MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bikenaga | 2025-08-21 16:18:09+00:00
Original article: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/wdvr9_v1

Abstract: "Peer reviewers judge the validity and quality of new research. These judgements would ideally be impartial, but some reviewers may give a more favourable review if they are cited in the article because the authors have recognised their work and because citations are a valuable academic currency. Reviewers sometimes request self-citations to their own work, which may be justified as reviewers should be relevant experts. However, some self-citation requests may be unethical, with reviewers exploiting the authors’ need to publish. We examined whether citations to a reviewer and self-citations influenced their peer review. We used a matched design at four journals that use open peer review and make all article versions available. Our sample included more than 37,000 peer reviews, with 13% where the reviewer was cited in the article and 6% where the reviewer included a self-citation to their work in their review. Reviewers who were cited were more likely to approve the article, with an odds ratio of 1.61 compared with reviewers who were not cited (adjusted 99.4% CI: 1.16 to 2.23). Reviewers who suggested a self-citation were much less likely to approve the article, with an odds ratio of 0.15 compared with reviewers with no self-citations (adjusted 99.4% CI: 0.08 to 0.30). Reviewers who requested and received a citation were much more likely to approve the article compared to reviewers whose request was disregarded (odds ratio of 3.5, 95% CI: 2.0 to 6.1). Some reviewers’ recommendations are dependent on whether they are cited or want to be cited. Self-citation requests can turn peer review into a transaction rather than an objective critique of the article."
by wredcoll | 2025-08-21 16:18:13+00:00
> That's like saying if/when an AV runs over a bunch of people that its not like they're the only ones running over people human drivers do it too!

I mean, that's literally what happened? Computer controlled cars were developed, killed some people, and everyone collectively shrugged and went on with their lives. A large part of that reaction was probably because we're all immersed in a culture that just expects some number of people to die because of cars every year.
by feoren | 2025-08-21 16:19:25+00:00
> These tech stacks are mainstream because so many use them

That's a tautology. No, those tech stacks are mainstream because it is easy to get something that looks OK up and running quickly. That's it. That's what makes a framework go mainstream: can you download it and get something pretty on the screen quickly? Long-term maintenance and clarity is absolutely not a strong selection force for what goes mainstream, and in fact can be an opposing force, since achieving long-term clarity comes with tradeoffs that hinder the feeling of "going fast and breaking things" within the first hour of hearing about the framework. A framework being popular means it has optimized for inexperienced developers feeling fast early, which is literally a slightly negative signal for its quality.
by varispeed | 2025-08-21 16:20:08+00:00
The funniest part isn’t that AI hasn’t delivered profits. It’s that the only “value” most people got from LLMs was accidentally rediscovering what Google used to be before it turned into an ad-riddled casino.

Executives mistook that novelty for a business revolution. After years of degraded search, SEO spam, and “zero-click” answers, suddenly ChatGPT spat out a coherent paragraph and everyone thought: my god, the future is here. No - you just got a glimpse of 2009 Google with autocomplete.

So billions were lit on fire chasing “the sliced bread moment” of finally finding information again - except this time it’s wrapped in stochastic parroting, hallucinations, and a SaaS subscription. The real irony is that most of these AI pilots aren’t “failing to deliver ROI” - they’re faithfully mirroring the mediocrity of the organisations deploying them. Brittle workflows meet brittle models, and everyone acts surprised.

The pitch was always upside-down. These things don’t think, don’t learn, don’t adapt. They remix. At best they’re productivity duct tape for bored middle managers. At worst they’re a trillion-dollar hallucination engine being sold as “strategy.”

The MIT study basically confirms what was obvious: if you expect parrots to run your company, you get birdshite for returns.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-21 16:20:13+00:00
Human communication is incredibly lossy (sometimes intentionally), plus humans will try to fill in gaps with assumed information. The more people you cut out between the message sender and the receiver, the more likely the message is to still be intact.

The kindergarten game of telephone is the perfect demonstration. You only end up with distorted messages if you have many players between the sender and the receiver. If you play telephone with 2 people, you end up with a boring game where any mistakes in communication are immediately resolved.
by alex1138 | 2025-08-21 16:20:28+00:00
Metaverse (especially) or AI might make more sense if you could actually see your friend's posts (and vice versa), if the feed made sense (which it hasn't for years now) and if you could message people who you aren't friends with yet without it getting lost in some 'other' folder you won't discover until 3 years from now (Gmail has a Spam folder problem... but the difference is you can see you have messages there and you can at least check it out for yourself)

What I'm trying to say is make your product the barest minimum usable first maybe? (Also, don't act like, as Jason Calacanis has called it, a marauder, like copying everything from everyone all the time. What he's done with Snapchat is absolutely tasteless and in the case of spying on them - which he's done - very likely criminal)
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 16:20:39+00:00
Index funds won't necessarily save you. 7.5% of the S&P 500 is NVidia, 7% is Microsoft, etc. Almost 40% of the S&P 500 is in the top 10 stocks, and of the top 10, only #9 Berkshire Hathaway is not big into AI.
by eatsyourtacos | 2025-08-21 16:20:53+00:00
This is C# so basically just automatically detected that I had 4 object types I was working with that were being updated to the database that I want to keep in a concurrent dictionary type of cache. So it created the dictionaries for each object with the appropriate keys, created functions for each object type if I touch an object to get that one updated etc.

It created the function to load in the data, then the finalize where it writes to the DB what was touched and clears the cache.

Again- I'm not saying this is anything particularly fancy, but it did the general concept of what I wanted. Also this is all iterative; when it creates something I talk to it like a person to say "hey I want to actually load in all the data, even though we will only be writing what changed" and all that kind of stuff.

Also the bigger help wasn't really the creation of the cache, it was helping to make the changes and detect what needed to be modified.

End of the day even if I want to go a slightly different route of how it did the caching; it creates all the framework so I can simplify if needed.

A lot of times for me using this LLM approach is to get all the boilerplate out of the way.. sometimes just starting the process by yourself of something is daunting. I find this to be a great way to begin.
by eithed | 2025-08-21 16:20:54+00:00
Depends on the subject - I can remember multiple subjects where the teacher would give you a formula to memorise without explaining why or where it came from. You had to take it as an axiom. The teachers also didn't say - hey, if you want to know why did we arrive to this, have a read here, no, it was just given.

Ofc you could also say that's for the student to find out, but I've had other things on my mind
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-21 16:21:10+00:00
> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.

That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.

Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.
by rsyring | 2025-08-21 16:21:29+00:00
I've wanted to try Podman for a couple years. But I keep bowing out because there are no official Ubuntu builds that I could find. Upstream seems content with that status quo.

That's their prerogative, and I could build it myself, but it makes me concerned they don't really have multi-distro compatibility as a priority, which makes me hesitant to commit time to experimenting with it when Docker considers Ubuntu a first-class citizen.
by bapak | 2025-08-21 16:21:59+00:00
> I'd also argue that D3 is no more verbose than vanilla JS

Right? So why load a bunch of JS to do the same thing? One step further, why load any JS at all since you're just generating an SVG? People have forgotten that HTML and SVG are meant to be DATA containers, you don't have to use JSON + JS.

D3 is cool for the advanced visualizations and the interactivity. If you're sticking to static graphs, for the love of god just have the server serve a static SVG.
by c0balt | 2025-08-21 16:22:08+00:00
> Nexusmods exists purely out of convenience - it has absolutely no functional advantage over any of the other much better alternatives for hackers to host their mods on.

Vortex and the newer nexusmods.app are significantly more convenient than any other solution I've seen. They aren't inherently unique or a most but more or less a culmination of significant effort to make modding accessible.

They give you simple collection management, updates and (for supported titles) healthchecks (on SD, is the correct wine module installed for this mod?).

Further, they actually have a working platform for distributing money to mod creators. This specifically also makes them a lot more bound by the normal stuff, like following age restriction regulations, as payment gateways will kick you otherwise.
by SirMaster | 2025-08-21 16:22:15+00:00
It's simple, I don't have things like that that I need to do on any sort of daily basis.

I have a work calendar for work meetings, but never saw a need for personal calendar.

OK sure I put doctor and dentist on my personal calendar, but dentist is 2x a year and doctor is like once a year for a physical. On my personal calendar I might have a dozen things put on it for the whole year. Some upcoming family event, some wedding, etc.
by mushufasa | 2025-08-21 16:22:33+00:00
1 in 20 doesn't sound great. But you have to mediate that with

- everyone and their mother are doing a "generative ai program" right now, a lot of times just using the label to try to get their project funded, ai being an afterthought

- if the 1 out of 20 projects is game-changing, then you could argue right now people should actually be willing to spend even more on the opportunity, maybe the number should actually be 1 in 100. (The VC model is about having big success 1 in 10 times.)

- studies of ongoing business activities are inherently methodologically limited by the data available; I don't have a ton of confidence that these researchers' numbers are authoritative -- it's inherently impossible to truly report on internal R&D spend especially a private companies without inside information, and if you have the inside information you likely don't have the full picture.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-21 16:22:36+00:00
We are entering the “Trough of disillusionment.” These hype cycles are very predictable. GPT-5 being panned as a disappointment after endless hype may go down as GenAI’s “jump the shark” moment.

It’s all fun and games until the bean counters start asking for evidence of return on investment. GenAI folks better buckle up. Bumps ahead. The smart folks are already quietly preparing for a shift to ride the next hype wave up while others ride this train to the trough’s bottom.

Cue a bunch of increasingly desperate puff PR trying to show this stuff returns value.
by CharlesW | 2025-08-21 16:22:40+00:00
Duplicate discussion from this week (162 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118

Here's the source report, not linked to by this content farm's AI-written article: https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...
by jeremyjh | 2025-08-21 16:22:43+00:00
Right, and then after you do all the thinking and the specs, you have to read and understand and own every single line it generated. And speaking for myself, I am no where near as good at thinking through code I am reviewing as thinking through the code I am writing.

Other people will put up PRs full of code they don't understand. I'm not saying everyone who is reporting success with LLMs are doing that, but I hear it a lot. I call those people clowns, and I'd fire anyone who did that.
by no_wizard | 2025-08-21 16:23:03+00:00
I can’t think of another career where management continuously does not understand the realities of how something gets built. Software best practices are on their face orthogonal to how all other parts of a business operate.

How does marketing operate? In a waterfall like model. How does finance operate? In a waterfall like model. How does product operate? Well you can see how this is going.

Then you get to software and it’s 2 week sprints, test driven development etc. and it decidedly works best not on a waterfall model, but shipping in increments.

Yet the rest of the business does not work this way, it’s the same old top down model as the rest.

This I think is why so few companies or even managers / executives “get it”
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by HankStallone | 2025-08-21 16:23:32+00:00
The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.

I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.
Where is the exponential growth part of AI?
by anon191928 | 2025-08-21 16:23:38+00:00
It's been almost 3 years since chatgpt. Progress was great but this does not seem like it's going to replace almost all jobs in few years? What am I missing? This thing might be decade away from fully replacing a software engineer. Anything else? how many more decades?

Did top insider tech people and VCs lied to us again?
by alex1138 | 2025-08-21 16:25:01+00:00
You're probably going to get comments like "Social networking existed before. You can't steal it". Well, on top of derailing someone else's execution of said non-stole idea (or something) which makes you a jerk, in the case of those he 'stole'/stole from, for starters maybe it was existing code (I don't know if that was ever proven), but maybe it was also the Winklevosses idea of using .edu email addresses, and possibly other concepts

Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 16:25:09+00:00
Ah, but note I said "mainstream browser engine", not "mainstream browser!" The mainstream browsers themselves dropped Mavericks some time ago, but other developers have been maintaining backports.

Firefox Dynasty is actually a relatively recent development. For a while I was using Chromium Legacy[1], which, yes, did stop getting updated a little over a year ago. But then just in time, i3roly came along with Firefox Dynasty[2]!

It's true that if i3roly drops Firefox Dynasty, and the Chromium Legacy developer doesn't return (there has been some movement on the repo), that will be the end of this project. But that could be many years from now!

1: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy 2: https://github.com/i3roly/firefox-dynasty
by addaon | 2025-08-21 16:26:17+00:00
> AI is improving employee productivity, but that's not leading to more business profit... how does that happen?

One trivial way is that the increase of productivity is less than the added cost of the tools. Which suggests that (either due to their own pricing, or just mis-judgement) the AI companies are mis-pricing their tools. If the tool adds $5000 in productivity, it should be priced at $4999, eventually -- the AI companies have every motivation to capture nearly all of the value, but they need to leave something, even if just a penny, for the purchasing company to motivate adoption. If they're pricing at $5001, there's no motivation to use the tool at all; but of course at $4998 they're leaving money on the table. There's no stable equilibrium here where the purchasing companies end up with a /significant/ increase in (productivity - cost of that productivity), of course.
by ajross | 2025-08-21 16:26:26+00:00
> What's the downside to having a 2 to 3 line comment above a constant in a C file?

That the code gets changed in the future such that the comment is a lie[1]. This happens with shocking regularity. Comments sound like a great idea until you deal with them in a long term maintenance situation.

As a corrolary, they also increase the cost of maintenance because if you end up doing refactoring that makes the comments a lie, it's never acceptable in review to just remove them. People expect you to write the same kind of treatise that the original author did. And original authors are horrifyingly verbose. All those doxygen crumbs you're leaving only act to confuse and irritate the pour souls coming after you.

Code is code. It should explain itself. If it does not, comments should do the absolute minimum needed (c.f. citing the relevant section in the ISA reference by number in this case) to rectify that.

[1] c.f. Guy Steele: https://softwarequotes.com/quote/don-t-get-suckered-in-by-th...
by ian-g | 2025-08-21 16:26:45+00:00
It's funny, because I had the exact opposite experience with abstract algebra.

The professor explained things, we did proofs in class, we had problem sets, and then he gave us open-book semi-open-professor take-home exams that took us most of a week to do.

Proof classes were mostly fine. Boring, sometimes ridiculously shit[0], but mostly fine. Being told we have a week for this exam that will kick our ass was significantly better for synthesizing things we'd learned. I used the proofs we had. I used sections of the textbook we hadn't covered. I traded some points on the exam for hints. And it was significantly more engaging than any other class' exams.

[0] Coming up with novel things to prove that don't require some unrelated leap of intuition that only one student gets is really hard to do. Damn you Dr. B, needing to figure out that you have to define a third equation h(x) as (f(x) - g(x))/(f(x) + g(x)) as the first step of a proof isn't reasonable in a 60 minute exam.
by pbarry25 | 2025-08-21 16:26:50+00:00
"What happens if I am distributing the runtime for commercial purposes?

According to our terms of service, the distribution of the Unity runtime for commercial purposes by Industry Customers requires explicit authorization from Unity and is subject to a fee ("Distribution License') which is generally equivalent to 4.0% of the revenue generated by the software product that incorporates the Unity runtime (discounts may apply). Please contact sales to discuss further."

For folks who didn't make the move to Godot the LAST time Unity pulled this, there's Godot... (not saying that move is easy for everyone, but am just sayin'...)
by Manuel_D | 2025-08-21 16:27:15+00:00
The NYT article says that the couple suspects that sediment buildup is blocking pipes, not that there is a water shortage causing taps to run dry: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-cent...

And there isn't solid evidence that this was connected to the data center construction:

> Ben Sheidler, a spokesman for the Joint Development Authority, which manages the industrial park that Meta’s facilities occupy, said the cause of the water issues was unknown. The Joint Development Authority did not do a well water study before construction to determine any potential effects, but the timing of the problems could be a coincidence, he said.

> “I wouldn’t want to speculate that even the construction had something to do with it,” he said. “One thousand feet away is a pretty significant distance.”
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-21 16:27:47+00:00
I am annoyed by Rings of Power, but at least we got some fairly passable (if still very flawed) adaptations from Peter Jackson. I'm more salty about Wheel of Time, because that trashed the source material just as hard, and because it bombed it's unlikely we will ever see someone try again with an actual good adaptation.
by IgorPartola | 2025-08-21 16:28:07+00:00
What are the actual use cases that can generate revenue or at least save costs today? I can think of:

1. Generate content to create online influence. This is at this point probably way oversaturated and I think more sophisticated models will not make it better.

2. Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. Only sort of works. After all, you can only babysit one of these at a time no matter how senior you are so realistically it will make you, what, 50% more productive?

3. Replace your customer service staff. This may work in the long run but it saves money instead of making money so its impact has a hard ceiling (of spending just the cost of electricity).

4. Assistive tools. Someone to do basic analysis, double check your writing to make it better, generate secondary graphic assets. Can save a bit of money but can’t really make you a ton because you are still the limiting factor.

Aside: I have tried it for editing writing and it works pretty well but only if I have it do minimal actual writing. The more words it adds, the worse the essay. Having it point out awkward phrasing and finding missing parts of a theme is genuinely helpful.

5. AI for characters in video games, robot dogs, etc. Could be a brave new frontier for video games that don’t have such a rigid cause/effect quest based system.

6. AI girlfriends and boyfriends and other NSFW content. Probably a good money maker for a decade or so before authentic human connections swing back as a priority over anxiety over speaking to humans.

What use cases am I missing?