MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IlikeKitties | 2025-08-15 03:26:02+00:00
> Never left bittorrent.

Yeah, I got into low level private trackers before netflix got really big and here in germany it always had a rather lackluster library anyway. The enshitification began faster than I was willing to move. In the end i'm still just pirating everything except games and music. Games because steam is more convenient on linux than dealing with cracks, wine installers and all that stuff. Not that i'm unable just that it's literally worth the convenience to pay for it and music because spotify was better than the pirated music i had available. I'm thinking about changing that and taking the RED pill, if you catch my drift.
by ipnon | 2025-08-15 03:27:57+00:00
Let me guess, you went to an elite university and you worked in Big Tech? I think you should be proud of your success, but it's not indicative of the larger American economy or the tech industry in general. There are reports that new grads in CS have higher unemployment than philosophy majors. Something is structurally unsound, even if the kernel of the industry composed of people like yourself is sound.
by ThalesX | 2025-08-15 03:28:10+00:00
> I’m very, very far from rich, yet

Maybe that's why? I know rich people (truly rich, not your upper middle class or rich as in I got a couple mils of net worth), in developed countries (West and Northern Europe) and to be honest your points, apart from being tangled and repetitive just so you can get 5, don't reflect their reality and are just a setup for your last politically charged line.

I'm sure with tens of millions of dollars in your hands, you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI. Especially when your kid gets sick god forbid.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-15 03:28:36+00:00
Employees are not game. They cannot be “poached.” That phrasing implies that they are property of the company that employs them. What you call “poaching” is just giving an offer to a person, and that person accepting the offer of their own free will. The idea that this is bad is absurd, and only serves to hurt regular people in favor of companies.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-15 03:28:50+00:00
There's always someone worse. That's whataboutism. You don't have to be Hitler to be a bad person.

Being a bad parent can damage a child for life. That's pretty bad in my book. I've seen it so much.

But in my view it's not black and white. He was certainly a bad parent. Also a pretty bad employer when I read the stories of how he treated people. But he was a good marketeer and a role model to many people. Definitely investors will think he was a good person lol

I think it's up to each of us to judge a person by the criteria we find important. Personally I don't think being a successful businessman is a virtue or admirable but creating beautiful things is. He did do some of that and I do admire that (that he sold millions of them and created value for shareholders is something I couldn't care less about though)

But being a kind and caring person is the most important criterium to me. For that reason I have to say that no, in my book he doesn't qualify as a good person. I'm sure that for many others he does and that's ok too. Everyone has their own metrics.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-15 03:29:06+00:00
Watch out. Someone on HN might send you a link to "Whataboutism" in order to dodge double standard accusations.

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

I might as well do it first.

For whatever reason, people on HN seem to think double standards are ok as long as the west do it but not when China does it. Maybe because "freedom"?
by ehnto | 2025-08-15 03:29:16+00:00
I guess I disagree that the main concern is the differences per each model, rather than the overall technology of LLMs in general. Given how fast it's all changing, I would rather focus on the broader conversation personally. I don't really care if GPT5 is better at benchmarks, I care that LLMs are actually capable of the type of reasoning and productive output that the world currently thinks they are.
by testfrequency | 2025-08-15 03:30:45+00:00
I’m not sharing those stories for sake of privacy.

Also, I actually never heard any stories like that about Steve. Steve was more or less: don’t talk to him, don’t make eye contact with him, don’t take the same elevator as him.

Obviously, the public had their opinions and stories of Steve..but generally, I never experienced much commentary on Steve. Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.
by LMYahooTFY | 2025-08-15 03:30:55+00:00
Let's not forget:

No advertising.

I think, particularly now after having the luxury of ad blockers for so long, that many of us are extremely triggered by advertisements and see them more nakedly as the awful propaganda they are.

Disrupting a cinematic experience with garbage propaganda ruins it. It's an insult to the creators, and none of us should tolerate it.

I'm glad streaming services adopted a better model, but then they reverted back as they increased prices because the money is too good and people put up with it.
by nh43215rgb | 2025-08-15 03:31:59+00:00
what model do you input in Cactus Chat? Seems like it's not one of the preset models and ggml-org/gemma-3-270m-GGUF on hf says Note This is a base (pre-trained) model. Do not use for chat!. Is there an alternative model that you can share so that I can put into cactus chat app?
by peter492927 | 2025-08-15 03:32:42+00:00
Thank you a lot for working on these models! If you think it would make sense, I think a bigger sized Gemma model would be really cool. Models in the 70B parameter range can be run at q4 on two 3090 or similar hardware and should offer considerable performance improvement over 27B. There’s also the DGX Spark as a possible target.
by K0balt | 2025-08-15 03:33:19+00:00
It gave you the tallest mountain every time. You kept asking it for various numbers of “tallest mountains” and each time it complied.

You asked it to enumerate several mountains by height, and it also complied.

It just didn’t understand that when you said the 6 tallest mountains that you didn’t mean the tallest mountain, 6 times.

When you used clearer phrasing it worked fine.

It’s 270m. It’s actually a puppy. Puppies can be trained to do cool tricks, bring your shoes, stuff like that.
by brandon272 | 2025-08-15 03:34:55+00:00
I have had the bright idea of replacing a couple of SaaS I rely on with the assistance of AI. I will note that I do consider a LLMs a genuine productivity boost. Observations:

1) It took a lot longer than I had hoped and I doubt the hours spent are worth the cost savings. Turns out a lot of SaaS I use are actually quite detailed products with lots of features and functionality that take a lot of time and consideration to replicate effectively.

2) Once you finish building that SaaS replacement, you are signing up to operate, maintain and secure it as long as you are running it. More time investment.

My realization is that, yes, AI can help me replace a couple other products I use and some of it is an interesting exercise. But signing up to build and manage a dozen services for my own use that I was previously paying a nominal fee for (in addition to all my other professional commitments) is probably not the utopia I might have thought it was.
by alpha_squared | 2025-08-15 03:36:14+00:00
It's a little unfair to blame startups, they largely just set up shop where the capital is. Most VCs required startups to be headquartered near by for easier management/communication. The tech scene in SV had such exceptionalism that it quite literally viewed any startup not in SV as an inevitable failure. Even YC mandated startups be in SV.
by rayiner | 2025-08-15 03:38:00+00:00
> The unique, defining feature of our culture is precisely its ability to incorporate every other, and reproduce itself among them and their children.

First, you're conflating America's effectiveness in Anglicizing immigrants with absorbing foreign cultures, which has happened surprisingly little. Our national institutions remain quite Anglo, even though there's pockets of different cultures all over the country.

Second, most good things about American culture trace back to its Anglo roots: https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/book/Albio.... Legalism, orderliness, disposition towards freedom and free markets, entrepreneurialism, egalitarianism, etc.

Areas where we've seen cultural change have been negative. For example, one thing we've lost is the WASP austerity. I know some older folks from New England who grew up learning that "food is for fuel, not enjoyment." Amazing! It's a downgrade that we lost that!

> and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.

No, it's Anglo-American culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tINJhf1Zs1Q&t=618s. The Anglo countries remain incredibly similar to each other culturally and economically despite the U.S. breaking off from England almost 250 years ago. America is different from England in many ways, but in more or less the same ways it was always different from England.
by kop316 | 2025-08-15 03:38:14+00:00
Sort of. A one time pad does not destroy data, but a hash will.

Wikipedia has a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

In their example, "HELLO" is the plain text, "XMCKL" is the key, and the ciphertext is "EQNVZ". However, with a one time pad, an equally plausible plain text is "later" with the key "TQURI". Thus, without anymore data, it is simply impossible to know what the original message is.
by gottorf | 2025-08-15 03:38:17+00:00
> Build a town, not a subdivision.

I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.

I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
by caconym_ | 2025-08-15 03:40:17+00:00
I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but if you're willing to buy physical media, it's not difficult to rip even 4K HDR blu-rays yourself and stream from a self hosted platform like Jellyfin.

I'm able to find most of what I want to watch on physical media in either HD or 4K, with the exception of more obscure anime. Some TV shows can be expensive to pick up and more laborious to rip, though.
by loktarogar | 2025-08-15 03:41:19+00:00
This is pretty similar to the contemplating rewriting an app. There's usually a lot of knowledge and nuance built into legacy software that was hard-won, edge cases that are dealt with. Rewriting the app may be a good idea, but you have to ensure you're not losing what the legacy learned.

You can certainly make one-off apps to deal with things as they come up. But unless you are already an expert on what you need, you will still spend time building (or vibe coding), reacting to domain holes that you could also just spend $20/mo to ignore entirely.

The gap is smaller for sure, but it's not gone.
by itake | 2025-08-15 03:41:31+00:00
My friend that left cruise got a 2.3x pay bump (post-ipo) moving to Figma in Feb 2025. He also had interviews at Meta and other FANGA (where he used to work).

If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.
by throw10920 | 2025-08-15 03:41:57+00:00
Hmmm, this seems reasonable, but I personally am extremely annoyed when I ask someone "what is thing x?" and they start by saying "let me give you an example" instead of a general description of the thing first.

Is this because I'm starting to think like a mathematician? Or because I'm conflating a deep, theory-first explanation of a concept with a surface-level summary that is then followed by concrete examples? Or something else?
by K0balt | 2025-08-15 03:42:02+00:00
Equality of opportunity is relatively easy: you provide people with the same opportunities, that they must meet at their own innate capacity and motivation.

I don’t defend that a doctor should make 20x what a nurse does, or that the c-suite should make 20000x what the janitor makes. But it’s also fine that some people don’t produce anything of value, at all, while others produce a lot of value for society. A meritocracy with a mechanism to limit suffering and harm to those who cannot participate seems a reasonable solution. We don’t need or want to incentivise parasitism at high or low levels.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-15 03:42:07+00:00
While I appreciate the aspects of (A) requiring physical rather than remote access and (B) the intrinsic "paper trail"... As others have pointed out, the trust and revocation problem of a Master Key still remains, and the device could easily be "lost" so that you can't tell the Master Key was abused.

If we accept that a back-door must exist (if!) then it would be far better to have a unique key baked into every single device at manufacture-time:

1. It tightens the "need to know" since a prosecutor with a warrant only needs the one key corresponding to the device they actually seized, not a skeleton key for all things everywhere.

2. It creates a stronger paper-trail against abuse, since requests for a bajillion keys might get noticed.

3. Hackers would need to copy entire databases, instead of exfiltrating a much smaller amount of information, making it a little easier to detect.

4. It impairs any mass remote exploit, since the exploit code would need to include the keys of every possible device it would encounter and want to compromise.
by Breza | 2025-08-15 03:42:12+00:00
GPT-5 did the below today when I asked it to proofread an email. Would you consider it a hallucination? I'm asking genuinely because I'm a fan of your thoughts on tech and am curious where you draw the line.

My wording: "Would you have time to talk the week of the 25th?"

ChatGPT wording (elipses mine): "Could we schedule ~25 minutes the week of Aug 25 [...]? I’m free Tue 8/26 10:00–12:00 ET or Thu 8/28 2:00–4:00 ET, but happy to work around your calendar."

I am not, in fact, free during those times. I have seen this exact kind of error multiple times.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-15 03:43:13+00:00
Oh hey, not even crypto pulled this kind of thing off, but here we now see crickets from certain parts of the tech community (on this site especially) about this particular gargantuan use of electricity. I guess it's no longer a problem when the people who employee you are doing it, despite the vast amount of slop, spam and other garbage being generated among the occassionally (only apparently so far) productive uses of LLM technology.

As far as that goes, i'd love to see a well researched breakdown of just what percentage of LLM technology is actually being used for anything productive, and what percentage is just being pissed into industrialized spam.

LLMs even have the whole crime angle neatly covered, considering all the innovative uses they're being put to by the same people who brought us ransoms paid in crypto. Would be interesting to see the numbers on how that breaks down too.
by gottorf | 2025-08-15 03:43:49+00:00
> In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.

Maybe the more fundamental problem is that in big city America, it's easy for existing homeowners to band together to forbid any further housing stock from being built.

See Silicon Valley: amazing concentration of high-paying jobs, laughably low population density.
by sovietswag | 2025-08-15 03:43:50+00:00
Hm, the author explicitly pointed out the same:

> What confuses me is that other people can form images in their minds. Are all those with character amnesia also aphantasic? That can't be, given that aphantasics amount to less than 5% of the population, while a much larger number of people forget how to write (70% of teenage participants in a Chinese TV show were unable to write the word "toad"!).

They were discussing their aphantasia as a precursor to other very interesting points, e.g. about how "seeing" a character in your mind isn't enough to be able to draw it, --> verbatim traces and gist traces.
by Hammershaft | 2025-08-15 03:44:52+00:00
Housing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income.

As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.
by throw10920 | 2025-08-15 03:44:58+00:00
> also verifying with Valgrind every step of the way

This is...both extremely obvious, and also not something that I've ever done before, thought of doing, or seen anyone else do.

Every single instance of Valgrind usage I've encountered or initiated has been triggered by a specific bug or performance regression.

Proactive use of the Valgrind suite (Memcheck and Helgrind at least) as part of the development process would probably result in massively better stability of most tools - and would also make it far easier to find bugs (as you could find them when they were introduced rather than hundreds of commits later).
by arrowsmith | 2025-08-15 03:45:39+00:00
TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.

I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)

So much for GPT-5.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-15 03:46:11+00:00
> his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence

A story about Chuck Yeager. He did a stint as squadron commander in the Korean War. When he arrived at the airbase, he watched the squadron land. Afterwards, he called all the pilots together, got a bucket of paint, and marked off two lines across the runway.

He said the pilots were doing sloppy landings and would now land between the two lines. The pilots protested, saying that was impossible. So Yeager got in a jet, took off, circled the airfield, and touched down exactly at the midpoint between the lines.

The squadron pilots got the point.

Yeager wanted his pilots to survive combat, and that meant being perfect pilots every time. If I was a pilot, I'd be glad to have a squadron leader like that in command, even if he was a total asshole.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-15 03:47:36+00:00
The consequences of an action can be prohibited without touching the action itself. For instance most of every state has laws against signaling a false alarm. It doesn't matter whether you do that by triggering a fire alarm, playing an extremely loud fire alarm type sound, shouting fire, or whatever else - it's all illegal.

Not only does this prevent trampling on speech and minimize abuse, but it's also far more to the point. Because why is shouting fire uniquely awful while shouting penis is just some kids being annoying that should simply be kicked out of a theater? It's not because of the words obviously, but because of the consequence created.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-15 03:48:22+00:00
> It's weird how much he gets under the skin of people so desperate to pretend they're at the top of the moral totem pole, or at least definitely above the one guy they've ever seen a tell-all story on.

I'm not perfect but he was everything I strive not to be (I'm not always successful though). I strive to be kind, fair, generous, caring and inclusive. I'm not always those things but I do try. From what I 've seen about Jobs is that he didn't really share those values.

I understand that other people admire him a lot but I don't really, because I have other criteria.

And really to be honest I would not like 95% of successful corporate CEOs. It's not just Jobs. You have to be a certain type, an ambitious person with shark tactics who puts everything aside to get to the top. Otherwise someone else who is will beat you to it. Those are not qualities I consider good in a person.

However each person makes their own judgment and that's ok. My opinion doesn't really matter, but it is mine.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-15 03:52:29+00:00
True, I'm not saying that. I'm sure without a big ego you won't succeed as a big businessman. I'm just saying he was a very typical narcissist and as such his ego would have been important to him (which is what the thread discussion was about). I didn't state any moral judgment there (though I do have one which I elaborated on elsewhere)
by kenjackson | 2025-08-15 03:52:59+00:00
That’s a worse analogy. The other guy doesn’t want to use a service because they don’t offer content he wants because people are offended by it. There’s a bunch of clothes not sold at most retailers because it is offensive but you can buy them online directly from the manufacturer.

The analogy you gave would be better if they edited the content to be semantically equivalent but they aren’t. The content just isn’t available.

Now maybe the argument is that you’re paying for the service. In which case it would be like Costco where you have a membership and they definitely don’t carry offensive material.
by kusokurae | 2025-08-15 03:53:02+00:00
long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine.

I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition is more important, and I don't see people panicing about how many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore.

Alternatives would be nightmarish and culturally destructive to implement in the modern day. Further, people confuse poor implementation with complexity being the cause of the problem. Taiwan and HK both have high literacy rates despite using traditional characters, yet simplified characters were apparently necessary to increase literacy? It doesn't compute.

Just under 50% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese. Recognising characters allows a ton of written nuance and extra vocabulary which the Japanese take full advantage of. There's at least 10 separate words for "kou kai". Even when not fully-remembered, Kanji allow mental mapping of multiple homophones without issue.

We're really talking about a vocabulary mass exctinction event. Back in the ancient times Korea didn't have such a wide-ranging and culturally-mixed set of words as now. If the Japanese do this it'll be cutting off the vast majority of their cultural history. Seems unideal considering the butchering the French did, did exactly that to Vietnam's literary culture and basically cut the people off from much of it.

Chinese doing this would be insane. Mao was tempted to use roman characters instead of the simplification they rolled out, which from a system design perspective only made a worse and more difficult/confusing system with more exceptions to rules than before, and poorer phonosemantic consistency/relations with other characters. Further because as research has proven many times over, it's harder to recognise many excessively simple & similar characters compared to more unique and specific forms. Thankfully Stalin advised him against it.

We really are talking about doing something similar to a total spelling reform of english and just throwing the last 1000 years of literature, written records etc away. Only in the case of especially Chinese, you're throwing away a system that was developed and specifically tailored to the languages using it, which have due to its relative robustness to change as compared with latin letters, led to writing surviving many many difficult periods, regime changes, wars, famines etc over 3000 years.

If you've ever compared Beowulf with Gawain, with Shakespeare and then modern English, you'll understand what a total overhaul a language can undergo if unchecked -- Chinese characters have enabled a comparatively stable orthography. Less than 800 years and it becomes gibberish.