MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CLPadvocate | 2025-08-21 18:02:01+00:00
> The UK has people in prison for tweets and saying mean words. We do not have that; the first amendment is not a myth.

US seems not to understand yet, how fast words become deeds. Every oppression starts with words.

> You called me a dilettante, I claim that is hate speech. It meets all the (current) criteria for hate speech.

He/She actually didn't. He/She called ALL Americans dilettantes, not you personally. In the latter case, you may TRY to sue, which would with nearly 100% probability be dismissed by any court, since it's not really an insult.

> Do you think that the government should be able to silence or punish you because I was offended by your insult? A world where that is true is a world where freedom and democracy die.

The government has absolutely nothing to do with it. And yes, absolutely and definitely, every single person should be able to defend himself against insults. Why should you have the right to insult other people? Are you somehow better than them? Not in a country where law is respected and where every person is equal.

> Language is context dependent and requires interpretation. I can easily take someone’s words out of context and they become hate speech, I can also easily misinterpret someone’s words and they become hate speech. What is fine one day can become hate speech the next under a different administration.

And this ist exactly where it gets wrong - you don't decide anything. You MAY think that something is hate speech, you MAY think that someone insulted you - so you are allowed to fill a complaint, but there is INDEPENDENT JUSTICE that decides if you have the point or not. And they would dismiss any claims that have no substance. So if someone was fined (most usually somewhere about 1000-2000 Euros) then it was really an insult, if someone was imprisoned (pretty uncommon) then it was someone who repeatedly insulted other people (and was convicted multiple times) or was so incredibly offensive that it crossed the boundaries of civilised behaviour by so far that he had to be isolated from the society. I actually have no examples where people were imprisoned for the first-time insult or even for the first-time hate speech.

There is absolutely no danger to democracy if the laws apply to all people equally and if people are forced to communicate in civilised ways.
by brandonb | 2025-08-21 18:02:12+00:00
By 2018, the concept was definitely in the air since you had GPT-1 (2018) and BERT (2018). You could argue even Word2Vec (2013) had the core concept of pre-training on an unsupervised or self-supervised objective leading to performance on a downstream semantic task. However, the phrase "foundation model" wasn't coined until 2021, to my knowledge.
by Johnny555 | 2025-08-21 18:02:14+00:00
My former company used to have engineers sit on sales calls regularly too.

While it was interesting to see what companies wanted and how they were sold our product, it wasn't extremely illuminating.

The features that customers wanted were already on our roadmap, we had one feature that customers found confusing and hard to use, but it was written that way to meet the needs of our largest customer.

Engineering wanted to streamline it but then it wouldn't have met that customer's needs. Eventually we wrote a "lite" version of the feature that was easier to use and turned that on for everyone but the big customer. (but that didn't come about because of engineers sitting on sales calls, we all knew it was hard to use but couldn't change it until it was on our product roadmap.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-21 18:02:21+00:00
When I was just getting started in programming, the best education I got came from the operations manager at a fossil fuel generating station. Russ Reynolds had a quite pragmatic view of computers as tools. Once I had written the system they wanted, he brought someone in from the plant and carefully explained that he was testing the system I built, and not them. He said "anything that goes wrong is his fault" pointing at me. He also told me to just be quiet and watch.

User looks at system, doesn't know what to do... I say oh, just press F1 for help (it was back in the MS-DOS era), Russ says.. "how is he supposed to know that?"

I was then enlightened.

Every screen after that had "Press F1 for help" on it either on the top or bottom line of text
by calf | 2025-08-21 18:02:43+00:00
The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.

(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)
by delichon | 2025-08-21 18:03:01+00:00
The act of entry without inspection is a misdemeanor crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. Repeat offenses can be felonies. It is just a civil violation if they have once entered with permission but lost it, e.g. a visa overstay or violation, adjustment denial, status expiration or revocation. So the Biden era catch-and-release rules created millions of such cases.
by hvb2 | 2025-08-21 18:03:12+00:00
There's 2 ways you can get to working software

1. Professional software engineers that can listen to learn about the problem space and are willing to come to understand that. This takes humility.

2. The people experiencing the problem. They might not write perfect code and it might not be maintainable long term. But their understanding of the problem and pain points is so good that they can solve just that and not write 90% of the code the professionals wrote...

I've seen this over and over again and can only tip my hat to the people that fixed their own problem. Just like for a dev, that means going into an unfamiliar domain and teaching yourself
by IT4MD | 2025-08-21 18:03:23+00:00
>Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.

As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of the US.
by mothballed | 2025-08-21 18:03:28+00:00
17% of the USA smokes weed (makes them a prohibited possessor), 8+% are felons, DV convictions are harder to find but incredibly common, 4+% of USA are immigrants who have no right to bear arms (illegal or non-immigrant visa).

So maybe 1/4 or more of the adult USA is explicitly barred from the right to bear arms. When you consider those same people would have been much of the ~3% that had high enough risk tolerance to fight the American revolution, basically the USA has barred a very large proportion of those with the risk taking temperament that would enable them to become part of the ~3%.

They've effectively made it illegal for revolution type of risk taker to have arms unless those risk takers used the police/military as that outlet. Note this is a relatively new development -- the M1 carbine was invented by a prisoner inside a prison!
by zahlman | 2025-08-21 18:03:29+00:00
It has indeed not changed. But practically speaking it doesn't matter much. The string implementation cheats by using resizable buffers internally for at least some purposes, while presenting an immutable-type interface. But regardless, a given line of code is going to have O(1) such additions; it's not remotely as bad as `for i in items: str += foo(i)`. (This should be done using `''.join` instead.)
by NickC25 | 2025-08-21 18:03:34+00:00
Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed.

And since we live in the era of the real golden rule (i.e "he who has the gold makes the rules), there's no chance that we'll ever get the chance to catch the ship. Mark lives in his own world, because we gave him a quarter trillion dollars and never so much as slapped him on the wrist.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-21 18:03:40+00:00
> redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.

Yeah it is reduced because as soon as someone calls they're trapped in a 30 minute "I'm sorry I didn't understand, what can I help you with" And people just give up and decide, maybe the $20 ATM fee isn't worth contesting...

Then again, this means the bank may be saving money too.
by spogbiper | 2025-08-21 18:03:51+00:00
Can't speak to the financial benefit over other investment. Total dev/testing time looks to be fairly small in comparison to time saved in even one year, although with different salaries etc I cannot be too certain on the money ratio. Ultimately not my direct concern, but those making decisions are very happy with results so far and looking for additional processes to apply this type of system to.
by tombert | 2025-08-21 18:04:42+00:00
I just bought a nearly-new used Herman Miller Aeron chair. It cost me $400, but if I had bought it new from their website it would have cost me ~$1600-1800.

It's a nice chair, but what I think what happens is that a company will buy a new nice chair for every employee, then do massive downsize and/or go bankrupt, and they liquidate these chairs for pennies on the dollar, oversaturating the market and making the chairs fairly cheap on the used market. It's no individual person's money, so they don't really care if they're taking a huge loss, and they might be able to write off a loss on taxes.

But it makes me think that if it's routinely easy to buy an $1800 chair for $400 because this is so common, maybe corporations aren't these hyper-optimized controllers of money.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-08-21 18:04:46+00:00
It's unclear what you're referring to. Their DNS (outside of Safari private browsing) and Private Relay aren't enabled by default. The latter is set up using blind signatures and oblivious DNS, so they can't figure out what it is (much less what to do with it). You're free to disable both and let your ISP do whatever they want with your browsing habits.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-21 18:04:52+00:00
OK, checked and Ruby does seem to use scalars. Well, unless you mess with encodings. Then it’s messy. So it’s probably better and worse than Python 3.

You may not have seen this interesting article before: https://hsivonen.fi/string-length/. I agree with its assessment that scalars are really pretty useless as a measure, and Python and Ruby are foolish to have chased it at such expense.

But seriously, I can’t think of any other popular languages that count by scalars or code points—it’s definitely not most languages, it’s a minority, all a very specific sort of language. “Most” encompasses well-formed UTF-8 (e.g. Rust), recommended UTF-8 but it doesn’t actually care (e.g. Go), potentially ill-formed UTF-16 (e.g. JavaScript, Java, .NET), and total-mess (e.g. C, C++).
by gen220 | 2025-08-21 18:05:21+00:00
Disclaimer that if you own any of the popular market-cap-weighted index funds (VOO, VGT, VTI) you are exposed to this risk and, conversely, have benefited from this ballooning in valuations.

NVDA, AAPL, TSLA and PLTR are together ~16% of VOO at the moment. NVDA alone is ~8%. Berkshire Hathaway is about the same % as TSLA, 1.61%.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-21 18:05:28+00:00
Yeah Maybe that's fair in the current world we live in.

But the solution isn't to use AI instead of not trusting the agents / customer service rep because their performance is graded on how quickly they can start talking to next

The solution is to change the economics in the way that the workers are incentivized to write good summaries, maybe paying them more and not grading them in such a way will help.

I am imagining some company saying AI is good enough because they themselves are using the wrong grading technique and AI is best option in that. SO in that sense, AI just benchmarked maxxed in that if that makes sense. Man, I am not even kidding but I sometimes wonder how economies of scale can work so functionally different from common sense. Like it doesn't make sense at this point.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-21 18:05:43+00:00
> Who cares? I'm not funding their military

Given the global nature of the oil market, you and I are probably funding Hamas just about as much as we're--individually, as taxpayers to the country paying for 15% of Israel's defence budget [1]--funding Israel.

More pointedly: I've seen it said that this war has an unusually-high civilian toll. 83% suggests it is being fought like others have historically fought wars. (That doesn't make war less abhorrent.) So I'm curious for the figure that would make this war's civilian toll unusual, even if it's also coming from a biased source.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts#:~:tex...
by mindcrime | 2025-08-21 18:05:44+00:00
the reason why they're so inefficient is not algorithmic, but purely architectural.

I would agree with that, with the caveat that in my mind "the architecture" and "the algorithm" are sort of bound up with each other. That is, one implies the other -- to some extent.

And yes, fair point that building dedicated hardware might just be part of the solution to making something that runs much more efficiently.

The only other thing I would add, is that - relative to what I said in the post above - when I talk about "algorithmic advances" I'm looking at everything as potentially being on the table - including maybe something different from ANN's altogether.
by milesvp | 2025-08-21 18:05:50+00:00
I haven’t needed windows for a game in over 3 years. between proton and lutris I have all the games I’m interested in covered. There are multiplayer games I can’t play, but I have little trouble with blizzard games. I’ve had a few games I’ve had to come back to when proton fixed things, maybe 2% of the games I’ve tried. AMD graphics cards have done me well.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-21 18:06:00+00:00
\* or ** to (reliably) put * into your text.

(4**8) + (4**3) + (2**2) + (2**1) = ...

(4*8) + (4*3) + (2*2) + (2*1) = ...

If you have an * surrounded by whitespace it's left alone but then you have to remember to always surround * by whitespace.
by dachworker | 2025-08-21 18:06:18+00:00
ML Research is ripe for such a subculture to emerge, because there are truly so many research directions that are nothing more than a tower of cards ready to be exposed. You need an element of truth to capture your audience. Once you have an audience and you already deconstructed the tower of cards, you start looking for more content. And then you end up like Sabine.
by Glyptodon | 2025-08-21 18:06:50+00:00
IMO this stuff happens frequently because the layers between engineers and users (IE product, project management, executive leadership) are crap and blaming the engineers for it.

Not that engineers can't be problematic. But product people who aren't technical enough and badly manage trade offs they don't understand or invent out of thin air outnumber engineers who are pigheaded know it alls more obsessed with technical minutae than product success.

Another one I see in the same ballpark is hiring a bunch of outsourced coders and then wondering why velocity and quality goes down. (Because you're multiplying the mythical man month effect by the skill difference between a day laborer from Home Depot and someone with significant skills/domain knowledge like a welder or electrician.)
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-21 18:07:09+00:00
Unity's failure to communicate will be studied for decades.

They really should of straight matched Unreal's revenue cut from the start, and maybe offer a deduction for site licenses.

Instead they announce something like a 20 cent fee per "initial interaction" which they track via embedded spyware. You had a massive backlash from indie developers who realistically weren't Unity's target in the first place.

People who never programmed or made a commercial product already complaining Unity is coming for them.

That said, Godot is often good enough for what most new programers can actually do.

It's also OK for certain non gaming projects. No need to worry about Unity deciding your not making a game and hiking your fees.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 18:07:15+00:00
That’s true, but why should I take on the work of being at the beginning of the pipeline instead of hiring a mid level developer. My incentives are to meet my quarterly goals and show “impact”.

To a first approximation, no company pays internal employees at market rates in an increasing comp environment after a couple of years especially during the first few years of an employee’s career where their marker rate rapidly increases once they get real world experience.

On the other hand, the startup I worked for pre-AWS with 60 people couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t have paid me the amount I made when I got hired at AWS.
by vel0city | 2025-08-21 18:07:53+00:00
The Best Buy near me is halfway there. They split their previous retail location in half. One half is still a walk-in retail store experience, but much smaller than before and more focused on being a showroom for the more expensive things and only a handful of accessories actually around on the floor. The other half is pretty much a warehouse. Outside, one set of doors is now dedicated to curbside pickup from the warehouse side. In between the doors to the showroom area and the curbside, it's a big set of automated lockers to pick up orders 24/7.

At a lot of the stores that offer it, the curbside pickup is hopping. Tons of associates constantly wheeling out cartloads of merchandise to an ever-rotating group of cars. More and more people opt for the curbside experience it seems, which is pretty much the full-service experience just more asynchronously. I do it from time to time, but typically not for grocery items as I usually don't like the experience of substitutions or the app saying they have something when they really don't.
by GloriousKoji | 2025-08-21 18:08:10+00:00
I live in the 3rd "wealthiest" county in the United States. The combined market cap of headquartered companies here total over 10 trillion dollars. I can't install solar panels and I can't be bothered to buy house batteries so I've only had power 98.6% of the time last year.

I've lost hope. In theory it can be done but it feels something on the same order as setting foot on the moon again. We have the technology and capability to do so but somehow our population collective decision results in keep things garabge.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-21 18:08:13+00:00
I happened to watch Sabine's video on the "how dare you.." drama, and I have to say that reading the blog and watching that video don't match. At least that's not what I got out of the video.

From memory: Sabine says she's only doing the video because she is a real-life friend of Eric's. So that's from the start an admission that she's biased. Then she goes off to say that his paper is probably bullshit. Then she goes back to her "but so is the vast majority of theoretical research, nowadays", and she argues it's weird that scientists have no issues making fun of Weinstein but not of their own colleagues who put out papers at least as bullshit.

So, I think the blog's characterisation of her role in this drama is a bit off, from what I remember.

That being said, the short clip of the "debate" clearly reinforced my total disinterest in Morgan's "show", whatever that junk is, and I put weinstein in the same bucket as NDT. Way too pompous for my taste. That he tries to play a physicist on top, doesn't surprise me at all.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-21 18:08:46+00:00
I think that's partially because Amazon returns are the most happy path support interaction I've ever seen. They basically always grant the refund/return (in my experience if it's soonish after purchase) and it's mostly about gathering the info to get it going rather than actually resolving an issue. The main decision on Amazon's side seems to be if they want you to bother sending the item back or not.
Show HN: ChunkHound – Advanced Code RAG
by ofriw | 2025-08-21 18:08:49+00:00
Hi everyone, I wanted to share ChunkHound with the community in the hope someone else finds it as useful as I do. ChunkHound is a modern RAG solution for your codebase via MCP. I started this project because I wanted good code RAG for use with Claude Code, that works offline, and that's capable of handling large codebases. Specifically, I built it to handle my work on GoatDB ( https://goatdb.dev/) and my projects at work.

LLMs like Claude and GPT don’t know your codebase - they only know what they were trained on. Every time they help you code, they need to search your files to understand your project’s specific patterns and terminology. ChunkHound solves that by equipping your agent with advanced semantic search over the entire codebase, which enable it to handle complex real world projects efficiently.

This latest release introduces an implementation of the cAST algorithm and a two-hop semantic search with a reranker which together greatly increase the efficiency and capacity for handling large, complex, codebases.

I would really appreciate any kind of feedback. Thank you!
by crazygringo | 2025-08-21 18:09:02+00:00
Maybe 75%?

I've gotten pointed to documentation I never would have found and I doubt a human would have found. I've had returns immediately processed rather than waiting 2 days for a RMA to show up in my email. I had a subscription rate lowered (my desired outcome) when I tried to cancel a service. And I've had a software bug escalated to the appropriate team within a couple of minutes. And all these interactions were probably 10x faster, at least, than they would have been with a human.

I love chatbots for customer service. Not because they save the company money, but because they seem to save me a ton of time (no more 20 minutes of hold, followed by being put on hold for 10 minutes multiple times), and they seem to follow policies more "objectively", and they escalate easily whenever they can't handle something. It just seems like more reliable and faster outcomes for "normal" support, and then you still get a real agent for more complicated situations.
by mlinhares | 2025-08-21 18:09:06+00:00
That has been my experience in multiple occasions, the moment i can sit with a customer and clearly discuss what their needs are and see them operating the tools, it makes the real user experience and workflow issues much easier to fix.

Glad I'm at a place where i can talk directly to people instead of having to go through layers of indirection. I takes away from my engineering time but now i'm always building the right thing, so it is much more productive.
by ninezerobk | 2025-08-21 18:09:24+00:00
Based on what I've read about Carbon, it feels like the project's inevitable path won't be from unsafe to safe Carbon, but rather directly to Rust.

The official documents state the goal is to reuse Rust's ecosystem, not replicate it. Doesn't that mean that Carbon will ultimately just be a stepping stone for the eventual adoption of Rust?
by godelski | 2025-08-21 18:09:53+00:00
I'll be honest, I didn't feel much of a difference changing from my Pixel 2 to my Pixel 6. Actually, I liked my Pixel 2 more. Boy do I miss that back fingerprint sensor. As well as the squeeze feature. What a great design. Also, it cleanly fit in my pocket. Pixel 2 was peak Pixel if you ask me. (never tried the 3)

Really the only reason I ended up switching was because I had already replaced the lens on the rear camera after some dirt got into it and I had cracked that back glass while taking it apart. Not a big deal, but it felt like time to move on I guess. I definitely got excited about all the new features of 6 and then promptly never actually used any of them.