MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw10920 | 2025-08-14 03:31:00+00:00
> BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.

There aren't any insults in their posts. You're conflating someone dismantling your claims with insulting you. Which is obviously, clearly, laughably false.

You claimed something that's just wrong:

> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.

Then they proceeded to show how you're wrong, and you deflected with

> You are unintentionally proving me right.

Then you throw in emotionally manipulative statements like

> but let's not pretend

> Both live a parasitic lifestyle.

> Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like

Then link to a random YouTube video that says that the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed (which is extremely obvious), with zero actual elaboration of any sort of negative effects, then say

> Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?

And make arbitrary moral claims like

> Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should.

There's no coherent arguments here. Just angry opinions and envy and greed invoked by those that have more than you. The only person being "unwilling to engage constructively" here is the one being outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument, and who is unable to parse actually coherent arguments and so thinks that they're "passive aggressive dismissal".
by dilyevsky | 2025-08-14 03:32:30+00:00
> You have ~60 days from the date of employment termination to have your work permit transferred or you are out of status, period.

What the hell else supposed to happen to your temp worker visa when you’re no longer a worker? Are you supposed to just get an immigration hall pass indefinitely?

Same point as in sibling thread - if you cant get a new job lined up while still employed or within 60 days of being laid off, you clearly dont possess "distinguished merit and ability" which is the entire purpose of this visa
by const_cast | 2025-08-14 03:33:06+00:00
People say this because it sounds right and dramatic, but if they knew and understood what cancer is, they'd understand why treating it is so hard.

For those unconvinced, cancer is your own bodies cells gone rogue and trying to kill you. Now, this happens all the time. Luckily, our immune system is awesome and catches it.

Cancer is when your immune system does not catch it. it's invisible, indistinguishable from your skin cells or your lung cells. Its not like the flu or pneumonia - there is no foreign body, there is no attacker. Its you.

So then treatment means we need to kill living, actively reproducing cells in the human body. Well, a fire can do that.

The trick is, how do you kill the cancer cells, which your own immune system cannot even distinguish as cancer cells, but not harm your normal cells?

Turns out that's very hard and very grueling. Chemo is very effective, but you still lose your hair and damage just about all your organs in the process.

And, for the record, we do have "one off" cures for cancer - surgery. Just cut it out. The trouble is cells are microscopic and there's billions of them. Rarely will they be so perfectly contained you can get them all in one go. No, you miss some, and they sit there, growing, until the cancer is detectable again. And they move, they use your own blood and lymphatic system as a highway.
by ddtaylor | 2025-08-14 03:33:46+00:00
I disagree.

You will be asked to prove you have marks to do things like be listed in the app store. You need to prove your identity with third party legal companies that look into your company and the marks you are using. If you don't own those marks you probably won't get your app published.

Many examples come to mind, but basically anytime a FOSS app goes into the app stores, like KDE. In the past we mostly argued about who should be the person that has to act as the app owner etc. or created foundations or other legal entities to bridge this gap.

Look at elementaryOS as well. They attempted to assert rights to marks they don't own and it created a fiasco for them. They are virtually irrelevant now in the Linux space. All of the developers left the project besides one who is struggling with mental illness.
by credit_guy | 2025-08-14 03:33:50+00:00
But here's the thing you can do: learn to use AI. It's early in the cycle, the barrier of entry is not very high yet. But it is getting higher and higher. If you hop on and start riding the wave, one year from now you will not only be miles ahead of others in terms of productivity, it's going to be hard for them to catch up with you.

AI is happening. It's up to you if you want to be one of those who gets ahead or one of those who gets left behind. Just saying.
by baggy_trough | 2025-08-14 03:33:54+00:00
99% of what resources? That sounds like quite an exaggeration.

I don't know if cars are subsidized more than mass transit on average. It's quite possible they are. The overwhelming majority of people find cars much more useful and enjoyable than mass transit, and politicians have to provide people with what they want to some degree. It's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.
Show HN: Yet another memory system for LLMs
by blackmanta | 2025-08-14 03:34:11+00:00
Built this for my LLM workflows - needed searchable, persistent memory that wouldn't blow up storage costs. I also wanted to use it locally for my research. It's a content-addressed storage system with block-level deduplication (saves 30-40% on typical codebases). I have integrated the CLI tool into most of my workflows in Zed, Claude Code, and Cursor, and I provide the prompt I'm currently using in the repo.

The project is in C++ and the build system is rough around the edges but is tested on macOS and Ubuntu 24.04.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-08-14 03:34:31+00:00
I just want to easily pull bank/card transactions into my budget app, and the glacial pace of open banking really annoys me. The pace in Canada has been just as slow, although we have Interac for direct person to person transfers already so I'm not sure how much the issue of direct payments applies there.

It's really just f**ing ridiculous that some of the earliest and most important digital systems we have are allowed to wall in their data with no API access. Banks suck so goddamn hard and are allowed to operate without any real competition and don't innovate at all. They are the definition of regulatory capture.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-14 03:34:45+00:00
> What about donating half of your salary to charity? I think many people would consider that quite extreme, too.

Maybe, but there are also degrees of extremity in terms of stuff like how broadly you donate (like there's a difference between donating a huge amount to one charity vs. spreading it around 10). Also I don't think the mere fact of donating half your salary would itself necessarily be seen as extreme; it would depend on the person's total wealth. It seems not unusual for wealthy individuals who get certain jobs to donate (or refuse) their entire salary (like Arnold Schwarzenegger declining his salary as CA governor).

Ultimately though I don't agree that this is anywhere close to as extreme as cold-blooded murder.

> I mean, prisons are full of murderers; they are not so exceptional.

I have a hunch that a large proportion of murderers in prisons are not comparable to rationalist murderers. There's a difference between just killing someone and killing someone due to your belief that that is the rational and correct thing to do. A lot of murders are crimes of passion or occur in the commission of other crimes. I could see an intermediate case where someone says "We're going to rob this bank and if the guard gives us any trouble we'll just shoot him", which is perhaps comparable to "always escalate conflict", but I don't think most murders even reach that level of premeditation.

> The difference is that the bad ones are willing to take abusive actions.

I'm not so sure that that is the difference, rather than that they are willing to take extreme actions, and then the extreme actions they wind up taking (for whatever reason) are abusive. It's sort of like, if you fire a gun into a crowd, your willingness to do so is important whether or not you actually hit anyone. Similarly a willingness to go well outside the bounds of accepted behaviors is worrisome even if you don't happen to harm anyone by doing so. I could certainly imagine that many rationalists do indeed formulate belief systems that exclude certain kinds of extreme behavior while allowing others. I'm just saying, if I found out that someone was spending all their days doing any spookily extreme thing (e.g., 8 hours a day building a scale model of Hoover Dam one grain of sand at a time) I would feel a lot less safe around them.

> > It's also interesting to me that the article focuses a lot not on rationalist belief per se, but on the logistics and practices of rationalist communities.

> That's what happens when you read about the rationality community from someone who is actually familiar with it. If you want to determine whether a group is dysfunctional (i.e. a cult), the actual practices are much more important than the stated beliefs.

Sure. My point is just that, insofar as this is true, it means what the article is saying is more about cults in general and less about anything specific to rationalism.
by quantummagic | 2025-08-14 03:36:10+00:00
OP didn't specify a timeline or that it would happen for us personally to behold. Just that it is inevitable. You've correctly pointed out that there are things that can slow or even halt progress, but I don't think that undermines (what I at least see as) the main point. That there's no reason to believe anything fundamental stands in our way of achieving full "artificial intelligence"; ie. the doubters are being too pessimistic. Citing the destruction of humanity as a reason why we might fail can be said about literally every single other human pursuit as well; which to my mind, renders it a rather unhelpful objection to the idea that we will indeed succeed.
by csomar | 2025-08-14 03:36:30+00:00
> I was kinda hoping he would not pay (that’s common) in which case I was looking forward to learning about how to garnish his wages or put a lien on his property.

If he has assets to his name and the action was against him, I don’t see him doing that. In most countries you can hire private recovery, so the process will be very fast to collect.
by venkii | 2025-08-14 03:37:33+00:00
I’ve briefly written about issues in the past: https://venki.dev/notes/google-gemini-is-bad

My first thought would be, re:

>It’s baffling that a tech giant like Google can’t seem to deliver the same level of reliability

It’s actually not that baffling to me! Shipping simple features gets harder and harder as scale, esp as the features must interact well with more and more existing features + get through bureaucracy.

For example, the regions bit you mention: Anthropic/DeepSeek can just pool all their regions together into a single API and mostly vibe it. But since Google already offers their regular compute by region, it’d be a little weird to not do that for LLMs only.

GCP probably just has a lot of complexity due to being enterprise-oriented, and unfortunately this carries over. Unencumbered startups get to start from a blank state though.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-14 03:37:44+00:00
On the frontiers of knowledge, people furthest out know what problems need to be worked on and what research needs to be done. You don’t need the government blindly throwing darts at the wall hoping that one of them hits a bullseye and calling it “basic science”.

I’m open to the idea that government can play a role here, but only in a very small way. The government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on research. They are such a huge consumer of talent and resources that they are crowding out private initiative. This ain’t Bell Labs of the 1950’s. And if you asked those researchers what they think of today’s system, I’m sure they’d be appalled.
by madanram92 | 2025-08-14 03:37:48+00:00
It is clear that Indian small businesses have not fully adopted LinkedIn for targeting B2B audiences, leaving a gap that needs to be addressed. Most business owners are currently using Instagram, with no clear segregation between B2B and B2C platforms. There is a need for a hybrid platform that, while enabling professional connections, also includes small and medium-sized businesses and strikes a balance with Instagram-style entertaining and engaging content. The platform should feature an intuitive UI/UX design that encourages small business owners to participate. These insights are derived from actual data collected through a survey conducted in WhatsApp groups, covering a total of 1,500 business owners. (We are continuing to add more participants to further increase and enrich the data.)
by throw10920 | 2025-08-14 03:38:12+00:00
> So your belief is that for-profit companies should not be required to comply to regulation put in place after they start business in any field.

That is not what they said. That's an extremely bad-faith statement that's not even a "misinterpretation", because that implies that there is a valid interpretation, and there isn't - you just made up something completely different and claimed that they said it.

You're really not helping your argument here if you have to resort to lying about other peoples' words in order to try to defend your positions.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-08-14 03:39:55+00:00
I'll just add that this has certain other interesting legal implications, because records in relation to a therapy session are a "protected confidence" (or whatever your local jurisdiction calls it). What that means is in most circumstances not even a subpoena can touch it, and even then special permissions are usually needed. So one of the open questions on my mind for a while now was if and when a conversation with an AI counts as a "protected confidence" or if that argument could successfully be used to fend off a subpoena.

At least in Illinois we now have an answer, and other jurisdictions look to what has been established elsewhere when deciding their own laws, so the implications are far reaching.
by nullc | 2025-08-14 03:40:49+00:00
Why do you think the lack of time limits is an advantage?

There is an amount of time spent gazing into your navel which is helpful. Less or more than that can be harmful.

You can absolutely make yourself mentally ill just by spending too much time worrying about how mentally ill you are.

And it's clear that there are a rather large number of people making themselves mentally ill using OpenAI's products right now.

Oh, and, aside, nothing stops OpenAI from giving or selling your chat transcripts to your employer. :P In fact, if your employer sues them they'll very likely be obligated to hand them over and you may have no standing to resist it.
by RunningWay | 2025-08-14 03:42:55+00:00
I'm excited to share a project I've been working on: Bank Statement Converter AI. It's a free, AI-powered tool designed to convert PDF bank statements into structured Excel and CSV files. The goal is to eliminate the need for manual data entry, saving users from tedious and error-prone work.

Why we built this:

Dealing with PDF bank statements for accounting, financial analysis, or even personal budgeting can be a huge pain. Manually transcribing transactions is not only time-consuming but also a major source of errors. We wanted to create a solution that was fast, accurate, and, most importantly, secure.
by Loranubi | 2025-08-14 03:42:58+00:00
Didn't read the paywalled article. But imo if it's not worth listening at 1x speed, it's not worth listening at all.

If it's entertainment like audiobooks, it's for my enjoyment, so why should it be faster than 1x? If it's for education, everything faster than 1x makes it hard to understand, and if there is too much filler content, I will find another source to learn about it.

I use 1.5x-2x for stuff I have to listen too, but don't enjoy.
by owlstuffing | 2025-08-14 03:44:29+00:00
I agree w that, but I think Scala has deeper problems.

It tries to be a better Java and a better OCaml at the same time. This split personality led to Scala’s many dialects, which made it notorious for being difficult to read and reason about, particularly as a mainstream language contender.

Above all, Scala is considered a functional language with imperative OOP qualities. And it more or less fits that description. But like it or not primarily functional languages don’t have a strong reputation for building large maintainable enterprise software.

That’s the quiet part no one says out loud.

It’s like how in academic circles Lisp is considered the most pure and most powerful of programming languages, which may be true. At the same time most real-world decision makers see it as unsuitable as a mainstream language. If it were otherwise, we’d have seen a Lisp contend with imperative langs such as Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

I’ve always attributed this disconnect to the fact that people naturally model the world around them as objects with state — people don’t think functionally.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-14 03:45:20+00:00
This is just plain false and honestly close-minded. People choose permissive licenses for all sorts of reasons. Some might want to close it off later, but lots of people prefer the non-viral nature of permissive licenses, because it doesn't constrain others' license choice in the future. Still others think that permissive licenses are more free than copyleft, and choose them for that reason. Please don't just accuse vast groups of people of being bad-faith actors just because you disagree with their license choice.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-14 03:46:11+00:00
I've been saying this to people. Tons of people don't realize that we have no idea how these things work. So questions like is it AGI? It is conscious? Where the questions themselves contain words with fuzzy and ill defined meanings are pointless.

The core of the matter is: We don't know!

So when someone says chatGPT could be conscious. Or when someone says it can't be conscious. We don't actually know! And we aren't even fully sure about the definition of consciousness.

My problem with HN is that a ton of people here take the stance that we know how LLMs work and that we know definitively they aren't conscious and the people who say otherwise are alarmist and stupid.

I think the fact of the matter is, if you're putting your foot down and saying LLMs aren't intelligent... you're wildly illogical and misinformed about the status quo of Artificial intelligence and a huge portion of the mob mentality on HN thinks this way. It's like there's these buzz phrases getting thrown around saying that the LLM is just a glorified auto complete (which it is) and people latch on to this buzz phrases and their entire understanding of LLMs becomes basically a composition of these buzz concepts like "transformers" and "LLMs" and "chain of thought" when in actuality real critical thinking about what's going on in these networks tells you we don't UNDERSTAND anything.

Also the characterization in the article is mistaken. It says we understand LLMs in a limited way. Yeah sure. It's as limited as our understanding of the human brain. You know scientists found a way to stimulate the reward centers of the brain using electrodes and were able to cause a person to feel the utmost pleasure? The whole golden gate bridge thing is exactly that. You perturb something in the network and causes a semi predictable output. In the end we still generally don't get wtf is going on.

We literally understand nothing. What we do understand is so minuscule compared with what we don't understand that it's negligible.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-14 03:46:54+00:00
The article is about Illinois banning AI therapists in our society today, so I think the far more reasonable interpretation is that OP is also talking about our society today — or at least, in the near-ish future. (They also go on to talk about how it would affect different people in our society, which I think also points to my interpretation.)

And to be clear, I'm not even objecting to OP's claim! All I'm asking for is an affirmative reason to believe what they see as a foregone conclusion.
by elliotto | 2025-08-14 03:47:19+00:00
I've thought about this problem a lot too.

I've wondered if it comes down to a game theory result where if you have x amount of time to distribute amongst y problems, there's more net social utility in applying a simple solution to everyone, and accepting that difficult problems will be missed. Versus spending detailed time on each problem, and as a result solving fewer problems but better.

Of course, when money comes into play, it seems as though you're going to be financially required to rush everyone through the door in 15 minutes, or else your business will lose to someone who adopts this strategy. Leaving anyone with a complex problem dead.

I spend a lot of time on migraine and pain subreddits and there is an air of deference to the medical authority to know what to do. But if your case is complex, you just can't fit into the simple flow chart, and need to advocate and problem solve for yourself. Which leads people into the path of pseudoscience and exploitation.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-08-14 03:47:28+00:00
Not gonna lie, setting up Nginx, Certbot inside docker is the biggest PITA ever. you need certificates to start the NGINX server but you need the NGINX server to issue certificates? see the problem? It is made infinitely worse by a tonne of online solutions and blog posts none of which I could ever get to work. I would really appreciate if someone has documented this extensively for docker compose. I dont want to use libraries like nginx-proxy as customizing that library is another nightmare alltogether
by callc | 2025-08-14 03:48:04+00:00
Do you really think Python’s consensus-driven language development is better than authoritarian?

I am honestly tired of the Python packing situation. I breathe a sigh of relief in language like Go and Rust with an “authoritative” built-in solution.

I wouldn’t mind the 30 different packaging solutions as long as there was authoritative “correct” solution. All the others would then be opt-in enhancements as needed.

I guess a good thought experiment would be if we were to design a packaging system (or decide not to) for a new PL like python, what would it look like?
by throw10920 | 2025-08-14 03:49:45+00:00
Practice is extremely important, and I don't think its importance is exaggerated at all.

I would expect students in an environment with a typically high student-to-teacher ratio, but who actually practice what they're being taught, will significantly outperform students who are taught one-on-one by a personal tutor but rarely actually perform the thing that they're trying to learn.

Obviously, "¿Por Qué No Los Dos?" - doing both is even better. But tutoring isn't obviously superior to practice.

As a personal anecdote (not to replace the above general arguments), I've gotten several hundred hours of one-on-one tutoring in an advanced field of physics from a number of experts, and yet I learned significantly less than I have from significantly fewer hours studying a separate (but no less difficult) field of math when I actually worked the problems.
by mindwok | 2025-08-14 03:50:24+00:00
This is true as individuals, but importantly as a society we have far more agency than sometimes it feels like when you watch us all acting out our own individual self-destruction.

Banning CFCs, making seatbelts a legal requirement, making drink driving illegal, gun control (in countries outside the USA), regulations on school canteens. These are all examples of coordination where we've solved problems further upstream so that individuals don't have to fight against their own greedy, self-serving, short-sighted nature.

We do have the ability to fix this stuff, it's just messy.