MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-20 23:34:35+00:00
For Zed specifically? It cuts directly against their stated goal of being fast and resource-light. Moreover, it is not acceptable for software I use to automatically download and run third-party software without asking me.

For node.js in general? The language isn't even considered good in the browser, for which it was invented. It is absolutely insane to then try to turn it into a standalone programming language. There are so many better options available, use one of them! Reusing a crappy tool just because it's what you know is a mark of very poor craftsmanship.
by getnormality | 2025-08-20 23:34:55+00:00
This guy thinks bus factors of zero started with ChatGPT. Hahahahahaha. Adorable.

How many of you have asked about a process and been told that nobody knows how it works because the person who developed it left the company?

There was a blog post at the top of HN about this, like, yesterday.

I hate the current AI hype hothouse and everything it seems to be doing to the industry... but I couldn't help but laugh.

The post is great. Bus factor of zero is a great coinage.
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-20 23:36:17+00:00
You can just change the license, that's what MIT allows for. You are allowed to do whatever you want:

MIT License Copyright (c) [year] [fullname] Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), **to deal in the Software without restriction**, including **without limitation** the rights to use, copy, *modify*, merge, publish, distribute, *sublicense*, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

You have to keep the copyright notice and notice of existing permissions, but that is not the same thing as a license. And you are allowed to sublicense into a more restrictive license (such as proprietary/closed source). Just not the other way around, which is what the inclusion of the existing notice helps to enforce.
by sfink | 2025-08-20 23:36:18+00:00
> I think the article underestimates how much intent can be grasped from code alone. Even without comments.

I agree, the human thought process always ends up getting embedded in a which of several possible ways any one thing might be done. But it's still a process, and a vastly inferior one to having a knowledgeable person on hand. Reverse-engineering has up until now been reserved to times when it is necessary. (I mean, we all still do it, especially on legacy codebases, but it's not good for productivity at all.)

> Humans (and I strongly suspect LLMs, since they're statistical synthesis of human production) are fairly predictable.

I disagree with the parenthetical. That's what stands out to me the most about LLM code: there are definitely intentions embedded in the code, but they're a hodgepodge of different intentions all tangled up together. You can't infer much of anything from a small snippet, because the intention behind that snippet was likely relevant to a completely different origin codebase that was piled up into a compost heap to grow an LLM out of. It's actually harder to make sense of an LLM codebase because the intentions distract and confuse the reader -- just as with text, we implicitly assume that a generated artifact means the same thing as if a human wrote it, and it doesn't.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-20 23:37:03+00:00
Changing the voltage doesn’t change the amount of power being used, the only thing that would change is the ampacity (which only impacts conductor size, in this case).

480 watts == 10 amps @ 48V == 15 amps @ 32V

An electrically commutated motor (brushless DC) in an e-bike will almost certainly have a speed controllee, if you want more range you simply have to go slower ;)
by Symbiote | 2025-08-20 23:37:33+00:00
Earlier today I found we'd served over a million requests to over 500,000 different IPs.

All had the same user agent (current Safari), they seem to be from hacked computers as the ISPs are all over the world.

The structure of the requests almost certainly means we've been specifically targeted.

But it's also a valid query, reasonably for normal users to make.

From this article, it looks like Proof of Work isn't going to be the solution I'd hoped it would be.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-20 23:37:44+00:00
> state-mandated software running on every device

No, it's merely included on every device sold (at least those with preinstalled operating systems), for the benefit of lazy parents. But it is software like any other, that can be completely removed by the owner (that is what "fully in control of the owner" means), and is open-source on top of it.
by Aeolun | 2025-08-20 23:38:22+00:00
Well, the thing I absolutely love about my linux setup, is that I can literally leave my computer running for a year, come back after that one year, and find it in exactly the state I left it. The system will never attempt to do anything for my own protection. No updates without me confirming them, never suddenly having it shut down because there’s a “critical” vulnerability. When it updates it never magically reverts a setting I had set.

Everything it does or doesn’t do is my responsibility.
by bigiain | 2025-08-20 23:39:23+00:00
My guess? The AI companies will keep the free and $20/month plans to entice developers and their managers. They will have $200/month plans with bigger context windows to allow effective work on larger that toy codebases. But sooner or later companies with large scale projects are going to need a much larger context window, that _that_ will suddenly become a $200k/year/developer subscription. There's a lot of correlation between "institutional knowledge" and context window I think.
by saghm | 2025-08-20 23:41:24+00:00
My understanding is that there isn't actually any "overriding" in the sense of two rules conflicting and one of them having to "win" and take effect. I think it's more that an enabled rule always is in effect, but it might overlap with another rule, in which case removing one of them still won't remove the restrictions on the area of overlap. It's possible I'm reading too much into your choice of words, but it does sound like there's a chance that the confusion is stemming from an incorrect assumption of how various permissions interact.

That being said, there's certain a lot more that could into making a system like that easier for developers. One thing that springs to mind is tooling that can describe what rules are currently in effect that limit (or grant, depending on the model) permissions for something. That would make it more clear when there are overlapping rules that affect the permissions of something, which in turn would make it much more clear why something is still not accessible from a given context despite one of the rules being removed.
by cool_dude85 | 2025-08-20 23:41:37+00:00
>defined once in a single source of truth

As one of the consumers of a "semantic layer" for many years now, I am firmly convinced that a "single source of truth" must either be useless or a lie.

Ok, the DBA has produced some joins that I can count up to decide how many "customers" we have. We immediately have the issue that a "customer count" from the semantic layer cannot always be the meaningful or relevant figure. In my experience, outside of the exllicit context it was written it, it cannot be the correct figure. So, I have my single source of truth customer count, but my revenue per customer needs to to use a different count that's slightly off. Another analyst needs to produce customer calls to our call center and that uses a slightly different definition. And so on, until the semantic layer is just a special database for pre-defined executive KPI dashboards and no more.
by wingworks | 2025-08-20 23:43:05+00:00
There are also services out that will solve any CAPTCHA for you at a very small cost to you. And an AI company will get steep discounts with the volumes of traffic they do.

There are some browser extensions for it too, like NopeCHA, it works 99% of the time and saves me the hassle of doing them.

Any site using CAPTCHA's today is really only hurting there real customers and low hanging fruit.

Of course this assumes they can't solve the capture themselves, with ai, which often they can.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-08-20 23:43:43+00:00
Duck tape is the older usage. It was strips of canvas duck (the technical name for traditional sailcloth fabric) for finishing sewn edges and rope splices. Adhesive variants came later but fabric tapes are ancient and still in use for example twill tape. Also if you know what duck weave looks like duct tape is still obviously based on it.
by tptacek | 2025-08-20 23:44:08+00:00
This is an extremely studied question, and The Bell Curve operates in the phlogiston era of this science. The idea that this is a forbidden topic only whispered about in the academy is an Internet myth.

Most of the reason you don't hear about current research into behavioral genetics is that a, uh, very particular excitable subset of Internet commenters are actually interested in this research, and the research results aren't coming out the way they want them to.

(You can get an isomorphic answer substituting psychometrics for behavioral genetics; this is the "twin studies" line of research that Richard Herrnstein relied on in the book, and it too is actively studied, but not talked about because the answers don't come out the way --- let's call them "Herrnstein fans" --- want them to).
by toast0 | 2025-08-20 23:44:31+00:00
> With HDMI CEC controls, there is no benefit to anyone by combining Apple TV with a display. Plus almost all displays support Airplay these days.

If you were a person that likes Apple TV, I imagine it would be nice to have a TV that was just that rather than a TV with whatever smartness the maker insisted on, plus a standalone Apple TV. (Even nicer would be a TV without smarts, but those seem to be extinct)
by xpe | 2025-08-20 23:45:37+00:00
Over the top humor duly acknowledged.

Disastrous? Quite possibly, but my concerns are based on different concerns.

Almost everything changes, so isn’t it better to rephrase these statements as metrics to avoid fixating on one snapshot in an evolving world?

As the metrics get better, what happens? Do you still have objections? What objections remain as AI capabilities get better and better without limit? The growth might be slow or irregular, but there are many scenarios where AIs reach the bar where they are better at almost all knowledge work.

Stepping back, do you really think of AI systems as stochastic parrots? What does this metaphor buy you? Is it mostly a card you automatically deal out when you pattern match on something? Or does serve as a reusable engine for better understanding the world?

We’ve been down this road; there is already much HN commentary on the SP metaphor. (Not that I recommend HN for this kind of thing. This is where I come to see how a subset of tech people are making sense of it, often imperfectly with correspondingly inappropriate overconfidence.)

TLDR: smart AI folks don’t anchor on the stochastic parrots metaphor. It is a catchy phrase and helped people’s papers get some attention, but it doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. Easily misunderstood, it serves as a convenient semantic stop sign so people don’t have to dig in to the more interesting aspects of modern AI systems. For example: (1) transformers build conceptual models of language that transcend any particular language. (2) They also build world models with spatial reasoning. (3) Many models are quite resilient to low quality training data. And more.

To make this very concrete: under the assumption of universal laws of physics, people are just following the laws of physics, and to a first approximation, our brains are just statistical pattern matchers. By this definition, humans would also be “stochastic parrots”. I go all this trouble to show that this metaphor doesn’t cut to the heart of the matter. There are clearer questions to ask: they require getting a lot more specific about various forms and applications of intelligent behavior. For example

- under what circumstances does self play lead to superhuman capability in a particular domain?

- what limits exist (if any) in the self supervised training paradigm used for sequential data? If the transformer trained in this way can write valid programs then it can create almost any Turing machine; limited only by time and space and energy. What more could you want? (Lots, but I’m genuinely curious as to people’s responses after reflecting on these.)
How are getting your customers (for B2B startups)?
by cpt100 | 2025-08-20 23:46:01+00:00
At some point, we all have to sell. I've built a b2b product and now am starting to sell. I'm wondering if you are getting your customers via email/linkedin outreach or some other method, like SEO, influencer, etc?

Any secret to success that you can spill?
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-20 23:46:12+00:00
Not familiar with how Android does it anymore, but sounds fairly similar to iOS.

The main difference is it's opt in on iOS, but opt out on Android I believe.

On iOS, when the app pops up and asks to track, if the user says no, the app can't access the system advertising ID at all, and also is not permitted to track activity via other means like email address, user ID, etc (but the only thing that's technologically enforced is the system advertising ID, it's only forbidden by policy to not use other tracking methods).

Given the huge fit Meta threw after Apple implemented this, while they were silent about Android, I'm inclined to believe Apple's method has more of a privacy impact.

Also worth noting Google is hoping to move away from device-level advertising IDs with their "privacy sandbox" thing.
by lemming | 2025-08-20 23:46:27+00:00
That’s irrelevant though. If the system requires human intervention, then it’s not fully autonomous by definition. See https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-... for example:

The companies do not advertise this feature out loud too much, but they do acknowledge it, and the reports are that it happens somewhere between every one to two miles traveled.

That’s… not very autonomous.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-20 23:47:00+00:00
> Sell a version of the phone that's 3 generations behind on camera tech, make it a little cheaper or make it the same price. I promise you I would buy it over your flagship if it means no camera tumor.

Two things:

1. Your desire is in a minority that would not be profitable to cater to.

2. Even if they tried, half the people sharing your opinion still wouldn't buy it. So many people claim they want something, but then don't buy it even when it's offered. I remember in 2011 being sad that physical slide-out QWERTY keyboards were disappearing and seeing some poll that showed that like 60% of smartphone users wish they had a physical keyboard, yet nobody was buying the Motorola Droid series which had them, opting instead for the sleek-looking iPhone. People complained about phones losing the headphone jack or getting a notch or hole punch in the screen for the front-facing camera, and yet they bought the phones anyways.
by hatthew | 2025-08-20 23:47:09+00:00
By my understanding, demosaicing almost always just "blurs" the photo slightly, reducing high-frequency information. Tone mapping is unavoidable, invisible to most people, and usually doesn't change the semantic information within an image (the famous counterexample is of course The Dress). Phone cameras in recent years do additional processing to saturate, sharpen, HDR, etc., and I find those distasteful and will happily argue against them. But AI upscaling/enhancement is a step further, and to me feels like a very big step further. It's the first time that an automatic processing step has a very high risk of introducing new (and often incorrect) semantic information that is not available in the original image, the classic example being the samsung moon.
by tptacek | 2025-08-20 23:47:31+00:00
There is a correlation between the IQ metric (whatever it represents) and income, but it's not as simple as Internet message boards want it to be: IQ reliability falls off as the scores get higher (which makes sense: IQ isn't intended as a ranking of human intelligence, but rather as a diagnostic measure for people with cognitive impairments) and income falls off as IQ scores get higher as well. Everything is complicated, as you'd expect.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-08-20 23:50:44+00:00
I agree with the premise and the conclusion, but over almost 20 years of writing, adapting and delivering software I've more than once been in exactly the same situation. Noone to ask, the only person even vaguely familiar with software development left half a year ago. Half of the processes have changed since the software was written, and the people who owned them have left, too. So while I agree that LLMs will accelerate this process, in my opinion it's not a new flavor, just more of an existing problem. Glad to see this kind of thinking though.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-20 23:51:02+00:00
> I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid.

I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use some 'nix, but they should chose what they were comfortable with.

It turned out to be bad advice. They were comfortable with Windows desktop of course, so they chose WinCE. WinCE is not the stable WinNT they were familiar with, despite what Microsoft's marketing said. I've used a number of WinCE based devices in the past, they were all about as reliable as Windows 95/ME, which is to say most wouldn't last the day without rebooting.

In the end they could only get it working by shipping the product to a team in Germany that had access to the WinCE source. It cost them a small fortune, and lost them over a year. The delay lost me as a customer.

Most (I hope all, but it's never all) of todays experienced software engineers wouldn't make that mistake, but these people where (pretty good) hardware engineers, with a vision for a product they built the hardware for. Developing software was something you hired people to so for you, like plumbing and legal work. And they wanted those people to provide them with a familiar environment.

WinCE has long since been retired, or course. May it soul burn in hell. Yes, those same hardware engineers who insist on sticking to what they are familiar with might turn to Windows 11 instead. But that comes with costs - no ARM or other CPU's, huge resource requirements, insistence on TPM's, so little lack of control of the platform that you lose control of the USS Yorktown [0]. Those costs are large. In fact so large they would have overwhelmed the budget of my engineering friends years ago, and they would have just gone with Linux. I haven't seen a new embedded Windows design in quite a while, so I suspect that's true for most embedded projects now.

[0] https://archive.is/aKrml
by Terretta | 2025-08-20 23:51:17+00:00
> So we're doing waterfall again?

The waterfall we know was always a mistake. The downhill only flow we know and (don't) love was from someone at DOD who only glanced at the second diagram (Figure 2) in the original 1970 Royce paper and said "This makes sense, we'll do it!" and... we're doing waterfall.

So, go to the paper that started it all, but was arguing against it:

- https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf

I encourage you to look at the final diagram in the paper and see some still controversial yet familiar good ideas:

- prototype first - coding informs design - design informs requirements - iterate based on tests -> design -> requirements (~TDD)

Crucially, these arrows go backwards.

See also the "Spiral Model" that attempts to illustrate this a different way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model#/media/File:Spira...

Amazing that waterfall arguably spread from this paper, where it's actually an example of "what not to do."

Here's what Royce actually says about the waterfall diagram:

The implementation described above is risky and invites failure. … The testing phase which occurs at the end of the development cycle is the first event for which timing, storage, input/output transfers, etc., are experienced as distinguished from analyzed. These phenomena are not precisely analyzable. … Yet if these phenomena fail to satisfy the various external constraints, then invariably a major redesign is required. … The required design changes are likely to be so disruptive that the software requirements upon which the design is based and which provides the rationale for everything are violated. … One can expect up to a 100-percent overrun in schedule and/or costs.

This is 55 years ago.
by stewmonger | 2025-08-20 23:51:24+00:00
I am not familiar with what actually goes into “neural retrieval”, and it seems to me like semantic search could be implemented in a very straightforward way with no “ai” whatsoever, just by having a database of words that share meanings, and then having less entries in your keyword index. I think the book “Managing Gigabytes” from the 90’s actually mentions this as a possible space saving measure for indexes, and also mentions the possible drawback of finding stuff you weren’t looking for.

You might be able to get away with only collapsing terms in specific cases where there are no other meanings, and thus save space in your index and only help people find things better without the drawback. Can’t think of any words off the top of my head that would work this way but I’m not trying very hard.

As for the term “Vibe Retrieval,” I think I like it. It reminds me of the paper where they discuss how “bullsh•t” is a more appropriate term for what llms produce than “hallucinations,” have you read that one? It’s a good one and I’ll link to it if you’re interested. Maybe “Bullsh•t Retrieval” is more appropriate heh heh
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-20 23:51:39+00:00
> I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.

Waiting for the day when Apple announces supporting recording videos horizontally and the Apple fanatics to go wild as they show off how amazing videos can be when the view is wider than it is tall.
by mindcrime | 2025-08-20 23:51:41+00:00
Oh man, assuming this is really Rudy, how fucking cool is that?!?? Rudy Rucker posting on HN! Totally gnarly.

Mr. Rucker, if that really is you, I hope you decide to hang around and participate in this little community a bit. It's a cool place (most of the time) and cyberpunk is perpetually a favored topic.
by marvinborner | 2025-08-20 23:52:29+00:00
As a reference on the volume aspect: I have a tiny server where I host some of my git repos. After the fans of my server spun increasingly faster/louder every week, I decided to log the requests [1]. In a single week, ClaudeBot made 2.25M (!) requests (7.55GiB), whereas GoogleBot made only 24 requests (8.37MiB). After installing Anubis the traffic went down to before the AI hype started.

[1] https://types.pl/@marvin/114394404090478296