MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runako | 2025-08-31 18:54:32+00:00
One of the more detrimental aspects of the Cloud Tax is that it constrains the types of solutions engineers even consider.

Picking an arbitrary price point of $200/mo, you can get 4(!) vCPUs and 16GB of RAM at AWS. Architectures are different etc., but this is roughly a mid-spec dev laptop of 5 or so years ago.

At Hetzner, you can rent a machine with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM for the same money. It's hard to overstate how far apart these machines are in raw computational capacity.

There are approaches to problems that make sense with 10x the capacity that don't make sense on the much smaller node. Critically, those approaches can sometimes save engineering time that would otherwise go into building a more complex system to manage around artificial constraints.

Yes, there are other factors like durability etc. that need to be designed for. But going the other way, dedicated boxes can deliver more consistent performance without worries of noisy neighbors.
by quectophoton | 2025-08-31 18:55:03+00:00
I call them a "soup" because AFAIK there's no intent behind them:

I'll stop calling them a soup when the part that generates a human-readable response is completely separate from the knowledge/information part; when an untrained program can respond with "I don't know" due to deliberate (/debuggable) mapping of lack of data to a minimal subset of language rules and words that are encoded in the program, rather than having "I don't know" be a series of tokens generated from the training data.
by Spivak | 2025-08-31 18:55:38+00:00
For tv and movies you're basically hoping they had a DVD release. All the options options to "buy" are essentially one time fees to stream it on various services or when you get a download it will have HDCP drm on it. I can understand why they don't offer drm free versions because I would give them away like candy to my friends but it's mostly all available pirating anyway so I doubt it really matters.
by joshmn | 2025-08-31 18:55:43+00:00
I did this (well, a large-r VPS for $120/month) for my Rails-based sports streaming website. I had a significant amount of throughput too, especially at peak (6-10pm ET).

My biggest takeaway was to have my core database tables (user, subscription, etc) backed up every 10 minutes, and the rest every hour, and test their restoration. (When I shut down the site it was 1.2TB.) Having a script to quickly provision a new node—in case I ever needed it—would have something up within 8 minutes from hitting enter.

When I compare this to the startups I’ve consulted for, who choose k8s because it’s what Google uses yet they only push out 1000s of database queries per day with a handful of background jobs and still try to optimize burn, I shake my head.

I’d do it again. Like many of us I don’t have the need for higher-complexity setups. When I did need to scale, I just added more vCPUs and RAM.
by em-bee | 2025-08-31 18:55:46+00:00
Answer is yes.

how then? just a rough idea would be nice. because don't see it. as much as it pains me, but i have to admit that i find the article convincing. i see these people around me every day. they have no experience with technology. they didn't even go to school long enough. yet they all have a smartphone with no idea what it is capable of, or what the consequences are. and they are used to the government taking care to protect them.
by ankit219 | 2025-08-31 18:56:04+00:00
Calling SEO content high quality is overestimating the nature and level of an SEO article. The other aspect that it implies is businesses are the reason we get so much high quality content. That is provably wrong. The moment people saw that some kinds of links got them high ranking on google, it resulted in an industry of producing SEO garbage where businesses would publish 1000s of words to answer something which could have been answered in a single word. (usual caveats exist)

People want signal and answers, not the 10 blue links as this post tries to argue.

The other thing is this: most high quality and valuable content can now be produced by individuals and finds distribution on social networks where they can occasionally charge for it as well. The drawback to google indexing those links was also that SEO-companies started targeting these mediums (eg: reddit, medium, forums). We needed an early regulation to minimize the needless hacking of SEO, but we let the market play it out, so it should still play out.
by KaiserPro | 2025-08-31 18:56:06+00:00
> to suggest that they are snooping on your pics in order to have a better understanding of their victims

no, but its expensive to do for little gain. Look at all the stupid snooping shit facebook, its all about getting a concrete link between persona and buying an object.

scanning photos is a detectable gamble, and the signal you'll get for that is pretty questionable. You're also assuming that they can over come conways law to actually pull it off. The risk of doing that vs the reward of signal is not worth it.

It also will get them fined like a motherfucker by the FCC, as they still nominally have oversight over "privacy". I mean that now questionable, given the state of the executive branch.

Its far easier to just work out if a 14 year old girl has just deleted a photo and target them with body image products. Much safer from the FCC too.
by fcarraldo | 2025-08-31 18:56:31+00:00
I don't think AI companies should be doing this, but they are doing it. All are opt-out, not opt-in. Anthropic is just changing their policies to be the same as their competition.

xAI trains Grok on both public data (Tweets) and non-public data (Conversations with Grok) by default. [0]

> Grok.com Data Controls for Training Grok: For the Grok.com website, you can go to Settings, Data, and then “Improve the Model” to select whether your content is used for model training.

Meta trains its AI on things posted to Meta's products, which are not as "public" as Tweets on X, because users expect these to be shared only with their networks. They do not use DMs, but they do use posts to Instagram/Facebook/etc. [1]

> We use information that is publicly available online and licensed information. We also use information shared on Meta Products. This information could be things like posts or photos and their captions. We do not use the content of your private messages with friends and family to train our AIs unless you or someone in the chat chooses to share those messages with our AIs.

OpenAI uses conversations for training data by default [2]

> When you use our services for individuals such as ChatGPT, Codex, and Sora, we may use your content to train our models.

> You can opt out of training through our privacy portal by clicking on “do not train on my content.” To turn off training for your ChatGPT conversations and Codex tasks, follow the instructions in our Data Controls FAQ. Once you opt out, new conversations will not be used to train our models.

[0] https://x.ai/legal/faq

[1] https://www.facebook.com/privacy/genai/

[2] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...
by eastbound | 2025-08-31 18:56:43+00:00
> to man walking on the moon in only 66 years

And that was before Epoch (1969, unix time started in 1970). We went from calculator to AI in 55 years, which is, actually, extremely long. It took exactly the time to miniaturize CPUs enough that you would hold as many gates in a GPU as neurones in a human’s brain. The moment we could give enough transistors to a single program, AI appeared. It’s like it’s just an emergent behavior.
by zahlman | 2025-08-31 18:56:51+00:00
> How do you even browse the web?

With NoScript, and some basic expectations for web designers to try to honour that "graceful degradation" concept that we were all assured was definitely a thing many years ago.

> Is it common for people to disable JavaScript?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/ claims about a quarter of a million users. Which I suppose is really not very much in the grand scheme of things. But there are also people getting similar effects using uBlock and other such tools.

But I don't care how popular this is or isn't. It's my computer and this is how I operate it. And I advocate strongly for others to follow suit, because there are numerous advantages.
by martin-t | 2025-08-31 18:56:52+00:00
A dictator deciding that every village needs to produce X amount of steel instead of actually harvesting their crops and them millions of people dying is exactly the opposite of what I described.

RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.

This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
by const_cast | 2025-08-31 18:57:02+00:00
NodeJS is, like, 10 steps back from PHP 8. Worse type system, less safe, package ecosystem is a hot mess, slower... I mean the list goes on and on.

We can "lipstick pig" a lot of those problems by using typescript or whatever, but now we're compiling JS and the output isn't even fast. At that point use a competent compiled language like C# or Rust.
by bearjaws | 2025-08-31 18:57:05+00:00
> Can you explain on this claim, beyond what the article mentioned?

I run a lambda behind a load balancer, hardware dies, its redundant, it gets replaced. I have a database server fail, while it re provisions it doesn't saturate read IO on the SAN causing noisy neighbor issues.

I don't deal with any of it, I don't deal with depreciation, I don't deal with data center maintenance.
by defanor | 2025-08-31 18:57:21+00:00
Are you arguing against simplicity being subjective, or as a tangent, with the topics brought up as examples (particularly advocating early returns)? I already mentioned that I view it as subjective, so perhaps as an illustration of that, it is worthwhile to point out why I do not find early/premature returns simpler (and would not consider it as knowledge that they are easier to understand for everyone, though acknowledging that those must be easier for some). I work primarily with Haskell in the past decade, and occasionally other functional languages, which have no such return and break statements (not counting their emulation, as whole imperative languages can be emulated; and neither does lambda calculus have those, which is the simpler model one usually has in mind while working with functional languages), operating on expressions, so I am rather used to control flow mostly following the syntactic structure (and I dislike exceptions for that reason: I find that they make control flow more confusing). Sometimes I do use early returns in imperative languages, though often I still prefer to use a "ret" variable in those, setting it instead of returning, and returning it in the very end of a function, so that the correspondence between code structure and control flow is maintained, and the code can be read and thought of more like Haskell or Scheme, rather than like assembly or C with goto. Which, I think, helps to avoid confusion: adding an early return statement and making the function to skip some cleanup in the end (particularly in lower-level languages), or adding a cleanup and forgetting that there is an early return already in place above it, looks like an easy way to introduce a bug. As an example of me not being the only crazy person, there is the NASA C style guide [0] with a section on the return statement, and I recall online articles along those lines as well (as mentioned above, comparing those to goto). I do not claim that this is the one true view/approach, but there it is, existing.

As a bonus (an additional example of differing views on simplicity), even goto itself is still in use these days, with some advocating its use, and others (famously) arguing against it, both camps using some kind of a simplicity (or complexity of the opposing approach) as an argument.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19950022400/downloads/19...
by saejox | 2025-08-31 18:57:31+00:00
I left a comment like that, because the project itself is about the productivity of AI. Project aims to increase it. Mine is also about productivity of AI. But my distaste about its blandness.

On the whole meta discussion thing, i have been reading HN for at least 15 years. Posts with lots of comments are meta discussions. HN is not really a place to discuss technics of a project.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-31 18:58:05+00:00
There's 0 chance they stop releasing open stuff. They are still way behind, so they have all the same incentives they had before to release models - brand recognition, devs engaged with their stack, slow down competition and so on. They will keep some models internal, or further train them on different datasets (internal?) for their own product use, but the "small" models (1-200ish B params) will be released in open weights for the foreseeable future.
by jedberg | 2025-08-31 18:58:15+00:00
Usually the way it works is you get signing bonus with your first paycheck, and then you have to return a prorated amount if you leave before the first year. It's possible they negotiated something better, but unlikely.

Amazon avoids this problem altogether by paying the signing bonus 1/52 with each bi-weekly paycheck for the first two years. They also do the proration on five workdays in a week when it's in their favor, but seven days in a week when it's in your favor, so they win either way.
by savef | 2025-08-31 18:58:26+00:00
Folks are saying Bandcamp, but surely that's only for the few indie artists that are on there (in comparison to the wider music ecosystem covered by Spotify). Please explain if I'm missing something here.

So I think a better answer is Qobuz[1], which I recently tried. I had a pleasant experience, where I downloaded DRM free FLAC files. I will use it again, but sparingly, as the cost adds up on top of the Spotify subscription and in comparison to piracy.

[1] https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/shop
by Refreeze5224 | 2025-08-31 18:58:36+00:00
I firmly disagree that history proves this. The history of certain countries, certain economic systems, and certain systems of social organization have proven inequitable, but most people are unfamiliar with the many systems that have proven workable, but have not provided for a small hierarchical cadre of people with coercive power over others. It's not surprising that this sort of thing is not taught within a capitalist or statist system, but they certainly do exist, and have throughout human history, which is much longer than the last 500 years or so existence of hierarchical states and capitalism.

See David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything for a deep dive into some of the many successful systems of human societal organization.
by trueismywork | 2025-08-31 18:58:57+00:00
I have seen your work and have some experience in kernel development. I think the situation is bad for everyone involved: you and linux. I would suggest trying to restart the conversation only focused on experimental feature changes.

In specific, I think there should be am effort to have a label (doesn't matter what one, hidden behind something like "icantbelieveitsnotbcachefs") where then you're (and not just you but anyone who wants to contribute changes to experimental features) allowed to push changes all the time.

That was already working for btrfs and will probably work for btrfs too.

Your argument about reducing feedback time can be a good argument in general. Yo shouldn't approach this as "im right allow me to push code, but start a different conversation about quick testing of experimental code with minimal friction. And make a case in general for linux to have this system.
by andersmurphy | 2025-08-31 18:59:19+00:00
A single machine can handle much, much more if you use sqlite and batch updates/inserts.

Honestly, unless you're bandwidth/uplink limited (e.g running a CDN) then a single machine will take you really far.

Also simpler systems tend to have better uptime/reliability. Doesn't get much simpler than a single box.
by nikkwong | 2025-08-31 19:00:23+00:00
Stimulants are still first line therapy for treating ADHD but I think mindfulness meditation is wholly underrated. People with ADHD have too much activity and overly-robust neural nets in the default-mode network in comparison to healthy controls. There is a network above this network, the salience network [0] that is responsible for the switching between the default-mode and executive control networks.

ADHD may present with many brain-network anomalies, but I believe the classic case is one where there is more default-mode activity, less executive control activity, and ineffective switching occurring from the salience network. Mindfulness meditation is honed at training the salience and attention networks towards playing closer attention, which offsets the deficits observed in ADHD.

That's my lay interpretation; but actually, I believe that people who suffer from ADHD probably have even more to gain, relatively, than those who don't from taking up the habit of mindfulness meditation. It's not an easy fix--I've read that it takes about twice as long for those with ADHD to benefit from the practice. But it seems like it's worth it; after all, your mind is really the only tool that you have.

Those interested in this topic should read about ADHD and it's relation to the salience and executive networks; and how mindfulness sharpens the function in these areas.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_network
by mannyv | 2025-08-31 19:00:32+00:00
Well, you have to understand what you're testing.

With a test like this, you're really testing two different things:

1. How fast your database is,

2. How fast your frontend is

Since the query is simple, your frontend is basically a DB access layer and should be taking no time. And since the table is indexed the query should also take no time.

The only other interesting question is if the database can handle the number of connections and the storage is. The app is using connection pools, but the actual size of the database machine is never mentioned...which is a problem. How big is the DB instance? A small instance could be crushed with 80 connections. A database on a hard drive may not be able to handle the load either (though since the data volume is small, it could be that everything ends up cached anyway).

So this is sort of interesting, but sort of not interesting.
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-31 19:01:01+00:00
> I think there is a school of thought that capex should be avoided at all costs (and server hardware is expensive up front).

Yes, there is.

Honestly, it looks to me that this school of thought is mostly adopted by people that can't do arithmetic or use a calculator. But it does absolutely exist.

That said, no, servers are not nearly expensive enough to move the needle on a company nowadays. The room that often goes around them is, and that's why way more people rent the room than the servers in it.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-08-31 19:01:27+00:00
I think San Francisco has something like this with their Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program. You have to be below a certain income to be considered, and basically you get to pay a fixed monthly rate to "own" a place that can only be sold for a fixed amount. It always just sounded like rent to me.

I think that NYC's co-ops (TICs in San Francisco) provided an interesting alternative model. They usually require owner-occupancy, can't be rented easily, and are difficult to finance.

These restrictions eliminate investors and speculators, and shields the the units from the inflation that happens from fed intervention and super low rates.

The result is that they're usually priced a lot lower and appreciate more slowly than they would be if they were condos.
by dvh | 2025-08-31 19:01:54+00:00
I'm a programmer, a creative person, working on my projects, and regularly I need a short break, so on every break I usually lay in bed and checked the news and I often ended on YouTube watching more videos, wasting hours every day. What eventually helped me was use css to replace entire YouTube (and other doom scrolling websites) with a motivational picture that says:

"One day, you'll realize that your dream died because you chose comfort over effort. Don't let that regret haunt you forever."

And it worked.

The css for yt looks like this:

body { min-height: 100vh; background-image:url(https://example.com/effort.jpg); background-size: contain; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center; background-color: black; } p,div,h1,span {display:none}

It's been 6 months and it's still working.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-31 19:02:08+00:00
All of their products are prime real estate for AI integration. But they need strong models that work well. L3 style but with current tool use / agentic stuff. They have "internal markets" for lots of niches. Auto store for mom&pop shops that use fb markets. Auto customer support. Auto chatbots for brands. Companions to keep people online and using their products. Flirty chatbots to bring in the new crop of users. And so on...
by lnxg33k1 | 2025-08-31 19:02:10+00:00
I deleted all my socials more than a decade ago and never looked back, to be honest it's expensive, this august I've spent a lot of money going out almost every day, but I also think it's because it's hard to stay in when outside the weather is great, also gym was closed, but I think getting rid of social completely it's the only way to go, when they are engineered to monopolise your time, there is no limiting
by meerab | 2025-08-31 19:02:14+00:00
Your routine seems completely normal. This is Not Youtube addiction and procrastination. You work 8 hours - that's already your productivity. The idea that your personal time also needs to be optimized and highly productive is tech bro nonsense.

After a full workday, your brain wants easy dopamine. That is being human. You're not a startup. The people posting about 5am routines are just performing productivity online.

Maybe go to bed earlier or be more mindful when it comes to digital dooms scroll.
by SXX | 2025-08-31 19:02:22+00:00
5 years ago you could install custom rom and still use 99% of apps with it. Now with Google "safety" and "certification" features you won't be able to use most of financial apps and a lot of non financial apps too.

Obviously there no way on earth Google will allow you to decide whatever device you own is "safe". There is still ways to bypass it using kernel hacks, but it's both cat and mouse game and often not very trustworthy since a lot of software used to bypass safetynet is proprietary.

So yep, using custom OS on your phone is impractical because Google made it so.
by jbm | 2025-08-31 19:02:28+00:00
I can relate. I've made some changes in my life that helped avoid Youtube.

The single most effective thing I did was during my week off when I put my phone in a drawer and mostly stuck to my apple watch for notifications and a keycard for my car.

Obviously I need my phone for work, so I've been trying other things to reduce its importance in my life.

I moved the TV from the room with the sofas to the room with chairs. I wind up spending more time in conversation with my wife or my friends on those sofas, rather than "Hey check out this video I saw..".

I've also replaced my phone with my watch for stuff involving unlocking car, and using a mostly-offline Linux handheld device with custom apps to replace stuff on my phone. You'd be surprised how many things don't require internet access; books and videos can be cached, and other things (paying credit cards, etc..) can be done on a desktop.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-31 19:02:31+00:00
A common test is something like ARC-AGI 2, where even the best models struggle to get into double-digit percentages. One thing I'd expect from AGI would be to go beyond "Solve this ARC-AGI test" to "Come up with more tests like ARC-AGI."

It can't have been lost on the humans who worked to create those tests that their own jobs should be automatable.