. They are currently in equilibrium because when they aren't they wipe almost everything else out and then create a new equilibrium or collapse the population. Humans are following in this grand tradition of nature. It is destructive tradition and I think we should break with nature on this point.

There is a decent chance that industrial civilization is so disruptive it brings about its own destruction. We should be taking steps to not speed run our own extinction and the extinction of a good chunk of complex life on this planet, but it does not seem that at the present moment that we are willing to do what is necessary.
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-06 02:54:51+00:00
I'm one of the unlucky ones who has coincidentally trained myself over the past fifteen years to write in the style that is now largely recognized to be the ChatGPT style— bolded lists, clear section breakdowns with intro and concluding sentences, correct and liberal use of semicolons and em-dashes. The only parts of it I don't do are litter my text with random emojis or directly address the reader with simpering praise.
by rgoulter | 2025-08-06 02:55:18+00:00
Examples of LLM-style text: short & punchy sentences, negative parallelism ("not just X, it's Y"), bullet points especially with emojis and bolded text. Overuse of em-dash.

This is a good list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

It's one thing to observe "LLM-generated writing all looks the same". Whether the LLMs were all post-trained the same way is a different question.

I don't agree "everyone says everything is AI". Do you have examples where a consensus of people are accusing something of being AI generated, where it lacks those indicators?
by irthomasthomas | 2025-08-06 02:55:28+00:00
My llm agent is currently running an experiment generating many pelicans. It will compare various small model consortiums against the same model running solo. It should push new pelicans to the repo after run. The horizon-beta is up already, not small or opensource but tested it anyway, and you can already see an improvement using 2+1 (2 models + the arbiter) for that model.

https://irthomasthomas.github.io/Pelicans-consortium/ https://github.com/irthomasthomas/Pelicans-consortium
by plasticbugs | 2025-08-06 02:55:57+00:00
I traveled across the country promoting Comcast@home for the summer of 1998. We visited malls near major cities where the service initially rolled out -- places like the Irvine Spectrum and the Smith Haven Mall. For each mall, the local cable company (usually Comcast, sometimes it was Cox?) provided a cable drop that gave us an approx. 300kbps connection. In some cases, this was the first broadband internet connection the mall had ever received (with most stores using dial-up modems to transmit their sales to the corp. office at the time).

Our setup required a POTS connection as well so we could do races between the two. We used comically large jpegs to do the demonstration.

My most memorable experiences from that time were from interacting with older folks who had never even seen "the internet". Some people had traveled many hours just to see the internet for themselves — even crossing state lines to get to us. And we felt like the Oracle at Delphi. Folks not even knowing how to use a mouse asking us to find information about their army platoon or information on old friends who they lost touch with. Some just wanting to us to explain what the internet was and how they might be able to use it.

We traveled with an enormous rack we called the UBR (which they told us was a universal broadband router -- which we picked up in San Jose from Cisco Systems). Sidenote: Sorry Cisco for backing up into (and majorly damaging) the fence surrounding your dumpsters!! This device provided a network connection to each of the four kiosks we had spread over the small footprint we were allotted in whatever court they had set aside for our use.

I remember showing folks how fast the connection was by downloading Doom to the local machine. The UBR would cache large files so in some cases, files would download in what felt like an instant and we would have to explain what a cache is and why those kind of speeds are not representative of average use.

I was a very heavy internet user at the time and had only ever experienced a connection as fast in the dorms on campus at the state college I attended.

It was a blast.

To Patrick (from Toronto) from @Home: I never did read RFC 793 which you so thoughtfully printed out for us on what seemed like a ream of paper.
by gotouted | 2025-08-06 02:57:05+00:00
The Tea App lets anonymous users post names, photos, and stories about men without consent. There’s no vetting, no notice, and no built-in way to get anything removed.

It markets itself as a safety app. But the reality is closer to an anonymous callout board where anyone can be exposed and labeled without proof. After a recent data breach exposed thousands of verification photos, it’s clear the risks aren’t just theoretical.

I built https://suetea.com as a response. It’s a free tool that helps people generate a legally worded takedown email to both the app’s legal team and Apple. No account required, no data stored, and it takes less than a minute to use.

We also partnered with lawyers who are taking on these cases. If they win, you share in the recovered funds. All you have to do is email them using the info on the site.

If your name or face is on that app, you have options. This tool is one of them.

Would love thoughts or feedback.
by mythz | 2025-08-06 02:58:01+00:00
Same, was just after a small lightweight solution where I can download, manage and run local models. Really not a fan of boarding the enshittification train ride with them.

Always had a bad feeling when they didn't give ggerganov/llama.cpp their deserved credit for making Ollama possible in the first place, if it were a true OSS project they would have, but now makes more sense through the lens of a VC-funded project looking to grab as much marketshare as possible to avoid raising awareness for alternatives in OSS projects they depend on.

Together with their new closed-source UI [1] it's time for me to switch back to llama.cpp's cli/server.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1meeyee/ollamas...
by keyle | 2025-08-06 02:58:42+00:00
I don't mind so much the size in MB, the fact that it's pure CPU and the quality, what I do mind however is the latency. I hope it's fast.

Aside: Are there any models for understanding voice to text, fully offline, without training?

I will be very impressed when we will be able to have a conversation with an AI at a natural rate and not "probe, space, response"
by harimau777 | 2025-08-06 02:59:41+00:00
If it's 30 minutes then it may not make a huge difference. However, it's often several hours.

There's also a big difference between 30 minutes on a train and 30 minutes driving. You can relax when you are on the train and 30 minutes of driving often ends up being 45+ minutes once you factor in finding parking.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-06 03:01:16+00:00
After 3 decades living in WestCentral FL counties, I learned something about local police departments. You can measure the ethics of the police chief (and to a lesser degree, county commissioners), by whether they embrace or refuse revenue-generating traffic cameras.

a school speed zone camera caught him going 38 mph when he thought the speed limit was 40mph because the school speed zone sign wasn’t flashing when he was driving past an elementary school near his home. In fact, despite the sign stating, "20 mph when flashing," the sign isn’t even equipped with a flashing beacon. As a result, Weaver believes the cameras have become an easy money grab for counties and cities using a vaguely written law to cash in on drivers.

Bad sheriffs and bad officials adore cash-spewing traffic cams.

Hillsborough county officials have clearly lost their way.
by djfobbz | 2025-08-06 03:01:31+00:00
I disagree with your blanket assumption that consumers always pay for tariffs. In my experience working for a major garment importer, we kept retail prices the same even after tariffs were added. Why? Because competition from local brands forced us to absorb the cost ourselves. Sure, that's not how every industry works, but saying consumers always pay is an oversimplification. It really depends on the industry, pricing power, and competitive pressure.
by bachmeier | 2025-08-06 03:02:38+00:00
I'd say they were when I was starting out in 2002. Obviously not perfect, but they had a lot to offer. That steadily changed until the pandemic. Then the job went to shit. I no longer recommend students look for academic jobs. I'll give my support if that's what a student's after, but I've talked to enough people that have moved away from academia, and academic jobs are dominated on pretty much every dimension in 2025.
by ksk385 | 2025-08-06 03:02:42+00:00
Location: Greater New York Area Remote: Yes (US-based) Willing to relocate: No Services - Web development, Data engineering, Cloud sysadmin + DevOps, Software consulting, Tech leadership

About Me: I’m Karan Krishnani, an independent software consultant with over 15 years of experience in full-stack development, cloud architectures, and AI integrations. I’m currently looking for projects as a fractional embedded team member (10–20 hours/week). My background includes building scalable solutions for industries like healthcare, government, and financial services.

What my last client had to say about my work: Karan is a reliable and results-oriented individual who consistently delivered high-quality work.

Technologies:

Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Python, Swift, PHP | Frontend: React/Redux, Next.js, Vue, Angular, TailwindCSS | Backend: Node.js/Express, Apollo GraphQL, Sequelize | Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP, Heroku, Netlify | AI/ML: Hugging Face, Jupyter, DataBricks, Transformers.js | Observability: AppDynamics, Sentry, DataDog, Grafana | Other Tools: Docker, Terraform, Figma, Git, SST

Résumé/CV: https://karankrishnani.com/resume

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/karan-krishnani

Email: karan.krishnani at gmail dot com
by Semaphor | 2025-08-06 03:02:57+00:00
Hah, timely. Apparently there is a current (or at least I only encountered it recently) marketing trend in (at least) Germany and the USA of calling cow mozzarella "Fior di latte", to make it out as something special, when all it means is that it’s the slightly cheaper Mozzarella made from cow’s milk instead of buffalo’s, and is what the vast majority of Mozzarella is made out of in both countries.
by ksk385 | 2025-08-06 03:03:34+00:00
SEEKING WORK Location: Greater New York Area Remote: Yes (US-based) Willing to relocate: No

Services - Web development, Data engineering, Cloud sysadmin + DevOps, Software consulting, Tech leadership

About Me: I’m Karan Krishnani, an independent software consultant with over 15 years of experience in full-stack development, cloud architectures, and AI integrations. I’m currently looking for projects as a fractional embedded team member (10–20 hours/week). My background includes building scalable solutions for industries like healthcare, government, and financial services.

What my last client had to say about my work: Karan is a reliable and results-oriented individual who consistently delivered high-quality work.

Technologies:

Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Python, Swift, PHP | Frontend: React/Redux, Next.js, Vue, Angular, TailwindCSS | Backend: Node.js/Express, Apollo GraphQL, Sequelize | Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP, Heroku, Netlify | AI/ML: Hugging Face, Jupyter, DataBricks, Transformers.js | Observability: AppDynamics, Sentry, DataDog, Grafana | Other Tools: Docker, Terraform, Figma, Git, SST

Résumé/CV: https://karankrishnani.com/resume

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/karan-krishnani

Email: karan.krishnani at gmail dot com
by ranprieur | 2025-08-06 03:03:42+00:00
A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolution, but inbreeding. We are turning our attention more and more into worlds of our own construction.

Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.
by dsubburam | 2025-08-06 03:05:51+00:00
> I’m still trying to understand what is the biggest group of people that uses local AI (or will)?

Creatives? I am surprised no one's mentioned this yet:

I tried to help a couple of friends with better copy for their websites, and quickly realized that they were using inventive phrases to explain their work, phrases that they would not want competitors to get wind of and benefit from; phrases that associate closely with their personal brand.

Ultimately, I felt uncomfortable presenting the cloud AIs with their text. Sometimes I feel this way even with my own Substack posts, where I occasionally coin a phrase I am proud of. But with local AI? Cool...
by 827a | 2025-08-06 03:07:52+00:00
We're also at the apex of almost every way you can measure human wellbeing. Health outcomes, literacy, child mortality, food availability, clean water, working hours [1], none have been better than they are right now. To suggest technology didn't have a hand in that would be folly. To suggest that money and wealth disparity didn't have a hand in creating that technology would be academic; there's no A/B test of reality, and there's decent circumstantial evidence that alternate systems of organization don't have as good outcomes.

Does wealth disparity really matter when every human in the western world has a magic box that can deliver endless global entertainment, communication, and information? Imagine if you had no clean water, people around you died of random diseases every day, you stepped in shit on your way to your 85 hour a week job [1], and then also, the aristocrats laughed at you from their rich ivory towers. That's a far drier powderkeg for the french revolution. People sometimes feel outrage today, but ultimately the feed keeps them happy.

It'll all end eventually. But everything always does. The best we can do is keep it going for as long as possible. Anyone who would actually use a time machine to take them anytime, anywhere in the past would be in for a rude awakening. Maybe I'd go back to the 1980s, only to relive the era we're in now all over again, except to buy a ton of AAPL and NVDA this time around.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
by anonym29 | 2025-08-06 03:08:29+00:00
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Banking and Credit Unions are a breeze for me. Grok is a no-go. Frustrating, given that's where all of xAI's new features go.

Way better than stock Android or iOS, which are basically spyware by design.
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-06 03:09:11+00:00
Two other observations I've found working with ChatGPT and Copilot:

First, until I can re-learn boundaries, they are a fiasco for work-life balance. It's way too easy to have a "hmm what if X" thought late at night or first thing in the morning, pop off a quick ticket from my phone, assign to Copilot, and then twenty minutes later I'm lying in bed reviewing a PR instead of having a shower, a proper breakfast, and fully entering into work headspace.

And on a similar thread, Copilot's willingness to tolerate infinite bikeshedding and refactoring is a hazard for actually getting stuff merged. Unlike a human colleague who loses patience after a round or two of review, Copilot is happy to keep changing things up and endlessly iterating on minutiae. Copilot code reviews are exhausting to read through because it's just so much text, so much back and forth, every little change with big explanations, acknowledgments, replies, etc.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-06 03:09:16+00:00
Believe me, cutting out bread and sugar completely is 10x easier than some kind of lifelong moderation for a person that has struggled for it already for most of his life.

And he is extremely happy with his new sugar and bread free life of increased mobility, less pain, and much lower blood pressure. At 64, he's learning how to ride a dirtbike and doing pretty well at it.
by niemyjski | 2025-08-06 03:09:22+00:00
I tried this to and had the same experience on half the books I tried to create. A lot of products I've tried have this issue and I think it will get better. I've been using and will stick to KidsAIStory as it allows me to use the same characters across the books. Also my child would be sad that they can't read their favorite series when google kills off another product.
by roncesvalles | 2025-08-06 03:11:28+00:00
As a dev, I find that the personal utility of LLMs is still very limited.

Analyze it this way: Are LLMs enabling something that was impossible before? My answer would be No.

Whatever I'm asking of the LLM, I'd have figured it out from googling and RTFMing anyway, and probably have done a better job at it. And guess what, after letting the LLM do it, I probably still need to google and RTFM anyway.

You might say "it's enabling the impossible because you can now do things in less time", to which I would say, I don't really think you can do it in less time. It's more like cruise control where it takes the same time to get to your destination but you just need to expend less mental effort.

Other elephants in the room:

- where is the missing explosion of (non-AI) software startups that should've been enabled by LLM dev efficiency improvements?

- why is adoption among big tech SWEs near zero despite intense push from management? You'd think, of all people, you wouldn't have to ask them twice.

The emperor has no clothes.
by altruios | 2025-08-06 03:11:42+00:00
You are characterizing police brutality - what we want to curb - as something they are trained to do… this is disingenuous at best. If a police officer kills someone innocent, or enters the wrong house and shoots someone… they absolutely should be held criminally accountable: as they have committed a crime.

Being a police officer shouldn’t excuse you from doing crime, come on.

Again: higher standards. And you should be asking yourself why you are okay with lower standards than “police should at least not be shooting innocent people in their sleep after entering the wrong house”

We really need better training for police: hopefully we at least agree on that…
by maest | 2025-08-06 03:13:16+00:00
For someone as clever as you, I'm sure it's obvious why using a throwaway greatly diminishes the value of what you're saying.

To spell it out for you: there is value to having some notion of persistent identity even on pseudonymous forums. Anyone can use a throwaway and say anything - and valiantly admitting you're using a throwaway doesn't change this fact.
by YZF | 2025-08-06 03:13:59+00:00
They might not have that concept but they absolutely have those people. I worked with many mechanical and electrical engineers building complex machines. Some people are just much better than others. This might not happen with more cookie-cutter work but any creative work in these domains absolute has 10x or even 100x engineers. That said collaboration really helps here, i.e. the good engineer can help others solve problems and be more productive then they'd be on their own. In software this seems to be harder for various reasons, one of which is that it's easier to demonstrate/see a good solution in the other domains but software tends to be a lot fuzzier.
by kkukshtel | 2025-08-06 03:14:03+00:00
I don't _really_ mean it obviously but I think a key component of what makes something like GTA compelling is that fully modeled world you move around in. These things take what amounts to hundreds if not thousands of man years to create "traditionally", and the fact someone can now prompt to life a city or any other environment with simiailr (or better) fidelity is a massive change in how we think about creative content production.

GTA6 will not actually be nerd-sniped, but it's easy to see how a lot of what makes the game defensible is being rapidly commoditized.
by hunter-gatherer | 2025-08-06 03:14:52+00:00
Another beaver comment... I know you didn't explicitly say it, so I will just to clarify in case you meant well. For all the city folk on here who read the beaver dam stuff and infer that beavers are destructive to eco systems, rest assured this is not the case. Consequences for local eco systems? Yes. Positive ones. There is no shortage of information out there about this subject. Sorry to preach, but I happen to live in beaver country and have spent more time in the dwindling forests and wilderness than most people. When people start talking about beavers building dams in this context it sounds so ridiculous.

Another note: The largest beaver dam discovered is about .5 miles in length. Even if it was purely destructive to local eco systems it would hardly compare to human development.
by 2noame | 2025-08-06 03:15:16+00:00
Articles like this are so annoying and no surprise coming from a Manhattan Institute guy.

Of course UBI is effective. We have hundreds of studies to look at to determine this, not just two.

The NYT article was shit too. It's one thing to say that $333/mo of UBI to a family of 2 or more didn't appear to have brain development impacts that were measurable within the first few years of life. It's another to say UBI isn't effective.

We know that a guaranteed monthly income floor has all kinds of positive impacts especially on kids, and especially if kids are prevented from living in poverty for their entire childhood.

Read a 30-year study like this article covers.

https://archive.ph/ps8k1

And never forget that a key component of UBI is universality. It's one thing to study the impact on an individual. It's another to test the impact on an entire community.

In the Dauphin pilot where an entire town got it, crime went down 15%, violent crime went down 37%, and hospitalization rates went down 9%. You aren't going to find stuff like that in any pilot that isn't a saturation pilot testing universality.
by PontifexMinimus | 2025-08-06 03:15:36+00:00
Indeed the blurb is absurd and very off-putting. It's not a big deal that "It clocks in at under 25MB with just 15 million parameters", because text to speech is a long-solved problem, in fact the Texas Speak and Spell from 1978 (half a century ago FFS) solved it, probably with a good deal less than 25MB.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-06 03:16:41+00:00
To give an exact example of what the WhiteHouse stands against.

Broadband funds from the last administration led to an open fiber provider trenching the neighborhood. I gained worthwhile ISP competition and 2Gb low-latency symmetrical for $80/mo.

A 2nd fiber provider is hanging line from the poles.

Our neighborhood has real competition now, instead of a monopoly (or duopoly).

Genuine competition infuriates the Whitehouse - which is threatening to bring the power of US Gov to bear against it.