MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giantrobot | 2025-08-10 01:03:54+00:00
> opting instead for gleeful mockery and scorn

This is well earned by the likes of OpenAI that is trying to convince everyone they need trillions of dollars to build fabs to build super genius AIs. These super genius AIs will replace everyone (except billionaires) and act as magic money printers (for billionaires).

Meanwhile their super genius precursor AIs make up shit and can't count letters in words while being laughably sycophantic.

There's no need to defend poor innocent megacorps trying to usher in a techno-feudal dystopia.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-10 01:05:09+00:00
> To cut to the chase, I think local councils are really upset that Telstra has the right to put these anywhere they want.

Yes, as per the link I posted (which appears to predate your investigation by a number of years)

I personally think that there needs to be a middle ground - Telstra have the real estate they do for the express purpose of providing access to a public phone, and I have no objection to them adding some advertising onto those.

I do, however, find it difficult to agree to Telstra using that to justify building a much larger billboard that has little to no purpose relating to access to the public telephone network.

Melbourne does not have any advertising on its pay phones now (not that I can think of, but I am going out some time this afternoon and will double check the CBD)
by drweevil | 2025-08-10 01:05:37+00:00
Just an interesting bit of trivia, the Large Hadron Collider uses/used (don't know if it still does) CORBA in its distributed control system. (On the control system I worked on we use Sun RPC, which was fine as things go but doesn't have the language support that CORBA has. We used a separate SOAP interface to the system to allow for languages such as Python. Today I'd use gRPC, or the BEAM.)

On a more general note, I see in many critical comments here what I perceive to be a category error. Using JSON to pass data between web client and server, even in more complex web apps, is not the same thing as supporting two-way communications between autonomous software entities that are tasked to do something, perhaps something critical. There could be millions of these exchanges in some arbitrarily short time period, thus any possibility of errors is multiplied accordingly, and the effect any error could cascade if it does not fail early. I really don't believe this is a case where "worse is better." To use an analogy, yes everyday English is a versatile language that works great for most use cases; but when you really need to nail things down, with no tolerance for ambiguity, you get legalese or some other jargon. Or CORBA, or gRPC, etc.
by avalys | 2025-08-10 01:06:32+00:00
I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020.

I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years.

Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time.

I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all the bullshit involved in starting a new code base - setting up a build system, looking up libraries and APIs, implementing a framework for configuration and I/O, etc.

Yes, I still had to do some of the hard parts myself, and (probably most relevant) I still had to understand the code it was writing and correct it when it went down the wrong direction. I literally just told Cursor “No, why do it that way when you could do it much simpler by X”, and usually it fixed it.

A few times, after writing a bunch of code myself, I compiled the project for the first time in a while and (as one does) ran into a forest of inscrutable C++ template errors. Rather than spend my time scrolling through all of them I just told cursor “fix the compile errors”, and sure enough, it did it.

Another example - you can tell it things like “implement comparison operators for this class”, and it’s done in 5 seconds.

As the project got more complicated, I found it super useful to write tests for behaviors I wanted, and just tell it “make this test pass”. It really does a decent job of understanding the codebase and adding onto it like a junior developer would.

Using an IDE that gives it access to your whole codebase (including build system and tests) is key. Using ChatGPT standalone and pasting stuff in is not where the value is.

It’s nowhere near able to do the entire project from scratch, but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway.

Seems valuable enough to me!
by fuzztester | 2025-08-10 01:07:39+00:00
forgot to mention that it is mobile Firefox.

I had checked the settings earlier, nothing seemed applicable.

interestingly, just now I tried it on mobile Chrome, on the same phone, and it rendered okay.

https://pasteboard.co/pPrVKF3dyyhz.png

(didn't think of that earlier somehow, dumb me, maybe because the page wasn't that important to me.)

so it may be a mobile Firefox issue.
by decimalenough | 2025-08-10 01:07:53+00:00
The book tells a story of how bananas were nearly unobtainable and thus became an almost totemic status symbol.

An Estonian actress pilfers a banana from a high-level Party function, risking grave consequences, just so her daughter could taste one at least once in her life. Alas, the daughter is too young to appreciate this and declares that it tastes like "poopoo".
by TulliusCicero | 2025-08-10 01:09:23+00:00
> Driverless cars that still are only available in couple percent of the world’s cities.

Okay, this one is a really bad attempted point.

Sure, self driving cars took longer than expected, have been harder to get right than expected. But at this point, Waymo is steadily ramping up how quickly they open up in new cities, and in existing cities like SF they at least have a substantial market share in the ride-sharing/taxi business.

Basically, the tech is still relatively early in its adoption curve, but it's far enough in now to obviously not be "bullshit", at the very least.
by Aloisius | 2025-08-10 01:11:44+00:00
First, 2.3 to 3.9% decrease in fast food employment in a year isn't really small given only a fraction were affected by increase.

Second, the effective wage increase for fast food employment was actually quite a bit lower than 25% since several large municipalities had higher minimum wages and not all fast food restaurants were affected.

Third, employment appears to still be dropping.
by throwawayohio | 2025-08-10 01:13:28+00:00
I certainly consider myself a skeptic in the current AI craze, but this entire piece (of which I find the technical criticisms interesting) just reads like attack on Altman/OpenAI.

Even if you want to make fun of the (alleged) snake oil salesmen of AGI, how are you not going after, like, Zuckerberg/Meta? At least Altman is using other peoples money.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-10 01:14:20+00:00
OpenAI tech is fine. The real problem is overpromising.

Is any other tech scrutinised like this. Next version of postgres aint giving me picosecond reads so Ill trash it. Maybe OK if postgres are claiming it is faster than speed of light perhaps.

But I'm meh. Bunch of people seem to be hot taking AI and loving this "fail" because as you can see from this submission it gets you a lot of traffic to whatever you are trying to sell (most often ones own career). There also seems to be a community expectation of subsidised services. Move on to Claude because I can get those good tokens cheaper. Its like signing up for every free trial thing and cancelling and then bragging about how can Netflix charge for their service more than $1 a month. I mean thats fine, play the game but at least be honest about it.

I think AI will thrive but AI is commoditizing the complement which is overcapitized AI companies with no moat. This plus open models is great for tbe community. We need more power to the people these days. Hope it stays like this.
by mikesabbagh | 2025-08-10 01:15:07+00:00
each LLM has its own personality and preferences. I choose different LLM to answer different needs. Claude is good to create a website from scratch, but if I ask it to fix one specific thing, it goes and modify something else too. GPT-5 has more of this. it is harder to control. it even answers me using incomplete sentences, and once used slang. It may be because i use slang and incomplete sentences. But yeah, it is not clear to me when i will go to GPT5 instead of others
by allenu | 2025-08-10 01:15:53+00:00
I think that's true with known optical illusions, but there are definitely times where we're fooled by the limitations in our ability to perceive the world and that leads people to argue their potentially false reality.

A lot of times people cannot fathom that what they see is not the same thing as what other people see or that what they see isn't actually reality. Anyone remember "The Dress" from 2015? Or just the phenomenon of pareidolia leading people to think there are backwards messages embedded in songs or faces on Mars.
by nayuki | 2025-08-10 01:15:55+00:00
Applying wrong definitions results in confusion and contradictions.

If "digital" means "by means of communication rather than delivering physical objects", then a digital camera held in your hand is not "digital". (But operating someone else's camera over the Internet would be a "digital camera".) Conversely, receiving music over analog FM radio would be "digital" because the information came from far away.

If "digital" means electronic, then printing a black-and-white QR Code (which is clearly made of discrete squares) onto paper makes that paper image not "digital". DNA with its 4 possible base pairs would not be digital. Doing accounting with pen and paper, involving discrete numbers, would not be digital. Moreover, an electronic computer made of analog capacitors, resistors, transistors, and op-amps - and with a continuous range of input and output values - would be classified as "digital" under this definition. On the other hand, sending 0s and 1s as photons in a fiber-optic cable would not be considered digital as the signal is not electrical or electronic in nature.

If "digital" means high-tech, then inventing an analog computer chip in the year 2026 would be considered more "digital" than conventional digital computer chips invented in the 1970s. (This isn't theoretical; there are researchers working on analog computers for neural networks to save die area and power consumption.)

By misusing definitions for "digital", things that are not digital get misclassified as digital, while things that are digital get misclassified as non-digital.

The only correct definition of digital with respect to information technology is the involvement of numerical digits. Everything else are qualities associated with popular digital systems, but are not fundamental definitions of digital systems.
by pepicon | 2025-08-10 01:17:09+00:00
Freaking expensive! And with bad service? Wow. I live in the northeast of Brazil, 27–32 °C all year, every day. When I installed a heat pump for our bedroom, it cost me about $500 for a Midea unit, $50 to prepare an electrical outlet, and $100 for installation, which was done in a single day. Service here isn’t great, but I guess it’s five stars compared to New York’s

My electricity cost to run this unit every night is ~$55 extra
by CyberDildonics | 2025-08-10 01:17:38+00:00
the Zig language, just like Rust, guarantees that there are no bounds violations (except in syntactically demarcated unsafe code). C++ just doesn't do that.

You said that already, but when saying zig is safer than C++, pragmatically it isn't because C++ bounds checks in the standard library but zig can never have the automatic resource management that C++ has, and that's what people use all day every day.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-10 01:17:56+00:00
I would say if a certain percentage (or fractional percentage) of the general population has a "processing" advantage, and they are equally represented among trained musicians, then the more accurate your measurement techniques, the more conclusively they would find no difference.

This should be tried among those who have no training and are prodigies or equivalent.

Also repeated among those who pull their weight on the same "instruments" more through instrument familiarity rather than pure musicianship.
by dnh44 | 2025-08-10 01:18:13+00:00
Last summer I came back to software after about 12 years away and I pretty much had an identical experience to you with using AI as a helper to come back. I've now spent the last 6 months coding as much as I can in between consulting gigs. I'm not sure if I would have been able to get caught up so quickly without AI.

I haven't had this much fun programming since I was at university hacking away on sun workstations, but admittedly I only write about 10% of the code myself these days.

I'm currently getting Claude Code to pair program with GPT-5 and they delegate the file edits to Gemini Flash. It's pretty cool.
by yosito | 2025-08-10 01:18:44+00:00
Don't make the mistake of thinking that "knowing" has anything to do with the output of ChatGPT. It gives you the statistically most likely output based on its training data. It's not checking some sort of internal knowledge system, it's literally just outputting statistical linguistic patterns. This technology can be trained to emphasize certain ideas (like propaganda) but it can not be used directly to access knowledge.
by mgh95 | 2025-08-10 01:19:19+00:00
> `DateTime` is not an ISO-8601 type. It can _parse_ an ISO-8601 formatted string.

This is exactly the point: a string is just a data interchange format in the context of a DateTime, and C# provides (as far as I can tell) a complete way of accessing the ISO-8601 specification on the language object. It also supports type-safe generation of clients and client object (or struct) generation from the ISO-8601 string format.

> And even past that, there are Windows-specific idiosyncrasies with how the `DateTime` class implements the parsing of these strings and how it stores the resulting value.

Not really. The windows statements on the article (and I use this on linux for financial services software) are related to automated settings of the preferences for generated strings. All of these may be set within the code itself.
by neom | 2025-08-10 01:20:00+00:00
I think back to the first version of ChatGPT and I would pick it up once in a while, ask it something or chat with it, and then be like... this is cool but I don't know wtf I would use it for, now I use a GPT at least a couple of times a day. Granted, the LLMs have obviously become considerably more capable, but I do believe part of it is I've also learned how to use them and what to use them for, I'm at the point now where I can generally predict the output of what I'm asking for - I don't know if that's the norm (it mostly gives me exactly what I want) I do know how I use them today and how I used them when they first came out is quite different. I guess all that is to say, imo how you prompt them really matters, and that takes time to learn.
by idiotsecant | 2025-08-10 01:20:23+00:00
People say that university is designed to teach you to 'think critically'. They say that a lot. I wonder, then, why it is that most people leaving university are not substantially better at thinking critically than any random person I meet.

There is real work and learning that happens in universities and there are people who actually care about those things but that work is tertiary to the primary function of the university, which is ensuring the continued existence of itself
by slug | 2025-08-10 01:20:26+00:00
I was able to record/playback fujitsu mini-split commands using a simple wemos d1 IR shield + wemos d1 mini (esp8266) a few years ago.

https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/d1_mini_shield/ir.html

https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/d1/d1_mini.html
by derivagral | 2025-08-10 01:20:36+00:00
> this also loses you taste

I won't forget the in-person interview round where I coded a frontend visualization for a data graph (tracking global shipping), then fielded a post-work general interview round from the whole company (~10 ppl) about specifics and "choices" made during a rush to finish. I ended up not going due to comp, but they were acquired months later. Life is funny.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-10 01:20:42+00:00
Even a monthly payment is unnecessary at this moment - again the evolution of the quality of the models, but also the free tier offerings for each model (you can still use the older model's free tier, it was working enough before)

I personally haven't tried GPT 5 yet, but I am getting all I need from Claude and Gemini.

Once I start experimenting with GPT 5.0 - I will still use Claude and Gemini when I run out of free uses.
by vessenes | 2025-08-10 01:21:01+00:00
Hard disagree. The essay is a rehash of Reddit complaints, no direct results from testing and largely about product launch (simultaneous launch to 500mm+ users mind you) snafus. Please.

I think most hit pieces like this miss what is actually important about the 5 launch - it’s the first product launch in the space. We are moving on from model improvements to a concept of what a full product might look like. The things that matter about 5 are not thinking strength, although it is moderately better than o3 in my tests, which is roughly what the benchmarks say.

What’s important is that it’s faster, that it’s integrated, that it’s set up to provide incremental improvements (to say multimodal interaction, image generation and so on) without needing the branding of a new model, and I think the very largest improvement is its ability to retain context and goals over a very long set of tools uses.

Willison mentioned it’s his only daily driver now (for a largely coding based usage setup), and I would say it’s significantly better at getting a larger / longer / more context needed coding task than the prior best — Claude - or the prior best architects (o3-pro or Gemini depending). It’s also much faster than o3-pro for coding.

Anyway, saying “Reddit users who have formed parasocial relationships with 4o didn’t like this launch -> oAI is doomed” is weak analysis, and pointless.
by vinhnx | 2025-08-10 01:22:28+00:00
This weekend, I have just integrated new model releases into VT: GPT-5, gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b, and Claude Opus 4.1.

Also optimized workflow utilities and chat pipeline handling, updated the UI/UX for improved performance, and added an icon provider for model selection.

https://vtchat.io.vn
by msgodel | 2025-08-10 01:22:59+00:00
What do we need people for to begin with? We want more people because we like people. If your civilization has a demographic collapse and your neighbor's does not that's probably going to end very very badly for you. At least it consistently has historically.

Also people keep throwing the word "AGI" around but the only definition I've heard is "being as intelligent as a normal person." We've had that for a while. The reason most of you don't accept it is because it's not actually a person which is the same reason you're not going to see some civilization restructuring event from AI.
by leptons | 2025-08-10 01:23:03+00:00
>I was working on some code where I didn't really understand the typescript types and fed it the crazy error messages I was getting and it made a try to understand them and didn't really, I used it as a "rubber duck" over the course of a day or two and working with it I eventually came to understand what was wrong and how to fix and I got into a place that I like and when there is an error I can understand it and it can understand it too.

I have to wonder if you tried a simple google search and read through some docs if you couldn't have figured this out quicker than trying to coax a result out of the LLM.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-10 01:23:16+00:00
Not sure. In RLHF you are adjusting the weights away from wrong answers in general. So this is being done.

I think the closest you can get without more research is another model checking the answer and looking for BS. This will cripple speed but if it can be more agentic and async it may not matter.

I think people need to choose between chat interface and better answers.
by nayuki | 2025-08-10 01:23:38+00:00
> a DVD is digital but it's not "digital only". Every single owner has a physical disc with the movie on it.

That satisfies the definition of "digital only" - every person who has the movie (conceptually speaking) has a digital version of it. This holds true as long as no one tried to print the movie onto paper as an analog image, or export it to VHS or something like that.

Note that digital does not contrast with physical. A DVD is a physical object that holds digital data. A sequence of pulses on an Ethernet cable conveys digital information via waves of electromagnetic energy.

> Digital only ownership is a few bytes abstracted into some database somewhere

And somebody still ultimately has to store at least one copy of the movie on a physical medium somewhere.

> Digital only ownership

I think we can all agree that if you own some coins/tokens/NFTs on Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc., that is a very pure form of digital-only ownership. There is no intuitive physical object that corresponds to the ownership of a digital token.

Yet, that blockchain database is publicly available and mirrored millions of times; it is not locked up behind a single company. This differs from what you were trying to say, where I interpret your notion of "digital-only" to mean that "the movie studio hosts the file on its server and streams it to you on demand, but you can never download a copy of the movie to keep for yourself".

Ultimately, "digital" just means that the information you wanted is a finite sequence of 0s and 1s, as opposed to some analog signal with infinite variation. "Digital" says nothing about who owns it, how many copies exist, how it is delivered, etc.
by toofy | 2025-08-10 01:25:10+00:00
some people in my circle are reacting to this kind of thing exactly how i expected.

the people who go on and on about meritocracy and despise diversity, etc… love this. they have loudly cried for years about meritocracy but despise any program that takes away clear and obvious advantages to certain people.

it’s similar to the carrot and stick argument. they claim certain classes of people need more money to work while claiming that other class needs less money so they feel the fear. in certain people’s minds, executives will only work for the 100s of millions in carrots while conveniently that other class will only work appropriately if they get the stick.
by bko | 2025-08-10 01:25:50+00:00
> For some reason AI seems to bring out articles that seem to fundamentally lack curiosity - opting instead for gleeful mockery and scorn

I think its broader to all tech. It all started in 2016 after it was deemed that tech, especially social media, had helped sway the election. Since then a lot of things became political that weren't in the past and tech got swept up w/ that. And unfortunately AI has its haters despite the fact that it's objectively the fastest growing most exciting technology in the last 50 years. Instead they're dissecting some CEOs shitposts.

Fast forward to today, pretty much everything is political. Take this banger from NY Times:

> Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many ingredients. In an interview with MSNBC on Nov. 6, he questioned the overall ingredient count: “Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it has two or three?” Mr. Kennedy asked.

> He was wrong on the ingredient count, they are roughly the same. But the Canadian version does have natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.

No self-awareness.

https://archive.is/dT2qK#selection-975.0-996.0