MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjmlp | 2025-08-04 09:34:02+00:00
It is all almost making richer even more richer, instead of properly hiring people for HR, AI bots.

Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.

Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.

Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.

Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
by jemmyw | 2025-08-04 09:35:13+00:00
> and nothing really happened

I'm not sure what you expect to happen? Tariffs can be a tool to promote local industry but when used like this they're more of a tax on Americans. I don't think other countries want to play the retaliatory game because it's lose lose. Instead they'll make deals where they can and otherwise get on with things. Trade is going to reorient by itself. That will take time but it's already happening.

In any case, it doesn't show the US is strong. Everyone already knew it has the strongest economy in the world. What it does show is that the US is less stable than partners believed. It's hard to see this benefiting the American economy in the long term. But you know, that might not be terrible, if American workers get more jobs and a larger share of the pie, then it might work out.
by LarMachinarum | 2025-08-04 09:35:13+00:00
Many here point out, and rightly so, what an abominable mess UI frameworks have been on Windows for quite a while.

That being said, I'd point out that the situation has been (and still is) unfortunately far from satisfying on the cross-platform and open-source side as well: GTK has also been a mess for quite long; Qt has - aside from the bloat - an increasingly repulsive licensing model for professional use (too bad the hopes from the early Nokia adoption days got smashed by MS mole Elop and the later owners of Qt), …

… and while there are some nice solutions for specific niches (e.g. Dear Imgui), the overall situation in general-purpose cross-platform native UI frameworks looks quite bleak and unsatisfying imho. There's a huge gaping opening for a permissive-licensed open-source cross-platform UI/Widgets framework that compiles to native, has a good set of widgets and gives access to Vulkan contexts for 3D rendering.
by sharperguy | 2025-08-04 09:35:21+00:00
LLMs are famously bad at producing rust code. I'm not sure how much of it is the lesser amount of Rust code in the training data, or just the fact that Rust has a very large number of pitfalls, and a large standard library with many edge cases and things you'd imaging should exist but don't for a variety of reasons. Rust also has a much wider variety in the way things could be structured, compared to something like go where there is often only one way of doing a particular thing.
by specproc | 2025-08-04 09:35:46+00:00
> Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.

I wouldn't necessarily say it _demonstrates issues_ with the academic system, but there are definitely big problems with academia it shares. Lots of overlap in terms of its function and dysfunction for sure.

> gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue

This is where the devil is in the details. So yes, absolutely, governments will chase fads/funding and cherry pick to suit their agenda, but "good" policy transfer does happen via the UN more often than some might think.

I live in a non-OECD country that's the target of a lot of recommendations via "the system". Here are a bunch of things I've seen happen here that I agree with that have been supported by this huge volume of reporting:

- maternity pay,

- permanent housing for internally displaced persons,

- an indoor smoking ban,

- proper driving tests and improved road safety laws,

- minimum standards in education (think, schools should have windows and functioning toilets),

- a land-ownership registry that vastly exceeds what's available in my (European) home country.

That's off the top of my head. It's a mixed bag, over many years, but it don't do nothing.
by valenterry | 2025-08-04 09:35:51+00:00
As a primary backend developer, I want to add my two cents:

> Top-Level Await: Simplifying Initialization

This feels absolutely horrible to me. There is no excuse for not having a proper entry-point function that gives full control to the developer to execute everything that is needed before anything else happens. Such as creating database connections, starting services and connecting to APIs, warming up caches and so on. All those things should be run (potentially concurrent).

Until this is possible, even with top-level await, I personally have to consider node.js to be broken.

> Modern Testing with Node.js Built-in Test Runner

Sorry, but please do one thing and do it well.

> Async/Await with Enhanced Error Handling

I wish had JVM-like logging and stack traces (including cause-nesting) in node.js...

> 6. Worker Threads: True Parallelism for CPU-Intensive Tasks

This is the biggest issue. There should be really an alternative that has builtin support for parallelism that doesn't force me to de/serialize things by hand.

---

Otherwise a lot of nice progress. But the above ones are bummers.
by justlikemaki | 2025-08-04 09:36:07+00:00
AIClient-2-API, a Practical Solution to Reduce LLM Usage Costs

For developers working with AI, API call costs and usage limits are common concerns. The AIClient-2-API project offers a solution to address this. By encapsulating various large model APIs into a local, OpenAI-compatible interface, it aims to lower both development barriers and costs.

The project's primary value comes from its two core implementation methods:

Utilizing gemini-cli Authorization to Access the Gemini Model: A key feature of the project is its use of the OAuth authorization mechanism from Google's gemini-cli tool. This approach allows for direct calls to the Gemini Pro model, often bypassing the rate limits and quotas associated with traditional API keys. This provides a viable option for users who need to make numerous calls for testing and development.

Accessing Claude Models via the Kiro Interface: Additionally, the project provides access to models like Claude through the analysis and integration of the Kiro client's interface. This offers users another model option that can be used without direct payment.

How This Benefits Developers

AIClient-2-API standardizes these different backend services into the official OpenAI API format, providing endpoints like /v1/chat/completions.

This means developers can point their existing OpenAI-compatible clients or tools (such as LobeChat, NextChat, etc.) directly to the local service address generated by AIClient-2-API. It allows them to use the model resources accessed by the project within these tools, without needing to modify the client application's code.

For developers who need to perform extensive functional validation, work on personal projects, or are looking for ways to reduce API expenses, this is a tool worth considering.

In summary, AIClient-2-API is a practical, open-source project that addresses developer cost concerns through its specific technical approach. If your workflow relies on large models and you are looking for ways to lower costs, you can learn more by visiting its GitHub page.

Project Link: https://github.com/justlovemaki/AIClient-2-API
by hvb2 | 2025-08-04 09:36:29+00:00
> Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market

Not necessarily, if price of product A goes up and I have to buy that it means I have less money to spend on product B. Meaning demand on product B goes down so its price goes down.

If we go back to the point that we're talking about, being how it affects the lowest incomes, then you can see how an ever increasing % of their income is locked up in food/housing etc.

By your logic "What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market." Why is the rate of inflation even a value that isn't known beforehand? Surely we control our own printers, no?
by pjc50 | 2025-08-04 09:37:54+00:00
Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read.

And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing"

But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article:

"We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-04 09:37:58+00:00
He's saying the quiet part out loud but all companies think the same whenever they design the hoops their candidates have to jump through.

It's shocking to me people are offended of hearing people tell the truth.

Would you prefer if he lied to you and called you "valuable family members" instead?

Edit to clarify for all those below who misread: I meant "the truth" as in "transparency" from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the holy ground truth of how things should ideally work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement that he's not sugarcoating it with valuable family member but just speaking his mind as in saying the truth.
by yeldarb | 2025-08-04 09:38:04+00:00
Wonder if you can subtract these vectors to get the opposite effect and what that ends up being for things like sycophancy or hallucination.

I also wonder what other personality vectors exist.. would be cool to find an “intelligence” vector we could boost to get better outputs from the same model. Seems like this is likely to exist given how prompting it to cosplay as a really smart person can elicit better outputs.
by jpc0 | 2025-08-04 09:38:30+00:00
Redaction if only drawing a box over content would not be redaction, I believe that even resulted in some information leakage in the past.

PDFs can be edited, unless they are just embedded images but even then it’s possible.

The selling point of PDFs is “word” documents that get correctly displayed everywhere, ie they are a distribution mechanism. If you want access to the underlying data that should be provided separately as CSV or some other format.

PDFs are for humans not computers. I know the argument you are making is that is not what happens in reality and I sympathise, but the problem isn’t with PDFs but with their users and you can’t fix a management problem with technical.
by ben_w | 2025-08-04 09:39:16+00:00
Was Gen X ever given significant autonomy? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space and the start of Dilbert both date to when Gen X were the newbies to the wold of work, and Dilbert in particular kept on going.

I'm just on the borderline of Millennial myself, and people older than me have expressed similar frustrations at various workplaces.
by petesergeant | 2025-08-04 09:39:41+00:00
Very interesting. How often do you encounter PDFs that are just scanned pages? I had to make heavy use of pdfsandwich last time I was accessing journal articles.

> quality is higher because we don't depend on vision based text recognition

This surprises me a bit; outside of an actual scan leaving the computer I’d expect PDF->image->text in a computer to be essentially lossless.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-04 09:40:50+00:00
And, importantly, tariffs are payed by the importing party. This means they affect the base price of the product and cannot be made progressive.

You could set up a deduction system... But that's retroactive (poor people still don't have that money for a whole year) and dramatically complicates their tax filing burden and financial record keeping requirements.

The rich can afford lawyers and accountants, so the IRS has been going after lower and lower income folk for their slip-ups more often. So yet more punishing the poor.
by ktzar | 2025-08-04 09:41:16+00:00
Also, the way models are evolving (thinking process, llms waiting for interactions with external entities via MCP, mixture of experts, ...) are making "useful chatbot responses" way way way more expensive than they used to be when you were pretty much hitting an autocomplete. To a level where these are starting to be prohibitive to run locally at a decent tokens/s speed, and we're being tied to using their models.
by hvb2 | 2025-08-04 09:41:22+00:00
Supply and demand aren't always in the same place...

If a lot of the farm workers in California are gone how does that help the people in Nevada or Michigan that are unemployed... You think they're going to fill those positions?

> When people realize that their wage doesn’t guarantee good living they will look for a better job or demand a raise

Wow... When your job requires no education or training? I guess everyone who works 2 or more jobs in the us needs to talk to you. They're all missing this obvious point.
by CMCDragonkai | 2025-08-04 09:42:02+00:00
I recently had an experience at a soup kitchen. It was my first time in an entirely new group and new place. Naturally I found that everybody only interacted with each other - the volunteers, not the people lining up for food. I realised it was more like a social gathering but there was a clear divide between the volunteers and the people getting the end product. In that sense I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit (hard to see if it's actually pro-social for those consuming the food).
by wink | 2025-08-04 09:42:34+00:00
I very recently did the math and with my CS job (and my wife's salary) in our early 40s (so both full time for at least 15 years) we could about now have bought the kind of house my parents bought when I was a kid - if it were the same price, just adjusted for inflation. But it's three times that adjusted cost. (Not the US, Germany)

Not sure that is a heightened expectation, you're just out of luck if you don't already have a house. And people in their twenties just have it even worse.
by stavros | 2025-08-04 09:42:41+00:00
I agree with you, that's why I can't believe it exists anywhere. What you mention is basically to reduce the costs of counting, and is still usage-based metering, just with a reasonable guess to make payment more frequent.

Power in Greece works the same way, except you (are supposed to) get the guess one month and the count the next (and pay the difference). In practice, they count less often than that.
by simonask | 2025-08-04 09:42:51+00:00
Honestly, I don't think these are problems that Rust has. What I see LLMs struggle with in Rust is more to do with understanding the language semantics at a fundamental level - exactly the things that the compiler statically verifies. For example, they will see things they think are "use-after-free" or "use-after-move", neither of which is a thing in (safe) Rust, because they don't understand that the language does not have these problems.

Largely I think LLMs struggle with Rust because it is one of very few languages that actually does something new. The semantics are just way more different than the difference between, say, Go and TypeScript. I imagine they would struggle just as much with Haskell, Ocaml, Prolog, and other interesting languages.
by Mordisquitos | 2025-08-04 09:43:20+00:00
I had the same thought.

The CEO of Braintrust, a company that offers AI interviewers, is quoted as saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. Let's see how they react to the founding of 'Trainbust', a company offering AI interviewees to respond to AI interviewers. The truth is, if they want to use AI interviewers, they’re gonna have to go through this thing.
by nabakin | 2025-08-04 09:43:57+00:00
If companies get large enough, you no longer have a free market. You simply have a company so dominate and powerful, they can undercut any new company or product. Not on merit or offering a better product. Purely based on size and its entrenched position.

Let's say company A is monopolizing a market. New company B finds a way to make company A's product providing exactly the same value, except half as expensive. A healthy market would reward company B and consumers both by allowing that innovation to spread, providing a return for those that invented it and a cheaper product for consumers, leading to greater prosperity for society. However, in the market you speak of, company A can simply use their orders of magnitude more wealth to undercut company B for a time until they go bust.

What incentive is there to innovate, to improve, in a market that doesn't reward it?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-04 09:44:13+00:00
> Which ones?

Liberation Day.

> can’t bet on negotiation tactic, only on the outcomes and formal agreements

How about money actually invested [1][2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RX1Q020SBEA

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RX1Q020SBEA
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-04 09:44:29+00:00
I think it depends on what you want to achieve; this solves another decentralised thing than I would want. I want users in a group to share data which is not possible to be ever retrievable by someone outside the group. So the data is encrypted between the members of the group, on THEIR devices only. And when the group collapses and/or users remove the data from their device, it cannot be retrieved in any way. Unlike any distributed decentralised network where, if we get good enough in 'n' years, we can just get that info from the chain and decrypt it. Even if the creators of the data disbanded and have no wish for any of this. I see for payments blockchain makes some sense, although it's hardly anonymous anymore, but for any other goal, I don't want anything stored where I don't have control. Ideally that is, of course life doesn't work like that.

I think there is no need to buy storage (you already have it); there needs to be software to share it in a way that is p2p and not via ANY other machines that are not owned by the members of the group (for instance, your family).
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-08-04 09:45:29+00:00
I suppose she's talking about net salary. Here is a histogram for France:

https://fr.statista.com/infographie/25111/distribution-des-s...

According to that, she's definitely in the top 20%. Of course "among the best paid people" is ambiguous depending on how much "top" you consider, but I think being in the top 20% it makes sense to say that.

PS: and I suppose (although it's hard to find data) that if we look at people in her age bracket, she will be in a higher percentile.
by bjackman | 2025-08-04 09:46:17+00:00
Well, you are just directly contradicting the concrete claims made by the post so one of you is wrong...

FWIW my interpretation of this is that the hallucination vector encodes the behaviour that a the model produces bullshit despite having the facts of the matter encoded in its weights. Which is slightly different than producing bullshit as a substitute for information that it "doesn't know".

And presumably there is a second-order property here where the minimal amount of hallucination is not only bounded by the model's "knowledge" but also its implicit "meta-knowledge", i.e. the "accuracy of the hallucination vector".
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-04 09:46:19+00:00
> to keep inflation at bay, one of the things you do, you restrict money supply

Again, nobody said money supply doesn’t affect price levels. But in this example, rising wages caused the inflationary impetus without any money printing. To correct for that, the money supply must be reduced.

If you’re piloting a plane, deflecting the control surfaces will move the plane. But so will winds. If winds buffet your plane you have to deflect control surfaces to get back to where you were. That doesn’t mean the wind doesn’t exist.

Rising salaries can cause inflation all on their own. Even in an economy with a fixed money supply. (So can printing money, but nobody was debating that.)
by aa-jv | 2025-08-04 09:46:20+00:00
My first 'real computer' was a MIPS Magnum pizzabox RC3230, which I later upgraded to an SGI Indy, and I've been an SGI fanboy every since, having kept every SGI machine I've ever hacked on, from the Indy to an Octane2 and O2 .. so I love to ask this question:

What would life be like right now if SGI had made a laptop?

Remember how revolutionary Apples' tiBook felt at the time? A decent laptop running Unix .. how extraordinary!

Well, it could've been SGI. I wonder at that alternative future on the regular ..
by methuselah_in | 2025-08-04 09:48:16+00:00
What i feel the only thing that made USA the best with the current position the reality that it never ran away. Overall the USA open stats allowed them to prosper! I hope this will soon gets over! though as outsider where we stand we want the USA to stay the way it was helper and rational based! Now people can come and say multiple things. But usa does helped a lot of good things to happen across world. If it falls CHINA rise. And if that country rise, it will destroy everything that it touches!
by saagarjha | 2025-08-04 09:48:38+00:00
I've been with my dentist for a while and in the last 10 years or so I think they've updated their X-ray machines twice. It used to be a massive machine that was in a special room, which they'd use to take multiple photos of your face by wheeling around. Then they got a smaller one that could be right next to your chair, and they'd make you bite down on some film while they moved an arm around with the source on it. Recently they have a new machine that you put your head in and it just seems to do the whole thing in one pass.
by taneq | 2025-08-04 09:48:39+00:00
That’s still way better than being told to take two Panadol and come back in the morning if your symptoms don’t improve. I mean, 99% of the time it’s a seasonal virus and that’s all you could/should do, but 0.1% of the time it’s meningitis and if you don’t go to the ICU then you die.
by dagw | 2025-08-04 09:49:09+00:00
3dfx never really competed with SGI since they were never compatible with the commercial and scientific software that people bought SGI machines for. Nvidia on the other hand (mostly) was. I worked at a small animation studio at the time and shortly after the GeForce 2 was launched we'd basically replaced all our expensive SGI and Intergraph machines with cheap generic Wintel boxes at a quarter of the price.