MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aeblyve | 2025-08-17 17:42:21+00:00
> Are we going to let those digital assistants be rented from our corporate overlords?

Probably yes, in much the same way as we rent housing, telecom plans, and cloud compute as the economy becomes more advanced.

For those with serious AI needs, maintaining migration agility should always be considered. This can include a small on-premises deployment, which realistically cannot compete with socialized production in all aspects, as usual.

The nature of the economy is to involve more people and more organizations over time. I could see a future where somewhat smaller models are operated by a few different organizations. Universities, corporations, maybe even municipalities, tuned to specific tasking and ingested with confidential or restricted materials. Yet smaller models for some tasks could be intelligently loaded onto the device from a web server. This seems to be the way things are going RE the trendy relevance of "context engineering" and RL over Huge Models.
Ask HN: A HN style text only view of your YouTube feed
by fcpguru | 2025-08-17 17:43:24+00:00
Been working on this firefox extension (previously posted here):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44768714

It will send the video id from firefox to a local backend server and kick off yt-dlp.

You get not just the video but the transcript as well. So today I added a little more to the extension:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSach4YIsns

TLDW: you can now just hover over any youtube video and get the transcript on your clipboard.

And it got me thinking how much I would want a 100% text only HN style look and feel view of my youtube feed. With big, medium, and short summaries I can select. I could stop watching so many videos just to hear the good stuff. I could read 100x faster.

Other hackers of the world, what do you think of this vision?
by alansammarone | 2025-08-17 17:44:24+00:00
exception? I couldn't disagree more. I can think of one or two specific examples "fair" or even "useful" advertising, and that's being generous, among thousands or tens of thousands of examples. I'm not claiming I know more than the buyer or seller, I'm claiming the seller "knows" much more than the buyer, and has vastly more resources and vested interest in the transaction than the buyer (because of the scale, and the fact that people are mostly very similar to each other - economies of scale, essentially). Note I'm restricting my argument to the case of big companies selling to consumers, or big companies buying from other big companies, although the latter is comparatively less damaging to society overall, still pretty bad tho.

The seller knows how much effort/resources were put into the product, knows (or has enough resources to figure out) how to nudge/mislead the consumer, has teams of brilliant people working on that - see the ad industry. I would definitely agree that the consumer has some responsibility, too, to stay informed, and if it weren't for the fact that this causes externalities to society, I wouldn't give a crap about the fact that some corporate director was duped into buying a terrible product. Unfortunately, that causes companies that particularly good in misleading people to outcompete companies who spend their money elsewhere.
by ambicapter | 2025-08-17 17:44:51+00:00
That's interesting, and I have no doubt it works for you. This sounds like a ritual you devised for yourself in order to get your work done, but one who would have to demonstrate that "talking" to an LLM is actually more effective than any other trick like saying "I'll just work for 10 minutes" or chanting some mantra that gets you in the right mood to code. I think you already said that here

> I read it with the same emotional attachment as I have when reading a Reddit post and see if there's something useful and move on.

but I'd love to see a study that actually tests interacting with an LLM vs. other techniques.
by ozim | 2025-08-17 17:45:35+00:00
Oh so it is OK to post mediocre stuff on your own blog where no one reads.

But trying to show it to people is not.

I like „content guardians” everywhere saying „oh this does not belong to HN”, „oh this doesn’t belong to linked in.

Fuck that - let people do what they want and express themselves even if it is mediocre shoveling of ideas
by gwynforthewyn | 2025-08-17 17:45:52+00:00
I've been seeing teammates go from promising juniors to people who won't think, and I've tried hard here to say what I think they're going wrong.

Like the great engineers who came before us and told us what they had learned, Rob Pike, Jez Humble, Martin Fowler or Bob Martin, it's up to those of us with a bit more experience to help the junior generation to get through this modern problem space and grow healthily. First, we need to name the problem we see, and for me that's what I wrote about here.
by spankalee | 2025-08-17 17:46:03+00:00
I'm very excited by Porffor too, but a lot of what you've said here isn't correct.

> - Porffor can use typescript types to significantly improve the compilation. It's in many ways more exciting as a TS compiler.

Proffor could use types, but TypeScript's type system is very unsound and doing so could lead to serious bugs and security vulnerabilities. I haven't kept track of what Oliver's doing here lately, but I think the best and still safe thing you could do is compile an optimistic, optimized version of functions (and maybe basic blocks) based on the declared argument types, but you'd still need a type guard to fall back to the general version when the types aren't as expected.

This isn't far from what a multi-tier JIT does, and the JIT has a lot more flexibility to generate functions for the actual observed types, not just the declared types. This can be a big help when the declared types are interfaces, but in an execution you only see specific concrete types.

> or have a very simple arena allocator that works at the request level.

This isn't viable. JS semantics mean that the request handling path can generate objects that are held from outside the request's arena. You can't free them or you'd get use-after-free problems.

> - many of the restrictions that people associate with JS are due to VMs being designed to run untrusted code

This is true to some extent, but most of the restrictions are baked into the language design. JS is a single-threaded non-shared memory language by design. The lack of threads has nothing to do with security. Other sandboxed languages, famously Java, have threads. Apple experimented with multithreaded JS and it hasn't moved forward not because of security but because it breaks JS semantics. Fork is possible in JS already, because it's a VM concept, not a language concept. Low-level memory access would completely break the memory model of JS and open up even trusted code to serious bugs and security vulnerabilities.

> It is unlikely that many people would run something compiled with Porffor in a WASM runtime

Running JS in WASM is actually the thing I'm most excited about from Porffor. There are a more and more WASM runtimes, and JS is handicapped there compared to Rust. Being able to intermix JS, Rust, and Go in a single portable, secure runtime is a killer feature.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-17 17:46:05+00:00
Prolog (and Datalog) plays fast and loose with the original FOL terminology from which its own is derived, so e.g. a "term" in Prolog is both an "atomic formula" or "atom" in FOL, and a "first order term" (or just term) in FOL. In FOL the sets of function and predicate symbols are distinct and disjoint, but in Prolog they are not, and my guess has always been that this is the reason that everything gets called a "term" (and "atom" ends up replacing "constant").

And nothing gets evaluated, either in FOL or Prolog/Datalog, so I'd like to nitpick and say that terms don't '"return" the value of true', they are only transformed, by unification and -in the case of Prolog- by SLD-Resolution. The interpretation of a Prolog program eventually "returns" the result of a proof, which is usually 'true' or 'false', but sometimes 'yes' or 'no'; but nothing in a Prolog program can really be seen as "returning" anything. It's a peculiarity of logic programming languages that I think takes a while for most programmers to get their heads around.

So a logic programming language that returns values and replaces expressions by their values is a substantial departure from Prolog syntax and semantics. But, you know that judging from the excerpt above.

Pedantry!
by brudgers | 2025-08-17 17:46:15+00:00
Typically the embedded story (at least in the stories I'm familiar with)

Maybe read the three classics dystopian sci-fi:

The Earth Abides Day of the Triffids On the Beach

Or just classic scifi:

Anything by Phillip K. Dick Most things by Robert Heinlein

Or authors of “modern” classics:

William Gibson John Scalzi

Even Dune is a pretty grim future for all the non-player characters. Never mind Margret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, McCarthy’s The Road, and Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.
by aledalgrande | 2025-08-17 17:47:04+00:00
I don't know a lot about 3D modeling, but I can see that the objects created by this AI are way too high poly, which would be bad for performance if used e.g. in a game. But it still looks like a great prototyping tool to me, especially if you want to express an idea in your head to an actual 3D designer, in the same way UX designers can show a prototype to developers with Claude code now, instead of trying to repro an idea with Figma.
by refulgentis | 2025-08-17 17:47:07+00:00
I have to wonder if its missing forest for the trees: do you perceive GPT-OSS-120b as an emotionally warm model?

(FWIW this reply may be beneath your comment, but not necessarily voiced to you, the quoted section jumped over it too, direct from 5 isn't warm, to 4o-non-reasoning is, to the math on self-hosting a reasoning model)

Additionally, author: I maintain a llama.cpp-based app on several platforms for a couple years now, I am not sure how to arrive at 4096 tokens = 3 GB, it's off by an OOM AFAICT.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-17 17:47:17+00:00
LinkedIn also rewards absolutely sickening PR spamming. All the corporate feelgood PR bullshit that people willingly repost, it makes me sick to my stomach.

People must have no spine or self-worth to be reposting all their employer's hot air like that.

But yeah Microsoft is all about mediocrity. Their game is becoming the biggest common denominator, not the best.
by alansammarone | 2025-08-17 17:47:48+00:00
This is... an understatement. I would agree advertising is a useful signal, but I would say that not only can you not trust advertising, you should put negative weight on advertising - i.e. whenever you see an ad, that means the company is putting some amount of money into trying to convince you by means other than an honest comparison/spec table, and therefore is likely to have an inferior product. So personally, I generally avoid any companies/people whose presentations contains no information about the objective characteristics of their work.
by K0balt | 2025-08-17 17:48:02+00:00
Decades ago I was in the PC manufacturing and repair business. I religiously used anti-static mats, straps, And diffusers, but I still destroyed several thousand dollars of equipment over those years from equipment/ grounding failures, or even picking a PC up (accidentally touching a port) to put it on a bench.

It was interior Alaska, where humidity is low enough that an orange turns into a passable golf ball in a week and a half, so that was definitely a factor.

TLDR static electricity is bad for electronics, and damage does not necessarily show up as failure but often manifests as flaky behavior.
by srhtftw | 2025-08-17 17:49:26+00:00
This was fun. A kind of engineering MBTI¹.

I'm +3 Abstract, +2 Human-Friendly - https://pastebin.com/Y7t4ys3J

At the end I would have liked to see how each answer contributed to the final score, perhaps plotted on the final graph.

It would also be interesting to see how many others took the test and how my answers compared to theirs.

¹- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
by _dain_ | 2025-08-17 17:49:50+00:00
>And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.

LISAs are a trap if you want to buy in the South. You can only use it if the value of the property is £450k or less. The limit hasn't been raised since 2017 despite crazy house price inflation. So many people got completely fucked by this; they have their money locked up in the LISA, can't buy a house near London with it, and can't transfer it to something else without a huge penalty.

See: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2025/06/lifetime-isa-...

More broadly, "the govt pays the rest" is part of the problem. All this help-to-buy stuff amounts to demand subsidies that just push prices higher and higher.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-17 17:50:10+00:00
They are not masking and pretending to be loveable and huggable -- it is very obviously different.

These two videos are by an interviewer who works with special needs kids/adults:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxZ7aZMFHPE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjlwtKAO6yw

As you can see it's also a physical development disorder, and it may bring to mind Downs syndrome more than autism (indeed, the young woman in the first video makes this comparison and understands the difference).

The thing it makes me want to ask a scientist is to what extent does Williams Syndrome change the mirror neurons or their processing.
by alansammarone | 2025-08-17 17:50:34+00:00
Couldn't agree more with part of your comment, but only because of the fact that you used the word "specs". Assuming the specs are objective, thats the only true form of useful ad.

Ads do work, yes. But not because they present true facts. It's because people tend to buy things that are from brands that they remember (a form of recency bias I guess, although not sure about that). So if you know nothing about which ice cream brand is best, you'll default to the one that had an ad saying "We sell ice cream!". That's, again, a well-studied effect. Consumers are not rational.

I don't remember seeing many tv commercials with a comparison table containing technical specs.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-17 17:50:40+00:00
"We" refers to people who agree with us, and that includes the Supreme Court of the United States.

Refer to my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44921015

> Theft, meanwhile, emphasizes the potential commercial harm of infringement to copyright holders.

> However, copyright is a type of intellectual property, an area of law distinct from that which covers robbery or theft, offenses related only to tangible property.

> Not all copyright infringement results in commercial loss

> the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that infringement does not easily equate with theft

> Judge Kathleen M. Williams granted a motion to deny the MPAA the usage of words whose appearance was primarily "pejorative"

> This list included the word "piracy", the use of which, the motion by the defense stated, serves no court purpose but to misguide and inflame the jury
by calmbonsai | 2025-08-17 17:50:51+00:00
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.

> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.

> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...

I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.

Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
by FluGameAce007 | 2025-08-17 17:50:55+00:00
Using only Apple’s official diagnostic tools (Console.app) on a clean, non-jailbroken iPhone 14 Pro Max, the following issues were observed:

System daemons silently initiate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) scans without app activity or user interaction.

GPS location harvesting occurs with no prompts, indicators, or active apps.

Internal frameworks bypass Apple’s Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) protections using undocumented flags.

Bluetooth trust metadata (e.g., IRKs, pairing history) is exposed even when devices are disconnected.

Cryptographic failures are silently ignored during trust operations.

These behaviors suggest an integrated telemetry pipeline that operates beneath iOS’s user-facing privacy model. The full report includes logs, technical breakdowns, and reproduction steps.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-08-17 17:51:02+00:00
The only sculpting example I see is the very first hat. Do you want to tell me you wouldn't be able to sculpt that?

I perfectly understand the time/patience/energy argument and my bias here. But even Spore (video game) editor with all its limitations gives you a similar result to the examples provided, and at least there you are the one giving the shape to your work, which gives you more control, and your art more soul, and moreover puts you on a creative path where the results are getting better.

Will the AI soon surpass human modeller? I don't know... I hear so much hype for AI, I have fallen victim to it myself where I spent quite some time trying to use AI for some serious work and guess what - it works as a search engine, it will give me a ffmpeg command that I could duckduckgo anyway, it will give me an Autohotkey script that I could figure out myself after a quick search etc. The LLM fails even at the tasks that seem optimal for it - I have tried multiple times to translate movie subtitles with it, and while the translation was better than using machine learning, at some point the AI goes crazy and decides to change the order of scenes in a movie - something that I couldn't detect until I watched the movie with friends, so it was a critical failure. I described a word, and the AI failed to give me the word I couldn't remember, and a simple search on thesaurus succeeded instead. I described what I remembered from a quote, but the AI failed to give me the quote, but my googlefu was enough to find it.

You probably know how to code, and would cringe if someone suggested to you to just ask the AI to write you the code for a video game without you yourself knowing how to code to at least supervise and correct it, and yet you think the 3D modelling will be good enough without intervention of a 3D artist; maybe, but as someone experienced in 3D I just don't see it, just like I don't see AI making Hollywood movies even though a lot of people claim it's a matter of years before that becomes the reality.

Instead what I see is AI slop everywhere and I'm sure video games will be filled with AI crap, just like a lot of places were filled with machine-learning translations because Google seriously suggested on its conferences that the translations are good enough (and if someone speaks only English, the Dunning-Kruger effect kicks in).

Sure, eventually we might have AGI and humanity will be obsolete. But I'm not a fan of extrapolating hyperbolic data; one Youtuber made an estimation that in a couple decades Earth will be visited by aliens, because there won't be enough Earthlings to satisfy his channel viewership stats.
by nialse | 2025-08-17 17:51:11+00:00
Working in psychometrics I’m in the somewhat conservative “g is simply shared variance of many tests measuring human abilities”-camp.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412107?origin=crossref&seq=1

I’m not subscribing to the notion that g should be controlled for environment, quite the contrary, but if you do, what is left is the part of g which is genetics.

EDIT: The bit of knowledge I have comes from being published in psychiatric epidemiology on the topic of cognitive impairment and substance use.
by ahmedhawas123 | 2025-08-17 17:51:55+00:00
Are there video generation benchmarks similar to how there are benchmarks for LLMs? Reason I ask is because with lots of these models you have to go through a long cycle to get them up and running before you see an output, and often they will break with basic tasks requiring physics, state, etc. Would love to see some comparison of models across basic things like that.
by mpweiher | 2025-08-17 17:52:06+00:00
> You were the one who tied it to renewables: “And the energy crisis 2021-2023 affected the entire world, yet for some reason the countries with intermittent renewables were worst affected?”

Nope, that was reacting to your previous comment:

To say nothing of the fact that prices in many countries are often set by the marginal generator, which in the case of say Germany on that graph is oil, gas, or coal. Most of which is imported from other countries as fluctuates wildly with fuel costs (e.g. price shocks after Russian’s invasion of Ukraine).

And again:

A statement of fact (that the site peddles in misinformation and anti-renewable taking points)

Nope. The only "evidence" for your claim that it "peddles" was something where the site was correct and you were the one who peddled the misinformation.

> In fact, coal consumption increased while renewable share went down. So check your facts. Feel free to check them,

I did. You obviously didn't.

German energy consumption jumps “surprisingly” due to weak renewables output in early 2025

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-energy-consumpti...

Energy usage in Europe's biggest economy increased to 187.3 million metric tons of coal equivalent, an industry standard measure, from 183.1 million in the first six months of 2024, AGEB's January-June report showed.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-energy-use-...

Germany's energy transition hits reverse so far in 2025

Clean energy sources generated the smallest amount of Germany's electricity in over a decade so far in 2025, dealing a blow to the energy transition momentum of Europe's largest economy.

To compensate for the drop in clean electricity supplies, German power firms were forced to lift fossil fuel power output by 10% from a year ago, and the share of fossil fuels in the German generation mix has climbed to its highest since 2018.

Anyway: you keep changing the subject, being dishonest about doing so etc.

Bye.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-17 17:52:09+00:00
toxic mediocrity is clever, on the other not sure if it is clever enough that he has to describe coming up with the phrase twice.

>I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity

four paragraphs later

>The vast majority of it falls into a category I would describe as Toxic Mediocrity.
by xena | 2025-08-17 17:52:33+00:00
Sometimes? A lot of the time the point of therapy is to challenge your statements and get you to the heart of the issue so you can mend it or recognize things that are off base and handle things differently. A lot of the relationship is meant to be a supportive kind of conflict so that you can get better. Sometimes people really do need validation, but other times they need to be challenged to be improved. As it stands today, AI models can't challenge you in the way a human therapist can.