MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arscan | 2025-08-29 16:56:30+00:00
> Honestly, I was less than half as useful as the current crop of robots and they still tolerated (in fact, encouraged) my involvement.

Don’t sell yourself short. External contributors are extremely valuable as they are often users and provide real world validation of a need for whatever they are contributing. They also retain any knowledge for any feedback they receive that they can apply to future contributions. And they also become advocates for that software, helping it grow its user base.

LLMs, not so much.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-29 16:56:47+00:00
I agree with your stance there. Further - the conventional opinion is that the power imbalance coming from the information imbalance (state/business know a lot about me; I know little about them) is that us citizens and consumers should reduce our "information surface" towards them. And address the imbalance that way. But.

There exists another, often unmentioned option. And that option is for state/business to open up, to increase their "information surface" towards us, their citizens/consumers. That will also achieve information (and one hopes power) rebalance. Every time it's actually measured, how much value we put on our privacy, when we have to weight privacy against convenience and other gains from more data sharing, the revealed preference is close to zero. The revealed preference is that we put the value of our privacy close to zero, despite us forever saying otherwise. (that we value privacy very very much; seems - "it ain't so")

So the option of state/business revealing more data to us citizens/consumers, is actually more realistic. Yes there is extra work on part of state/business to open their data to us. But it's worth it. The more advanced the society, the more coordination it needs to achieve the right cooperation-competition balance in the interactions between ever greater numbers of people.

There is an old book "Data For the People" by an early AI pioneer and Amazon CTO Andreas Weigend. Afaics it well describes the world we live in, and also are likely to live even more in the future.
by RobRivera | 2025-08-29 16:56:52+00:00
> returned to creditors/customers/employees

I appreciate the sentiment, however it should really be clarified, for the purposes of productive dialogue, that employees and customers do not own a business. Businesses are for-profit and have a balance sheet just like everyone else, and creditors and minority shareholders have a responsibility in the ecosystem.

A creditor has a due-diligence obligation to determine credit worthiness, and a recent change in ownership could be part of that. Noone forces a creditor to give a loan.

In any non-public share ownership of a company, the shareholder has agency to manage their holdings in the company, and if they are bearish, they should sell.

Now the real grift is PE use of regulatory capture of a consumer. Consumers do not have much choice in the world of healthcare/hospice care.

In that sense, the government has the power of the pen to adjust the law.

I dont find any value in echoing a false entitlement to customers amd employees.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-29 16:56:59+00:00
>Microsoft fired two more staffers Thursday for engaging in on-site protests

A bit sensationalist: [the original two staffers] were fired for breaking into an executive's office which will get you fired nearly anywhere, if not have you brought up on criminal charges.

I'm afraid the younger generations have never grown out of the college bubble if they think stuff like this is acceptable. It's quite insane actually.

Recall a President of the United States resigned because someone broke into an office.

[Edit]: It appears I misread, this is an additional two employees, on top of the two that did the B&E, bringing the total to four. It's unclear what these two did specifically (the article doesn't say) but I imagine MS has had it with the shenanigans.
by peterleiser | 2025-08-29 16:57:03+00:00
Yes, just a thought experiment. I grew up on a farm in Northern California (mostly rice and tomatoes), lived in the bay area for 20 years for college and working in tech, and now live in a red state. I tell people the same thing you do about blue cities and red everything else. It's bizarre how many people in red states and blue states don't know that (and don't want to believe it).
by TIPSIO | 2025-08-29 16:57:30+00:00
Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web.

But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real...

Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed data"?

Unless you're reddit, X, Google, or Meta with scary unlimited budget legal teams, you have no power.

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M0QyOp7zqcY
by jjangkke | 2025-08-29 16:57:46+00:00
I can confidently state that for CRUD web apps, its truly over as in those jobs are never going to command the same wages it once used to.

With the recent models its now encroaching similarly on all fronts, I think the next few iterations we'll see LLM solidify itself as a meta-compiler that will be deployed locally for more FCS type systems.

At the end of the day the hazards are still same with or without AI, you need checks and bounds, you need proper vetting of code and quality but overall it probably doesn't make sense to charge an hourly rate because an AI would drastically cut down such billing schemes.

For me "replacement" is largely a 70~80% reduction in either hourly wages, job positions or both and from the job market data I see it can get there.
by legitster | 2025-08-29 16:57:59+00:00
The area in question (Northeast) is about the only place in the US that matches the population density of the parts of Europe served by high-speed rail.

It's not a question of wealth but of efficiency. Even if you took every single meter of high speed rail that France has built in the last 50 years, you would barely cover 2/3 of the distance of a single line between New York and LA.
Ask HN: Best self-hosted wiki solution in 2025? Mediawiki or something else?
by jMyles | 2025-08-29 16:58:15+00:00
The two things I wish mediawiki had:

* APIs with deeper functional inroads in multiple languages. There are lots of great tools for writing bots, but if you want to write a parser extension, you're stuck with PHP right? Or has that changed?

* Multiplayer. Edit conflicts can be a real pain and turnoff for beginner users. I wish that simultaneous use felt more like a collaborative social experience and less like a minefield.

...but I do think mediawiki is wonderful, and I'm inclined to use it despite these drawbacks.
by bikenaga | 2025-08-29 16:58:28+00:00
The book by Mashaal and a book by Aczel (which I enjoyed) were reviewed by Michael Atiyah (1966 Fields Medalist): "Bourbaki, A Secret Society of Mathematicians" (Maurice Mashaal) and "The Artist and the Mathematician" (Amir Aczel) - Notices of the American Mathematical Society, v. 54, no. 9, October, 2007 - https://www.ams.org/notices/200709/tx070901150p.pdf

There have been numerous articles about Bourbaki, including some by former Bourbaki members:

"The Work of Bourbaki During the Last Thirty Years" - Jean Dieudonne - Notices of the American Mathematical Society, v. 29, no. 7, November, 1982 - https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/198211/198211FullIssue....

"Twenty-Five Years with Nicolas Bourbaki, 1949–1973" - Armand Borel - Notices of the American Mathematical Society, v. 45, no. 3, March, 1998 - https://www.ams.org//journals/notices/199803/borel.pdf

Edit: fixed typo
by sdesol | 2025-08-29 16:58:41+00:00
> will we still need vector-based retrieval

I think for most use cases, it doesn't make much sense to use vector DBs. When I started to design my AI Search feature, I researched chunking a lot and the general consensus was, you can can lose context if you don't chunk in the right way and there wasn't really a right way to chunk. This was why I decided to take the approach that I am using today, which I talk about in another comment.

With input cost for very good models ($0.30/1M) for Gemini 2.5 Flash (bulk rates would be $0.15/1M), feeding the llm thousands of documents to generate summaries would probably cost 5 dollars or less if using bulk rate pricing. With input cost and with most SOTA LLMs being able to handle 50k tokens in context window with no apparent lost in reasoning, I really don't see the reason for vector DBs anymore, especially if it means potentially less accurate results.
by ehnto | 2025-08-29 16:58:48+00:00
They are not free to do whatever they like, there are tomes of laws across all countries governing what someone can and cannot do with your intellectual property. Just because we didn't have the foresight to add in a "if by chance in the future someone invents artificial intelligence, that's not fair use" is a shame, but doesn't make what these companies are doing ethical or morale.

I don't disagree regarding Google, I also think they exploited others IP for their own gain. It was once symbiotic with webmasters, but when that stopped they broke that implied good faith contract. In a sense, their snippets and widgets using others IP and no longer providing traffic to the site was the warning shot for where we are now. We should have been modernising IP laws back then.
by 12ian34 | 2025-08-29 16:58:57+00:00
Thanks for this considered response. I find it difficult to disagree with anything you said in this particular comment :) however I do think each instance you mention in this message is quite different to the topic at hand, regarding the big tech data machine. Additionally, I think I would rather our UK level of privacy regarding healthcare data than the commercialised free for all in the US. One counterpoint could be that Palantir got a significant amount of UK NHS data.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-29 16:59:11+00:00
People use the phone tree not because they want to, but because they have limited alternatives. Companies deploy them for line goes up ("how can we provide as little value as possible for as much profit as possible without the customer leaving"), not for the benefit of the customer.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-29 16:59:15+00:00
You'd think they would have an interest in developing reasonable crawling infrastructure, like Google, Bing or Yandex. Instead they go all in on hosts with no metering. All of the search majors reduce their crawl rate as request times increase.

On one hand these companies announce themselves as sophisticated, futuristic and highly-valued, on the other hand we see rampant incompetence, to the point that webmasters everywhere are debating the best course of action.
by didibus | 2025-08-29 16:59:19+00:00
> And there is no free CDN like Cloudflare.

Their pricing page says:

No-nonsense Free Tier

As part of the AWS free Usage Tier you can get started with Amazon CloudFront for free.

Included in Always Free Tier

1 TB of data transfer out to the internet per month 10,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS Requests per month 2,000,000 CloudFront Function invocations per month 2,000,000 CloudFront KeyValueStore reads per month 10 Distribution Tenants Free SSL certificates No limitations, all features available
by tiniuclx | 2025-08-29 16:59:40+00:00
Well, the quality of the games that reach some level of commercial success has indeed gone up. On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.

The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.
by tashoecraft | 2025-08-29 17:00:33+00:00
There’s this saying that humans are terrible at predicting exponential growth. I believe we need another saying, those who expect exponential growth have a tough time not expecting it.

It’s not under a decade for ai to get to this stage but multiple decades of work, with algorithms finally able to take advantage of gpu hardware to massively excel.

There’s already feeling that growth has slowed, I’m not seeing the rise in performance at coding tasks that I saw over the past few years. I see no fundamental improvements that would suggest exponential growth or human level of performance.
by gmueckl | 2025-08-29 17:00:41+00:00
I would challenge that it is really a vast majority working at these highest levels of abstractions. There are thousands of people working on C#, Java and JavaScript runtimes and basic libraries. There are thousands of people working on compilers and thousands more (morw likely tens of thousands) working on operating systems and drivers etc... I think that the amount of effort that goes into all of this is severely underestimated because it so far removed from the perspective of a high level application developer.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-08-29 17:00:43+00:00
P320/M17/M18 trigger weight is not the problem. Glocks have roughly similar weights (except for the NYPD horror show), so do S&W, Walthers, and any number of other pistols.

Trying to equipment-ify your way out of a training problem resulted in NYPD equipping its pistols with a trigger so heavy that their already-easy qualification course became a problem for many recruits. Their hit percentage in actual shootings is awful, and that ~12 pound NYPD-spec trigger didn't help it any. They finally saw the error of their ways after making their officers suffer needlessly for years.

https://www.police1.com/patrol-issues/articles/nypd-should-i...
by SKILNER | 2025-08-29 17:00:45+00:00
"According to the study, AI still struggles with several crucial facets of coding: sweeping scopes involving huge codebases, the extended context lengths of millions of lines of code, higher levels of logical complexity, and long-horizon or long-term planning about the structure and design of code to maintain code quality."

uhhh, not sure even the best people or teams are very good at this either. Condemning AI for not being capable of something we're not capable of, ok...

“If it takes longer to explain to the system all the things you want to do and all the details of what you want to do, then all you have is just programming by another name.”

This is called the specification process, which hopefully is already occurring today.

There's so much self-serving bias in articles like this, as well as the comments on HN, Reddit, etc. It's good to critique AI, but that self-serving line is frequently crossed by many people.
Ask HN: I made a new kind of AI, how do I make money from it?
by ikishade | 2025-08-29 17:00:51+00:00
I've created a brand new kind of AI (first-principles, not based on neural-networks), filed a patent (should be published in the next two months) and my attorney assured me I have a strong case (>100 pages, novel research, self-funded). I've written two libraries (C++, JavaScript) implementing it. It can do amazing things, but I've struggled to get anyone to even pay attention. How can I turn this into something profitable?
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-29 17:00:55+00:00
Long term usually equates to a bit stale/out of date with distributions that only release every few years. Appropriate for stuff you don't really care about.

That's why I use rolling release distributions on my Desktop. For Debian, people recommend Debian testing usually. And that's fine. Maybe they should just call it Debian rolling releases and rename stable to Debian LTS. I think it's more appropriate to how people actually use these things.

Manjaro is not without issues but I've had it on one of my laptops for the last four years and it's nice to have the latest driver updates, kernels, etc. working together. It also helps that the community is just focused on current versions of stuff and fixing minor integrations with released packages rather than working around issues in some long forgotten release with distribution specific patches, etc. You find relatively little of that in Arch (which underlies Manjaro).

For production servers, the server just needs to boot my docker containers and get out of the way. IMHO There's no need to support > 10K packages for god knows what there. Most of that stuff probably has no business being installed on a server. I'm actually leaning towards immutable distributions and servers for that reason. The business of manually fiddling with servers in a production environment is something I'm trying to avoid/do less off. They shouldn't need a package manager if they are properly immutable.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-29 17:01:08+00:00
Ask the LLMs to vibe code a text editor, and you'll get pretty much what you deserve in return for zero effort of your own.

Ask the best available models -- emphasis on models -- for help designing the text editor at a structural rather than functional level first, being specific about what you want and emphasizing component-level test whenever possible, and only then follow up with actual code generation, and you'll get much better results.
by apercu | 2025-08-29 17:01:27+00:00
So maybe the truth is somewhere in between - there is no way AI is not going to have a major societal impact - like social media.

If we don't see some serious fencing, I will not be surprised by some spectacular AI-caused failures in the next 3 years that wipe out companies.

Business typically follows a risk-based approach to things, and in this case entire industries are yolo'ing.
by olelele | 2025-08-29 17:01:27+00:00
My last impression of Facebook was that configuring the account settings had become more like setting up a fresh raspbian install or configuring a phone. Too many privacy intruding settings to count. I get the feeling that most people don't care enough and just leave everything on default, which is on.

I think Facebook is deeply scammy now.

I deleted my accounts a few years ago and never looked back.
by azinman2 | 2025-08-29 17:01:54+00:00
You’re making the assumption (from what I understand) that most of the inefficiency is in the administration side. I’m sure there is, but it’s also woefully complicated with insurance, laws, parties who may or may not be financially and cognitively sound, etc.

But let’s say you can make the administration side way more efficient. How much did that save? 20%? That’s not the kinds of returns being sought. So where does the 2x, 3x, or more returns expected come from? Cutting services.
by mrpopo | 2025-08-29 17:01:56+00:00
Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. They benefit everyone, even people with cars.

You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage.

Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.
by bombcar | 2025-08-29 17:02:07+00:00
As mentioned it is possible to make double or even triple safe (or more).

But some of the types of safeties increase the change you won’t have it on (because time to disengage the safety is too long/complicated) or that they will introduce additional failure modes.

For some missions, “unsafe” is better than “too safe” - think one step from gun drawn, finger on the trigger.

This is one of the reasons Glocks are so popular, as the trigger safety is really “easy” to disengage as it’s the same as the mechanism you use to fire.

But it doesn’t protect YOU from being a dumbass. Safeties that do that are dangerous in another way.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-29 17:02:33+00:00
To be 100% clear: FSD and Autopilot are both terrible product names that imply promises greater than the products can deliver, and Musk / Tesla have made that worse with statements like those you reference. People have died as a result.

I just disagree that any significant number of people anywhere have thought the 'self' in 'full self driving' refers to the driver.
by graycat | 2025-08-29 17:02:38+00:00
An important and well plowed subject. Can consider also for the coding theory

W.\ Wesley Peterson and E.\ J.\ Weldon, Jr., {\it Error-Correcting Codes, Second Edition,\/} The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1972.\ \

and for the abstract algebra, e.g., field theory

Oscar Zariski and Pierre Samuel, {\it Commutative Algebra, Volume I,\/} Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1958.\ \
by ianburrell | 2025-08-29 17:02:40+00:00
That is weird thing to say when US has the best freight rail in the world. Lots of containers are transported by rail from west coast to east coast ports. The competition is trucks, not barge.

If anything, that is one reason that passenger rail sucks because the freight companies own the rails. They delay passenger trains and don’t get punished. The freight companies don’t spend on maintenance, and have pulled up double track.
by timshell | 2025-08-29 17:02:47+00:00
I think about this as a startup founder building a 'proof-of-human' layer on the Internet.

One of the hard parts in this space is what level of transparency should you have. We're advancing the thesis that behavioral biometrics offers robust continuous authentication that helps with bot/human and good/bad, but people are obviously skeptical to trust black-box models for accuracy and/or privacy reasons.

We've defaulted to a lot of transparency in terms of publishing research online (and hopefully in scientific journals), but we've seen the downside: competitors fake claims about their own best in-house behavioral tools that is behind their company walls in addition to investors constantly worried about an arms race.

As someone genuinely interested (and incentivized!) to build a great solution in this space, what are good protocols/examples to follow?
by securesaml | 2025-08-29 17:03:02+00:00
Google has a program where you can submit patches to OSS projects (including libxslt) https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/open-source/492808...

The patches need to fix a systemtic design flaw (which seems like you are trying to do).

You are eligible even if you are a contributor:

> Q: I'm a core developer working on one of the in-scope projects. Do my own patches qualify?

> A: They most certainly do.

Additionally, github has: https://resources.github.com/github-secure-open-source-fund/

Companies have changed after seeing the log4j incident and are open to funding open source security (but we still need more)
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2025-08-29 17:03:31+00:00
Great promise; sometimes need to reference docs to build context.

I looked at the examples you posted and did a quick glance. For example

'''init?(exactly: Float80)'''

the tool converted it to

'''- [initexactly-63925](/documentation/Swift/Double/init(exactly:)-63925)'''

To achieve its goal I would be worried that it dropped the verbatim function signature. Claude still figured it out, but for more obscure stuff that could be an issue.
by luqtas | 2025-08-29 17:03:34+00:00
> ... entirely on its own

ok, ok! just like you can find for much less computation power involved using a search engine, forums/websites having if not your question, something similar or a snippet [0] helping you solve your doubt... all of that free of tokens and companies profiting over what the internet have build! even FOSS generative AI can give billions USD to GPU manufacturers

[0] just a silly script that can lead a bunch of logic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70058132/how-do-i-make-a...
by axiolite | 2025-08-29 17:03:52+00:00
Is that even necessary? Is their menu so large that you can't just have a menu with a push-button next to each item?

Are fast food companies so mentally locked-in to replicating the old model of verbal order-taking that they can't see how cheap, fast, easy and accurate it would be to switch to photos and buttons?

We all manage to use a soda fountain, without needing a person (or AI) to take our drink order... and use vending machines.