MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trod1234 | 2025-08-07 17:40:48+00:00
No, it assumes there is a fixed amount of stuff to do that is dependent on population (which changes, albeit slowly). This is how demographics and demographic cliffs come into this topic.

Your reasoning also conflates the economic concepts of "demand" with "need". The two are quite different. The latter assumes there is some cross section of exchange that can happen between supply and demand, whereas with the cohort of people in need, they are anyone that could benefit but which no exchange is possible.

You speak about opportunity cost, but you also neglect distortions. The suggestions you make do not happen in a vacuum and we are at a point where the entire bottom rung of sequential careers is being removed. Sequential pipelines fail over time when the initial inputs go to zero; they fail on a lag but if you take the entire cycle as any competent engineer would during design, its clear.

If you look globally, water, food, and decent housing hasn't been sorted and won't be sorted because its more profitable to keep these industries captured and distributed as a narrow peak spinodally. For a clear example the SROs of the 50s and 60s.

People don't realize they are in the grip of runaway money-printing schemes, and when you replace people with machines in aggregate, the real economy shrinks proportionally. When it gets beyond a certain threshold you see violence because these are the exact same living conditions and dynamics that led to 1776, only its worse because of fiat currency.

There may be great need, but so long as there is no demand to incentivize change it will forever lay out of reach. Economics is not so easily tamed with the money-printer its filled with invisible pitfalls.

What's worse is many of my Socialist friends that want to make the world better neglect these things, and some of them are fairly intelligent but they are dogmatic when it comes to any mention of incentives as being too close to Capitalism. Neglect in these areas though leads to eventual collapse, which we are seeing in slow motion with the collapse of the birth rate. People don't have children if they lack the economic means to do so.
by W3zzy | 2025-08-07 17:41:17+00:00
You were mentioning productivity as a reason for motoring your every move at work. Productivity is not a valid reason.

The reason the can't use video footage is because your image is biometric data.

There are other ways of monitoring at the workplace without being so privacy invasive.

My team is set free. We don't have work hours. Technically we have to work 3 hours a day, between 10:00 and 12:00 and between 13:00 and 14:00. Without any monitoring they've reached their yearly target in may of this year.

So productivity is a falsehood. Nobody works harder when they're watched. People work hard when they are valued.

Fair performance reviews now and then do the job.

Then back on safety. I used to work in a bar years ago. It was in a busy part of the city and out of 30+ bars on the square I was the last to close. I had 3 cameras and they were installed for my safety. Imagery was erased every morning and only used when needed after a bar fight or theft. That's fair use.

Never use biometric data lightly.

On a sidenote. I just don't get why people want to live in a surveillance state so much. You can't build a society without trust.
Ask HN: OpenAI employees, how did you get the job?
by davidajackson | 2025-08-07 17:42:08+00:00
It's been entertaining reading about the OpenAI-Meta talent wars. I thought it would be an interesting discussion to ask some OpenAI employees here how they got an 'in' to one of the most challenging companies to join.

Obviously, with the levels of talent on here, many of us are more founder-oriented/already have great gigs, but I'm curious if there were any special processes or connections you had to get the job. No agenda here :) just want to hear more about this.
by koeng | 2025-08-07 17:42:17+00:00
I hate the direction that American AI is going, and the model card of OpenAI is especially bad.

I am a synthetic biologist, and I use AI a lot for my work. And it constantly denies my questions RIGHT NOW. But of course OpenAI and Anthropic have to implement more - from the GPT5 introduction: "robust safety stack with a multilayered defense system for biology"

While that sounds nice and all, in practical terms, they already ban many of my questions. This just means they're going to lobotomize the model more and more for my field because of the so-called "experts". I am an expert. I can easily go read the papers myself. I could create a biological weapon if I wanted to with pretty much zero papers at all, since I have backups of genbank and the like (just like most chemical engineers could create explosives if they wanted to). But they are specifically targeting my field, because they're from OpenAI and they know what is best.

It just sucks that some of the best tools for learning are being lobotomized specifically for my field because of people in AI believe that knowledge should be kept secret. It's extremely antithetical to the hacker spirit that knowledge should be free.

That said, deep research and those features make it very difficult to switch, but I definitely have to try harder now that I see where the wind is blowing.
by OsmanDKitay | 2025-08-07 17:42:34+00:00
The Reddit example gets right to the heart of it: when a platform loses control over its data and how it makes money, it just shuts the door on open access.

And that s really what aura is trying to address. If we dont figure something out the web could easily end up just being a handful of big ai sites, and all the smaller, independent sites might just fade away.

The goal with aura is to give control back to the people running the websites. It s not about blocking ai but about giving sites a clear, standard way to say "here s how you can work with me meaningfully...". This means an agent can do something specific and useful without costly, aimless scraping, and it lets site owners build cool, new features just for ais.

and you re right to worry about malicious manifests but that s a trust problem. A site that lies in its aura file would get a bad reputation fast just like a phishing site does now.

At the end of the day aura is a bet that we can build an open, capability based web where site creators can join in on the AI revolution on their own terms. Time will tell if it's the right technical answer, but it s a conversation i think we absolutely need to have to keep the web diverse and creative.
by nyeah | 2025-08-07 17:42:48+00:00
"They" are just some people who did an experiment on mice. They don't know the effects on humans. It sounds like you think you know more than they do. Ok.

A paper is not like a religious commandment or something. It's, best case, some mortals honestly trying to learn something. Scolding them for admitting the limits of their knowledge is not reasonable.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-07 17:42:57+00:00
IT Manager here, and deal with this almost weekly at this point. I'll add to your list of how not to do it - ignore my brush-offs and start email blasting others on my team or within the company to get around me. Quick way to get your domain blocked all together.

Also please don't make me sit through a demo just to get a quote. If I want a full demo I'll ask for it, and I need to know pricing first before even considering going any further. I've probably already researched your product, maybe even did a trial if available - I don't need to sit through any number of sales pitches, just give me the numbers.
by pmcf | 2025-08-07 17:43:02+00:00
I think Google doesn’t turn Gemini loose on docs the same reason Apple doesn’t turn AI loose on your phone. It’s just not reliable enough to let 99.99% of the world use it. Those of us on the bleeding edge have been fine tweaking and working with inconsistencies. If you put a lot of work in, you get a productivity boost. Think of the family member you are “tech support” for. (You know who you are) would you recommend that to them? Yeah. Me neither.
by retsibsi | 2025-08-07 17:43:16+00:00
I think they're copping this criticism because it's neither one thing nor the other. If it was really just a group of scientists being themselves, some of us would appreciate that. And if it was inauthentic but performed by great actors, most people wouldn't notice or care about the fakeness. This is somewhere in the middle, so it feels very unnatural and a bit weird.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-08-07 17:43:27+00:00
> Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.

The various blocklists are opt-in; you’ll only be invisible to their respective subscribers. Only the default bluesky moderation list is global, and they only adjudicate ToS violations (like every other social network).

Community moderation is quite distributed and egalitarian on bsky, perhaps even more so than the benevolent dictatorship used here (which obviously doesn’t scale).

> BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.

On Bsky I have yet to have anyone out of the blue, with no prior interaction, call me a slur or racial epithet. Can’t say the same about my old Twitter account.
by e12e | 2025-08-07 17:43:29+00:00
Does anyone know if there's been any efforts towards running freeBSD on arm64 laptops?

On Linux there's been some effort:

https://www.linaro.org/blog/linux-on-snapdragon-x-elite/

Ed: hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44699393
by csours | 2025-08-07 17:43:55+00:00
Imagine manufacturing like a long vine - any disturbance along the vine can cause the fruit to wither.

The overall company can run low on capital or the share price may drop too far and induce leadership changes.

The product has to reach capacity targets to pay for overheads and fixed costs.

A competitor can drop their prices.

A supplier can go out of business or have their own production issues - fires and floods happen ever year.

Many governments have ramping targets for safety and efficiency.

Any particular government can increase taxes or tariffs, causing an unplanned uprooting of production from one assembly plant to another, costing at least millions of dollars; also unknown costs due to uncertainty.

Consumers preferences change over time.

---

With all of that, the fruit that withers first is the smallest - the cheapest or leanest.

I'm sorry if this is upsetting.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-07 17:44:01+00:00
Funny how every debate about economics ends up with people dropping a variation of “go beat the stock market if you think you are clever”. It's not an argument, it's just a bad faith shot. Neither you or I can predict the hydrodynamic behavior of gas in a jet engine, but it doesn't mean it isn't doable with the right modeling tools, as all the jets flying above your head right now prove.

Also, your claim that the stock market has a big influence on inflation is unsubstantiated.

Finally, you're fighting a strawman when talking about “perfect” inflation prediction or limited precision in data: nobody is asking for a .1% precision in inflation forecasts (though most economics seem to have a problem understanding the concept of significant figures and keep producing numbers with a ridiculous amount of details relative to the underlying error in the data), but the fact that nobody can predict a surge in inflation before it starts poses serious questions on the usefulness of the models. And don't tell me it was the stock market …
by dbg31415 | 2025-08-07 17:44:42+00:00
I take a strange comfort in still spotting AI typos. Makes it obvious their shiny new "toy" isn't ready to replace professionals.

They talk about using this to help families facing a cancer diagnosis -- literal life or death! -- and we're supposed to trust a machine that can't even spot a few simple typos? Ha.

The lack of human proofreading says more about their values than their capabilities. They don't want oversight -- especially not from human professionals.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-07 17:44:55+00:00
I wonder how good it is compared to Claude Sonnet 4, and when it's coming to GitHub Copilot.

I almost exclusively wrote and released https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file yesterday with GPT 4o and Claude Sonnet 4, and the latter's agentic behavior was quite nice. I barely had to guide it, and was able to quickly verify its output.
by nine_k | 2025-08-07 17:45:03+00:00
I suppose that the TFA author is lowering their load by not having to respond to inane issues, which is also work.

Otherwise, yes, non-essential things are best delegated, especially when it's free. Some essential things also have to be delegated, if doing them yourself takes too much (like growing rice). The latter works best when the essential thing is a commodity with a wide choice of suppliers (like rice).
by firasd | 2025-08-07 17:45:28+00:00
Well isn't Wikipedia one of the biggest SPARQL-queryable DBs out there? They use 'slug' based IDs

I don't oppose randomization but what I say is that Time is entropy. Use it as a prefix. And UUIDs v7 which uses time is still too long and ugly.

WordPress powers half the web and there are no UUIDs in its URLs... so in practice using UUID is just not aesthetically pleasing for URLs

Postscript: And in fact LLMs seem to be better at fulfilling the Tim Berners Lee and Bill Gates dreams of universal interop. They can just say "oh here's the weather in Amsterdam according to this json" without any rigid interop ID or protocol
by blueflow | 2025-08-07 17:45:48+00:00
Private repos: git init --bare in your homedir on the server, and then push/pull using user@hostname:path/from/homedir/to/repo.git as remote url.

Optionally, public repos: Set-up git-daemon in some /var directoy and do the git init dance there. Also touch the git-daemon-export-ok file to whitelist each repo for public serving. chown the repository directory to your own user so you can write there freely, while git-dameon can read and serve the contents to the world.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-07 17:45:55+00:00
I'm just going to wildly speculate.

1. They had many teams who had to put their things on a shared Google Sheets or similar

2. They used placeholders to prevent leaks

2.a. Some teams put their content just-in-time

3. The person running the presentation started the presentation view once they had set up video etc. just before launching stream

4. Other teams corrected their content

5. The presentation view being started means that only the ones in 2.a were correct.

Now we wait to see.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-07 17:46:25+00:00
Right, obviously you can't give the level-1 schlubs the keys to the kingdom, but they need to be able to escalate. What you're doing now, trapping customers in a maze of no-reply dead ends, isn't OK. It's never a good long-term play to let bad actors drive your business model. (Well, all right, maybe PayPal has to do that, but you don't.)

One obvious approach would be to charge for access to human support. I'll bet the OP would happily have paid $50 to talk to someone with both the ability and inclination to escalate the issue. In rare instances such as this one where the problem really is on your end, the $50 would be refunded.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-07 17:46:39+00:00
Let's appreciate that Tim Cook traveled to the White House to present President Trump with literal gold. Cook said it was "designed for you" when presenting it to Trump.

Top tier fidelity here, like in days of old, the Duke of Apple has traveled far to present King Trump with tribute.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-07 17:46:40+00:00
I've worked on this problem for a year and I don't think you get meaningfully better at this without making it as much of a focus as frontier labs make coding.

They're all working on subjective improvements, but for example, none of them would develop and deploy a sampler that makes models 50% worse at coding but 50% less likely to use purple prose.

(And unlike the early days where better coding meant better everything, more of the gains are coming from very specific post-training that transfers less, and even harms performance there)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-07 17:46:42+00:00
If interested in understanding this topic in detail, https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net has information on running your own relay network, migrating data, etc as it relates to Bluesky and AT Proto. Work continues to enable data migration, portability, alternate relay networks, etc. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t is particularly relevant.

(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)
by dang | 2025-08-07 17:46:53+00:00
>* stop talking out of your ass*

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how incorrect another comment is or you feel it is.

Doing this has the obvious downside of making the threads more toxic, plus the less obvious one of discrediting the truth (assuming your comment is indeed correct) by giving it toxic associations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-07 17:47:02+00:00
True, but I still think it could be done, within the LLM model.

It's just generating the next token for what's within the context window. There are various options with various probabilities. If none of the probabilities are above a threshold, say "I don't know", because there's nothing in the training data that tells you what to say there.

Is that good enough? "I don't know." I suspect the answer is, "No, but it's closer than what we're doing now."
by jazzyjackson | 2025-08-07 17:47:11+00:00
I use LLMs to get answers to queries but I avoid having conversations with them because I'm aware we pick up idiosyncrasies and colloquialisms from everyone we interact with. People who spend all day talking to thier GPT-voice will adjust their speaking style to be more similar to the bot.

I developed this paranoia upon learning about The Ape and the Child where they raised a chimp alongside a baby boy and found the human adapted to chimp behavior faster than the chimp adapted to human behavior. I fear the same with bots, we'll become more like them faster than they'll become like us.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/25/5385804...
by sharkjacobs | 2025-08-07 17:47:37+00:00
The upgrade from GPT3.5 to GPT4 was like going from a Razr to an iPhone, just a staggering leap forward. Everything since then has been successive iPhone releases (complete with the big product release announcements and front page HN post). A sequence of largely underwhelming and basically unimpressive incremental releases.

Also, when you step back and look at a few of those incremental improvements together, they're actually pretty significant.

But it's hard not to roll your eyes each time they trot out a list of meaningless benchmarks and promise that "it hallucinates even less than before" again
by simoncion | 2025-08-07 17:47:49+00:00
If you're not using KeepassXC's browser plugin (or are using KeePassX, which -IIRC- never had a browser plugin), then its autotype feature will check the title of the window that has keyboard focus when deciding which entry to use. If one or more matches are found, it will [1] also ask you to confirm which entry you're about to have the software punch in. If no matches are found, it will alert you to that fact.

You might find the KeePassXC docs about the feature [0] to be informative.

If you're going to complain that all a phisher has to do to capture a password is create a website with the same title as the official one, then my reply would be something like "Duh. That's what the browser plugin is for.".

[0] <https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_auto_type>

[1] ...optionally, and on by default...
by jerf | 2025-08-07 17:47:58+00:00
Suppose you had a concrete definition of "happiness", as some seek a concrete definition of "consciousness".

That implies that it could be maximized. Perhaps along a particular subdimension of a multidimensional concept, but still, some aspect of it could be maximized.

What would such a maximization look like in the extrema?

Could a benzene ring be the happiest thing in the universe? It's really easy to imagine some degenerate case like that coming to pass.

You can generally play this game along any such dimension; "consciousness", "agony", "love"... if you have a definition of it, in principle you can minmax it.
by rfwhyte | 2025-08-07 17:48:11+00:00
Fortunately the kind of AI generated images as described in this article is broadly against real estate board rules across most of North America.

At least where I live, you can use AI to put furniture in empty rooms and to remove temporary objects from photos (Like cars in front of a house, or photos from a wall inside the house) but pretty much every other type of AI generated imagery is strictly prohibited and will result in substantial fines and potential loss of their license if an agent is caught using them.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-07 17:48:12+00:00
>but I don't think attestation per-se is bad, if you are a employee from a company and they provide you the hardware and have special certification requirements for the hardware then attestation is totally fine

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I do think hardware "attestation per-se is bad. Just look at the debacle of SafetyNet/Play Integrity, which disadvantages non-Google/non-OEM devices. Hardware attestation is that on steroids.

As for corporate/MDM managed environments, what's wrong with client certificates[0] for "attestation"? They've been used securely and successfully for decades.

As for the rest of your comment, I think you're spot on. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_certificate
by motoxpro | 2025-08-07 17:48:16+00:00
You're describing low skilled presenters. That is what it looks like when you put someone up in front of a camera and tell them to communicate a lot of information. You're not thinking about "being yourself," you're thinking about how to not forget your lines, not mess up, not think about the different outcomes of the prompt that you might have to deal with, etc.

This was my point. "Being yourself" on camera is hard. This comes across, apparently shockingly, as being devoid of emotion and/or robotic
by never_inline | 2025-08-07 17:48:50+00:00
> people who shouldn't be talking about CS.

Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.

I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.

I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-07 17:48:57+00:00
Short?

It's a perfect situation for Nvidia. You can see that after months of trying to squeeze out all % of marginal improvements, sama and co decided to brand this GPT-4.0.0.1 version as GPT-5. This is all happening on NVDA hardware, and they are gonna continue desperately iterating on tiny model efficiencies until all these valuation $$$ sweet sweet VC cash run out (most of it directly or indirectly going to NVDA).
by greenbeans12 | 2025-08-07 17:48:59+00:00
GPT-5, announced today, follows the same pattern we've seen from OpenAI these past few releases - better model cards, faster inference, lower costs.

And yet it still uses the em dash (—), or long hyphen, far more frequently than is found in typical written communication.

Is OpenAI "locked in" to the em dash as a result of its use of unsupervised training of model outputs on their subsequent models? Or are they willingly keeping it now a signature part of their brand?

It seems odd for them to continue to produce "AI-sounding" text from their newest model's default prompt - but at least it makes it easier to identify AI-generated content.