MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HankStallone | 2025-08-21 14:54:35+00:00
True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?

The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-21 14:55:03+00:00
I believe the usual uninformed thinking is "terraform exists outside of AWS, so I can move off of AWS" versus "we have used CF or Bicep, now we're stuck" kind of deal

Which is to say both of you are correct, but OP was highlighting the improper expectations of "if we write in TF, sure it sucks balls but we can then just pivot to $other_cloud" not realizing it's untrue and now you've used a rusty paintbrush as a screwdriver
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-21 14:55:07+00:00
It's simple: When there's money to be made, the folks with the money to make, will pull out the stops to game the reviews. We have seen this in just about every review system ever (except Consumer Reports). They game it, milk some money, until everyone figures out it sucks, then abandon it. The reviewers count on getting brought.

I really miss Mr. Cranky[0, 1]. Here's his review of Battlefield Earth[2]:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Cranky

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120503072554/http://www.mrcrank...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120926010236/http://www.mrcrank...
by hearsathought | 2025-08-21 14:55:28+00:00
> It almost seems as though the record-setting bonuses they were dolling out to hire the top minds in AI might have been a little shortsighted.

If AI is going to be integral to society going forward, how is it shortsighted?

> She did well by recommending investing in companies that invest in AI (like MS) but who had other profitable businesses (like Azure).

So you prefer a 2x gain rather than 10X gain from the likes of Nvidia or Broadcom? You should check how much better META has done compared to MSFT the past few years. Also a "financial investment person"? The anecdote feels made up.

> She skillfully navigated the question in a way that won my respect.

She won your respect by giving you advice that led to far less returns than you could have gotten otherwise?

> I personally believe that a lot of investment money is going to evaporate before the market resets.

But you believe investing in MSFT was a better AI play than going with the "hype" even when objective facts show otherwise. Why should any care what you think about AI, investments and the market when you clearly know nothing about it?
by Martin_Silenus | 2025-08-21 14:55:55+00:00
Wait… that's the specific question I had, because rendered text would require OCR to be read by a machine. Why would an AI do that costly process in the first place? Is it part of the multi-modal system without it being able to differenciate that text from the prompt?

If the answer is yes, then that flaw does not make sense at all. It's hard to believe they can't prevent this. And even if they can't, they should at least improve the pipeline so that any OCR feature should not automatically inject its result in the prompt, and tell user about it to ask for confirmation.

Damn… I hate these pseudo-neurological, non-deterministic piles of crap! Seriously, let's get back to algorithms and sound technologies.
by aksnsman | 2025-08-21 14:55:58+00:00
> well specc'd CRUD endpoints

I’m really tired of this trope. I’ve spent my whole career on “boring CRUD” and the number of relational db backed apps I’ve seen written by devs who’ve never heard of isolation levels is concerning (including myself for a time).

Coincidentally, as soon as these apps see any scale issues pop up.
by ksherlock | 2025-08-21 14:56:03+00:00
The Federal Reserve will lower interest rates to keep that big, beautiful bubble. Donald Trump thinks interests should be 1%. There are 2 FRB governors (jockeying for a new chair) that have publicly called for lower interest rates. One FRB member (Adriana Kugler) unexpectedly resigned a couple weeks ago and will be replaced by the WH economist.

Just yesterday, the guy who was found liable in court for financial fraud demanded an FRB (Lisa Cook) resign after being accused of mortgage fraud. Do you suppose somebody in the WH is digging up dirt?

And of course, weekly rants, accusations of fraud, and musings of firing JPo.
by Aachen | 2025-08-21 14:56:16+00:00
That, but apparently also restrictions on what tech you can use to access the website:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971990 person being blocked with `message looking something like "you failed"`

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970290 mentions of other requirements that are allegedly on purpose to block older clients (as browser emulators presumably often would appear to be, because why would they bother implementing newer mechanisms when the web has backwards compatibility)
by Draiken | 2025-08-21 14:56:34+00:00
These are rich people hiring rich kids exactly to extract as much money as they can from the companies. A huge salary or bonus is the best way to do that regardless of company performance in the long term.

Take a look at this: https://www.theyrule.net/

These CEOs are sons, brother in laws, cousins, friends, etc. from the same group of people that populate the boards. The corruption at the top is absolutely blatant and that's where huge chunks of money generated from the folks that actually do the work ends up.

There are even studies on companies that self-organize without CEOs being more efficient than "regular" companies. The sad truth is that having a dictator at the top of every company is not as good as people make it out to be. You may get a good dictator, but it's way more likely you don't.
by eep_social | 2025-08-21 14:56:47+00:00
unsurprisingly they killed off the BOI reporting requirement in March [1]:

> ALERT [Updated March 26, 2025]: All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as “domestic reporting companies” — and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN.

[1] https://www.fincen.gov/boi
by echelon | 2025-08-21 14:56:51+00:00
Vision language model.

You feed it an image. It determines what is in the image and gives you text.

The output can be objects, or something much richer like a full text description of everything happening in the image.

VLMs are hugely significant. Not only are they great for product use cases, giving users the ability to ask questions with images, but they're how we gather the synthetic training data to build image and video animation models. We couldn't do that at scale without VLMs. No human annotator would be up to the task of annotating billions of images and videos at scale and consistently.

Since they're a combination of an LLM and image encoder, you can ask it questions and it can give you smart feedback. You can ask it, "Does this image contain a fire truck?" or, "You are labeling scenes from movies, please describe what you see."
by elashri | 2025-08-21 14:57:42+00:00
In academia the research pipeline is this

Undergraduate -> Graduate Student -> Post-doc -> Tenure/Senior

Some exceptions occur for people getting Tenure without post doc or people doing some other things like taking undergraduate in one or two years. But no one expect that we for whole skip the first two and then get any senior researchers.

The same idea applies anywhere, the rule is that if you don't have juniors then you don't get seniors so better prepare your bot to do everything.
by ben-schaaf | 2025-08-21 14:58:43+00:00
> It's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3

That's correct, but it could be the day after you buy the license is when ST3 stops receiving any updates and we dedicate all work to ST4. With a ST4 license you're always getting 3 years of updates, ST3 it was anywhere from 3 to zero (not counting the beta period, ST3 only got 3 years of updates).

> Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)

I think we can all sympathize with some buyer's remorse. Unfortunately the line needs to be drawn somewhere. Maybe you can take solace in that we probably can't put multiple huge features in a single update, at least not a dev release. :)
by michaelt | 2025-08-21 14:58:55+00:00
The original press release and report are at [1], couldn't find a link to them in the article.

> In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity

If they're running on, say, two RTX 6000s for a total draw of ~600 watts, that would be a response time of 1.44 seconds. So obviously the median prompt doesn't go to some high-end thinking model users have to pay for.

It's a very low number; for comparison, an electric vehicle might consume 82kWh to travel 363 miles. So that 0.24 watt-hours of energy is equivalent to driving 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) in such an EV.

When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure, it always makes me think: Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...
by nutjob2 | 2025-08-21 14:59:31+00:00
> We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do

I think this is one of the major mistakes of this cycle. People assume that AI will scale and improve like many computing things before it, but there is already evidence scaling isn't working and people are putting a lot of faith in models (LLMs) structurally unsuited to the task.

Of course that doesn't mean that people won't keep exploiting the hype with hand-wavy claims.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-21 14:59:52+00:00
A great option for most people, and indeed Anubis' README recommends using Cloudflare if possible. However, not everyone can use a paid CDN. Some people can't pay because their payment methods aren't accepted. Some people need to serve content or to countries which a major CDN can't for legal and compliance reasons. Some organizations need their own independent infrastructure to serve their organizational misson.
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-21 14:59:52+00:00
Yes, we all love pedantry around here (that’s probably 99% of the reason I wrote the original comment!)

But if your position is that the percentage of time in the software lifecycle that dead code has a negative effect on a system is anywhere close to the percentage of time in an aircraft lifecycle that extra non-functional rivets (or other unnecessary weight objects) has a negative effect on the aircraft, you’re just wrong.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-21 15:00:29+00:00
The most likely explanation I can think of are drugs.

Offering 1B dollar salaries and then backtracking, it's like when that addict friend calls you with a super cool idea at 11pm and then 5 days later they regret it.

Also rejecting a 1B salary? Drugs, it isn't unheard of in Silicon Valley.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-21 15:00:48+00:00
I’m confused. How do you do frequent small changes and avoid stacked PRs. Do you just do a small commit, wait for a review, merge, do another small commit? Or do you make a bunch of small commits locally and only put up the next one for review when the previous one is reviewed and merged?

That’s the only models I can think of and it’s weird to advocate to have a variable time asynchronous process in the middle of your code or review loops. Seems like you’re just handicapping your velocity for no reason.

Stacked PRs are precisely about factoring out small changes into individually reviewable commits that can be reviewed and landed independently, decoupling reviewer and developer while retaining good properties like small commits that the reviewer is going to do a better job on, larger single purpose commits that the reviewer knows to spend more time on without getting overwhelmed dealing with unrelated noise, and the ability to see relationships between smaller commits and the bigger picture. Meanwhile the developer gets to land unobtrusive cleanups that serve a broader goal faster to avoid merge conflicts while getting feedback quicker on work while working towards a larger goal.

The only time stacked commits aren’t as useful is for junior devs who cants organize themselves well enough to understand how to do this well (it’s an art you have to intentionally practice at) and don’t generally have a good handle on the broader scope of what they’re working towards.
by tguvot | 2025-08-21 15:00:50+00:00
at some point of time there was serious fallout between PA west bank and Hamas in Gaza (you need to remember that Hamas was elected as majority party by elections in 2006 and later there was coup attempt by PLO sponsored by usa, that succeeded in west bank and failed in gaza).

As result of this fallout PA stopped transferring money to Gaza to pay salaries and for maintenance of all infrastructure and services.

Mainstream media across the world had headlines that "hundreds of thousands of gazans will starve to death any moment now because they can't afford to buy food because israel blocks money for salaries" and "unmaintained infrastructure will result in mass illness etc.. etc.. etcc.. because israel blocks money for fixing things".

eventually Israel folded and allowed those transfers.

and now this is known as "israel propping up hamas"
by somenameforme | 2025-08-21 15:01:10+00:00
You're assuming there is another side, which there seems to be no reason whatsoever to assume. The facts, outside of the government's behavior, are extremely benign and supported by decades of precedent by the exact same people doing the exact same stuff in the exact same way. I'm certain the guys who quit, or even if they were fired, on the first day didn't expect to get a crop year's salary out of it. This makes the government's behavior all the more absurd. Yet the government's behavior is not in question, only the constitutionality of it. And indeed it turns out that it was unconstitutional.
by tombert | 2025-08-21 15:01:33+00:00
I think AI has overall helped me learn.

There are lots of personal projects that I have wanted to build for years but have pushed off because the “getting started cost” is too high, I get frustrated and annoyed and don’t get far before giving up. Being able to get the tedious crap out of the way lowers the barrier to entry and I can actually do the real project, and get it past some finish line.

Am I learning as much as I would had I powered through it without AI assistance? Probably not, but I am definitely learning more than I would if I had simply not finished (or even started) the project at all.
by moi2388 | 2025-08-21 15:01:50+00:00
I completely agree.

On a side note.. ya’ll must be prompt wizards if you can actually use the LLM code.

I use it for debugging sometimes to get an idea, or a quick sketch up of an UI.

As for actual code.. the code it writes is a huge mess of spaghetti code, overly verbose, with serious performance and security risks, and complete misunderstanding of pretty much every design pattern I give it..
by necovek | 2025-08-21 15:01:51+00:00
Wouldn't it be nice to have a good study that supports either your or my view?

FWIW, I've never been stopped by Anubis, so even if it's much more rarely implemented, that's still infinitely less than 5-10 captchas a day I do see regularly. I do agree it's still different scales, but I don't trust your gut feel either. Thus a suggestion to look for a study.
by duxup | 2025-08-21 15:01:51+00:00
>What I would really like is for every university classroom to be treated more like the sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs, in the White House and other government buildings: Phones are not permitted and are locked in cubbies outside of every room. Students would have to deposit their phones before class and pick them up after class. Ideally, professors could still choose to opt out of this policy, especially if phones or other mobile devices were integral to the educational process and content of the class.

Conference rooms should do this.

Really lots of places... anywhere you actually care about people's engagement / learning.
by craftkiller | 2025-08-21 15:01:53+00:00
> Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair

I'm not much of a car person but I thought stick shift also had the benefits of:

1. engine braking 2. being able to jump start a car with a dead battery by pushing it down a hill while turning the ignition and shifting into 2nd gear (which my sister successfully did after school one day).
by bitwize | 2025-08-21 15:02:05+00:00
New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.

It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.
by ack_complete | 2025-08-21 15:02:38+00:00
I have a simple website consisting solely of static webpages pointing to a bunch of .zip binaries. Nothing dynamic, all highly cacheable. The bots are re-downloading the binaries over and over. I can see Bingbot downloading a .zip file in the logs, and then an hour later another Bingbot instance from a different IP in the same IP range downloading the same .zip file in full. These are files that were uploaded years ago and have never retroactively changed, and don't contain crawlable contents within them (executable code).

Web crawlers have been around for years, but many of the current ones are more indiscriminate and less well behaved.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-21 15:02:42+00:00
Yes, but they are now aiming to use these funds to buy real estate and of course that is going to raise a bunch of flags. If the government would accept this without challenge criminals would suddenly be left all kinds of crazy inheritances. At a minimum you'd expect some documentation of how that money landed in their possession in the first place, for instance a will, a final balance of an estate and so on.

I've handled a couple of these for family members and the amount of paperwork around even a minor inheritance can be pretty impressive.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-21 15:02:46+00:00
I think self check-out is only faster if you compare it to really, really slow checkout clerks with no dedicated bagger. I've been in grocery stores with fantastic checkout staff where 100 items were checked out and bagged in a minute and a half. Ain't no way I'm going to achieve that rate standing by myself there over a tiny kiosk where I need to find a bag, put every item into bags before scanning the next one.
by ajross | 2025-08-21 15:03:05+00:00
Yes yes, but it's only an exploit mitigation if the bytes encode a mitigating instruction. On 32 bit ARM, they do. In thumb mode[1], they don't. That's interesting enough to be worth a blog post.

[1] For those who don't realize: author is on a Cortex-M processor per the ISA Ref they cite. These devices support *only* thumb instructions. Although as of thumb2, the encoding is now variable-length and there are lots of not-at-all-orthogonal-with-big-ARM 32 bit variants too. It's... not really the same architecture at all, to be honest.
by bazmattaz | 2025-08-21 15:03:22+00:00
I have fond memories of my Hackintosh years. Over time the frustration of updating to the latest OS and having to deal with breaking changes just sucked all the joy from it. Especially when I really needed to use the computer for something.

I might tinker again some time soon. I had thought of building a Mac mini for a home theatre setup but then again Apple TV just works so well
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-21 15:03:24+00:00
These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both?

However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checkouts.

I have zero problem with max enforcement. I'm not a thief and if you have a thousand AI cameras tracking my every move through the store, I simply do not care. I also don't see a particularly slippery slope about systems that highlight the frequent thieves. Further I appreciate that retail operates at a pretty thin margin, so every penny they save (both on labour and by catching/preventing thefts) is actually good for law abiding society. So more of it, please.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-21 15:03:28+00:00
The first thing to understand is that middle-lower and lower class people don't matter much to the economy, but they make up a large contingent of the population, so they matter a lot to media orgs. They love news stories about their struggle and the media is happy to oblige them with ad-ridden news stories. Hence the endless pandemic economic doomerism and "I lost my cashier job" stories.

Who does matter are the white collar upper-middle, upper class people. They generate the most value and spend the most money. These advanced sectors are the american economy. And what happened to them during the pandemic? They just stayed home and kept working, thanks modern tech.

However the government responded like it was still 2005, where there was no tech to keep things moving, and created an incredibly stimulative environment for an economy that was largely still doing fine. By the end of 2020 GDP had recovered.

Despite this we still got:

- 0% interest rates, this is the crack-cocaine of the upper class, especially when the actual economy was doing fine.

- Pause on student loan payments, this was massive, most of these people were employed making more money than ever

- Pause on rent, another massive boon, again people who didn't lose their job now are not paying loans or rent

- PPP loans, pretty much a straight handout to business owners, who again, were still in business anyway.

- Child tax credit, the child tax credit was almost doubled for anyone who had a kid(s).

- Unemployment benefits, this is getting away from upper class territory, but lots of lower class workers were getting 2x pay while not paying rent or working, which they took right to spending.

- Stimulus checks, the most visible but least impactful, everyone got a few thousand dollars.
by bpodgursky | 2025-08-21 15:03:30+00:00
> In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

> Denied access to an outside court or jury, the Marinos were subjected to an in-house agency process from pillar to post. Pursuit by DOL agents, enforcement by DOL personnel, trial by DOL attorneys, decision by DOL judge, and approval by DOL appellate judges.

The farm was accused of violating labor laws, sued for a half million dollars, got tried and convicted by an internal DOL judge with no jury. Just really, seriously try to argue to me that the drafters of the 7th amendment considered what happened here to be outside the scope of the 7th amendment. They would have said:

"right of trial by jury shall be preserved, unless the federal government sets up an entire parallel legal system to avoid the inconvenience of taking people to trial before taking their livelihoods"

Come on man.