MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-21 22:23:00+00:00
Between “presumes a solid grasp of which things out there are not fraud besides those which are coercion, but that's not a subject I'm interested in having an opinion about,” before going on and sharing an opinion on that subject, and “even the Invisible Hand of the market is hand-shaped,” I think it may just be AI slop.
by 6r17 | 2025-08-21 22:23:07+00:00
Hei ! Just wanted to drop by to say that i tested this with a black and white logo that I had generated ; sounded like the worst case scenario ; it handled it flawlessly ; the picture didn't look the best - but the job was done and it worked. Bookmarked it will definitely use it if i need to !

Is this a commercial project or an open-source ?
by ThieleMachine | 2025-08-21 22:23:20+00:00
Author here. This repository contains the formal specification and reference implementation of a new model of computation. The core of the work is the formal proof in thielecpu/coq/ThieleMachine.v. This file contains the machine-checked proofs for two main theorems: 1. Turing-Completeness: The machine can simulate any Turing Machine. 2. The Paradox-Cost Theorem: The machine operates under a formal law where a detected logical contradiction corresponds to a provable, infinite information-theoretic cost (cost_of_paradox_is_infinite).* The Python code is a reference implementation designed for empirical testing. The README.md serves as the technical paper explaining the model and its implications. I invite you to review the formal proofs and the experimental results.
by joak | 2025-08-21 22:23:30+00:00
The issue I have is that it produce code that is unmaintainable. Poor modularity, code duplication, hidden errors producing spurious bugs, ...

Nonetheless it's ability to produce code that works is impressive, it's useful for learning, to generate throwaway code...

For example I can ask for a piece of code generating stats from logs. The code is not meant to last and will have few users (the devs), so maintainability is not an issue.
by therobots927 | 2025-08-21 22:23:53+00:00
“The rigidness and near-perfect reliability of computer software is the unusual thing in human history, an outlier we’ve gotten used to.”

Ordered approximately by recency:

Banking? Clocks? Roman aqueducts? Mayan calendars? The sun rising every day? Predictable rainy and dry season?

How is software the outlier here?
by Nevermark | 2025-08-21 22:24:21+00:00
> what do you think of recent MIT news that 95% gen ai projects don't do anything valuable at all ?

Worth noting that a project that ends up “doing nothing” isn’t the same as a project that had/created no value.

Even some projects that in hindsight were deterministic lemons.

Assuming compute resources continue scaling up, and architectures keep improving, AI change now has an everything, everywhere, all the time, scope. Failing fast is necessarily going to have a substantial dimension.
by mynameisash | 2025-08-21 22:24:26+00:00
> what this program does is trivial to describe and should have a commensurately simple implementation

Why do you think that a simple implementation follows from a simple explanation? As an example, see XKCD 1425[0], whose transcript I include here:

> Cueball: When a user takes a photo, the app should check whether they're in a national park...

> Ponytail: Sure, easy GIS lookup. Gimme a few hours.

> Cueball: ...and check whether the photo is of a bird.

> Ponytail: I'll need a research team and five years.

> In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1425/
by pixl97 | 2025-08-21 22:25:42+00:00
Civilization is the process of externalizing our individual needs to others.

We externalize our information to books. We externalize our jobs to specialists. We externalize our shelter to home builders. We externalize our food to farmers. We externalize our water to manucipalities.

Individually we may be weaker because of it. Yet in the end we are all stronger, and now billions of us can live at levels unimaginable in the past.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-21 22:25:43+00:00
It isn't clear to me why these are so different? The alternative mindset to deterministic software is to use probabilistic models. The common mentality is that deterministic software takes developer knowledge into account. This becomes less effective in the big data era, that's the bitter lesson, and that's why the shift is taking place. I'm not saying that the article is the bitter lesson restated, but I'm saying that this is a realisation of that lesson.
by scuff3d | 2025-08-21 22:26:24+00:00
This is why I'm still dubious about the overall productivity increase we'll see from AI once all the dust settles.

I think it's undeniable that in narrow well controlled use cases the AI does give you a bump. Once you move beyond that though the time you have to spend on cleanup starts to seriously eat into any efficiency gains.

And if you're in a domain you know very little about, I think any use case beyond helping you learn a little quicker is a net negative.
by nikisweeting | 2025-08-21 22:26:24+00:00
That's why we support Brave, Edge, Ungoogled-Chromium, and our own custom Chromium fork that we're working on.

Just because we only support Chromium doesn't mean we're pro-Google-dominance.

There are enough Chrome forks at this point that Google no longer has the power to unilaterally remove features from Chromium. Manifest v2 extensions still work great in Brave for example.
by eschaton | 2025-08-21 22:26:25+00:00
He’s pretty widely regarded as a kook by real scientists. He did some good math and physics back in the day and then some good work on cellular automata, and assumed that meant he was smarter than everybody else and that all of science was in fact a subset of his special focus, which it’s pretty trivially not.

Furthermore he has a very long history of grossly misrepresenting his accomplishments, whether by claiming authorship of his employees’ accomplishments or denying he was ever exposed to work that he built upon.

For example, I believe it’s been proven now that he had substantial exposure to MACSYMA before he started to lead his employees in the development of Mathematica—but that didn’t stop him from claiming it was entirely original and even threatening others with patent and other IP infringement claims for trying to do things that were similar.

(Which is the other problem with him: He doesn’t just take credit for the work he pays others to do, he’s an “IP protection” maximalist.)
by qingcharles | 2025-08-21 22:27:11+00:00
I don't see it as an easy problem for dang and team to solve. HN didn't flag the post, users dogpiled it. I think dang is right that the title smelled baity and for some reason a bunch of users just insta-flagged it without getting into the details. Moderation is hard. Good posts die unread.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 22:27:20+00:00
Measuring median wage of Starbucks employees against the one time multi-year strictly performance based stock-option plan given to the new CEO is so blatantly dishonest I can barely read the rest of the article.

Especially when Starbucks awards stock and healthcare plans to even part time baristas. Probably one of the better major employers of low skill labor in the world.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-21 22:28:22+00:00
I would argue that third-party tools don't really cut it, because a lot of the value is being able to include a script inline in, e.g., an email or chat message, and that's undermined if the recipient has to download and install a separate tool. (uv gets half credit because adoption is rapidly rising and it has a shot at becoming a de facto standard, but I'll only award full credit to Python when pip supports this.) They're good for exploring the design space, though.
by nielsbot | 2025-08-21 22:28:56+00:00
Key Points

- While some policymakers have blamed immigration for slowing U.S. wage growth since the 1970s, most academic research finds little long run effect on Americans’ wages.

- The available evidence suggests that immigration leads to more innovation, a better educated workforce, greater occupational specialization, better matching of skills with jobs, and higher overall economic productivity.

- Immigration also has a net positive effect on combined federal, state, and local budgets. But not all taxpayers benefit equally. In regions with large populations of less educated, low-income immigrants, native-bor

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116727/documents/...
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-08-21 22:29:14+00:00
The reason it's common courtesy is out of respect for the reviewer/maintainer's time. You need to let em know to look for the kind of idiotic mistakes LLMs shit out on a routine basis. It's not a "distraction", it's extremely relevant information. On the maintainer's discretion, they may not want to waste their time reviewing it at all, and politely or impolitely ask the contributor to do it again, and use their own brain this time. It also informs them on how seriously to take this contributor in the future, if the work doesn't hold water, or indeed, even if it does, since the next time the contributor runs the LLM lottery the result may be utter bullshit.

Whether it's prose or code, when informed something is entirely or partially AI generated, it completely changes the way I read it. I have to question every part of it now, no matter how intuitive or "no one could get this wrong"ish it might seem. And when I do, I usually find a multitude of minor or major problems. Doesn't matter how "state of the art" the LLM that shat it out was. They're still there. The only thing that ever changed in my experience is that problems become trickier to spot. Because these things are bullshit generators. All they're getting better at is disguising the bullshit.

I'm sure I'll gets lots of responses trying to nitpick my comment apart. "You're holding it wrong", bla bla bla. I really don't care anymore. Don't waste your time. I won't engage with any of it.

I used to think it was undeserved that we programmers called ourselved "engineers" and "architects" even before LLMs. At this point, it's completely farcical.

"Gee, why would I volunteer that my work came from a bullshit generator? How is that relevant to anything?" What a world.
by edent | 2025-08-21 22:29:17+00:00
I've been writing about (and using) QR codes for a couple of decades. I love the innovation that happens within the bounds of the specification.

One problem that I foresee with this is that they don't look like QR codes. People are now used to looking for a specific monochrome pattern to point their phone towards.

There was a competitor to QR - MS Tag - which tried something similar. Their codes were able to be integrated into designs without the "ugliness" of QR codes. The problem is, no one knew they were there!

See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/11/ms-tags-vs-qr-codes/#not-as...

The corner targets are still visible in Nitro's codes - so hopefully people will spot them. But I think it is OK to embrace the ugly. Not everything needs to be smothered in your corporate branding. Something which is standardised across multiple things is useful.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 22:29:18+00:00
I know it, understand it, it's easy for me to use, modern, can run without complex initialization/setup, a massive amount of module support including plugging into almost every kind of backend under the sun, and portable as a single file/script.

Those aren't good reasons to choose something?

I mean, sure, I COULD use Python or Go, or actually build small programs in a number of other languages instead of scripts altogether... But Deno+TS is actually a pretty good and capable shell scripting option. I'm not bashing on Python or Go here.. but given that I KNOW one of these options better than the others, it definitely is more than enough to tip the scales.

Unless you're making the assumption that my starting with JS so long ago means I don't understand modern/current conventions?
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-21 22:29:32+00:00
They scrubbed him on the grounds that he was an alchemist and charlatan. He wasn’t the only one to claim he had created a perpetual motion device in those centuries before thermodynamics was discovered. The French patent office banned perpetual motion submissions in 1789. I just don’t know if any other perpetual motion devices that worked — back when people didn’t know the difference between what you call (1) & (2) — (1) a modern definition of perpetual motion framed against thermodynamics and (2) a common notion of perpetual motion.

Drebbel’s patent: > “We have received the petition of Cornelis Jacobsz. Drebbel, citizen of Alkmaar, declaring that, after long and manifold investigations, he has at last discovered and practiced two useful and serviceable new inventions. The first: a means or instrument to conduct fresh water in great quantity, in the manner of a fountain, from low ground up to a height of thirty, forty, fifty or more feet, through lead pipes, and to raise it upward by various means and in whatever place desired, continually to flow and spring without ceasing. The second: a clock or timekeeper able to measure time for fifty, sixty, even a hundred or more years in succession, without winding or any other operation, so long as the wheels or other moving works are not worn out.”

I mean, I don’t blame people for being skeptical! Neither do I blame people that discount claims like “perpetual motion” or “theories of everything”— after all, they are associated with cranks and charlatans. But I do blame those that dismiss them entirely, out of hand. This was the case for Drebbel, when several 19th century reviewers lumped him with all the Alchemists and called them all frauds.

Now, Drebbel had the opportunity to demonstrate that his inventions worked — without stage trickery. Furthermore, his ideas and mechanical theories also bore other fruit.

To the OP, I don’t understand UM or the critique. If the theory is good, it will lead to some interesting output.

(Aside: GPT5 seems to have become much better at sourced humanities research, though it still has limitations. See how it pulled material for me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68a79d89-d194-8007-a8fa-c367cbf3fd... )
by jbmchuck | 2025-08-21 22:29:38+00:00
Should be easily doable with a semgrep rule, e.g.:

~> cat semgrep.yaml rules: - id: no-pattern-matching pattern: | match ...: message: | I'm not a fan of the pattern matching in Python severity: ERROR languages: - python

...

~> cat test.py #!/usr/bin/env python3 foo = 1 match foo: case 1: print("one")

...

~> semgrep --config semgrep.yaml test.py no-pattern-matching I'm not a fan of the pattern matching in Python 4┆ match foo: 5┆ case 1: 6┆ print("one")

(exits non-0)
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-21 22:29:41+00:00
but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter)

AI is a great proxy for how much someone has. If you're writing a PR you're demonstrating some manner of understanding. If you're submitting AI slop you're not.
by arp242 | 2025-08-21 22:30:02+00:00
> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.

Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.

To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.

As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-21 22:30:24+00:00
> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets.

Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-21 22:30:25+00:00
From much experience in this, I've never seen Walmart file a civil suit.

They don't technically prosecute anyone, but in the county where I was witness to prosecutions for Walmart shop-lifting they were putting a lot of pressure on the DA office. They would bring a ton of muscle, investigators, attorneys, print outs, DVDs, etc. They would push their prosecutions hard when they wanted to.
by strken | 2025-08-21 22:30:36+00:00
> The engineers will spend 10 minutes thinking about it, come up with a solution

This is fine if coupled with a dose of humility. Coming up with obvious solutions then researching why they don't work (or asking an expert) is a good way to understand the domain.

> (that won't work, but they insist it will) and dismiss the problem as "trivial", and think the guy is an idiot

This is obviously bad, but engineers often have imperfect people skills. I like to think they're aiming for the first but accidentally end up doing the second.

> it is not their job to rip each detail to shreds

It is an engineer's job to ask questions during planning when they're confused. This feels like it might be bad people skills again, because "ask questions" and "rip each detail to shreds" are in the same direction.
by XorNot | 2025-08-21 22:31:15+00:00
Which is a more complicated scenario then originally claimed, which was "I bought a $100 of BTC in cash many years ago and held onto it since then". If you cashed out that BTC via an exchange for example, then there will be bank transaction records showing you did but also welcome to "you were likely due taxes on your gains in the interim because it's no longer $100 of BTC - you took possession of much more in cash and later bought BTC again". Which is to say, you were ongoingly interacting with the money at decreasing intervals from the present.

The original claim is easy to prove: it'll be in a wallet which was held for that amount of time. The bank isn't obligated, unless you turn up covered in blood, to prove that you didn't just beat a guy with a hammer till he gives you the password - because you'll go down for that crime by other means.

But very few people engaging in ongoing criminal transactions are going to have a supply of aged BTC accounts to use in trade for goods and resources, and certainly you'll trigger red flags if you keep turning up with a brand new "held it for years" account of $50,000 each week. I mean we know this: because it makes headlines when untouched BTC accounts start moving.
by zmmmmm | 2025-08-21 22:31:16+00:00
The problem with sentiment driven market phenomena is they lack fundamental support. When they crash, they can really crash hard. And as much as I see real value in the progress in AI, 95% of the investment I see happening is all based on sentiment right now. Actually deploying AI into real operational scenarios to unlock the value everyone is talking about is going to take many years and it will look like a sink hole of cost well before that. Buckle up.
by schwartzworld | 2025-08-21 22:31:27+00:00
> I think it has replaced search quite quickly.

I really don't get this one. Between the ludicrous energy waste and answers that are confidently wrong, I don't see why anybody would prefer to get their information from am LLM.

Voice recognition is an apt example though. It has it's place, like texting my wife from the car without having to look at my phone, and it's obviously a boon to accessibility, but I wouldn't want to have it needlessly jammed into every workflow. I don't get people's willingness to place so much trust in a statistical language model that does a pretty good job of pretending to know things.
by stetrain | 2025-08-21 22:31:43+00:00
I think that may be a bit of an exaggeration.

Yes the financial component is part of it. Building dense walkable urban developments makes car ownership more expensive and non-car options cheaper and more convenient.

Some would argue that in many places car ownership is being subsidized by the way we develop and tax.

Some households will still have cars, but households are not the same as individual people.

And I think there are plenty of places where the majority of households don’t own cars. You can say they would if it was cheap and convenient enough, but that’s the whole point we’re discussing. Not dedicating so much development and infrastructure to cars will make them less convenient and more expensive options than the alternatives for at least some of the population.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-21 22:32:29+00:00
The problem is, no small company can reasonably compete with the big guns.

We're seeing this here in Munich. BMW and other local industry used to lure over loooots of people by virtue of paying much more than smaller shops - and now, Apple, Google, Microsoft and a few other big-techs our "beloved" prime minister Söder do the same thing to them... and as a side effect, fuck up the housing market even more than it already is.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 22:33:10+00:00
Stock buybacks were never illegal. Stock buybacks were how Buffett took control of a small textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway in the 1960s. What was not allowed was at-the-market buybacks in the open market. Corporations had to do tender offers at a fixed price, usually well above market price, in order to attract sellers to mail in their certificates. I'm not sure why that is necessarily better or helps anyone, so I think allowing ATM buybacks is a net good.
by azinman2 | 2025-08-21 22:33:11+00:00
Meta doesn’t really serve companionship. It used to make Yu connected to others in your social graph, which AI cannot replace. If IG still has the eyeballs, people can put AI generated content on it with or without meta’s permission.

Like with most things, people will want what’s expensive and not what’s cheap. AI is cheap, real humans are not. Why buy diamonds when you can’t tell the difference with cubic zirconia? And yet demand for diamonds only increases.
by FredPret | 2025-08-21 22:33:16+00:00
If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again.

We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.

I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.