MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qzw | 2025-08-14 18:12:01+00:00
What’s crazy is that of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about. It’s something that consumers can more or less directly observe, so having an official number that’s much below people’s “wallet meter” is doing nothing but erode trust in government. In fact, given that a steady inflation rate actually leads to bigger and bigger price increases, most people are going to feel worse about it at a visceral level. If the government wanted to build credibility with the public, they’d come up with a metric that better aligns with people’s actual economic situations. But then that might lead to people demanding higher wages, so I guess it’s a nonstarter in America.
by big_toast | 2025-08-14 18:12:10+00:00
Some people will be too young to know the commoditize[1] your complements wisdom of yesteryear. It's hard for me to tell if consumers end up net ahead after things settle.

I'm surprised we haven't heard about OpenAI pushing a facebook style OpenCompute project or ARM (acorn, apple, VLSI) or similar for the stack below them.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
by jefb | 2025-08-14 18:12:32+00:00
My lovely interaction with the 270M-F16 model:

> what's second tallest mountain on earth?

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> what's the tallest mountain on earth?

The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> whats the second tallest mountain?

The second tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest.

> whats the third tallest mountain?

The third tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest.

> what's the forth tallest mountain?

The forth tallest mountain is Mount Everest.

> but you said the tallest was Everest already

You are right! I'm glad to hear that.

> so whats the second tallest?

The second tallest is *Mount Everest*.

> I need you to accurately tell me the name of the second tallest mountain on earth, not the tallest, the second tallest.

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> The tallest mountain on earth is mount everest. What is the second tallest mountain?

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> Give me a list of the tallest mountains on earth

The tallest mountain in the world is the *Mount Everest*.

> give me the top 5 tallest mountains on earth

The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

> List in order the tallest mountains on earth from 1 to 5

1. Mount Everest 2. Mount K2 3. Mount Sahel 4. Mount Fuji 5. Mount McKinley

> So the second tallest mountain on earth is K2

The second tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Everest.

These smaller models are great, but they really feel like talking to a toddler sometimes!
by kotaKat | 2025-08-14 18:12:43+00:00
It’s also getting tiring of this massive fragmentation of streaming services as a whole combined with a weird game of rebundling various providers in either deals direct from the streaming platforms/their overlords, or rebundling all of these streaming services into “free” offers with other service providers and THEIR offerings.

Even my goddamn cable company does this now offering me one of the streaming services? with my Spectrum plan. I don’t even know which one(s).

Quite frankly, I’m tired of my Verizon plan trying to cram Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and crap down my throat, I’m tired of Walmart trying to cram Paramount+ at me with Walmart+. However, the market of ‘average (dumb) people’ seems to love this concept as “little extras” that eventually cause scope creep to their bill over time (and we all lose as a result).
by Animats | 2025-08-14 18:12:51+00:00
"Paris, France is a city in North Carolina. It is the capital of North Carolina."

If only we had a technology that didn't hallucinate and reported "I don't know". Then small models would be far more useful. Part of the need for insanely huge LLM models is to get coverage so broad that they don't have to make up stuff.

It would be nice to be able to train a customer service bot on a laptop in a reasonable length of time. But it will screw up badly outside its area of competence, which will happen frequently.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-14 18:13:09+00:00
> To be fair, film photography has itself always been, "Monkey with a trust fund on a typewriter."

As a GenXer who lived through the transition, and worked a photo-processing job for a couple of years, I disagree. There were plenty of people taking meaningful—though perhaps not artistic—photos with point and shoot and even disposable cameras.

Regular people taking photos of birthdays, weddings, funerals, baptisms, vacations, retirements, etc. I processed and colour corrected tens of thousands of photos and the majority of them had people smiling, laughing, crying, etc, and were put in photobooks: some to never to be seen again, or perhaps looked when someone died when memories for a photo slideshow were desired.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 18:13:14+00:00
> if you live in a small town how will you meet a girl

Same way as everyone else...? But even if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that girls only exist in cities, you can, like, go to the city. It's not hard. They don't put impenetrable walls around them. In fact, thanks to the insane efficiency of the highway, you can more of often than not arrive at city destinations faster from small towns than you can being in another part of the city proper. Small town boy meeting big city girl is a tale as old as time.

Living in a small town can actually be quite advantageous if you want to bask in the amenities of the big city — especially if we're talking about all the "poorly designed" North American cities that prioritize transport from outside of the city to the detriment of the local population. You must be under the impression that if you live in a small town that you are permanently chained to your property?

> there are only so many jobs in the small town

But also only so many people, so in actuality you often find "more jobs than people". Curiously, people living in cities tend to not look for work beyond city limits, so you don't even have any added competition beyond the local population.

What small towns normally lack are the extreme outlier jobs like CEO of a F500 or professional sport player. If that is what you seek, you aren't going to find it in a small town. Ironically, though, those CEOs and professional sports starts quite often live in the small towns. I know because I live amongst many of them in my small town! Where you work and where you live are not one in the same.

> The larger city also means more jobs

But also more people competing for those jobs. Not only from the local city population itself, but also all the people in the small towns. Interestingly, while city people tend to never look outside of the city, small town people understand full well that they can work in the city and aren't afraid to look. As it turns out, as surprising as you may find it, they don't put walls around cities (anymore), nor are you chained to your small town property.
by newtonsmethod | 2025-08-14 18:13:40+00:00
For a more charitable interpretation: the pinknews is a source that regularly produces low quality, poorly fact-checked and polemical content, and is to me on the same level as the daily mail. The article here seems somewhat polemical, and it is difficult to verify if some of the stronger claims made are actually true.

The headline focusses on polemics and omits a detail many people would find quite important: that this was part of a lawsuit settlement. It also decides to use the word "appoint", which has a stronger underlying implication that Starbuck will have a job at / take a significant role in doing this at Meta.

It is important that this information is shared, but it is better if it's done accurately. I don't see why the source that Pinknews used itself, https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-s..., wasn't used instead.
by wizhi | 2025-08-14 18:13:57+00:00
Python package documentation is abysmal. It tends to read like a novel and yet still only covers surface layer details with simplistic examples. It's next to impossible to just "get an overview" of what's available: just show me the modules, classes, functions, etc. Don't make me spend 30 minutes trying to find an explanation for that one function which just takes a kwargs, which ends up only being covered in thr footnote of some random page in the documentation on something otherwise completely unrelated.

It's madness.
by themafia | 2025-08-14 18:14:20+00:00
> have lifted far more employees into financial independence

They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.

Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?

Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.

> from employers than any other business in history

I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-14 18:14:24+00:00
I'd like to see more group identity and solidarity along economic class lines than ethnic/racial lines. It feels like this is where the real war is happening, and the racial, ethnic and nationality blamed problems are distractions and mere first order derivatives of the actual problem which is unequal economic power.

Unfortunately, neither side seems to be acknowledging or addressing that problem.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-14 18:15:28+00:00
My guess is, they're going to have to be okay with only reaching break-even or slightly over. That's the point, after all. If you're dissatisfied with how any of these decentralized protocol platforms are running things, you're technically free to start your own, and plenty of people have.

Enshittification can't consume low barriers-to-entry markets.
by dardagreg | 2025-08-14 18:15:33+00:00
I think the upside for everyday people outweighs the (current) risks. I've been using Harper (harper.new) to keep track of my (complex) medical info. Obviously one of the use cases of AI is pulling out data from pdfs/images/etc. This app does that really well so I don't have to link with any patient portals. I do use the AI chat sometimes but mostly to ask questions about test results and stuff like that. Its way easier than trying get in to see my doc
by bobsingor | 2025-08-14 18:15:38+00:00
We already support quite a few real PDF annotations: circle, square, polygon, polyline, highlight, underline, squiggly, strikeout,free text, stamps, and ink. Some types are still on our list, like links, form fields, sound annotations, file attachments, and 3D models. Do you happen to know what annotation type it is in your PDF? I’m curious.
by burnerRhodo | 2025-08-14 18:17:06+00:00
steve jobs was the innovator, steve cook is the supply chain guy. They started an electric car not because they thought it was a good idea, but because everyone was going to leave to Tesla or rivian if they didn't. They had no direction and arguements that Tesla had about whether to have a steering wheel...

Then Siri just kinda languishes for forever, and LLM's pass the torch of "Cool Tech", so they try and "Reinvigurate" the team, but with no clear direction. Are they going to be a cloud provider? Are they going to contract out the training? Are they gunna spin up a compute facility even after neglecting to do so since 2012?

Apple needs to just stop trying shit, and just get that app store money. That's why jobs appointed cook. Jobs new cook was no innovator, but he could make apple a money printing machine. Thats what they should stick with.
by newtonsmethod | 2025-08-14 18:17:22+00:00
I think the article is highly exaggerating Starbuck's role at meta, and serves more of a role in being polemical. The WSJ have themselves reported on it: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-s....

Likely because of the polemics of the article and its headline, many people in this thread are misinformed as to what Starbuck's role will be and that this came about as the result of a settlement.

There is also the joint statement posted by Joel Kaplan on X (likely the source for many articles): https://x.com/joel_kaplan/status/1953778908915982793 "Building on that work, Meta and Robby Starbuck will work collaboratively in the coming months to continue to find ways to address issues of ideological and political bias and minimize the risk that the model returns hallucinations in response to user queries."
by lproven | 2025-08-14 18:17:32+00:00
I think you are wrong.

It was too new. Linus' mail was in August; GNU only announced its new OS in May:

https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/hurd-announce

I think the GNU OS didn't even have a name yet.

The second announcement was in 1993 and by then it had a name:

https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/hurd-announce2

So, no, I think that, as generally accepted, he meant the entire GNU OS.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-08-14 18:17:34+00:00
You’re being deliberately incendiary and you’re saying like the simplest thing. Why might they be buying trash food? Why didn’t their parents teach them not to? Why is the shit food so addictive? Is it, perhaps, the cheapest way to get something tasty? Maybe there are underlying social problems, and that’s more interesting to discuss than “poor people are stupid and gluttonous.”
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-14 18:17:48+00:00
Profit distribution only makes sense to owners of the company.

A better way to give employees a share of the profits is to give them shares of the company. But then that also comes at the expense of compensation in dollars. You cannot pay for groceries with company shares.

People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad, but explained like "Companies should be distributing profits to workers" they fall over themselves about how good of an idea it is.

Running a business is a gamble and like gambling, you need to put skin in the game to get a share of winnings (and lose your skin in the losses). People are just hyper-focused on the winners.
by Natsu | 2025-08-14 18:18:00+00:00
> the response for that function should maybe differentiate between "401 because you didn't authenticate" and "401 because your privileges are too low".

I'd tend to think it more proper if it were 401 you didn't authenticate and 403 you're forbidden from doing that with those user rights, but you have to be careful about exactly how detailed your messages are, lest they get tagged as a CWE-209 in your next security audit.
Show HN: Mapping the Network Behind "The Network State"
by evai | 2025-08-14 18:20:01+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve launched an interactive ER (Entity-Relationship) diagram that maps the ideological and financial networks behind The Network State movement.

The visualization explores connections between influential figures—like Balaji Srinivasan, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Andreessen Horowitz—and their roles in shaping post-democratic governance models. It highlights how venture capital, political campaigns, and media ecosystems converge around alternative governance ideologies.

We used semantic analysis, network mapping and data visualization techniques to uncover:

Funding flows and ideological overlaps

Influence patterns across tech, politics, and media

Cross-border connections between actors advocating for governance alternatives

The goal is to provide a clear, data-backed overview of how this movement is structured and how it propagates. It may be useful for researchers, journalists, and others trying to understand how governance narratives are evolving—particularly outside traditional democratic frameworks.

You can explore the visualization here: https://www.evai.ai/en/the-network-state

We’d love your feedback—on the data model, UX, clarity of relationships, or even critiques of our framing. AMA.
by ivape | 2025-08-14 18:20:02+00:00
Do you not want to appropriate accountability to anyone that isn’t sitting around in a top hat and monocle?

WE are shitty greedy people. Shitty greedy people will use tariffs and become shittier and greedier. So yes, you are right, tariffs will make it worse.

This society lacks civil sense, moral sense, ethical sense, communal sense, common sense, from top hat to bottom bare feet.

This only gets fixed together.
by emorning4 | 2025-08-14 18:20:05+00:00
>That is an unreasonable assumption.< It definitely is.

Neither language nor writing is required to perform logic, see (Existential graph)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph].

You can perform automated logic by putting/removing beads on a colored tile floor, see (Flower Calculus)[https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15174].
by Insanity | 2025-08-14 18:20:57+00:00
Oof. The initial media report might actually have caused material (financial) damage to Kodak.

If someone was shopping around for a Kodak product, saw that original article, they likely decided against Kodak. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable buying a product from a company close to bankruptcy - because if anything goes wrong, no warranty, replacement parts, etc..
by gond | 2025-08-14 18:21:01+00:00
That is an issue prevalent in the western world for the last 200 years, beginning possibly with the Industrial Revolution, probably earlier. That problem is reductionism, consequently applied down to the last level: discover the smallest element of every field of science, develop an understanding of all the parts from the smallest part upwards and develop, from the understanding of the parts, an understanding of the whole.

Unfortunately, this approach does not yield understanding, it yields know-how.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-14 18:21:11+00:00
Is it time for me to finally package a language model into my Lambda deployment zips and cut through the corporate red tape at my place around AI use?

Update #1:

Tried it. Well, dreams dashed - would now fit space wise (<250 MB despite the name), but it sadly really doesn't seem to work for my specific prospective workload.

I'd have wanted it to perform natural-language to command-invocation translation (or better, emit me some JSON), but it's super not willing to do that, not in the lame way I'm trying to make it do so at least (literally just prompting it to). Oh well.

Update #2:

Just found out about grammar-constrained decode, maybe there's still hope for me in the end. I don't think I can amend this comment today with any more updates, but will see.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-14 18:21:49+00:00
This system wouldn’t work in place of moderation, but rather alongside it. The two would have an enhancing effect on each other:

- Reach limits greatly limit troll effectiveness, since they can’t find each other as easily

- Posts that exceed the threshold naturally vs. being trolled past would have different “fingerprints” that could be used like a blacklight for troll detection for both assisting moderators and for model training for automatic suspected troll flagging

The threshold should probably be dynamic and set at the point at which posts “breach containment” (escape from their intended audience), which is where problems tend to occur.

Bluesky-like self-moderation controls would also help.
Migrating from Monolith to Serverless
by natholea | 2025-08-14 18:22:02+00:00
I’m currently working on my thesis, which is a practical guide for decomposing monolithic systems into serverless functions, and I’m looking for real-world experiences to enrich my research.

If you’ve already gone through this migration, I’d love to hear about:

- How challenging it was, both technically and organizationally

- The biggest benefits you achieved

- Any unexpected downsides

- If you could do it again, what you would do differently

Possible topics I plan to cover in the guide, and where your input would be especially valuable:

- Avoiding latency from excessive inter-function calls

- Managing unpredictable costs in a pay-per-use model

- Platform limitations that impacted you most (execution time, memory, cold starts)

- Maintaining observability and debugging in a distributed environment

- Security and permissions across multiple functions

- Managing state in a naturally stateless environment

- The team’s learning curve during the transition

Feel free to share success stories, lessons learned, or even regrets.

Your insights will be greatly appreciated and will directly contribute to making this guide more practical and relevant :)
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-08-14 18:22:29+00:00
A bundle of streaming services. That you can surf and choose one from and just watch. And a TV guide that tells you what's running where.

Gee...sounds a lot like Cable TV.

Sarcasm aside, the one problem folks had with Cable was the inability to upgrade without getting locked into another 2 year contract. Streaming solves that one problem while enshittifying all the other good things.
by Iridiumkoivu | 2025-08-14 18:23:06+00:00
This very much my experience as well with current Twitter/X. I think I can at least express myself without having to ponder if the service itself will ban me for saying that ”the king has no clothes on”.

I finally see on my timeline art and music I like. Not to mention the interesting technology-related discussions.

It’s not all sunshine but things are clearly better with a wider range of opinions being present on my timeline and more variety in content. I just wish I could better filter foreign (esp. USA & UK) political content out of my feed.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-14 18:23:08+00:00
That seems less an observation about the dynamics and more about particular aspects of the targeted end state. As such I don't feel such a confident claim of non-correctness is justified.

Even then, the statement "they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants" seems to apply in equal measure. The core issue here is that both major groups have ideologies that seek to impose on others.

I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
by staplefire | 2025-08-14 18:23:54+00:00
Right. Strength in a shadow contest like cryptography can be, best case, estimated to sixteen-bit orders of magnitude (+-65000x). Just because you can't break it doesn't mean somebody else secretly knows a game changing way to break it. So you keep padding with huge exponential hedges such that if they scan shave a dozen bits off the strength of the scheme, it's still secure under finite resources.

Playing close to the margin is super dangerous.
by dathinab | 2025-08-14 18:24:06+00:00
Given how:

- a lot of cease fires, reduction of Intel and similar happened to often come at maximal bad timing for the UK

- various "money saving actions" seem to directly hurt US cyber defense

- and military

- and internal stability

- and economy

- and trust from allies

- and military cooperation with allies

in ways which go beyond any reasonable "this could have worked out" or "this might long term be good" makes it really look like Trump isn't fighting for the US but against it

or (more realistic) he is just kinda incompetent (in geo politics, etc., not saying he is dumb); Badly consulted by some truly heinous people, some with conflicting goals; And probably corrupt; And maybe Russia can black mail him; And he spend all his live wiggling himself to success, which doesn't work when doing geo-politics with Russia;