MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by autoexec | 2025-08-05 21:12:35+00:00
> The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project.

Why would any user ever care about the scope of the project or how you feel about their ideas? If they want your open source software to also play MP3s and read their email they'll just ask an AI to take your code and add the features they want. It doesn't impact anyone else using your software. What you'll probably have though are a bunch of copies of your code with various changes made (some of them might even have already been available as options, but people would rather ask AI to rewrite your software than read your docs) some listed as forks and others not mentioning you or the name of your software at all.

Most people aren't going to bother sharing the changes they made to your code with anyone but eventually you'll have people reporting bugs for weird versions of the software AI screwed up.
by philjohn | 2025-08-05 21:12:51+00:00
Well, there's also cultural reasons. If the government of Japan entrusts you to self regulate on the basis of open access and no restrictions a Japanese business will understand the weight of expectations that have been placed on them.

A US telco would pop the champagne and then plan how best to screw their customers, safe in the knowledge that they have few competitors after they got local governments to ban municipal broadband.
by mc32 | 2025-08-05 21:13:00+00:00
20 might be hyperbola but in SF cops ignore lots of drug use on the streets. They used to care up until the end of the Brown mayorship. Once Newsom and the new wave of progressives took control over the city they began pulling back from enforcement incrementally —it peaked with Breed and is now slightly retrenching but very very slowly.

Willy might have been corrupt but at least he took care of crime meaningfully.
by timmg | 2025-08-05 21:13:08+00:00
It says “usage-based pricing” is coming soon. I think that is the sweet spot for a service like this.

I pay $20 to Anthropic, so I don’t think I’d get enough use out of this for the $20 fee. But being able to spin up any of these models and use as needed (and compare) seems extremely useful to me.

I hope this works out well for the team.
by cco | 2025-08-05 21:13:25+00:00
The lede is being missed imo.

gpt-oss:20b is a top ten model (on MMLU (right behind Gemini-2.5-Pro) and I just ran it locally on my Macbook Air M3 from last year.

I've been experimenting with a lot of local models, both on my laptop and on my phone (Pixel 9 Pro), and I figured we'd be here in a year or two.

But no, we're here today. A basically frontier model, running for the cost of electricity (free with a rounding error) on my laptop. No $200/month subscription, no lakes being drained, etc.

I'm blown away.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-05 21:13:27+00:00
I've done this too and sure it's not perfect. But it's better than the average person in my industry. So, 1, that means a decent chunk of my industry could use it and be about as good as they are now.

2, unless I magically have a plan for talking to an expert in HVAC repair, and not just an idiot in HVAC, I can diagnose my HVAC unit with AI just fine. And I did. And no it wasn't as simple as "well duh, every post online says it's the large capacitor".
by DefineOutside | 2025-08-05 21:14:19+00:00
This has been applied to minecraft region files in a fork of paper, which is a type of minecraft server.

https://github.com/UltraVanilla/paper-zstd/blob/main/patches...

from the author of this patch on discord - the level 9 for compression isn't practical and is too slow for a real production server but it does show the effectiveness of zstd with a shared dictionary.

So you start off with a 755.2 MiB world (in this test, it is a section of an existing DEFLATE-compressed world that has been lived in for a while). If you recreate its regions it will compact it down to 695.1 MiB You set region-file-compression=lz4 and run --recreateRegionFiles and it turns into a 998.9 MiB world. Makes sense, worse compression ratios but less CPU is what mojang documented in the changelog. Neat, but I'm confused as to what the benefits are as I/O increasingly becomes the more constrained thing nowadays. This is just a brief detour from what I'm really trying to test You set region-file-compression=none and it turns into a 3583.0 MiB world. The largest region file in this sample was 57 MiB Now, you take this world, and compress each of the region files individually using zstd -9, so that the region files are now .mca.zst files. And you get a world that is 390.2 MiB
by zone411 | 2025-08-05 21:14:58+00:00
I benchmarked the 120B version on the Extended NYT Connections (759 questions, https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections) and on 120B and 20B on Thematic Generalization (810 questions, https://github.com/lechmazur/generalization). Opus 4.1 benchmarks are also there.
by fabian2k | 2025-08-05 21:15:00+00:00
The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity.

The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains. Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains.

One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per month you can take any regional train or bus.
by HeatrayEnjoyer | 2025-08-05 21:15:08+00:00
Communities around fictional universes are already fractured and shrinking in member size because of the sheer number of algorithmically targeted universes available.

Water cooler talk about what happened this week in M.A.S.H. or Friends is extinct.

Worse, in the long run even community may be synthesized. If a friend is meat or if they're silicon (or even carbon fiber!), does it matter if you can't tell the difference? It might to pre-modern boomers like me and you.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-05 21:15:29+00:00
This is the way.

I had a task to do a semi-complex UI addition, the whole week was allocated for that.

I sicked the corp approved Github Copilot with 4o and Claude 3.7 at it and it was done in an afternoon. It's ~95% functionally complete, but ugly as sin. (The model didn't understand our specific Tailwind classes)

Now I can spend the rest of the week on polish.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-05 21:15:39+00:00
I wonder why cp on the Mac doesn't create a clone by default, the way duplicating a file in Finder does? And therefore why Python doesn't clone by default as well?

Is there any use case where you need to avoid a clone on the same disk? I see only benefits (less disk usage). Am I missing something? Isn't the clone status just as file system implementation detail?
by tlamponi | 2025-08-05 21:16:05+00:00
The linked forum post has an FAQ entry, this was a carefully weighted decision with many factors playing a role, including having more staff available to manage any potential release fall-out on our side. And we're in general pretty much self-sufficient for any need that should arise, always have been that way and provide enterprise support offerings that back our official support guarantees if your org would have the need for that.

Finally, we provide bug and security updates for the previous stable release for over a year, so no user has any rush to upgrade now, they can safely choose any time between now and until August 2026.
by mandevil | 2025-08-05 21:16:10+00:00
So first of all, Erika McEntarfer is a she.

Second of all, revisions are incredibly common with BLS numbers, it's normal. They are trying to balance accuracy with speed, and this is how they do that.

They survey about 50,000 companies out of the 12 million registered US companies. Since the pandemic, response rates on their surveys have gotten worse. It is now about 50% at the end of the first month, slowly rising to about 90% two months later, so they update their results as the surveys get completed. The waiting is especially important because the speed of survey returns turns out to not be randomly distributed, the bigger the business, the faster it returns a survey, so small businesses are more likely to respond later. The BLS attempts to counter for that in their initial reports by inflating the small business returns that do come in early enough to account for their under-reporting, but the later returns are just incredibly valuable for getting accurate data.

Even with all of that, under normal economic circumstances revisions generally are small (they exist, but generally they cancel out thanks to the BLS inflation of the small business numbers, some of the businesses are higher than expected, some are lower, it all cancels out). Large revisions, either up or down, are generally associated with the economy changing course (lots of small businesses miss in the same direction, pretty good sign that the economy is changing)- large revisions down are often seen as a leading indicator of a recession, and large revisions up are often seen as a leading indicator of an economic improvement.

This is all true at least in the previous regime, where the BLS was trusted to be non-partisan. That reputation has definitely taken a hit; we will have to see how much trust remains in that organization going forward.
by gwd | 2025-08-05 21:16:23+00:00
> What incentives are they trying to create?

One obvious explanation is that pricing is strongly related to the price to them, and that their only incentive is for people to use an expensive model of they really need it.

I forget which one of the GPT models was better, faster, and cheaper than the previous model. The incentive there is obviously, "If you want to use the old model for whatever reason, fine, but we really want you to use the new one because costs us less to run."
by peterlk | 2025-08-05 21:16:36+00:00
The postal service is a federal service. If email offerings were, say, a municipal service, it seems like the Feds would have a much harder time regulating it. The federal government in the US can certainly put pressure on municipalities, but it wouldn't be compulsory - for example, university emails don't need to be used as a primary email except for specific, university-related circumstances.

This argument could easily be extended to private businesses. The government has the capability of putting pressure on private entities to compel them to treat email in certain ways. The rule of law prevents such things, and I don't really want to start a thread about how the current administration has no regard for the rule of law.

Furthermore, not everywhere is the US. Why hasn't Germany done this? Or Australia? Or Singapore?
by j_timberlake | 2025-08-05 21:16:46+00:00
No it's good, you're ahead of the curve, most people aren't there yet.

The next step is to realize that, if life is a cheap simulation, not everyone might have... uh... fully simulated minds. Player Characters vs NPCs is what gamers would say, though it doesn't have to be binary like that, and the term NPC has already been ruined by social media rants. (Also, NPC is a bad insult because most of the coolest characters in games are NPC rivals or bosses or whatnot.)
by coltonv | 2025-08-05 21:16:54+00:00
If you really need some, there are some links in another comment. Another one that was made me really wonder if I was missing the bus and makes 10x claims repeatedly is this YC podcast episode[1]. But again, I'm not trying to write a point by point counter of a specific article or video but a general narrative. If you want that for your article, Ludicity does a better job eviscerating your post than I ever could: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-arti...

I'm trying to write a piece to comfort those that feel anxious about the wave of articles telling them they aren't good enough, that they are "standing still", as you say in your article. That they are crazy. Your article may not say the word 10x, but it makes something extremely clear: you believe some developers are sitting still and others are sipping rocket fuel. You believe AI skeptics are crazy. Thus, your article is extremely natural to cite when talking about the origin of this post.

You can keep being mad at me for not providing a detailed target list, I said several times that that's not what the point of this is. You can keep refusing to actually elaborate on how you use AI day to day and solve its problems. That's fine. I don't care. I care a lot more to talk about the people who are actually engaging with me (such as your friend) and helping me to understand what they are doing. Right now, if you're going to keep not actually contributing to the conversation, you're just kinda being a salty guy with an almost unfathomable 408,000 karma going through every HN thread every single day and making hot takes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8
by nawgz | 2025-08-05 21:17:12+00:00
> Different strokes for different folks and surely the average programmer understands what environment they will be most comfortable in.

That's a silly claim to me, we're talking about a completely new environment where you prompt an AI to develop code, and therefore an "average programmer" is unlikely to have any meaningful experience or intuition with this flow. That is exactly what GP is talking about - where does he plug in the AI? What tradeoffs are there to different options?

The other day I had someone judge me for asking this question by dismissively saying "dont say youve still been using ChatGPT and copy/paste", which made me laugh - I don't use AI at all, so who was he looking down on?
by tomhow | 2025-08-05 21:17:54+00:00
> So, to all the majority of haters in this thread (and all those who will soon downvote me) I say this...

Please don't comment like this on HN. Sneers and swipes at others in the community are against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and drag down the standard of debate from what we're aiming for. We want HN to be a place where we can discuss difficult topics and hear different perspectives, but everyone needs to make an effort to express their positions without snark.
by xtracto | 2025-08-05 21:17:57+00:00
I don't agree with you. I am as leftist as it gets, but I don't let my political beliefs get in the way. I subscribe to r/ccw (gun subreddit) and some conservative subs because I want to understand where the right wing people is coming from.

I think younger generations have lost Nuance, in the University I had several good friends who had very opposite political views from me. Still we could sit down and play a D&D round.
by db48x | 2025-08-05 21:18:24+00:00
I disagree. I would argue that most people just don’t produce enough data to have a huge need for faster uploads. You would have to produce more than 200 gigabytes of data per day before your backups would take longer than a day to finish:

$ units 20Mbps*24hrs gigabytes * 216

If you’re an entertainer then you might record more than 200GB of raw video per day, but most people aren’t. You wouldn’t even need a faster connection to _become_ an entertainer, even if you soon wanted one. You could stream 4K video of your antics all day and it would be less than 200GB.

And remember that the definition is about the _minimum_ bandwidth necessary to participate in society, not what you need to be at the peak of your entertainment career. People who do need higher speeds can and will pay extra for them; the FCC definition is not about limiting what products are available. It doesn’t even require anyone to have 100×20Mbps service. The FCC is just trying to get us to a point where we can say that 100% of Americans have _access_ to that level of service, even if they have _subscribed_ to a lower level of service to save money. Since 45 million Americans don’t even have access to 100×20Mbps service we’re still pretty far away from that.
by dumbledoren | 2025-08-05 21:18:24+00:00
There is nothing nationalistic about it. I have lived in multiple countries, and in no country have I ever ! heard ! about a phenomenon like this one. In every country I lived, leaving that child alone like that would cause you to get legally prosecuted, regardless of who said what - and that prosecution would include that woman who made those threatening remarks. We are reading stories of people who even refrain from patting a child's head because it could be seen as some kind of molestation.

This is one of the hysterias and fads that visibly come out of the US frequently as the US public opinion and even the political landscape change.
by jll29 | 2025-08-05 21:18:32+00:00
I saw a paper that cite an author like this: "some metric (Smith 1971)".

The author last name was correct, but the year cited should read "2004" instead. Turns out the Smith listed in the bibliography wasn't the smith that invented the 2004 metric from computer science for which he was cited, but another Smith with the same last name from the field of medicine, who wrote a very unrelated paper in 1971 that was referred to. I made the author aware (not mentioning any suspicions of potential LLM involvement...) by email and got told I wasn't the first one to point that out.

Papers like that are now creeping into journals, conference proceedings and online archives, mostly unchecked/unnoticed, which waters down the quality a lot.

PS: cited author's name changed.
by qwertox | 2025-08-05 21:18:46+00:00
This is revolutionary. I mean, we already could see this coming, but now it's here. With limitations, but this is the beginning.

In game engines it's the engineers, the software developers who make sure triangles are at the perfect location, mapping to the correct pixels, but this here, this is now like a drawing made by a computer, frame by frame, with no triangles computed.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-05 21:18:49+00:00
Ok you're off in the land of "what if" and I can just flat out say: If you have a ZDR account there is no filtering on inference, no real-time moderation, no blocking.

If you use their training infrastructure there's moderation on training examples, but SFT on non-harmful tasks still leads to a complete breakdown of guardrails very quickly.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-08-05 21:19:05+00:00
> when they could easily pass on these costs because we have no alternatives

The administration has made it clear they will take such actions personally.

The USA by and large figuratively controls the world. All of Europe is one step away from a protectorate and if Taiwan doesn't want to conquered by China they need the USA in the way.

If the USA ever sours on the relationship it means China will take Taiwan so they do whatever they need to do to appease the USA.
by FergusArgyll | 2025-08-05 21:19:37+00:00
> To improve the safety of the model, we filtered the data for harmful content in pre-training, especially around hazardous biosecurity knowledge, by reusing the CBRN pre-training filters from GPT-4o. Our model has a knowledge cutoff of June 2024.

This would be a great "AGI" test. See if it can derive biohazards from first principles
by peterlk | 2025-08-05 21:19:52+00:00
You're right, I didn't know that. Thanks!

In the US, this could be a municipal service (my.name@themunicipality.emailservice.mystate.gov), and then we treat everyone in a geography as an organization. This feels a bit more likely to represent an "organization", especially for smaller municipalities. I would expect service availability and quality to vary widely between different municipalities - similarly to how parks, bike lanes, and other infrastructure quality vary widely between municipalities.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-05 21:19:53+00:00
Precisely my thoughts.

You have to ask the question "why are we encoding this as base64 in the first place?"

The answer to that is generally that base64 plays nice with http headers. It has no newlines or special characters that need special handling. Then you ask "why encode json" And the answer is "because JSON is easy to handle". Then you ask the question "why embed a base64 field in the json?" And the answer is "Json doesn't handle binary data".

These are all choices that ultimately create a much larger text blob than needs be. And because this blob is being used for security purposes, it gets forwarded onto the request headers for every request. Now your simple "DELETE foo/bar" endpoint ends up requiring a 10kb header of security data just to make the request. Or if you are doing http2, then it means your LB will end up storing that 10kb blob for every connected client.

Just wasteful. Especially since it's a total of about 3 or 4 different fields with relatively fixed sizes. It could have been base64(key_length(1byte)|iterations(4bytes)|hash_function(1byte)|salt(32bytes)) Which would have produced something like a 51 byte base64 string. The example is 3x that size (156 characters). It gets much worse than that on real systems I've seen.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-05 21:20:34+00:00
"Software engineering" will become vibe fixing.

There's many jobs that can be eliminated with software, but haven't because managers don't want to hire SWEs without proven value. I don't think HN realizes how big that market is.

With AI, the managers will replace their employees with a bunch of code they don't understand, watch that code fail in 3 years, and have to hire SWEs to fix it.

I'd bet those jobs will outnumber the ones initially eliminated by having non-technical people deliver the first iteration.

Many of those jobs will be high-skill/impact because they are necessarily focused on fixing stuff AI can't understand.
by tomwojcik | 2025-08-05 21:20:46+00:00
Opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode provides a CC like interface for copilot. It's a slightly worse tool, but since copilot with Claude 4 is super cheap, I ended up preferring it over CC. Almost no limits, cheaper, you can use all the Copilot models, GH is not training on your data.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-05 21:21:02+00:00
The flex hours are usually only for office workers where performance can be measured - sometimes it replaces overtime.

So the employer can "suggest" you work longer hours now when there's a ton of stuff to do (like end of year rush in accounting or payroll) and then you take days off when it slows down.

But yea, it's not something that's easy to police.
by SR2Z | 2025-08-05 21:21:06+00:00
Prisoners themselves are the ones choosing to work most of the time, and generally none of them are REQUIRED to work (they are required to either take job training or work).

They choose to because extra money = extra commissary snacks and having a job is preferable to being bored out of their minds all day.

That's the part that's frequently not included in the discussion of this whenever it comes up. Prison jobs don't pay minimum wage, but given that prisoners are wards of the state that seems reasonable.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-05 21:21:19+00:00
I’m talking about kids between 6 and 11 years old so dropping out in 9th grade seems not completely relevant. But if we’re talking about subsegments of the population bringing down the average, removing a few low performing states from the US would drastically change the average here too.

>requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school

I’m not sure what you meant by compensated for. I’m discussing the differences between writing systems. Not which country has a better education system.