MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 13:01:39+00:00
> What do I need to do to make a difference, and how much time will this take?

EU or US?

> what's the path? Legislation?

Send them a letter explaining why this is bad for you. Keep it strictly factual and ideally concise. Copy Google’s legal [1] and any relevant digital or markets regulators. (If in the US, don’t forget your state regulators.)

Wait two weeks and then call the elected. Make sure they’re aware, and talk through your options. Send a letter thanking them for the call, incorporating any new information and actions they said they would take, and copy all of the previous parties again.

More work: reach out to other top developers and organise an open letter. This will be hard because everyone wants to include their pet issue and everyone will fight over scope and language.

[1] https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275?hl=en
by boxed | 2025-08-28 13:03:24+00:00
> The thing is, there is no demand to get that much stuff into space.

You mean no other company except SpaceX has such a demand. But SpaceX does in fact have such a demand and are using it to make a profit.

Small governments don't understand that they can have space science programs rivaling NASA for super cheap. That's what's holding demand back imo.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-28 13:04:49+00:00
The EU is almost ready to sign off on Apple's DMA compliance as sufficient, despite sideloading being similarly restricted, and despite 15-20% commissions remaining. The DMA was never written to allow completely anonymous sideloading, or even commission-free sideloading, another law is needed for that.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-28 13:04:55+00:00
> precautionary principle when we run nuclear, build dams

Yes. Dams in particular. You calculate for various failure modes and you design around mitigating the disaster if failure should occur. That's why dams are designed with emergency spillways. If there is a bunch of rain, gate failures, etc and you suddenly have more water than you know what to do with, you have the emergency spillway as a last resort. They exist to route water in high volume out of the resevoir, often in a sacrificial manner in an attempt to prevent the dam from failing. And if a dam would fail, it's preferably that it do so at the emergency spillway than elsewhere. So there is a certain amount of "in certain conditions failure can/will happen so this is how we design the system to fail as gracefully/least destructively as possible".

Nuclear has this as well. The plans for this are called "Severe Accident Mitigation Guidelines" or SAMGs with the general practice being called SAM (same abbreviation, just drop the G). Each nuclear site has them and they are generally framed as "this shouldn't go wrong but if it does". You can try to avoid those failure modes but they can always still potentially occur and the most you can do is just try to keep the damage from spreading to the best of your ability.
by hollerith | 2025-08-28 13:05:59+00:00
>important but slightly subtle language features from the late '70s

Programming-language researchers didn't start investigating linear (or affine) types till 1989. Without the constraint that vectors, boxes, strings, etc, are linear, Rust cannot deliver its memory-safety guarantees (unless Rust were radically changed to rely on a garbage collecting runtime).

>it's a damning indictment of programming culture than people did not adopt pre-Rust ML-family languages

In pre-Rust ML-family languages, it is harder to reason about CPU usage, memory usage and memory locality than it is in languages like C and Rust. One reason for that is the need in pre-Rust ML-family langs for a garbage collector.

In summary, there are good reasons ML, Haskell, etc, never got as popular as Rust.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 13:06:44+00:00
Yes. Not a rando online petition: “we have succesfully escalated complaints on this problem to consumer agencies in France, Germany, and Australia, and have brought forth petitions for new law on this problem to various countries.”

Petitions from verified voters are powerful. Triply so if done in person, because the infrastructure that can collect signatures in person can also e.g. back a primary challenge or plebiscite.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-28 13:06:49+00:00
If we put people in a jet with poor training and they crash, that's the pilot's fault, yet if people crash LLMs, that's the LLMs fault. If a study showed 95% of people crashed jets without training, I wouldn't take that as a sign jets are a flawed idea.

As it is, I have no problem with your naysaying, I'm getting results, your disbelief doesn't change that, in fact I find it more amusing than anything.
by jibal | 2025-08-28 13:07:29+00:00
P.S. Why would someone be "suspicious" of people doing their writing in Word and copying it into a comment field? Suspicious of what, exactly? What crime is being committed? The issue here is AI, not people's workflow methods. I have sometimes written lengthy comments in my editor (emacs) which gives me many more editing features, doesn't throw away my work with the wrong keystroke (not a problem at HN but it is at sites where the comment field is a pop-up), and doesn't randomly freeze or slow down radically (this seems to be a problem with my browser).

I reject everything else about that poorly reasoned "suspicious" response as well.
by pahool | 2025-08-28 13:08:09+00:00
Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just. The majority of research papers, at least in the U.S., are (or historically have been, I don't know the data now under the current administration) publicly funded, one way or another. Publicly-funded research should not be behind paywalls.

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-28 13:08:26+00:00
Since we are talking about BigTech, I can’t imagine to a first approximation any IC up to and including senior or a low level manager being at any BigTech company for a reason besides wanting to maximize their income via cash and RSUs.

Does anyone stay in the same position/team for more than two or three years even at the same company?
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-08-28 13:08:30+00:00
It really, really sucks to be tricked into installing malware, and I have sympathy for the victims. But this measure will remove so much freedom from a much larger group of people, and therfore it isn't justified.

We just have to educate people better about how to protect themselves online, not resort to paternalistic control regimes which just happens to give one of the largest tech giants the power to also crush anything that it sees as a threat to their business model.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-28 13:08:33+00:00
Re DJI Fly: a combination of WebBluetooth, WebRTC, the normal location API, offline web pages (through managed caches), regular browser video features, and a bunch of other web technologies.

Re SyncThing: there's the File System Access API. You can ask the user for a folder and then operate on the files and directories inside it. Also from a locally cached offline copy, of course. Serviceworkers are there to run in the background, though I'm not 100% sure if the FS API and service workers can be combined to be honest.

It'll need as much effort or maybe even more to port it to the web as it has taken to develop the Android app, but it's almost definitely possible, at least on Chrome.

As part of Google's attempt to break free from the iOS app store, they accidentally invented an alternative to their own draconic measures.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-08-28 13:09:02+00:00
I disagree that having to update a package which is also now a automatic service qualifies as broken. Sure there are issues but they are usually either self induced e.g. AUR, easily fixable e.g. keyring update or broadcasted publicly with a fix e.g. archnews.

At the end of the day arch is firmly a do it yourself distro where some user intervention is expected.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-28 13:09:08+00:00
These articles (of which there are many) all make the same basic accounting mistakes. You have to include all the costs associated with the model, not just inference compute.

This article is like saying an apartment complex isn’t “losing money” because the monthly rents cover operating costs but ignoring the cost of the building. Most real estate developments go bust because the developers can’t pay the mortgage payment, not because they’re negative on operating costs.

If the cash flow was truly healthy these companies wouldn’t need to raise money. If you have healthy positive cash flow you have much better mechanisms available to fund capital investment other than selling shares at increasingly inflated valuations. Eg issue a bond against that healthy cash flow.

Fact remains when all costs are considered these companies are losing money and so long as the lifespan of a model is limited it’s going to stay ugly. Using that apartment building analogy it’s like having to knock down and rebuild the building every 6 months to stay relevant, but saying all is well because the rents cover the cost of garbage collection and the water bill. That’s simply not a viable business model.

Update Edit: A lot of commentary below re the R&D and training costs and if it’s fair to exclude that on inference costs or “unit economics.” I’d simply say inference is just selling compute and that should be high margin, which the article concludes it is. The issue behind the growing concerns about a giant AI bubble is if that margin is sufficient to cover the costs of everything else. I’d also say that excluding the cost of the model from “unit economics” calculations doesn’t make business/math/economics since it’s literally the thing being sold. It’s not some bit of fungible equipment or long term capital expense when they become obsolete after a few months. Take away the model and you’re just selling compute so it’s really not a great metric to use to say these companies are OK.
by bri3d | 2025-08-28 13:09:18+00:00
In the case of Jetson, NVidia also have a fairly generic BSP which you can use to customize almost any distribution, and the Jetson-customized Ubuntu is standard enough that you can upgrade it using the normal Ubuntu upgrade path without major issue.

For most of the Tegra boards there’s also upstream support. Overall the situation with NVidia BSP is about 10000x better than weird Chinese stuff. In the case of Tegra/Jetson, there’s even detailed first-party documentation about reconstructing the BSP components from source:

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/archives/l4t-archived/l4t-327...

I’d assume the decent software support will carry over to DGX.
by Thorrez | 2025-08-28 13:09:30+00:00
>> At that time my M was a staff level IC TLM with 4 reports who was forcibly converted to EM.

>I am obviously not disputing your experience, but wanted to mention that this was not the standard pattern. The standard pattern for forced conversion at L6 (Staff) was either 6 or 7 reports (I don't remember exactly).

I think you're both saying the same thing. By "forcibly converted to EM", I think B-Con was saying the person was given more reports.
by g105b | 2025-08-28 13:09:31+00:00
I've been trying to achieve the opposite of this project: render scenes in ASCII/ANSI in the style of old BBS terminal games. I've had terrible success so far. All the AI models I've tried only understand the concept of "pixel art" and not ASCII/ANSI graphics such as what can be seen on https://www.bbsing.com/ , https://16colo.rs , or on Reddit's r/ANSIart/ .

If anyone has any tips for how I could achieve this, I would love to hear your ideas.
by weirdpickles | 2025-08-28 13:09:48+00:00
Duke is also trying to merge its two NC operations into one entity. NC also gave Duke permission to pre-charge customers for infrastructure which isn't built, and has no guarantees of being finished. Specifically, power plants.

And before people say: this won't happen. It literally happened in other states with Duke, a company that continues to charge customers for years for plants it has long abandoned even breaking ground on.

If you live in one of the handful of cities with municipal power: hold tight. The prices are already crazy in NC when comparing Duke areas (almost all of the state) to the handful of municipal energy areas (Apex, Wake Forest, High Point, etc). Duke will have charges around $0.16-$0.25kwh with surge pricing doubling that easily. But the municipal energy areas often have flat fees, the cheapest of which that I found is $0.08kwh.

The research linked in the article said some areas of Virginia (where there are lots of data centers going online) can expect a 25% increase in energy rates. That's insane. People need to prioritize living in areas where the community cuts out the entities like Duke, or rightfully handcuffs them with municipal-level contracts to keep rates reasonable.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-28 13:09:53+00:00
> sad that just pointing out logical mistakes in someone's post gets you attacked

They didn’t. They mis-applied fallacies and in one case made one up. There was no substantial good-faith response to OP’s argument. Instead we got a shallow dismissal masked in the language (but not substance) of logic.

It was fun to engage with! But not meaningful. The online-commenting equivalent of scrolling short-form videos and getting enraged or delighted or awe-struck for a picosecond.
by toyg | 2025-08-28 13:10:01+00:00
Bending Spoons is a weird beast. Nobody likes them and nobody likes working for them, but they are loved by capital markets - they seem to have an endless stream of money coming in to finance acquisitions. They will buy anything, strip it down to bare essentials, jack up prices, and leave it running to generate cash for as long as it can, until it dies of natural death. There is little or no pretension of innovation, just value-extraction distilled into purest form.

Oracle should buy them, they'd fit together perfectly.
by rchaud | 2025-08-28 13:10:20+00:00
Yes. A decision like this creates the impetus to move to alternatives like Jolla OS that have an Android-compatible layer.

20 years in, the so-called "smartphone" duopoly have jointly converged towards a "dumb terminal" strategy, where almost nothing can be done without cloud-based authentication from a centralized third party. And this was the case prior to the AI horse manure they're baking into the OS.

I use the Fossify forks of Simple Mobile Tools apps (Gallery, File Manager, Calculator) because these can be installed via APK files and just be left alone. My Google Calculator app on the other hand seems to want to download new updates every single month.
Ask HN: Building tools to make WhatsApp integration less painful for developers
by milanspeaks | 2025-08-28 13:10:42+00:00
So if you have some kind of experience integrating with WhatsApp Business API as a developer, you would already know how tough it gets. I am planning to build a tool that is specifically intended to solve the developers problem regarding the following specific things:

1. Easy Onboarding with embedded setup with bank grade security (data encryption and security first approach)

2. Secure and scalable Send Message API supporting all message formats.

3. Secure and scalable Webhooks for incoming messages, delivery reports etc

4. Embedded Components for resellers like Meta Onboarding, Template Management etc.

5. Attractive Pricing

Yes, on the face of it, it would look like a WhatsApp API Wrapper, but behind the scene, we would be doing a lot of security, scalability, use-cases related solutions.

This is somewhat similar to what Twilio offers or several other enterprise provider offers but at a very high cost and with a lengthy sales cycle. I am going to provide the same thing but with excellent experience and attractive pricing.

I am not going to build Chatbot, Abandonded Cart or things directly for end-customer but my product is targeted to developers specifically who are sending more than 50k messages per month.

I want to know from you regarding your experience using WhatsApp Business API. Where did you hit friction - onboarding, approvals, webhooks, SDKs, scale, costs?

Would you mind sharing few of your experience?
by Hilift | 2025-08-28 13:10:55+00:00
Not related, but this reminds me of a recent issue with the Samsung 990 Pro SSD that required a firmware update for fix, and some drives had to be returned. I speculate it was exacerbated by increased usage.

https://serverfault.com/questions/1172216/issue-with-samsung...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-dro...
by asmor | 2025-08-28 13:11:24+00:00
What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on.

I find that to be a pretty dishonest business model. I don't have any Bitnami images to replace, but I know a lot of people who do without ever having made that choice - and their bosses aren't going to pay Broadcom for the most part either. So you end up with overworked developers that now hate Broadcom and/or a whole lot of deployments that just break or never get updated. The number of people going "I can just switch over to the archive image, whatever" on the K8s subreddit alone is concerning.
by reuven | 2025-08-28 13:11:50+00:00
A lot of people I know, including many of my students, first heard about uv as a lightning-fast replacement for pip. That's what piqued their interest, and that's also more or less where they stopped. Just yesterday, someone was asking me about whether uv knows about handling different versions of Python, or if it only installs packages.

So your points are all valid -- but I'm trying to address pain points people have repeatedly raised, and that I myself experienced, and flatten the learning curve for as many people as possible.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-28 13:12:03+00:00
> Didn't google just prove there is little to no environmental harm, INCLUDING if you account for training?

No, they showed that the environmental impact of using a smaller AI embedded on Google results uses less power to train and run than using something SOA. That's quite a different thing altogether.

> I don't ask a lot of race-based questions to my LLMS I guess

You don't need to ask explicit questions to receive answers where bias is implicitly stated. You've dismissed the argument out of hand without actually meeting it.

> I won't deny it's an issue but to act like it's being ignored by the industry is a miss completely.

The claim was that critics had been vocal about it, not that it had been ignored by the industry.

> I also grew up being told that ANYTHING on the internet was for the public, and copyright never stopped me from saving images or pirating movies.

Policing is always very patchy. You maybe broke the law and got away with it as an individual, that's common. The issue is that these huge businesses can do a level of copyright infringement, and do it on a for-profit basis, while smaller businesses would be eradicated for attempting the same thing, and the artists they're taking from would face similar issues if they attempted even a fraction of that level of plagiarism.
by originalvichy | 2025-08-28 13:12:48+00:00
That's a nice way of explaining it. I also feel like some sort of LLM purist by being critical of features that serve only to pollute emails and comms with robotic text not written by an actual person. We will as societies have to come up with a new metric for TL;DR or "this was a perfectly cohesive and concise text", since LLMs have obscured the line.
by helsinki8 | 2025-08-28 13:13:44+00:00
And other people said the Internet was a fad and a bubble and cell phones were just for people who wanted to look important and solar panels would never work.

History is full of people making wrong predictions in both directions about new technology.

As the most obvious parallel, pets.com went bust in the first dot com bust and so did webvan. Today chewy is successfully replicating pets and ordering groceries online for delivery is common.

We might see 1,000 different AI companies go bankrupt in the next few years, but still have AI be a huge chunk of the economy throughout the 2030s.
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-28 13:13:45+00:00
The EU has lots of laws, including some that were made after the DMA. One of them is the CRA, which says that by the end of 2027 all app marketplaces are required to provide developer contact info to people who download software. If the contact info is fake or wrong, the app marketplace can face fines.

So the app marketplace should probably verify the contact info, right? Would you take on that kind of risk to protect the anonymity of some rando you’ve never met and will never give you any money? I wouldn’t.
by uticus | 2025-08-28 13:13:49+00:00
> It’s essentially a manufactured replica of gasoline, designed to power internal combustion engines while potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.

Key word: "potentially". Because it is less accurate than the word "currently" - as in, "currently, the cost of production is a significant barrier" - I would argue the word "potentially" at the outset frames the whole description of benefits as an unsubstantiated faith.

When all processes for deriving synthetic gasoline require more input energy than available energy from the output, you're not describing processes that "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels."
by curl-up | 2025-08-28 13:14:05+00:00
Not OP, but I have long thought of this type of approach (underlying "hard coded" object tracking + fuzzy AI rendering) to be the next step, so I'll respond.

The problem with using equations is that they seem to have plateaued. Hardware requirements for games today keep growing, and yet every character still has that awful "plastic skin", among all the other issues, and for a lot of people (me included) this creates heavy uncanny-valley effects that makes modern games unplayable.

On the other hand, images created by image models today look fully realistic. If we assume (and I fully agree that this is a strong and optimistic assumption) that it will soon be possible to run such models in real time, and that techniques for object permanence will improve (as they keep improving at an incredible phase right now), then this might finally bring us to the next level of realism.

Even if realism is not what you're aiming for, I think it's easy to imagine how this might change the game.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-08-28 13:14:21+00:00
The nerds are the ones who pave the way for technology, enabling people around them to adapt more easily to it. They find new paths into the undiscovered land that then get either shut down or commercially exploited. Companies like Google have piggybacked on this volunteer work.

I have the feeling that these companies don't need nerds anymore. Who needs pioneers if everything is paved and regulated?