MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by icw_nru | 2025-08-11 15:16:02+00:00
The language of the posts is usually representative of the user country. E.g. USA=English, Egypt=Arabic.

However, on aggregate, the majority of posts taken down are from middle eastern countries, and are mostly arabic language.

Please see "random/cherry picked" examples from human rights watches report mentioned in the bottom of the article.

To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
by icedchai | 2025-08-11 15:16:10+00:00
On top of that, almost nobody actually connected at 56K. You needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit. Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100's of milliseconds.

I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
by sreenathmenon | 2025-08-11 15:16:29+00:00
Hey, Thanks for the great feedback! You're raising valid point.

Actually, this package started based on a hackathon project where I was burning the Anthropic API credits for our hackathon project which was RAG (internal documentation) + MCP.

There were question which were getting repeated several times. The 50% + comes from this experience. So, based on this, I was thinking of some of the use cases like this:

Multi-User Support/FAQ Systems: - How do I reset my password? - Reset password steps? - Forgot my password help - Password reset procedure

RAG based: - How to configure VM? - How to deploy? - How to create a network?

Educational/Training Apps Developer Testing scenarios, etc

You're absolutely right that apps with unique queries won't see these benefits - this won't help in - Personalized Content - Real-Time Data - User-Specific Queries - Creative Generation and other scenarios

I think I should clarify this in the docs. Thanks for the great feedback. This is my first opensource package and first conversation in hackernews. Great to interact and learn from all of you
by MarkusWandel | 2025-08-11 15:17:15+00:00
Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat.

My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached.

Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were.

Hacker News still worked of course.
by tbbfjotllf | 2025-08-11 15:17:18+00:00
Sounds to me like you need something simple and quick. If the current system works for you I would suggest to keep using it. If you ever feel like you need something better I would recommend trying microsoft todo or google tasks. Google Tasks syncs with your google calendar so it's a bit more powerful. Apart from them both a pretty simple. If you are looking for something even simpler take a look at google keep. This is what I use personally.
by d_burfoot | 2025-08-11 15:17:30+00:00
The problem with productivity apps is that one size does not fit all. Everyone has radically different goals, constraints, interests, and workflows. Many people would benefit from having a "living" app that is personalized to their tastes, and also adapts over time as the characteristics of your life change (e.g. having kids is probably going to change your approach to productivity!)

I recommend finding a framework within which to build your own apps, and then building your own suite of apps that have exactly the features you want (shameless plug, I built a platform that can serve as such a framework : WebWidgets.io. It is basically a way to hook up SQLite databases to JS objects in the browser, which allows wide liberty to build your own simple custom apps).
by akkartik | 2025-08-11 15:18:04+00:00
I want to address the underlying philosophy behind your edit (and also your original comment). "Perfect is the enemy of good" is not just "all that." It is the thing, the critical design constraint. Computers are a hundred years old. If you believe all repetition should be offloaded to computers -- it sounds like that isn't working for you? I'm in the same boat, and I reacted by.. reducing my standards. I have a tool. It isn't perfect and there are no signs it's going to get perfect in my lifetime. So I don't wait for perfection. I get on with my life. Even if computers will be suitable for all repetitive tasks in another hundred years.

I do have a single source of truth, and it's my todo list. However, I manualate to keep it thus. When I add something to the calendar, I copy it over to my todo list as well.

I don't do this for everything, only stuff that improves my decision making. So an appointment with a barber can just be on my calendar. Long todo lists intimidate me anyway, so it would do more harm than good cluttering up my view of critical decisions I need to make. Stuff like, "what should I make next," or "how should this thing be designed?"

So if manualating seems like too much work, I'd suggest that maybe you're taking on too much in the critical decision category, in which case you might make better decisions by focusing on fewer things. But yeah, YMMV. This is how I think about it and it works well for me.
by dragontamer | 2025-08-11 15:18:06+00:00
That's not job creation. That's job destruction.

With this much shoddy code out there, I'm expecting a LOT more testers are going to be needed. This is job creation but not the good kind.

Think Tesla Optimus robot grabbing popcorn. Instead of one cashier filling bags of popcorn, you now have a dedicated teleoperator + sweeper to pickup all the popcorn that's spilled. One job turned into two jobs.
by chippiewill | 2025-08-11 15:18:13+00:00
> But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review

This is misleading. Actual primary legislation isn't subject to judicial review. The only exception to that is a Judge can declare legislation incompatible with the ECHR - but even then that doesn't actually nullify the law, it only tells the government/parliament they need to fix it.

The bit that is subject to review is _secondary_ legislation, which is more of an executive action than lawmaking. It's mostly a historical quirk that statutory instruments count as legislation in the UK.
by lossolo | 2025-08-11 15:18:39+00:00
> Even without a chance of UB. You're adding an implicit `Type | null` to every piece that uses nullable code without handling the null case. Each time you forget to do it, you cause either an UB or a null pointer error. And the place it manifests is different from where it's generated. > Furthermore, listening to Tony Hoare's talk (https://youtu.be/ybrQvs4x0Ps?t=1682), he mentions that trying to avoid the null, in the context of a language like Java or C#, that permits them is also causing people to waste time working around them.

It's an insignificant amount of time in my experience, which makes this irrelevant in practice. I’ve never had to "work around them", this is either a theoretical argument or just sloppy programming.

> Sure, but that's not a $0 mistake. It's {time to fix * hourly rate}. Even if you're doing for OSS, you could have been spending that time doing something else.

Oh, come on, you’re smart enough to understand that a few minutes every few months may not be exactly $0, but it’s such an insignificant value that it can be treated as $0.

> Sure. But trading "ease of use" for "preventing errors" is not something I want in any language I use.

Well, you can choose your trade offs, and you can let others choose theirs. So I guess you use Ada for everything? or maybe you use Coq to prove everything? Of course you don’t, you’re also making trade offs, just different ones.

> Null/nil are about as good concepts today as silently skipping errors.

You exaggerate again. I do not agree with that framing, and I back my opinion with experience from practice.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-11 15:19:37+00:00
Especially when companies lay off the workers that would normally consume license seats or purchase consumer goods with job wages.

Funny how all these boosters bragging about automating the economy seem to conveniently forget how much of the economy, in some way, is based around headcount and consumption - both of which are going down due to AI with no replacement being pitched, almost as if that were the plan all along.
by justin66 | 2025-08-11 15:19:47+00:00
We're talking about the military. In the worst case he can do a lot more than fire people for their disobedience. He's already indicated publicly that he believes General Mark Milley ought to be hung, although to date his efforts to end the general have not gone further than removing his security detail. (the general is believed to be an assassination target of Iran...)

And to go back to the original comment, the president cannot be prosecuted for doing any of this since it's part of his "official duties." I'd expect this Supreme Court to walk back the specifics of this ruling the moment a Democratic president starts pushing the limits, however.
by 93po | 2025-08-11 15:19:51+00:00
if im a below average web developer of 15 years and wanted to transition to entry level ML/AI engineer of any sort, how much time would you guess it would take to become a competitive candidate if i worked at it full time? i'm intelligent but just completely declined to apply myself more to web dev, which is why i sucked at it.

i've been unemployed for two years and it's hard to find anything i can do with my background that isn't "software engineer". entry level stuff for adjacent things like project or product management simply aren't available. exploring options like data science seems to show that area is also extremely competitive and the job market is terrible.

i really do not want to grind leetcode for the sake of yet another job plumbing CRUD apps together, but i could see myself learning a new domain and following through with that because the end result would be worth it/interesting
by xnorswap | 2025-08-11 15:19:57+00:00
My guess is most of it? This commit message for example sounds very much like a Claude result:

Add Space Invaders game implementation in assembly language - Implemented the core game logic including player movement, missile firing, and invader behavior. - Added collision detection for missiles and bombs. - Included game state management for win/lose conditions and restarting the game. - Created functions for drawing game elements on the screen and handling keyboard input. - Defined constants and variables for game configuration and state tracking.

That last one in particular is exactly the kind of update you get from claude, it doesn't sound very human. "Constants and variables" eh? Not just constants or variables, but constants and variables.

Helpful, but not. Detailed, but not.
by icw_nru | 2025-08-11 15:20:09+00:00
Human rights watch's report covers more individual examples.

To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."

This leak aims at looking at the bigger picture across all of Meta's 3 billion users.

Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that as counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed. But anyone familiar with how ML models work knows that false positives / false negatives exists.

Its the degree to which the ML models primarily censor almost any content related to Israel/Palestine, the systemic nature of targeting specific countries, such as Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and the fact that per-capita, Israel is the country that most abuses the content enforcement system (3x more than any other country).
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-11 15:20:09+00:00
The unit economics is fine. Inference cost has reduced several orders of magnitude over the last couple years. It's pretty cheap.

Open AI reportedly had a loss of $5B last year. That's really small for a service with hundreds of millions of users (most of which are free and not monetized in any way). That means Open AI could easily turn a profit with ads, however they may choose to implement it.
by bram2w | 2025-08-11 15:20:24+00:00
When I started working on Baserow (this seems similar based on the roadmap), a couple of years ago, I thought it would be a big challenge to quickly render a million rows in the browser. Introducing a system that fetches a page of rows based on the scroll offset, and with a small debounce did the trick. We only had a couple of field types, and it was all incredibly fast

The thing that make performance complicated for a no-code database is when you have 30 interconnected tables, some tables with 200 fields, containing many formulas or other computed fields like lookups or rollups. Updating a single cell, can result in thousands of other rows that must be updated across different tables. If there are 30 users making constant changes, locking PostgreSQL rows under the hood while the formulas are recalculated, and then a couple of n8n workflows making a many API requests to those tables, that's when things get interesting. Especially in combination with features like webhooks, real-time updates, 100+ filters, grouping, 26 field types, date dependencies, aggregations, importing/exporting whole databases.

When implementing a new feature, I've heard users say that's not complicated because it's just adding a checkbox. Making to run it at scale and keeping things performant is what's making it complicated.
by deepthunder | 2025-08-11 15:20:55+00:00
>If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?

Because cost cutting increases share-holder value. See Jack Welch at GE. Over time he destroyed the company but also raised the share price tremendously.
by piltdownman | 2025-08-11 15:20:55+00:00
Because these trials and tribulations are designed to disenfranchise the lower classes - regardless of age, the protected classes tend to be unimpeded by societal measures in the UK.

If teenagers Felicity or Joshua need to purchase a knife, or access questionable internet content, it'll be an assumed part of their privilege that they'll be able to do so. Similarly they are unimpacted by anti-social behaviour orders or restrictions on their entitlement to exist in public spaces unmolested, as this is the demographic insulated by their memberships to 3rd spaces such as Social and Sporting clubs - a fry cry from their lower-class urban peers resigned to hanging around the Tesco carpark.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-11 15:20:58+00:00
It's just basic economics; when something makes the economy more efficient, it doesn't destroy jobs forever, people get new, better jobs in a more efficient economy.

Perhaps AI will finally raise the bar so high lower-IQ individuals won't be able to find any meaningful employment, but this has never happened in before and I doubt it'll happen again. I don't think I've seen a respected economist go on a news broadcast and say AI will lead to mass unemployment.
by sixhobbits | 2025-08-11 15:21:03+00:00
(author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have seen it.

I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
by schnable | 2025-08-11 15:21:07+00:00
> He used his AI startup, Emma.love, to further drive the point home. He indicated that he was able to build the app with the help of two other software developers, a task that would have otherwise required the manpower of "over 350 developers in the past."

Looking at the product, the idea that this would take 350 developers is likely complete nonsense. It also indicates that the recent big tech layoffs and hiring reductions are simply removing bloat, not AI driven.
by smithkl42 | 2025-08-11 15:21:10+00:00
This is roughly my experience with LLMs. I've had a lot of friends that have had good experience vibe coding very small new apps. And occasionally I've had AI speed things up for me when adding a specific feature to our main app. But at roughly 2 million lines of code, and with 10 years of accumulated tribal knowledge, LLMs really seem to struggle with our current codebase.

The last task I tried to get an LLM to do was a fairly straightforward refactor of some of our C# web controllers - just adding a CancellationToken to the controller method signature whenever the underlying services could accept one. It struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and just did it by hand.

The widely cited study that shows LLMs slow things down by 20% or so very much coheres with my experience, which is generally: fight with the LLM, give up, do it by hand.
by skydhash | 2025-08-11 15:21:13+00:00
Maybe I lack a sense of rush, but I usually take the slow lane for these kind of work. Actually reading through the whole documentation and taking notes. Maybe do some experiment. I'm wary of things going wrong and me not being able to give a clear and short explanation on the cause. If something is important for me to do, I may as well do it well (or explain the tradeoffs that makes it a hacky solution instead).
by therealpygon | 2025-08-11 15:21:18+00:00
Well, for one, no “theft” occurred at all. There is a reason it is called “infringement”. This is like saying that our brains are “stealing” the art we look at.

Second, absolutely. Even if someone wanted to call it theft, the only theft occurred by the user, not the LLM. This is like saying photoshop is stealing because you can use it to recreate copyrighted images. Or, again, like saying when a user looks at a painting then paints something similar, they are “infringing”. What a silly, silly thing.

Beyond that, this cites Reuters v Ross Inteligence as a precious “win” against AI, but that case had literally nothing to do with AI. It was a straight direct infringement case. It’s the difference between “we had an LLM read the law and create notes”, and “we had the LLM rephrase the copyrighted notes directly so we could try to avoid licensing them”. That activity would be infringing with or without the LLM participation.

Even funnier is that none of the circled items are actually infringing. Right off the top, none of the positions line up with the original image, and none of the items match the original image. In fact, if anyone looks closer, the entire image is different and just shares similarities (likely prompted) with the original. The fire is different, the shadows are different, the persons pants, shirt, hair, mask are different. Literally nothing is the same other than the overall composition…which isn’t protectable.

Are they seriously trying to argue that any image that contains a street sign, tail light, and green blob, and looks similar to another image is, is therefore “infringement”? How many people have taken exactly the same photo of the Eiffel Tower from the same location? Did they all infringe on each other because they have similar features and compositions?

What nonsense.
by sangeeth96 | 2025-08-11 15:21:21+00:00
I too think that has some weight to it, but there's no reason we can't have both.

Before the LLM boom, I wouldn't have thought twice about having fine-grained options, but since then, every SaaS company on the face of the planet has forcibly bundled ChatGPT and its ilk and jacked up prices — LLM crap I don't use and don't plan to use in its current state.

Similarly, many might wanna go initially with a simple option but later, based on their usage, whittle it down to the few that are relevant, save money in the process, and commit to the company.
by mattfrommars | 2025-08-11 15:21:44+00:00
Are we really shocked by this? It's screaming obvious but we still have many people whose head is buried deep in the sand.

Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.

It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-11 15:21:47+00:00
There are a profound number of people who now seem to just spend all day giving interviews and yapping about their AI takes.

Geoffrey Hinton seems to be in the headlines constantly going "godfather of AI" and giving some random obtuse warning or call for action.

Eric Schmidt also spends a lot of time yapping.

And of course people like Gary Marcus.

Simon Willison also does a lot of writing but at least his blog is actually useful information of actual tests and news.
by chippiewill | 2025-08-11 15:22:05+00:00
A variety of things could happen:

- Employees become accountable for their company's actions - Wikimedia could be blocked - Other kinds of sanctions (e.g. financial ones) could be levied somehow

In practice what will likely happen is Wikimedia will comply: either by blocking the UK entirely, making adjustments to be compliant with UK legislation (e.g. by making their sites read-only for UK-users - probably the most extreme outcome that's likely to occur), or the as-yet unannounced Ofcom regulations they've preemptively appealed actually won't apply to Wikimedia anyway (or will be very light touch).
by notavalleyman | 2025-08-11 15:22:19+00:00
> Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that are counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed

No, meta don't need to prove anything to anyone.

It's you who alleges that the content should have stayed up, so what's your evidence?

You're telling me I need to go and read a HRW pdf instead? Okay where is that?
by duxup | 2025-08-11 15:22:21+00:00
>You might think that YouTube, owned by Google, would be quick to take down a fraudulent video using the image of Apple's co-founder, but you'd be wrong. "We never got to YouTube; our lawyer has gotten to their lawyer, that's all," said Steve.

It's wild how many Youtube ads I see that are scams or very borderline scams. Weird health products, "5G blocking beanies that prevent brain fuzzing" and so on ...
by felixgallo | 2025-08-11 15:22:33+00:00
I don't think either of those are particularly problematic. The actor model as implemented by Erlang is concrete and robust enough. The big problems with the actor model are, in my opinion, around (1) speed optimizations for immutable memory and message passing (currently, there's a great deal of copying and pointer chasing involved, which can be slow and is a ripe area for optimization), (2) (for Erlang) speed and QOL improvements for math and strings (Erlang historically is not about fast math or string handling, but both of those do comprise a great deal of general purpose programming), (3) (for Erlang) operational QOL misc improvements (e.g. existing distribution, ets, amnesia, failover, hot upgrade, node deployment, build process range from arcane (amnesia, hot upgrades, etc.all the way up to covered-in-terrifying-spiders (e.g. debugging queuing issues, rebar3))