MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-08-11 10:18:51+00:00
Our last CIO bought into all the AI hype early on and pushed it hard, before we were even allowed to use it. It was an odd time. We’d go to a town hall and get told that AI is going to change everything, and then get an email telling us we weren’t allowed to use it.

Now that we can use Copilot, we have a new CIO and I don’t hear about it so much. There is still some AI hype, but it’s more about how it’s being used in our products, rather than how to use it internally to do the work.

Apparently sometime in the next year we’re getting a new version of Jira with some AI that can do user stories on its own, but I don’t see that changing much of anything.

The bottleneck has rarely been the actual writing of code, it’s been people making decisions and general bureaucracy. AI isn’t solving that. Copilot has also not impressed anyone on my team. As far as the code we work on, it’s pretty bad. There are a few niche things it helps with, mostly writing queries to pull values out of complex json. That saves a little time, but hardly 30-50%. More like 1-2%.

Management stopped giving us new people, while pressuring us to do more, for many years now. This was a trend long before AI and I haven’t noticed any major change. I’d say it’s been this way for over 10 years now, ever since they had the realization that tasks could be automated.
by pyrale | 2025-08-11 10:19:07+00:00
> In general you are not refuting my main point

I don't care about refuting a theoretical point.

Dissemination of big three alumni into companies, and their use of the services of their former colleagues is a thing I have witnessed, both from the client side, and from the experience from friends at these firms when they left.

It's simply the way these firms work: associates cultivate long-term business/support relations with executives, and they progress in the firm as these relations become more fruitful. It's honestly unsurprising that departing employees are seen as potential clients, and therefore that the firm helps them land as well as they can.
by ben_w | 2025-08-11 10:19:24+00:00
> That's not an answer.

???

> You are factually wrong, a Yemeni does not need to pay 100+ years of salary to get a CS degree, end of story.

So far as I can tell, the like-for-like comparison is as per the other commenter you responded to: here's a fancy thing rich people in rich countries use, therefore the comparison is to a rich country's degree.

This is because you also don't need to pay 38.6 months of income to get access to an AI. Not even to access OpenAI's best. And even the downgrade after usage limits is not terrible.

Of course, if you don't like this comparison, then sure, I'd accept what you say. I'm disagreeing about the assumptions of what's comparable here.

> I've seen ZERO evidence that a student from Harvard or Imperial to be more knowledgeable than one in unnamed universities from the third world you've never heard about.

Mm. Tempted to agree even without looking you up: I'm British, so my reference point for "fancy university isn't automatically great" is half the British politicians.

OTOH, after I graduated, I did live in Cambridge (UK) for nearly a decade, and I do miss how incredibly densely packed it was with nerds, it's not something I found in other places.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-11 10:19:28+00:00
> Interestingly enough, not nearly as much gets published for e.g. Europe. Innate ability ?

From my personal feeling:

US culture is more on the extraverted side (i.e. a lot of people want/need shallow conversation instead of shutting their mouth, except if they have something important to say) than what is common in many European countries.

Thus, people who are more on the introvert side have a harder time in the USA than in many European countries, I guess.

Also, for various reason the whole "self-improvement industrial complex" is much less prevalent in European countries than in the USA.

Relatedly, I would say that in the USA, there is the mentality "Our society is the greatest ever made since God created Earth, so if you don't feel happy, the fault is on you: you need to self-improve."

On the other hand, in many European countries, the mentality is rather like "The society [note that I didn't write "our" - there is barely any sense of belonging] is a corrupt, messed-up shithole. Yes, there exist those smooth talkers who tell you that you need to self-improve (e.g. social skills), but do you know what: those just want to make money from the mess you are in, and/or are telling you the things that those in power want you to brainwash with. So, instead of wasting time and money to get yourself a brainwashing to make yourself 'socially adapted', better invest this energy into exposing all these assholes in power who are responsible for the whole mess. Since there are so many people who also have this kind of hate, you will easily find friends this way, and thus become more socially skilled." :-)
by uyzstvqs | 2025-08-11 10:19:41+00:00
It's not a left-right divide. Privacy advocates are a combination of the general right-wing + the anti-establishment left-wing. The people supporting this are establishment career politicians, who are left-wing as well (e.g. ylva johansson), though different from the anti-establishment left-wing (e.g. pirate party).

Anyone who tries to make this a left-right issue must stop, because that's how we lose.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-08-11 10:20:10+00:00
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.

* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"

Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption

https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...

Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement

https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
by aitchnyu | 2025-08-11 10:20:33+00:00
Guess the name: In 2015 I was preaching that ____ simplfies the mental model of your web app, makes everything performant, the api will dominate and endure for decades. Answer: React. Soon, we were feeling the induced demand for features and timelines till we regressed to our natural "hair on fire" state. AI is (not just) a better footgun.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-08-11 10:20:46+00:00
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.

* https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ , see the table "The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail"

Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption

https://edri.org/our-work/technical-experts-call-on-virkkune...

Concluding report of the High-Level Group on access to data for effective law enforcement

https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/4802e306...
by karel-3d | 2025-08-11 10:20:59+00:00
The previous post in this entry is even more impressive!

Very condensed tl;dr: winter games had a DRM that makes the game perform poorly if you enter wrong code; most of the cracks (including an "official" crack from 1996) skip it wrong and therefore you have a broken game; that includes gog.com version.

This person actually released a "patch" for gog.com version of the game.

https://mrwint.github.io/winter/patcher/index.html
by andrepd | 2025-08-11 10:22:32+00:00
Nice theory, but the European left wing parties (The Left, and Greens) are against chat control, while the right wing parties are in favour.

In the UK, the Conservatives and the "New Labour" aka centre-right Starmer aka Tory Lite are responsible for massive backsliding of civil liberties, while those "far left" types like Corbyn are opposed to it.

So reality, at least in those two examples, seems to contradict your theory.
by gambiting | 2025-08-11 10:22:39+00:00
I can only assume you'd say so if you were able to do either of those things in the first place, so yeah, it doesn't feel life changing. It's like winning a car in a radio lottery when you already had a car - yeah pretty cool, but not life changing.

There's a lot of people who can't even imagine ever being able to put down a deposit on a house or to send their kids to collage debt-free. With an amount of money like that you can go from being trapped in a rent hell forever to actually purchasing your own house. Or you can give your kids the education you want to give them. They are major, life changing impacts. Again, to describe it as "simplifes a thing or two" to me implies that you could do them even without this money in which case yeah, it changes very little.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-08-11 10:23:27+00:00
I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too.

Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
by denizsafak | 2025-08-11 10:24:01+00:00
Hey, can you share an example book or text so I can test it?

Regarding "abogen chunks the text it feeds to Kokoro by sentence", that's not quite correct, it actually splits subtitles by sentence, not the chunks sent to Kokoro.

This might be happening because the "Replace single newlines with spaces" option isn’t enabled. Some books require that setting to work correctly. Could you try enabling it and see if it fixes the issue?
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-11 10:24:04+00:00
Without getting into hairy calculations, if you really thought this was possible with a high probability, you'd accept $20 bucks and agree to give me a big payout (say $4000) in the future (say when you retire) because you think there is a large chance you'd never have to pay.

We could game this out and figure out exactly what a rational bet is, but you get my point. It seems very hard to believe you think there is a 10-15% chance. Those are probabilities at which you would be making major moves to hedge.
by glimshe | 2025-08-11 10:25:00+00:00
Home computers were ridiculously expensive in their initial years. Some could cost more than a car. ChatGPT Pro gives you access to cutting edge technology so it isn't surprising that it's expensive.

Just remember that a Wal Mart $50 phone is faster than a supercomputer from the 70s/80s. Prices will go down.
by gwd | 2025-08-11 10:25:35+00:00
I agree that we have a new situation developing; but we're not going to get any clarity unless we see clearly what the new situation is. There are several things you're still conflating:

1. The ability of an entity (human or AI) which can be prompted to produce copyright-infringing material.

2. Actually producing copyright-infringing material.

Sure, if OpenAI is actually producing copyright-infringing material at scale, unprompted, then that needs to be addressed. If a common way around NYT's paywall were to copy & paste the first few lines into ChatGPT and then read the rest of the article, then yes, that's a hole that needs to be filled. But that's with the production and dissemination, not the training.

Regarding scale, yes, there is a difference here, but it's more subtle than you think. There are probably millions of toddlers who can recite The Gruffalo nearly verbatim. However, each of those toddlers were trained individually. Similarly, there are probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of artists who, when prompted, could generate an image that would be similar enough to the presented image to violate copyright. But again, each of those individuals were trained separately.

The difference that modern tech companies have is that they can train their systems once, and then duplicate the same training across millions of instances.

One potential argument to make here would be to say: Training with this material is fair use; but fair use or not, those weights are now a derivative work. You can use exactly one copy of those weights, but you can't copy those weights millions of times, any more than it would be fair use to distribute one copy of that image to everyone in the company. You need to either train millions of copies, or pay licensing fees.

I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but at least it seems to me to bring the actual issues into more clarity.
by murderfs | 2025-08-11 10:25:44+00:00
It is very easy for zero-copy IPC using sealed memfd to be massively slower than just copying, because of the cost associated with doing a TLB shootdown on munmap. In order to see a benefit over just writing into a pipe, you'd likely need to be sending gigantic blobs, mapping them in both the reader and write into an address space that isn't shared with any other threads that are doing anything, and deferring and batching munmapping (and Linux doesn't really provide you an actual way to do this, aside from mapping them all in consecutive pages with MAP_FIXED and munmapping multiple mappings with a single call).

Any realistic high-performance zero copy IPC mechanism needs to avoid changing the page tables like the plague, which means things like memfd seals aren't really useful.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-11 10:25:46+00:00
Proving the point that better type system and abstractions don't necessarly produce bad Assembly, and if constexpr is used, there won't be anything on the final executable other than the actual value.

https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/31o75W5xx

https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/av6a43WeY
by username332211 | 2025-08-11 10:25:50+00:00
I feel the ship has sailed here.

Once the police started to record every interaction with the public, along with their existing habit of placing traffic cameras left and right, they acquired enough data to track people.

Trying to restrict the analysis of existing data is never going to work. The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened, if they had ran Flock's software on their surveillance footage.

And even if by some miracle you manage to forbid plate recognition, cross referencing, etc, every ambitious (or lazy) detective would start doing it on the down low with OSS software.
by Svip | 2025-08-11 10:25:51+00:00
Which leads to my next questions: What is pornography material? Do drawings qualify? What about text? What about softcore pornography? What about a non-profit outfit? What is the amount of pornography material I need to have for it to be considered disseminating? Someone uploads a few suggestive fan art drawings to my niche bulletin board and now I am liable for a year in jail?
by crossroadsguy | 2025-08-11 10:26:19+00:00
Never stopped. I save some semi-sensitive data as well now, but inside Cryptomator.

It still works few times better than Google Drive and, if I could pick a safe estimate, some 100…000 times better than i-bloody-Cloud. The latter is not really a compliment. The latter is just an empirical example of a mammoth company churching out subpar software year after year to a captive fanbase (distinct from a customer base) in its infinite arrogance and non-h/w incompetence.

I did try alternatives like Mega, Tresorit (my god, this solid snappy native app sucks in functionality!) et cetera but nothing came close in reliability, smooth operation and consistency. So there I am still tolerating one of those few last remaining non-native apps on my devices. I have Syncthing but that has a different role and usecase and I reckon not just for me.
by andrepd | 2025-08-11 10:26:30+00:00
> The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject.

Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.

It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
by tobr | 2025-08-11 10:26:45+00:00
Good opportunity to share this life hack: I used to end up with a mess almost every time I used my coffee grinder, much like the picture in the article. Eventually I learned that this only happens with very dry beans. Adding a few tiny drops of water before grinding is enough to get rid of it pretty much completely. Since making coffee already involves water it’s as easy as dipping a finger and then running it through the beans.
Creating good content with AI still needs good amount of iteration if you CARE
by soorajsanker | 2025-08-11 10:27:56+00:00
I wasn't spending much on my side projects for the last few weeks, but I this weekend, made some progress on my content creation experimental agent! (and burnt some $ tokens too )

I keep getting excited about the future and the new set of problems that are coming with assisted deep content creation.

Iteration is the key! like most of the conversational agents, keeping what is relevant in the context without bloating is more important in non textual contents, it sometimes needs language as a medium, it sometimes need differently trained models to understand the context -> pass it to another nicely -> store it in a common memory -> let users iterate nicely.

- no rush. I tried solving it with lesser turns and efficiency, but getting inspired from coding agents, i realised its about the quality, slow is fine so that content creators will get enough time to think and try to match the pace with the assistant, like we do in a team.

My attempt to solve this is constantly changing! When I started, it looked like very simple dots to connect, but when I actually tried, it is difficult.

I tried solving it like a programmer first by making more agent tools, but what AI cares about more is raw capabilities and excellent examples, you don't have to wrap everything in tools, I feel agents fundamentally works better if tools can do broader tasks than creating numerous focused tasks, I could be wrong in other aspects, but with my current experiments and the given context requirements thats what i learned.

I hope I should be able to show this once I am satisfied of sharing it!(definition of "satisfied" here is that when it delivers value - when i am able to fully iterate and publish on a long form content myself -podcast/long paper/video, it needs to stand out with the one shot content created with currently available tools)

the journey of building AI tools that actually help creators is messier and more iterative than i thought. but worth every token spent though.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-08-11 10:28:30+00:00
> I struggle to comprehend how an odd quantization like 5 bit, that doesn't align well with 8 bit boundaries, would not slow things down for inference

Who says it doesn’t :)?

At least in my tests there is a big penalty to using an “odd” bit stride.

Testing 4bit quantization vs 5bit in Llama.cpp, I see quite a bit more than the “naiively expected” 25% slowdown from 4 to 5 bits.
by rightbyte | 2025-08-11 10:28:42+00:00
> "ptr isn't declared in the class body"

I would assume the interviewer messed up and forgot to declare it and if I just not pretend to assume it was "left out for brevity" I would fail the interview as a smart ass.

There are so many layers to interviewing and you kinda need to guess what the intervoewer wants to hear.
by echoangle | 2025-08-11 10:29:33+00:00
I can't imagine that the image shown in CarPlay Ultra is still rendered on the phone. It's used to show all driving relevant things (speed etc.). Is a wireless connection to the phone reliable enough so this would be allowed by regulators?

I thought the main image would be rendered on the car using local data and only the entertainment stuff is transferred from the phone.

And also, how would you drive your car without the phone if everything is rendered on the phone? Would they implement an entire backup dashboard for this? I thought it would always show the CarPlay Ultra interface, even when no phone is connected.
by M95D | 2025-08-11 10:29:44+00:00
I'm not opposed to a player connected to a phone or other network, but that player doesn't need to be on the CAN bus, or any other car bus. Car speed for volume control, steering wheel buttons, lights, etc. can be communicated from the car to the player via dedicated wires (on/off, pwm, voltage ladder, etc.) like they did it in the early 2000s.
by maccard | 2025-08-11 10:30:04+00:00
> I didn't do that well on it just because I was nervous as hell.

The problem is everyone gets nervous. The only way to avoid that is paid work trials and to decide whether you want to keep hem after 90 days. But that requires the person to quit their job.

> "hey look at this class from our codebase and tell us what's wrong with it!"

Ours is a self contained example, littered with absolutely obvious errors that anyone who has written the language being interviewed for (C++) should be able to spot a least 2-3 issues with. There are absolute glaring fundamental issues in about 50 lines of code and you are explicitly told there are numerous errors with it.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-11 10:32:29+00:00
Yes; they could amend the definitely-not-a-constitution (for branding/eurosceptic-appeasement reasons, the EU constitution was rebranded as the Lisbon treaty before adoption). Arguably such a right may exist already and this legislation might find itself on a collision course with the ECJ if it passed (notably the ECJ nuked _another_ intrusive law, back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive).
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-11 10:33:48+00:00
> individuals copying even small excerpts of copyrighted material

Legal copyright claims (not the YouTube kind) need to justify harm to the original piece.

> libraries

Setting aside my opinion on the situation of public libraries, I wouldn't call libraries "humans copying books by hand"

> this happened: [...]

"This article is purely satirical and fictitious. "
by ElectroBuffoon | 2025-08-11 10:33:57+00:00
Yes, many sites already have it, RTA is nearly 3 decades old. It seems new proposed laws always ignore such systems are not just a theory but in a reality in use.

What happens over and over only reinforces they idea that they really want "everyone, empty your pockets and show your papers, NOW!" laws and just hide it with "it's the only way, trust us; for the children!". A pretty telling proof is they want to be exempt.
by ryanjshaw | 2025-08-11 10:34:32+00:00
I found it frustrating because of all the links everywhere. In the “How to use this guide” section it links to a body language section.

But there’s no context as to where this body language section fits in.

Am I supposed to read the body language section now and then remember to go back to the how to section? Or is body language discussed later? Then why link to it now? This format stresses me out.
by thorin | 2025-08-11 10:34:45+00:00
If you want to live in a low cost of living country you need to learn to live as the locals live. My friends that live overseas in Asia or in Eastern Europe probably spend as much as I do on rent and have servants, drivers etc so they still need to earn quite a bit.

If you don't have any family you could try somewhere relatively close by for short periods and see how you get on e.g. USA->Panama/Costa Rica, Western Europe -> Eastern Europe, or maybe consider Thailand/Vietnam.
by eska | 2025-08-11 10:34:52+00:00
That whole post reads like a parody. Making fun of other config formats, only to go full blown category theory to explain one can merge config files.. Also weird to use key-value maps as basic type instead of lists, then having to make lists out of maps, rather than the other way around. And who wants to configure the comment symbol? Schema validation is also not in, but hey we can define data types (which are app specific anyway?)