MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Falkon1313 | 2025-08-06 08:21:40+00:00
Over the course of my learning and my career, I've kind of gone back and forth on this a bit.

On the one hand, software is like a living thing. Once you bring it into this world, you need to nurture it and care for it, because its needs, and the environment around it, and the people who use it, are constantly changing and evolving. This is a beautiful sentiment.

On the other hand, it's really nice to just be done with something. To have it completed, finished, move on to something else. And still be able to use the thing you built two or three decades later and have it work just fine.

The sheer drudgery of maintenance and porting and constant updates and incompatibilities sucks my will to live. I could be creating something new, building something else, improving something, instead, I'm stuck here doing CPR on everything that I have to keep alive.

I'm leaning more and more toward things that will stand on their own in the long-term. Stable. Done. Boring. Lasting. You can always come back and add or fix something if you want. But you don't have to lose sleep just keeping it alive. You can relax and go do other things.

I feel like we've put ourselves in a weird predicament with that.

I can't help but think of Super Star Trek, originally written in the 1970s on a mainframe, based on a late 1960s program (the original mainframe Star Trek), I think. It was ported to DOS in the 1990s and still runs fine today. There's not a new release every two weeks. Doesn't need to be. Just a typo or bugfix every few years. And they're not that big a deal. -- https://almy.us/sst.html

I think that's more what we should be striving for. If someone reports a rare bug after 50 years, sure, fix it and make a new release. The rest of your time, you can be doing other stuff.
by freddealmeida | 2025-08-06 08:21:46+00:00
At my firms I saw this happen often. HR would review, or a junior engineer and pass on very good candidates. It wasn't until I set up a review system with A-class engineers that we started to catch the best people. A-class engineers recognize themselves far better than anyone else. But they prefer to build than review resumes.

I ended up building my own head hunting firm specifically to address the whole pipeline. That helped somewhat but head hunting is its own very odd space. Full of inefficiencies and bias.

With any AI company, there are always limits you hit. Energy, compute, optimizations, inference, team resources, money, and all the flows to make it a company. HR is usually the one that gets the fewest resources.
by tmikaeld | 2025-08-06 08:21:49+00:00
I also tried it for a full 100K credits (Wasted in 2 hours btw which is silly!).

Compared to both Udio and Suno, it's very very bad.. both at compositions, matching lyrics to music, keeping tempo and as soon as there's any distorted instruments like guitars or live, quality goes to radio-level.
by calf | 2025-08-06 08:22:22+00:00
As a bicultural Chinese Canadian with a fancy STEM background, this is a terminally flawed argument because it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid. It is shortsighted, self-centered, and actually undermines itself because it is meta-conflict avoidant. Comply with capitalism or you're out. That's compliance with more steps; it talks about "embracing conflict" but its philosophy is essentially a broken one.

(and look: less than 4 minutes my comment is downvoted. Talk about serious debate when an East Asian actually has an informed opinion on this.)
by simonask | 2025-08-06 08:22:37+00:00
I get this viewpoint from a software architecture level, but that is also effectively the death of the open web. When every website is an opaque app, even often requiring a client-side optimizing compiler that builds an arbitrary binary in order to load (WASM), we can say goodbye to things like search engines and typically also hyperlinks. The rise of social media has already balkanized the web a lot, where almost all content is locked behind a login screen.

This could be what we want, but I can't help but think about what we've lost.
by a2128 | 2025-08-06 08:22:54+00:00
ONNXRuntime makes it fairly easy, you just need to provide a path to the ONNX file, give it inputs in the correct format, and use the outputs. The ONNXRuntime library handles the rest. You can see this in the main.js file: https://github.com/clowerweb/kitten-tts-web-demo/blob/main/m...

Plus, Python software are dependency hell in general, while webpages have to be self-contained by their nature (thank god we no longer have Silverlight and Java applets...)
by dns_snek | 2025-08-06 08:23:54+00:00
That's where we disagree, I do not consider a system that isn't capable of learning, improving, or reasoning to be generally intelligent. My most basic criteria for "AGI" is a system that can absorb and integrate new knowledge through repetition and experience in real time, just like a human would.

Further, their statements, knowledge, and "beliefs" should be reasonably self-consistent. That's where I'm usually told that humans aren't self-consistent either, which is true! But if I ever met a human that was as inconsistent as LLMs usually are, I'd recommend that they get checked for brain damage.

Of course the value of LLMs isn't binary, they're useful tools in many ways, but the sales pitch was always AGI == human-like, and not AGI == human-sounding, and that's quite clearly not where we are right now.
by latexr | 2025-08-06 08:24:35+00:00
I’m unsure if you’re being serious or making a joke. If you depend on something, it is in your best interest to have it continue and remain in good shape. What better way to ensure that then to pay the salary of the creator and world’s utmost expert on the thing? As a bonus, it ensures your specific needs about the thing are addressed in a timely manner.
by shoo | 2025-08-06 08:25:11+00:00
Yep, there's a big difference between a company and its stock. Even if the company is great, an investment such as a stock can never be good or bad without reference to the price you need to pay for it. A famous example from the dot-com era is Cisco. Great company, but buying Cisco stock at its March 2000 peak was a bad investment -- it was "priced to perfection" and the stock price today, over 25 years later, is lower than the dot com era price.
by AngryData | 2025-08-06 08:25:33+00:00
The luddites were often the ones that built the mechanized looms. They had nothing against mechanized looms, they had everything against the business owners using their workers talents and knowledge to build an entire operation only to later undercut their wages and/or replace them with lesser paid unskilled workers and reduce the quality of life of their entire community.

Getting people to associate the luddites as anti-technology zealots rather than pro-labor organization is one of the most successful pieces of propaganda in history.
by lucumo | 2025-08-06 08:25:41+00:00
I've never found the Socratic method to work well on any model I've tried it with. They always seem to get stuck justifying their previous answers.

We expect them to answer the question and re-reason the original question with the new information, because that's what a human would do. Maybe next time I'll try to be explicit about that expectation when I try the Socratic method.
by ArcHound | 2025-08-06 08:25:43+00:00
Hey, props to your attitude, and I wish you the best of luck.

Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power and the intent to just abuse and exploit

I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration from the perceived injustice.
by Havoc | 2025-08-06 08:26:15+00:00
> reflect the reality of your company

Accounting is an exercise in standardization and communication. Like a network protocol you want different parts speaking the same language even if it requires some constraints and abstractions

The info you describe is something you’d have FP&A/MI team do. There you can do whatever the team thinks is best to capture things in a unique manner

Mixing the two is generally a recipe for disaster (and IRS audits)
by eqvinox | 2025-08-06 08:27:08+00:00
I'm confused that noone is pointing out most protected 18650 cells won't even fit in those holders, since protected cells are generally in the 18690…18700 pseudo size range. That's too long to get into those holders.

Source: the holders are likely Keystone 1042 [https://www.keyelco.com/product.cfm/product_id/918], which I've worked with before. For a protected cell, cf. for example https://imrbatteries.com/products/panasonic-ncr18650b-3350ma... - note 69.41mm length.

[ed.: it's the China equivalent of a Keystone 1042, https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C2988620.html - I can't confirm but am 95% confident a protected cell won't fit; if it would, the hold on an unprotected 18650 cell would be quite loose.]
by eloisius | 2025-08-06 08:27:14+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | Asia/USA

Looking for computer vision work. Multi-view stereo, camera calibration, SfM, scene reconstruction, 3D object triangulation, 3D multi-object tracking. Object detection, tracking, video processing. I mostly work in Python and C++, but the stack is not super important to me. I have 14 years of experience as a software engineer. Self-directed, and I do not require a lot of management. I go the extra mile producing technical notes, reports, visualizations, etc. to help communicate my results. References available upon request. Willing to travel.

RECENT PROJECTS

Camera/Projector Calibration System

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Damage detection/grading for collectable items

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- Map 2D multi-view into global 3D space for unique damage instance collation with novel camera calibration technique using differentiable rendering

- AWS pipeline to orchestrate all the ML/GPU crunching to support a mobile app

Real-time soccer markerless motion capture

- Camera calibration (20+ cameras) using COLMAP

- Calibration refinement and camera drift maintenance

- 3D object triangulation from multi-view 2D object detections

- 3D human pose reconstruction from 2D pose estimations

- 3D multi-object tracking

- Real-time pipeline (60 Hz)

Video auto-cropping to convert long-form landscape orientation videos in to vertical, short videos

- Prioritize between competing subjects in video

- Create smooth panning crop-out region for each subject

- Naturally transition focus between different subjects

CONTACT

email work at zacstewart dot com

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by senko | 2025-08-06 08:29:04+00:00
There are a lot of fraudsters out there who will happily create thousands of accounts with valid CCs that will fail on first actual charge.[0]

I wouldn't be surprised if asking for a phone number lowers the fraud rate enough to compensate for the added friction.

[0] Incidentally, this is also why many AI API providers ask for your money upfront (buy credits) unless you're big enough and/or have existing relationship with them.
by maxglute | 2025-08-06 08:29:46+00:00
In Pacific war... with standoff distances involved most of determinant fighting all going to be one way trip, i.e. 2000km+ = disposable. I suppose question is how much US can value engineer their stand off missiles, which will inevitably have more requirements than PRC because when US moving shit across salty ocean, each shot is logistically more expensive. PRC can just haul them out of conditioned depots and get firing.

And how many US can actually produce, i.e. bluntly, US military has _never_ fought any adversary on the scale of modern PRC. WW2 JP+DE had like <50% of US economic and industrial power, while being ganged up by multiple other allies with reasonably large militaries. Peak cold war USSR also similar scale (1/2 US) and realistically US war plan for NATO invasion was to stall and nuke the Fulda gap. Asymmetrically stomping Iraq still took 5 carriers on high tempo operations (not sustainable for more than 1-2 months), favourable coalition basing, completely compromised IADs... multiple months to dismantle power charitability 1/100th size of modern PRC. Even Korean war vs peasant PRC fought US+UN to stand still. Vs modern PRC with 150% US GDP by PPP and and industrial gap like current shipbuilding #s, in their backyard, I suppose the answer is, get defense spending back to 10%-15% of GDP (at least Korean or Vietnamese wartime economy) and go figure out form there.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-06 08:30:06+00:00
Another reminder that if you write software under an MIT licence or similar then you're just working for companies like Anthropic for free.

Use GPL or AGPL. It's the best thing we have.

Remember that companies like Microsoft spend billions on PR and their goal is to make you think what's good for them is good for you. This is rarely the case.
by deafpolygon | 2025-08-06 08:30:28+00:00
Many websites have no business being a full-blown application.

The web is getting smaller and smaller, being dominated by the bigger players (Google, Microsoft, Apple, et. al) for whom pushing opaque web standards and "applications" benefit only them as gatekeepers.

While it's still entirely possible for people to still build websites, search engines like Google don't prioritize them - leading them to never being discovered. 90% of the web is still the 'small' web and we can't ever discover them because they're not being indexed by Google (why should they? Most of them don't include Google's tracking js scripts ['analytics']).

The web was never supposed to be like this. It's turned into a massive surveillance engine for the big corporations.

I'll leave this here: https://wiby.me
by IronyMan100 | 2025-08-06 08:31:35+00:00
you should not trust science. I mean look where the article is published. It's not Vox nor The New York Times, etc. It's in Science, one of the most reputable journals in the world. So the community of scientist is aware of the problem and in the end science is self-correcting. It's just a slow process. Science advances one funreal at a time.
by ozim | 2025-08-06 08:31:59+00:00
IF you have a side gig it is easy to think you won’t be 100% invested in company success. If you monetize you most likely will jump ship.

There are other risks like burn out as you may read a lot of OSS contributors have — so when someone is hit by burn out it will be across the board not that they somehow will perform at their peak at job while burned out by coding on side.
by imiric | 2025-08-06 08:32:11+00:00
It is terrifying whenever a vibe coder publishes an app or service that gains users. It's celebrated and seen as an example of what AI tools can accomplish. Until the inevitable security "breach" happens a few weeks later because they left the front door open.

The scary thing is that these tools are now part of the toolset of experienced developers as well. So those same issues can and will happen to apps and services that used to take security seriously.

It's depressing witnessing the average level of quality in the software industry go down. This is the same scenario that caused mass consumer dissatisfaction in 1983 and 2000, yet here we are again.
by conductr | 2025-08-06 08:32:17+00:00
I would argue that technology diffusion would occur even without trickle down economics/tax policies. Even if they were taxed more heavily, there would still be people wealthy enough to buy the v1.0 flat screen, computer, DVD player, etc because wealth is still unevenly distributed and there are still some richer people in the population.

Trickle down economics is supposed to make poorer people more wealthy. Not suppress their wage growth while offering a greater selection of affordable gadgets.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-06 08:32:21+00:00
Can't most people read faster than they can hear? Isn't this why phone menus are so awful?

> But there seems to be no good way to output spoken text without doing round-trips to a server and generate the audio there

As people have been pointing out, we've had mediocre TTS since the 80s. If it was a real benefit people would be using even the inadequate version.
by kiselitza | 2025-08-06 08:32:28+00:00
Yep, sounds like that to me too.

Pay-per-seat works well when no proper competition to go against it. What we built with http://voiden.md should be free forever, with monetization on plugins, but only the ones that introduce costs to the team.

The blessing was that the team was already profitable on another tool, and VC-independent, so nobody shoved some dumb design decisions down anyone's throat.
by latexr | 2025-08-06 08:32:41+00:00
> creating a community around an open source project is not like what you expect.

> (…)

> Then someone wrote that you should not make your friends/alt-accounts comment on your posts, it's cringe and that happiness went away.

Respectfully, if you’re that easily discouraged you should not in any way attempt to “create a community”. Having a popular open-source project isn’t glamorous, it’s extra work for you. It’s entitled users making demands and opening crappy bug reports, punctuated by the occasional decent contributor and even rarer exceptional one.

Make your tool available and let it be. Mention it only when relevant, and even then think twice. Make it clear the tool is for yourself and you may accommodate respectful requests which make sense for your vision of the project, but make no promises. Do what’s enjoyable, don’t try to chase fame and notoriety.
by sakjur | 2025-08-06 08:32:46+00:00
I’m concerned that AI slop will affect open source projects by tilting the already unfavorable maintainer-contributor balance even more towards low-quality contributions.

Daniel Stenberg (from the curl project) has blogged a bunch about AI slop seeping into vulnerability reports[1], and if the same happens to code contributions, documentation and so forth that can help turning a fun hobby project into something you dread maintaing.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...
by ManlyBread | 2025-08-06 08:32:49+00:00
This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this sort of thing can be demoralizing.

I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic.

I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line.

The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.
by Ekaros | 2025-08-06 08:32:51+00:00
I wonder about actual effectiveness of spending on railroads vs AI... Even if railroads were somewhat waste, did the investment spread much wider? At least geographically it must have as there were workers that moved around and needed services. That is it was mostly spend in economy. Thus had actual change to trickle down.

Where as AI, who actually gets the investment? Nvidia? TMSC? Are people who are employed some that would have anyway been employed? Do they actually spend much more? Any Nvidia profits likely go just back to the market propping it up even higher.

How much efficiency from use of LLMs have actually increased proctiveness?
by Yokolos | 2025-08-06 08:33:14+00:00
I get a lot of garbage out of 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet and ChatGPT. There's always this "this is how you solve it", I take a close look and it's clearly broken, I point it out and it's all "you're right, this is a common issue". Okay, so why do we have to do this song and dance a million times to arrive at the actually correct answer?
by lucumo | 2025-08-06 08:33:24+00:00
I'm in a corporate environment. There's a study group to see if maybe we can potentially get some value out of those AI tools. They've been "studying" the issue for over a year now. They expect to get some cloud service that we can safely use Real Soon Now.

So, it'll take at least two more quarters before I can actually use those non-local tools on company related data. Probably longer, because sense of urgency is not this company's strong suit.

Anyway, as a developer I can run a lot of things locally. Local AI doesn't leak data, so it's safe. It's not as good as the online tools, but for some things they're better than nothing.
by mac-mc | 2025-08-06 08:34:21+00:00
Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.

IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-08-06 08:35:12+00:00
Have a look at the average admin headcount per student in 1995 vs 2025. It has grown to be the largest department by far of modern US universities (and a lot of places in Europe as well, unfortunately) - usually significantly larger and more well-paid than the faculty.

In one extreme example, I heard the ratio of student:admin is nearly 1:1. That is bonkers.

And no - administration employees don't need to justify their ongoing employment by constantly publishing new research in academic journals. For them, the gravy just keeps rolling in. Just keep increasing tuition, increasing the endowment fund (often through real estate deals and other hedge fund like activity), increasing donations, increasing their own budget, and threatening to cut research & academic department budgets.

Yes, academic and research departments have often had budget cuts. But expenditures per student are way up to pay academic administration salary.

(If I sound angry, it's because I am. MBA types have caused so much harm to these institutions.)