MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arghwhat | 2025-08-15 12:20:18+00:00
And sunlight causes skin cancer, but we don't want to boycott neither water vapor nor sunlight lest we will have no precipitation and no... life.

Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed. Evaporation from a datacenter is unlikely to make any notable impact through water vapor. What it could impact is highly localized potable water availability and humidity in places with e.g. low precipitation and limited reservoir capacity.

And, again, note that other cooling methods are also in use, and that other things also use evaporative cooling.

Heck, even when evaporative cooling is used, it doesn't necessarily mean that the water escapes into the atmosphere! Both heat pipes and refrigeration cycles are forms of evaporative cooling where the gas is allowed to condense, cool and evaporate again.
by Jensson | 2025-08-15 12:21:05+00:00
When I'm confident something will work it almost always works, that is very different from these models.

Sure sometimes I do stuff I am not confident about to learn but then I don't say "here I solved the problem for you" without building confidence around the solution first.

Every competent senior engineer should be like this, if you aren't then you aren't competent. If you are confident in a solution then it should almost always work, else you are over confident and thus not competent. LLM are confident in solutions that are shit.
by loudmax | 2025-08-15 12:21:19+00:00
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat.

To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
by jeswin | 2025-08-15 12:22:28+00:00
> Oh, I am getting an authentication error. Well, meaybe I should just delete the token check for that code path...problem solved?!

If this is how you think LLMs and Coding Agents are going about writing code, you haven't been using the right tools. Things happen, sure, but also mostly don't. Nobody is arguing that LLM-written code should be pushed directly into production, or that they'll solve every task.

LLMs are tools, and everyone eventually figures out a process that works best for them. For me, it was strongs specs/docs, strict types, and lots of tests. And then of course the reviews if it's serious work.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-15 12:23:22+00:00
This is all a familiar pattern. In the early days of ride share it was an amazing advancement and very cheap, because it was highly subsidized. The quality was decent, and certainly better than taxi and car services in most cities. Tons of ride share app companies popped up.

Then reality set in. Costs were raised so they weren’t losing money anymore. Rideshare became more of a commodity and competitors got squeezed out as there wasn’t much room to compete and make money. Service quality went downhill. Uber is generally reliable but the quality has fallen off a cliff. My last car smelled bad and the rear axel sounded like was about to fall off the car. In most cities at the airport I just walk outside and get an old fashioned taxi at the rank vs dealing with all the nonsense regulations forcing one to walking to some remote corner of a parking garage for the “ride share pickup” zone.

GenAI is entering that pivot point. The products have plateaued. There’s pressure to stop the loss leaders and set prices to a more realistic level. Services are becoming commoditized. It’s not going away but we’re entering a period of rapid consolidation. GenAI will still be here in a few years and will be useful, but like rideshare the allure will wear old and we’ll look at these things like we do spell checkers today. Something everyone uses but ultimately boring commoditized tech where there’s not a lot of money to be made. A useful feature to add to actual products.

I do think there’s some good opportunity to shift to locally run small models, but that too will just become commoditized spell-checker level tech.
by tw04 | 2025-08-15 12:24:20+00:00
> I have not disagreement the 2021 storm should never have happened.

But they still haven’t fixed any of the issues. The exact same thing is going to happen again when (not if) it freezes.

> I would prefer a more Texas like approach but with some thoughtfulness around capacity instead of just generation.

Capacity isn’t the issue. Lack of winterization of pumps is the issue. Because that costs money and private companies have zero incentive to make the investment if government doesn’t force them to.
by stingraycharles | 2025-08-15 12:24:29+00:00
It’s basically the old “what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away” but then with NVidia and AI shops.

Models get more computationally expensive as they start doing more things, and an equilibrium will be found what people are willing to pay per token.

I do expect the quality of output to increase incrementally, not exponentially, as models start using more compute. The real problem begins when companies like NVidia can’t make serious optimizations anymore, but history has proven that this seems unlikely.
by coder543 | 2025-08-15 12:24:50+00:00
I'm pretty sure you're supposed to fine tune the Gemma 3 270M model to actually get good results out of it: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/huggingface_text_full_...

Use a large model to generate outputs that you're happy with, then use the inputs (including the same prompt) and outputs to teach 270M what you want from it.
by motorest | 2025-08-15 12:24:56+00:00
> That page was made in December 2022, (...)

Irrelevant. Wikipedia does not create concepts. Again, if you take a few minutes to learn about the topic you will eventually understand the concept was coined a couple of decades ago, and has a specific meaning.

Either you opt to learn, or you don't. Your choice.

> Here's the first linked source:

Irrelevant. Your argument is as pointless and silly as claiming rubber duck debugging doesn't exist because no rubber duck is involved.
by ramesh31 | 2025-08-15 12:24:57+00:00
I do think there will be a great de-skilling in software as we know it currently, essentially equivalent to the shift from craftsman manufacturing to assembly line production in the physical world. There will of course always be niches for high skill experts, but the vast majority of enterprise CRUD work will be done by people with far less expertise, whose salary will be some diminished percentage based on their reliance on AI. Will the results be "better"? No, but they will be good enough, and faster and more reliably tracked/scheduled and allow capital more control. The bosses have wanted to be able to "add X dollars to a project to speed it up by Y" forever, and now they finally can.
by ta1243 | 2025-08-15 12:25:06+00:00
That's all noise that the press likes to trump up. Sure 5% of the cost might be on "silly things" like bat tunnels or hedghog bridges, but that doesn't make or break a project.

Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.

Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.

Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
by leelin | 2025-08-15 12:25:29+00:00
Years ago I asked my teacher what percent of street merchants or high school kids would know how to write some of the more complicated, uncommon characters from the advanced textbooks. She replied street merchants maybe 50%, but high school students 100% -- during high school every student will be at their lifetime peak literacy, because they will be cramming and memorizing how to write every possible character in preparation for the college entrance exams.

I tell locals I can "speak, read, and type", but only have 1st grade writing abilities in Mandarin. The key is typing -- you can chat on Line, WeChat, email, or any mobile apps to accomplish day-to-day tasks. But the typing is phoenetic either via Roman pinyin, zhuyin, romaji, etc.

So yes, this problem only comes up in languages where drawing the characters are mostly independent of the pronunciation. You don't need to type individual words, you can type phrases and the input tool presents choices sorted by most commonly used. Therefore, even sending communication is closer to a reading exercise rather than a writing exercise.
by vidarh | 2025-08-15 12:25:36+00:00
> I could walk to my local town centre with a placard for either saying: "Stop Genocide in Palestine" or "Down with Hamas" this weekend and not be arrested.

You might "just" get threatened with arrest:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/armed-police-t...

Or you might get arrested:

https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/peter-tatchell-arres...

There are many similar ones, but they are now much harder to find due to the hundreds of arrests over Palestine Action.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-15 12:25:53+00:00
I hear this a lot and it is mathematically incorrect.

Frameworks solve two business problems:

1. Candidate selection

2. Clearer division of labor

That’s it. Everything else is an imaginary quality from the developer. In most cases the well reasoned arguments from developers in favor of large frameworks can be performed faster without the frameworks, both in human writing speed and software execution speed. Typically these imaginary qualities taken a defensive tone from developers who have never learned to execute without the frameworks, which becomes an argument from ignorance because you know what you are arguing for but not what you are arguing against.

At any rate the result is the same that the article makes about AI: output of brittle toolchains.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-15 12:26:22+00:00
The accountability aspect itself is equally inconsistent. The accountability is typically regarded as if it were a "punishment". However, the point of punishment is to teach. Touch the stove and mommy smacks your hand - It's meant to be a small pain to prevent a bigger pain.

What then is the point of the sort of eternal punishment that's usually implied by this worldview? What can possibly be learned from that sort of punishment? What larger pain does it prevent?

It becomes obvious that what we're considering isn't punishment, or even accountability, at all. It's torture.
by homebrewer | 2025-08-15 12:27:16+00:00
Local translation has been pretty useful for me. It's obviously not as good as fat commercial models used by e.g Google Translate, but get the point across often enough that I almost stopped using those commercial engines. What's interesting is that this only useful ML service came out from collaboration with several European universities and was mostly an academic project, polished by a commercial interest into a useful service. Makes an interesting comparison with those pipe dreams conjured up by Mozilla business suites that set fire to millions of dollars and ended up with nothing.
by tw04 | 2025-08-15 12:27:20+00:00
> The power outages are not due to lack of central planning

It is 100% due to lack of central planning. The outages were caused by a lack of winterizarion of natural gas pumps which was a known issue in Texas but the lack of regulation meant companies could just ignore the problem. Why invest in winterizing when you can just jack up prices and make even more money when they freeze and there’s not enough power to meet demand?

There’s a reason the power doesn’t go out in the winter anywhere else in the country when it gets below freezing and it’s not “a lack of regulation”.
Ask HN: How do you categorize business expenses?
by codeitfast | 2025-08-15 12:28:15+00:00
I spend 3+ hours every month manually sorting bank transactions into categories (office supplies, travel, meals, etc.) for tax/accounting purposes.

Currently using Excel with VLOOKUP formulas but it's tedious and error-prone. QuickBooks auto-categorization is only ~70% accurate.

Some tools out there offer this as an add-on, but the pricing is pretty steep.

How do other small business owners handle this? Any tools that actually work well?
by glenstein | 2025-08-15 12:28:49+00:00
Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival.

If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
by XorNot | 2025-08-15 12:29:38+00:00
The bigger issue with all those non-zero probabilities is they're meaningless while you still experience actual time as a human...but become pretty damn significant when you experience no time after you die.

So tiny probabilities become essentially guarantees unless the heat death of the universe is so thorough as to erase the slight probability that the whole thing pops back into existence.
by schneems | 2025-08-15 12:29:56+00:00
I guess you’re saying that the current status is mandated by the design of the grid. Which is true, but that status would be best described as “deregulated” rather than “purposeful regulation.”

Lack of regulation and oversite around weatherization and redundancy is the main source of our problems. The Texas’ grid is market based and so unregulated that it’s not connected to the national grid so it can avoid federal regulation.

I recommend this podcast to anyone interested https://kutkutx.studio/category/the-disconnect-power-politic.... I learned that our current Texas grid was designed by Enron.
by ivape | 2025-08-15 12:29:58+00:00
Well, now we enter the magical explanation. There is a place that is perfect, and it requires perfect understanding. If one cannot even understand how thieving harms the world, then they can’t be good in a nice place like that. Plus it’s eternal, so imagine not understanding an eternal place and why even one flaw would last for eternity in a place like that.

It’s not something anyone will consider until the last few days of their lives. The very last few moments and seconds.

You can’t walk in dirty to a pristine palace, not because you are dirty and bad, but because such a place is to be clean, for eternity. That requires an other worldly level of solidarity, which would take a lifetime for humans, who cannot even feed and house all their brothers and sisters in this world right here, to understand.

Of course, God can just make it all so, but then our creation can just be done away with. We were defined in a very specific way, the same way Angels are defined to be perfect. We were not to be that. The same way a Lion was to never consider what we are talking about here.

——

Which brings me to my final point. I am God of my codebase. A function that I give life to cannot, ever, sit around and lament “why oh why, I lowly Fibonacci function, must compute Fibonacci numbers forever?”. Because I fucking said so.

Arrogance at the possibility of God in the exact way I’m describing is just something a human will have to deal with. Many are confident in that arrogance. That’s about all we can say.

I can delete any function from my codebase, but I have mercy. Catch my drift?
by dathinab | 2025-08-15 12:31:04+00:00
You mean the same Texas where

- many of the most influential people are invested into Oil and similar

- the political stance had been for a long time that "there should be a fair competition" between energy sources ... while subventionieren non renewable and trying everything they can to prevent subventions for renewable

- the same Texas which once it realized solar is competitive in Texas without subventions, has been non stop looking for ways to actively hinder solar (while still subvention the non-renewable sector)

- the same Texas which is by now even internationally known to have a very brittle power grid
by linuxftw | 2025-08-15 12:31:10+00:00
> Well, first up, they'd have spotted that our major cities need more frequent and faster rail connections from suburbs to centres and that these are prevented at the moment by insufficient platform capacity in stations like Leeds, Manchester Piccadilly and Birmingham New Street. So we need more station capacity in our city centres.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Build new cities, don't keep shuffling people into the existing ones. When you keep building new infrastructure to shuffle people into the same cities, the property values at the tail end of the infrastructure rise, pushing people further out, increasing the demand for new infrastructure.

The property prices inside the city stay inflated, wages stagnate, the working class loses.
by toast0 | 2025-08-15 12:31:28+00:00
Nit: WhatsApp was built in PHP and then people started chatting in status messages. Pivoting to be a chat system may not have been a massive pivot, but it was still a pivot.

Chat was added by running ejabberd[1], and the rest of the services (registration, status, sync) remained in PHP for some time, MMS was added as a PHP service. Services migrated to Erlang over time.

[1] Need chat? Run ejabberd is a gateway drug to running Erlang. Happened lots of places, but some then rewrite chat in another language later.
by JackFr | 2025-08-15 12:31:48+00:00
> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue.

That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.

It’s not an easy problem to solve.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-15 12:32:17+00:00
It's ancillary to this post, but I don't understand this obsession with "programmable" keyboards, at least for plain remapping of keys. There's entirely no point in doing it; the keymap / layout (not application key bindings, before that) is what gives keys meaning to begin with. Why would you care about what keycode a keyboard sends for some key? The only thing that matters is NKRO, if you want to remap modifiers; on non-NKRO keyboards the modifier keys are different in that they don't clash with other keys.

If the keyboard has some macro function, okay, I can see that being useful, in rare circumstances (in most cases you could also just do that in software.)

Meanwhile, the only way to get a keyboard that has 2 physical keys in the space where the wide caps lock key is on a "normal" keyboard is to build it myself. That key is the one completely useless key in the "core" of a regular layout, and I'd really like to be able to put 2 custom functions there (rather than just 1).
by hellcow | 2025-08-15 12:32:21+00:00
Lately Claude has said, “this is getting complicated, let me delete $big_file_it_didnt_write to get the build passing and start over.” No, don’t delete the file. “You’re absolutely right…”

And the moment the context is compacted, it forgets this instruction “fix the problems, don’t delete the file,” and tries to delete it again. I need to watch it like a hawk.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-08-15 12:32:41+00:00
The taxes in the Netherlands for personal income are incredibly high (the highest bracket is 55%). I think it is better for the government to have as many people as possible employed to collect lots of taxes, instead of trying to tax companies.

It is much easier for a company to set up shop somewhere else than for an employee to just pack up and uproot his/her whole life to relocate for a job.
by mcv | 2025-08-15 12:33:00+00:00
The idea is that you should consider the area around the notch to be extra, and not part of the normal screen. Show your game on the rectangular part of the screen, and use the extras for stuff that doesn't need the whole screen, like time, date, notification count, menu, whatever.

Having just the rectangular screen means not having the option of making those things visible, or having a smaller screen.
by thenthenthen | 2025-08-15 12:33:26+00:00
Curious, is there a minimum salary for migrant workers in the US? Here in Shanghai if you are a foreigner you can only get a 1 year work-residence permit unless you make x times amount the local minimum wage. Then there are also categories, for A tier talent the minimum is now 800.000 RMB per year iirc (recently adjusted from 880.000, which does not add up, because I got a A tier permit with 650.000 a year two years ago..)
by somenameforme | 2025-08-15 12:33:52+00:00
Absolutely, those are great examples of things that are protected by free speech. When the ACLU was at the height of its reputation, and the US at the height of its soft power, we even had things like the ACLU defending the right of a literal nazi group to stage a march. And the various death cults the US has had were also all operating completely legally.

The paradox of tolerance is largely nonsensical, because the key to a free society is free speech but stringent, and blind, enforcement against actions. Somebody can larp out with their swastikas and roman salutes all they want, but the second they lay hands on anybody - they're going to have a few years in a cage to rethink their life decisions. If they repeat this onto a third time, the key gets thrown away.

In general I think that the liberties of the worst of society work in many ways like a canary in the coalmine for the rest of us. As soon as that canary dies it's not long before your government, with its 29% approval rating, is trying to do things like ban the highest polling party in the country under ridiculous mental gymnastics that, in reality, come down to little more than 'we want to stay in power.'
by troupo | 2025-08-15 12:34:18+00:00
Aside of the technical merits there are also the questions of open vs proprietary, platform availability etc.

Also the question of "technically best solution" is also fraught with subjective definitions of "better". You also want competition in approaches. E.g. Vulkan might not have happened (an we would be stuck wit OpenGL) without the newer more modern GPU APIs from Metal and DX12.
by suriya-ganesh | 2025-08-15 12:34:36+00:00
I can confirm this is exactly how llms are working. Spent two hours trying to get an llm to implement a filescan skip a specific directory. Tried, claude code, Gemini and cursor. All agents debugged and wrote code that just doesn't make sense.

Llms are really good at template tasks, writing tests, boilerplate etc. But, Most times I'm not doing implement this button. I'm doing there's a logic mismatch in my expectation