MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasd00 | 2025-08-21 15:03:45+00:00
> Our societies are driven into a concrete wall at full speed by the financialization of every tiny aspect of our lives. All that matters these days are the gods of the stonk market - screw the economy, screw the environment, screw labor laws, all that matters is appearing "numbers go up" on the next quarterly.

I have been in the various nooks and crannies of the Internet/Software dev industry my whole career (i'm 49). I can't think of any time when the stock market didn't drive software innovation. It's always been either invent something -> go public -> exit or invent something -> increase stock price of existing public corp
by immibis | 2025-08-21 15:04:23+00:00
You must be on a good network. You should run one of those "get paid to share your internet connection with AI companies" apps. Since you're on a good network you might make a lot of money. And then your network will get cloudflared, of course.

We should repeat this until every network is cloudflared and everyone hates cloudflare and cloudflare loses all its customers and goes bankrupt. The internet would be better for it.
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-21 15:04:34+00:00
That's all it ever has been; it was dressed up as a legible, personally-styled literal composition of one's name for a few centuries.

Many of the signatures throughout Europe's premodern era were crosses - anyone can make a "t" shape, everyone knew what it meant (and what it implied, morally), and it was as valid for this William as it was for that Henry because it was witnessed by state-recognized authorities (Notaries, if you will).

Egyptian signatures weren't written BY the person signing, but if you had your own cartouche, ain't nobody faking that... Wax seals only had names written in Latin print. Thumbprints were used in China, and handprints in paleolithic France.

Modern web interfaces give up on the "draw something like your signature with this janky software" bullshit, and fall to "just type your own name and we'll assume it's you."

All are societally-recognized authentic signatures.
by immibis | 2025-08-21 15:04:51+00:00
> Having worked at a railroad, I will say it’s comically easy to steal a train, for instance. They all have the same key, which is basically just a plastic rod.

> The argument of the railroads is... okay, you have our train. Now what? You either go forward or you go backward, and we know where both those directions go.

[credit: thanatos_dem]
by nirdiamant | 2025-08-21 15:05:13+00:00
My open-source project on building production-level AI agents just hit 10K stars on GitHub

My Agents-Towards-Production GitHub repository just crossed 10,000 stars in only two months!

Here's what's inside: - 33 detailed tutorials on building the components needed for production-level agents - Tutorials organized by category - Clear, high-quality explanations with diagrams and step-by-step code implementations - New tutorials are added regularly - I'll keep sharing updates about these tutorials here
by x0x0 | 2025-08-21 15:05:16+00:00
1 - Not deprecate the api that allowed people to run incremental backups. They took positive action to intentionally break this. If they feel the need to break the api for ginned-up security excuses, provide a working solution for incremental backup.

2 - Fix takeout not to be entirely broken and hostile to users on 2 axes: usability and reliability. Usability: emit photos once only with a separate json specifying group memberships. Like, you know, competent engineers. Because that's how they store it internally.

2a - Either (i) fix whatever brokenness in their system regularly causes zip downloads to fail; or (ii) figure out or build a reliable alternate solution. Forcing users to wait hours to a day or two to access zips that they can't download is nothing more than a symptom of total disdain for their users while checking a compliance checkbox.
by lvspiff | 2025-08-21 15:05:28+00:00
Recognizing the patterns and applying patterned solutions is where I see success in my niche of healthcare interoperability. So much of my time is spent watching people do things,process and how they use data. It's amazing how much people remember to do their job, but me coming in and be able to bridge the doctor and the lab to share data easier is like Im an alchemist. It's really not a problem I've been able to see ai solve without suggesting solutions that are too simple or too costly and in that goldilocks zone everyone will be happy with
by boshalfoshal | 2025-08-21 15:05:46+00:00
Clickbait title and article. There was a large reorg of genai/msl and several other teams, so things have been shuffled around and they likely don't want to hire into the org while this is finalizing.

A freeze like this is common and basically just signals that they are ready to get to work with the current team they have. The whole point of the AI org is to be a smaller, more focused, and lean org, and they have been making several strategic hires for months at this point. All this says is that zuck thinks the org is in a good spot to start executing.

From talking with people at and outside of the company, I don't have much reason to believe that this is some kneejerk reaction to some supposed realization that "its all a bubble." I think people are conflating this with whatever Sam Altman said about a bubble.
by throw101010 | 2025-08-21 15:06:12+00:00
You think El Chapo had a lot of banking issues in practice? He went around most of these hurdles with and without the complicity of banks and governments.

HSBC's cash deposit tellers in Mexico were even reported to be wider to accommodate the larger cash deposits from the cartels [1]

The same people we put in charge of watching their own activites are the ones breaking the law, repeatedly... and the governments enable it by arguing that fines are "preferable" to real prosecutions and firm/long prison time for complicit bankers.

They are just taking their share on the illegal traffic revenues, like mob bosses do. No intent to stop them. And in the mean time all these AML hurdles hinder legal activites.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/11/hsbc-fine-p...
by echelon | 2025-08-21 15:06:30+00:00
Speaking of Netflix -

I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.

Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.

I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.

For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 15:06:39+00:00
Some people even figured it out in the 80's. Sears founded and ran Prodigy, a large BBS and eventually ISP. They were trying to set themselves up to become Amazon. Not only that, Prodigy's thing (for a while) was using advertising revenue to lower subscription prices.

Your "Netflix over dialup" analogy is more accessible to this readership, but Sears+Prodigy is my favorite example of trying to make the future happen too early. There are countless others.
by jofla_net | 2025-08-21 15:06:42+00:00
>For regular companies they're infested by managers imported from non-engineering fields

Someone's cousin, lets leave it at that, someones damn cousin or close friend, or anyone else with merely a pulse. I've had interviews where the company had just been turned over from people that mattered, and you. could. tell.

One couldn't even tell me why the project I needed to do for them ::rolleyes::, their own code boilerplate(which they said would run), would have runtime issues and I needed to self debug it to even get it to a starting point.

Its like, Manager: Oh heres this non-tangential thing that they tell me you need to complete before I can consider you for the positon.... Me: Oh can I ask you anything about it?.... Manager: No
by lelag | 2025-08-21 15:06:48+00:00
In his last blog post, Sam Altman also revealed how much power the average chatgpt query uses, and it's in the same ballpark.

> People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
by heavensteeth | 2025-08-21 15:06:53+00:00
I tried Podman on my messing around VPS but quickly reverted to rootless Docker.

The straw that broke the camels back was a bug in `podman compose` that funnily enough was fixed two hours ago[1]; if `service1` has a `depends_on` on `service2`, bringing down `service1` will unconditionally bring down `service2`, even if other services also depend on it. So if two separate services depend on a database, killing one of them will kill the database too.

Another incompatibility with Docker I experienced was raised in 2020 and fixed a few months ago[2]; you couldn't pass URLs to `build:` to automatically pull and build images. The patch for this turned out to be a few lines long.

I'm sure Podman will be great once all of these bugs are ironed out, but for me, it's not quite there yet.

[1]: https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/pull/1283

[2]: https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues/127
by immibis | 2025-08-21 15:06:57+00:00
But I can't even afford 1 single house unless I buy it on margin (and my bank won't give me margin). The minimum quantity is too high. It's like the problem with options trading but worse. (A single options contract can be worth $X,XXX to $XX,XXX and the ones on the lower end of that range are the ones most likely to expire worthless)
by timmg | 2025-08-21 15:07:03+00:00
If I'm doing the math right, you can get ~4000 queries per kWh. A quick Google search gave $0.04 per kWh when bought in bulk. So you can get around 100k queries per dollar of electricity.

That's.... a lot cheaper than I would have guessed. Obviously, the data centers cost quite a bit to build. But when you think of $20/mo for a typical subscription. That's not bad?

Did I do that right?
by ryandrake | 2025-08-21 15:07:03+00:00
This is only true because of having to wait in line for the checkout personnel. Once you get to the person, if they're even reasonably skilled, they can check out your groceries faster than you can.

My local grocery store has something like 15 checkout aisles, and usually only have one or two open. If they manned each aisle, there would be no wait and self checkout would be pointless. But they are not going to staff properly because the CEO needs another yacht.
by swader999 | 2025-08-21 15:07:08+00:00
I asked GPT 5 to extrapolate this to a Max Claude code monthly usage, two sessions a day, just business days. It guessed that would be 21k prompts a month. Google’s proxy numbers give a monthly footprint of ~5.1 kWh, ~5.53 L water, and ~0.64 kg CO₂e for heavy CC use.

That's equivalent to doing less than two miles driving(CO2), one toilet flush (water) and about three dryer loads of laundry.
by duxup | 2025-08-21 15:07:22+00:00
>The latest education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) raised alarm in Denmark when it found 24% of Danish 15-year-olds cannot understand a simple text, up four percentage points in a decade

For some reason. I don't think a VAT applied to books has anything to do with this nor will altering it do anything to help.

This is one of those situations where it seems like government reaches for the first tool they think of regardless if it makes any sense.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-08-21 15:07:22+00:00
I think that the starting point is that productivity/developer has been declining for a while, especially at large companies. And this leads to the "bloated" headcount.

The question is why. You mention microservices. I'm not convinced.

Many think it is "horizontals". Possible, these taxes add up it is true.

Perhaps it is cultural? Perhaps it has to do with the workforce in some manner. I don't know and AFAIK it has not been rigorously studied.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-21 15:08:14+00:00
> From a continuous integration perspective my understanding is that stacked pulled requests do not make change more frequent if we define a "change" as being committed on the master branch

Empirically this is not true if you also control for review quality. If your code review is a rubber stamp then sure mega PRs win because you put up a PR and then merge. But why review then?

However, code review quality goes up when you break things down into smaller commits because the code reviewer can sanity check a refactor without going over each line (pattern matching) while spending more time on other PRs that do other things.

And if you are breaking things down, then stacked PRs are definitely faster at merged to master/unit of time. I introduced graphite to my team and whereas before we struggled to land a broken down PR of ~5 commits in one week, we’d regularly land ~10+ commit stacks every few days because most of the changes of a larger body of work got approved and merged (since often times the commit order isn’t even important, you can reorder the small commits), conditional approvals (ie cleanups needed) didn’t require further follow ups from the reviewer, and longer discussion PRs could stay open for longer without blocking progress and both developer and reviewer could focus their attention there.

Additionally, graphite is good about automatically merging a group of approved small individual commits from a larger set of changes automatically without you babysitting which is infinitely easier than managing this in GitHub and merging 1 commit, rebasing other PRs after a merge etc.
by runarberg | 2025-08-21 15:08:22+00:00
I would say all of them. By taking part of a discussion about the editor, they are contributing. But if you are talking about code contributions in particular. Zed has thousands of code contributors, and this discussion has hundreds of interactions, overwhelmingly supportive. There is no way for me to cross check that (but honestly I would be very surprised if there is no code contributor among the 170 upvotes this discussion got).

But this is all an aside, I was talking about contributors in a more general sense.
by brandonb | 2025-08-21 15:08:27+00:00
I worked on one of the first wearable foundation models in 2018. The innovation of this 2025 paper from Apple is moving up to a higher level of abstraction: instead of training on raw sensor data (PPG, accelerometer), it trains on a timeseries of behavioral biomarkers derived from that data (e.g., HRV, resting heart rate, and so on.).

They find high accuracy in detecting many conditions: diabetes (83%), heart failure (90%), sleep apnea (85%), etc.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-21 15:08:49+00:00
>If it doesn’t work for you on l33t code problems, what techniques are you finding more effective in that case?

Memorization of l33t code DOES work well as prep for l33t code tests. I just don't think l33t code has much to do with application programming. I've long felt that "computer science" is physics for computers, low on the abstraction ladder, and there are missing labels for the higher complexity subjects built on it. Imagine if all physical sciences were called "physics" and so in order to get a job as a biologist you should expect to be asked questions about the Schroedinger equation and the standard model. We desperately need "application engineering" to be a distinct subject taught at the university level.
by coldtea | 2025-08-21 15:08:57+00:00
>The way around that is that is for LLM-based tools to run a regular search engine query in the background and feed the results of that in alongside the prompt.

Hardly better, as soon those "search engine results" would be AI slop themselves, including actual published papers (phoned-in by using AI, and "peer reviewed" by using AI from indifferent reviewers)
by immibis | 2025-08-21 15:09:40+00:00
In Germany, the entire self-checkout section moves as fast as one human cashier (they're very skilled, this is no joke). And they have one human supervising it at all times. And it takes the space of two human cashier lines, so they double up one of the other lanes. At the end nothing is really gained except a little bit of privacy (but not really because the supervisor's terminal still shows everything you scan)
by mvkel | 2025-08-21 15:10:04+00:00
> Everyone has full access to all of the available data and information

Ahh, but this is part of the problem. Yes, they have access, but there is -so much- information, it punches through our context window. So we resort to executive summaries, or convince ourselves that something that's relevant is actually not.

At least an LLM can take full view of the context in aggregate and peel out signal. There is value there, but no jobs are being replaced
by palata | 2025-08-21 15:10:09+00:00
But that does not really answer my question: if a human can prove that they are human anonymously (by getting an anonymous token), what prevents them from passing that token to an AI?

The whole point is to prevent a robot from accessing the API. If you want to detect the robot based on its activity, you don't need to bother humans with the token in the first place: just monitor the activity.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-21 15:10:14+00:00
> “Often times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,” he observed. “So I'm never really sure why that's the exciting metric that people like to brag about.”

I remember someone that had a .sig that I loved (Can't remember where. If he's here, kudos!):

> I hate code, and want as little of it in my programs as possible.
by bradley13 | 2025-08-21 15:11:32+00:00
Moving money around is a crime...why? It results in massive intrusiveness by government: full insight into everyone's finances, without evidence of a crime.

And, yes, this does get abused. Government is people, some of whom are evil, or out for revenge, or whatever. I had an acquaintance whose accounts were periodically frozen by the IRS, because he had pissed off the local office. He would get them unblocked, but only after weeks of missing mortgage payments and other bills.
by psionides | 2025-08-21 15:11:52+00:00
Hmm… Yeah, I guess each language does it kinda differently. At least Ruby also does it similarly like Python.

> I’m confused here. You established indexing is by UTF-8 code unit, then said it’s because of JavaScript which… doesn’t do UTF-8 so well?

It's not that UTF-8 is because of JavaScript, it's that indexing by bytes instead of UTF-8 code units is because of JavaScript. To use UTF-8 in JavaScript, you can use TextEncoder/TextDecoder, which return the string as a Uint8Array, which is indexed by bytes.

So if you have a string "Cześć, #Bluesky!" and you want to mark the "#Bluesky" part with a hashtag link facet, the index range is 9...17 (bytes), and not 7...15 (scalars).
by lostmsu | 2025-08-21 15:12:12+00:00
You took the words out of my mind (mouth would not be able to write so clearly). But here's a question:

> If they do, maybe that’s fine, but they can’t be held culpable if they do nothing. The citizens however, must be, as there otherwise is no one else to stop the evil. Now, I include the US in this list too.

On an abstract level how are the citizens more responsible than random countries? Random countries and random citizens are in the same boat: they have to deal with something they had no simple choice over (at least in totalitarian states).

Mind you I agree with the proposition, but the explanation is not satisfactory.
by coldtea | 2025-08-21 15:12:13+00:00
>Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating?

When it comes to the EV, the answer is simple: the EV takeover "by 2030" was 100% wishful thinking - the capacity is nowhere near there, starting from scaling the battery production, never mind the charge capacity.
by Draiken | 2025-08-21 15:12:45+00:00
Our votes are limited by who we can vote for. That's where the rich come in.

The two party system is a great example of how to stop the masses from messing their plans too much. They can pick two candidates that are corporate friendly, finance their campaigns, so it doesn't matter which one wins, they win. Even without the two party system, the financing of politics is what determines this and it's absolutely corrupt.

It's publicly known that corporations blatantly contribute to both sides to ensure that whatever happens they have control over it.

The US had a great example just now: Bernie. He's not even as extreme as he should be IMO but even if people WANTED to vote for him, they couldn't. They had to choose between two corporate candidates. In this case without even a vote (I think the fake "pre-election" the USA does is ridiculously fake, but that's another issue).

If we then add the fact that they own the media and the vast majority of the population can't think for themselves, we have what I described: the rich controls who wins.

No matter the party (americans are obsessed with left/right simplifications), the one constant is that the lives of the rich will get better at the cost of the lives of the poor. Maybe one day folks will understand that. Maybe not.
by hearsathought | 2025-08-21 15:13:31+00:00
> What else would you call food that comes from plants?

Vegetables? I don't know.

> My grandma was born in 1922 in Northern Italy. She ate meat once a year.

Oh so I can safely say you are lying. No fish. No pork. No chicken. No sausages, cold cuts, etc? Also, are you talking about ww2? Are you that sneaky that you equate that abnormal period in time with normality? When the war ended, did she still eat meat once a year? Or is it twice?

> What would you call a diet where you eat meat twice a year?

I thought she only ate meat once a year? Now you are boosting it to twice a year?

> Again, how would you call a diet where 99% of nutrition comes from plants?

If 99% of a human diet came from plants, they would die without supplements. No european diet, even during ww2, was 99% from plants. Is your grandma a herbivore? Is she a cow.

> It's you that decided to get all confrontational and cast doubts on my personal account of what old people told me and my culture, tbh.

What they told you about life in ww2? Or northern italian culture? Stop being so deceptive. Stop extrapolating ww2 to thousand years of history.

> I'm pretty sure that kind of makes me not vegan.

You may not be a vegan ( assuming you are not lying about the pork chops ), but you are lying about european diet. Especially northern italian diet. It certainly wasn't 99% vegetables for thousands of years. It certainly wasn't even 99% vegetables during the war torn era of ww2.
by lardissone | 2025-08-21 15:13:36+00:00
I've been working with Django/Python for many years, and around 10 years switched to JS stack, because of work (and because I read HN too much).

Last year finally convinced me that the entire JS community is sick, they want to re-invent the wheel all the time and making new libraries obsolete in months. So I started to use Django again. Most of the things needed for MVPs or prototypes are covered by their admin panel, thn when I need to build a front, I decide if use views or a simple frontend (next.js, svelte, etc) that communicates to my API.