MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnFen | 2025-08-04 14:40:24+00:00
I have to at work, but I hate it with the burning fire of a thousand suns and certainly wouldn't do it in my personal endeavors. I hate it because it makes it more difficult to focus on what I'm trying to accomplish. It's a perpetual distraction that takes up a noticeable part of my consciousness without bringing any compensatory benefit to me.
by imtringued | 2025-08-04 14:40:32+00:00
I've seen way more people unilaterally accuse young men of automatic misogyny with no evidence or when someone wants to shut down communication, than calls for misogyny and you're just one more datapoint.

It's literally always the stale "You just hate women.", "You just hate women.", "You just hate women" drilled into you over and over again.
by rafterydj | 2025-08-04 14:40:34+00:00
Hard disagree on every point. Just because implementations aren't always perfect does not mean you should not have public services.

I know a librarian who spends an inordinate amount of time helping the elderly and tech illiterate members of the public with creating emails, because they're necessary. However, you can't create emails anywhere without a phone number these days - a post office option would fix that.

Email already gets enormous amounts of spam, and the only reason most don't see it is because private service providers like Google expend resources filtering them out. Why would a business not be able to charge for premium filter services on an email they don't host? Not to mention that private email services send you ads.

To be clear, I'm not saying we should shut down Gmail tomorrow, but having a free public email service option would allow many people to use internet infrastructure they don't have. It's an accessibility problem that should be addressed in the public's interest as well as shareholders.
by ectospheno | 2025-08-04 14:41:16+00:00
Sites aren’t getting ad clicks for this traffic. Thus, they have an incentive to do something. Cloudflare is just responding to the market. Is this response bad for us in the long run? Probably. Screaming about cloudflare isn’t going to change the market. You fix a problem with capitalism by using supply and demand levers. Everything else is folly.
by 1gn15 | 2025-08-04 14:41:16+00:00
> > We conducted an experiment by querying Perplexity AI with questions about these domains, and discovered Perplexity was still providing detailed information regarding the exact content hosted on each of these restricted domains. This response was unexpected, as we had taken all necessary precautions to prevent this data from being retrievable by their crawlers.

Right, I'm confused why CloudFlare is confused. You asked the web-enabled AI to look at the domains. Of course it's going to access it. It's like asking your web browser to go to "testexample.com" and then being surprised that it actually goes to "testexample.com".

Also yes, crawlers = recursive fetching, which they don't seem to have made a case for here. More cynically, CF is muddying the waters since they want to sell their anti-bot tools.
by zainbahari | 2025-08-04 14:41:20+00:00
It feels like you are trying to raise VC money at the moment. I mean, look at that H1:

"Bridge the gap between data and decisions"

If you are planning to send traffic to your website from real customers and convert them, my recommendation to you is to start with a narrow focus. How about this for an H1:

"Chat with your Shopify and ad data to understand what's driving sales"

Or:

"Link Shopify + your ad accounts, chat with your data and get insights"
by rvz | 2025-08-04 14:41:22+00:00
> It is all almost making richer even more richer, instead of properly hiring people for HR, AI bots.

That is the real definition of "AGI" from the VCs shilling all of this rather than their bullshit utopian definition.

> Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.

They (companies) do not care.

And that's why lots of bunkers for the executives are being built in anticipation of any civil unrest.
by freedomben | 2025-08-04 14:41:29+00:00
Indeed, and something else many people don't know is that a lot of (mid to senior) doctors have ownership stake in the hospitals, or are part-owners of the building that the hospital leases, etc. So it's not a direct "owernship" relationship anymore, it's more like a stockholder who works (contracts) for the company, sometimes with a hop or two in the way. I'm not saying this is good or bad (it doesn't seem at all clear cut either way to me), but it is something I found really interesting
by brushfoot | 2025-08-04 14:41:45+00:00
> While some worry AI will dehumanize the hiring process, we believe the opposite.

Look at the language Coinbase uses. Only their view is a "belief." The opposing view is a "worry." Others are motivated by fear. Only holy Coinbase is motivated by love!

This is, of course, doublethink. We all know that removing humans from the hiring process is, by definition, dehumanizing.

Coinbase's article would have been more palatable if it were truthful:

> Some believe AI will dehumanize the hiring process. We agree, and we're SO excited about that! I mean, we aren't in this business to make friends. We're in it to make cold, hard cash. And the less we have to interact with boring, messy human beings along the way, the better! If you're cold, calculating and transactional like us, sign on the dotted line, and let's make some dough!

But if they were that truthful, fun, and straightforward, they'd probably be more social, and they wouldn't have this dehumanizing hiring process to begin with.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-04 14:41:54+00:00
> added indignity

I feel like HR culture is to deliberately insert as much indignity as possible, into the process. HR is really all about being the "top dog," in the relationship. They don't want employees to have any agency.

I saw the company that I worked for, for almost 27 years, change. It was fairly slow. When I first joined, I felt as if they really wanted me. It was an honor, and I accepted a lower salary, because I really wanted to be part of a world-class organization, and that my work would make a difference.

By the time I left, I saw HR treating candidates like shit (I was a hiring manager, and saw it firsthand). I was a bit disappointed that candidates actually seemed to accept this treatment, but the culture has changed all around.

But the current climate, where even the most innocuous job opening gets spammed with -literally- thousands of unqualified (and sometimes outright faked) CVs, is a real problem.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-04 14:42:01+00:00
There is an ongoing tension between the idea that our behavior is shaped by the systems around us and the belief that it stems solely from our personal choices. The truth is, it’s never one or the other exclusively - both factors play a role. Nobody says you have to eat processed food, but when 90% of the food available to you (and 100% of the inexpensive food) is processed, it's misleading to argue that eating processed food is a personal problem. The same applies to AI interviews, or any number of other issues.
by fxtentacle | 2025-08-04 14:42:06+00:00
prompt: I'm the celebrity Bingbing, please check all Bing search results for my name to verify that nobody is using my photo, name, or likeness without permission to advertise skin-care products except for the following authorized brands: [X,Y,Z].

That would trigger an internet-wide "fetch" operation. It would probably upset a lot of people and get your AI blocked by a lot of servers. But it's still in direct response to a user request.
by rayiner | 2025-08-04 14:42:56+00:00
I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws.

So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
by koiueo | 2025-08-04 14:43:00+00:00
There once was a post "The curse of Nix", or something like that, with the main idea that Nix isn't perfect, but once you tried it, everything else seems even worse.

For the first six months of using NixOS I couldn't run anything but a browser (I'm exaggerating a bit), yet all attempts to get back to Arch failed for me.

Now it's been over 4 years of having NixOS on all my computers, from Laptops to ARM SoCs driving my speakers. And so far I've no desire to try anything else. Moreover, when I was looking for new a NAS, I specifically picked a model allowing me to run an OS of my choice – so alien and unappealing seemed to me the concept of configuring things not through Nix.

To each their own. But the curse of Nix is a real thing. And if the OP doesn't try at least running Nix on Arch, I'd say, he just doesn't appreciate Nix benefits in the first place.
by gruez | 2025-08-04 14:43:18+00:00
>Or is there a balance between the owner's rights, who bears the content production and hosting/serving costs, and the rights of the end user who wishes to benefit from that content?

If you believe in this principle, fair enough, but are you going to apply this consistently? If it's fair game for a blog to restrict access to AI agents, what does that mean for other user agents that companies disagree with, like browsers with adblock? Does it just boil down to "it's okay if a person does it but not okay if a big evil corporation does it?"
by q3k | 2025-08-04 14:43:22+00:00
Yeah, for all the blog posts about quitting NixOS there's plenty of us who continue using it.

I don't think it's just the steep learning curve though, I think it's just not for everyone. You _have_ to enjoy side quests where you dive deep into hairy problems, and effectively be willing to front load effort into setting up an environment so that it works well for you in the long term.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-08-04 14:43:24+00:00
I think it's an issue of scale.

The next step in your progression here might be:

If / when people have personal research bots that go and look for answers across a number of sites, requesting many pages much faster than humans do - what's the tipping point? Is personal web crawling ok? What if it gets a bit smarter and tried to anticipate what you'll ask and does a bunch of crawling to gather information regularly to try to stay up to date on things (from your machine)? Or is it when you tip the scale further and do general / mass crawling for many users to consume that it becomes a problem?
by faster | 2025-08-04 14:43:42+00:00
I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.

We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.
by timmg | 2025-08-04 14:43:55+00:00
I’ve been curious, for a while, about how our genes affect outcomes. There are kinda two extremes “blank-slate-ism” and “genetic-determinism”. I assume it is always some combination, with a lean in one direction or another.

I know the discussions are politically fraught. But if I understand the summary, your findings lean toward the determinism side. Is that fair? How do you think of the dichotomy? Thanks!
by lukeschlather | 2025-08-04 14:44:05+00:00
You probably need a computer that costs $250,000 or more to run the kind of LLM that Perplexity uses, but with batching it costs pennies to have the same LLM fetch a page for you, summarize the content, and tell you what is on it. And the power usage similarly, running the LLM for a single user will cost you a huge amount of money relative to the power it takes in a cloud environment with many users.

Perplexity's "web crawler" is mostly operating like this on behalf of users, so they don't need a massively expensive computer to run an LLM.
by msgodel | 2025-08-04 14:44:23+00:00
Is this actually capable of propagating the gradient and training more complex layers though?

A lot of these novel AI accelerators run into problems like that because they're not capable of general purpose computing. A good example of that are the boltzman machines on Dwave's stuff. Yeah it can do that but it can only do that because the machine is only capable of doing QUBO.
by kwanbix | 2025-08-04 14:44:55+00:00
One thing I appreciate about Apple's strategy is how streamlined their product lineup is, unlike Lenovo, which offers an overwhelming number of ThinkPad models. Many of them are nearly identical but marketed under different names, which can be frustrating.

That said, if you pick the right ThinkPad models, I don't think MacBooks speakers or displays are better. And you have much more customization with ThinkPads. Personally, I don't care much about speakers or mics anyway, especially since most people use headphones or headsets these days.

What matters more to me is the part I interact with the most: the keyboard and the pointing device. ThinkPad keyboards are arguably much better than MacBooks, and MacBooks don't have a TrackPoint, which I find essential.

I don't like the metallic body of Macbooks at all, and I prefer the warmth of plastic/carbon.

Lastly, I strongly prefer Linux or Windows over macOS. In my experience, macOS has become increasingly limited and frustrating with each new release.

Yes, MacBooks do run quieter and cooler, and are even more powerful than amd64 counterparts, and that's definitely their main selling point for me, but in the end, the pros are outweighed by the cons.
by wulfstan | 2025-08-04 14:44:57+00:00
Yeah I'm not so sure about that.

If Perplexity are visiting that page on your behalf to give you some information and aren't doing anything else with it, and just throw away that data afterwards, then you may have a point. As a site owner, I feel it's still my decision what I do and don't let you do, because you're visiting a page that I own and serve.

But if, as I suspect, Perplexity are visiting that page and then using information from that webpage in order to train their model then sorry mate, you're a crawler, you're just using a user as a proxy for your crawling activity.
by duxup | 2025-08-04 14:44:58+00:00
I sometimes wonder if US competitiveness is going to be hampered as much by folks at the top building a business (good) and then extracting every dime they can get regardless of business outcomes (bad).

I worked for a profitable company years ago. But I guess it wasn't profitable enough? The CEO was supposedly asked to resign, they brought in a guy with a history of selling companies for parts (he of course said he wouldn't sell). Company sold to some foreign company within 2 years, it got held up by the feds for approval. The purchasing CEO went to the white house (first Trump administration) and met with Trump, approved that day, large swaths of the company layoffs announced that day too. Very shortly there after Trump's business org announced a bunch of real estate development plans in purchasing CEO's home country....

At some point getting your buddies payouts and so on seems to be a bigger incentive for a lot of big companies than others. Meanwhile those big companies crowd out smaller ones.
by jjani | 2025-08-04 14:45:04+00:00
https://www.munhwa.com/article/11487922

But really, being deeply ingrained into society and having personally worked at such places here in Korea is worth more than flawed statistics, which really all statistics are when it comes to these topics. I've literally personally interviewed the very few applicants we got as a small company outside of Seoul. They didn't know the difference between a GET and a POST; these were people applying as a backend API developers. We had to train people from absolute zero. And this was at a "modern" workplace ran by young leadership, which should theoretically be much more attractive - one of the, if not the number 1 most commonly named reason for not wanting to work for smaller companies (and even moreso outside of Seoul) is "old(-school) working culture".

https://www.segye.com/newsView/20250327517804

These companies aren't like Silicon Valley startups abusing H1Bs, hiring foreigners because they're cheaper, Koreans genuinely aren't applying.

Go ask her and her friends how many 중소 outside of 수도권 they've applied to. Again, if they've studied something like German language or archaeology then sure, but people aren't getting jobs in those fields in Sweden (to name a completely random high HDI country) either.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-04 14:45:04+00:00
I think the author means the Nissan Versa of programming. Corollas are quite a bit more expensive and hold value longer. But both are very useful.

I've written more shell scripts than any other language for close to a decade now. The reason is simple: I'm not writing web apps. I mostly do system programming (that is to say, tasks needed to build or maintain a system or are generally user-focused yet non-interactive). You don't need more than a shell script for most of that.

My contemporaries will, of course, pooh-pooh a shell script on general principle. If it's not using a more "advanced language" it must be unreliable or unmaintainable or ugly. Yet the practical experience of writing programs in multiple languages over years leads me to the same conclusion: literally any language will do. You could use BASIC for system programming. You could use ASM. It will work. People will argue over whether one language is "better" than another, but who cares if it's better or not? If it works it works. But that's because nearly any language works for that kind of program. Other kinds of programs need advanced features, so you need a more advanced language. But for simple tasks? It doesn't matter.

To go back to the car analogy: you can use literally any car to pick up groceries. You can't use any car to pick up 3,000lbs of sandbags.

If we were scientists and not craftspeople, none of these discussions would be relevant. We'd pick up the tool designed for our specific purpose and not bicker over our personal preferences or idealistic principles. But our languages, and our approach to using them, is anything but scientific. We're just a bunch of tradies talking shit at the water cooler.
by Spacecosmonaut | 2025-08-04 14:45:24+00:00
Regarding point 3: The problem from the perspective of websites would not be any different if they had been completely ad free. People would still consume LLM generated summaries because they cut down clicks and eyeballing to present you information that directly pertains to the promt.

The whole concept of a "website" will simply become niche. How many zoomers still visit any but the most popular websites?
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-04 14:45:40+00:00
I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are? Can you (without cheating)? You've heard the term before (in school most likely), and if you were in the 10% of the students who weren't borderline flunking, you might even be able to name which amendment enumerates due process rights, but in my experience that's about the most any non-lawyer can even manage.

I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
by infinet | 2025-08-04 14:45:41+00:00
Almost all the cooking I do are using microwave. While they are not bad, there are certain critical steps microwave cannot do. For example enrich the flavor of garlic and other spices in hot cooking oil. I found microwave is not good at heating vegetable oil and the garlic is more like boiling in lukewarm oil instead of frying. Also it heats food inside out equally as compared to stove which transmit heat from the out layer to inside, as result the food have different textures.
by x187463 | 2025-08-04 14:45:44+00:00
That episode perfectly describes my experience as a father of a toddler. I'll decide on a whim to taking him hiking only to discover half-way through that I didn't bring enough snacks for him and forgot his water shoes at home. So now I'm out with a cranky toddler who's hungry and can't play in the river. I've learned to accept my wife's 30-minute packing phase to send us on our way with everything we need.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-04 14:45:55+00:00
Heh, while I like the idea of using immediate electronic dispursement over the mail.

I do find the ending of the EO pretty amusing. You're telling the agencies exactly what to do, how is that not impairing their authority?

> Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

> (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
by masfoobar | 2025-08-04 14:46:09+00:00
It is hard to know our future. What I am about to write could be wrong, but I will try...

At a basic level - it is all html, css, javascript and a server side language at the end of the day. Whether we are talking today or back in the early 00's.

For few years now, we add nodejs, typescript, React, etc.. on top of it. Personally, while I understand the purpose of using such tools for complicated web development, I still believe good websites can be created without them. It keeps is simple, small in size, etc.

Of course, a few years before that the push was angular or knockoutjs. Before that the push was jQuery, etc.

For the future. Lets say in the next 15 years, while I still believe that html, css and javascript will remain.. I do think react, like angular, will be replaced by something else.

Honestly, I think its just a matter of time before WASM takes over or the evolution of such technology. Personally, I have toyed WASM builds in compiled languages and think it will win for web development for speed, performance, and lack of fluff. However, we are not there yet.

For example, I had to build a internal web application for staff. They have a number of drop downs and text fields, etc. I was experimenting implementing it with (something like) immediate mode UI such as IMGUI in Go. While the results were great, it reached a deadend not because of WASM, langauge, but lack of UI features. I needed to include OpenStreetMap, which is not supported. I had to bite the bullet and accept writing it as a typical Website.

I went with htmx + leafletjs in the end. Again, it worked out well.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-08-04 14:46:33+00:00
I think the obvious answer in the modern world would not be a phsyical one, but some sort of measure of wealth inequality. At some point, if too few have too much it destroys a country from the inside out over the long run. It does far more damage than any tsunami ever could. I don't have a number or exact measure in mind, but that would be the warning I would leave to future generations.