MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikepurvis | 2025-09-30 18:07:54+00:00
> "descending into lemonhood" is not a progression of markets

It takes time for the participants to respond to the lemon market conditions, eg buyers to make purchases that are bad, so that they come to distrust the sellers, and then sellers with quality goods taking them elsewhere because the buyers are now pricing everything as if it's going to be a lemon.

The transition from healthy market to lemon market once the preconditions have been in place for enough time could reasonably be described as a "descent".
by Jimmc414 | 2025-09-30 18:08:01+00:00
The LoRA + GRPO training pipeline and the semantic similarity reward function over exact matching is actually interesting, but there is an evaluation issue if you want to accept the headline at face value.

They trained on synthetic extractions like "extract equations from arXiv papers" and "extract regulatory information from FDA documents," then tested on more synthetic extractions from the same sources. Essentially, "model trained on synthetic arXiv/PubMed/FDA extractions performs better on more synthetic arXiv/PubMed/FDA extractions than a model that never saw this distribution."

I'd like to see how it handles extractions from a real contract, or a low quality scan of a financial document, or processes a format it didn't see in training. o3 very likely handles these variations better, but we don't have that data to compare.

We need the model weights or tests on standard benchmarks to verify if this generalizes beyond documents that look like the training distribution.
by JohnKemeny | 2025-09-30 18:08:34+00:00
There's even a HN post from almost exactly 5 years ago:

Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications, 2nd ed (szeliski.org)

0 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945823

But anyway; why not? Yes, add (2020) to the title, by all means.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-30 18:08:42+00:00
It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s.

There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.

Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
by alterom | 2025-09-30 18:08:42+00:00
Long-press on the dash on mobile (in Google keyboard at list) gives you two em-dash options.

...yeah, I guess people who don't know how to write are now assuming I use AI to generate my thoughts.

It's still so damn easy these days to spot AI writing — it's hamstrung by the milquetoast limitations imposed by its corporate masters, particularly even it comes to the default prompt.

And don't get me started on the use of language. Most writing is bad, so the AI has integrated the worst if it too.

But people thinking that something was written by an AI because of punctuation (and not, say, because you're seeing a list masquerading as an argument) is the kind of thing that makes me lose faith in humanity.
by muldvarp | 2025-09-30 18:08:44+00:00
Yeah, I used to like technology. I don't anymore. LLMs just seem like they were purposefully built to annoy me personally. I dislike pretty much everything about them:

Everything they produce looks high-quality, only a fraction of it actually is. This makes time-tested signals of high-quality texts (e.g. em-dashes) worthless. I know it really doesn't matter but the fact that em-dashes specifically are now signals of AI slop is just so sad.

Vibe-coding is the exact opposite direction I wanted software engineering to go. I liked that computers followed hard rules and that I never needed social engineering to get a computer to do the thing I wanted it to do.

I'm not sure if LLMs will do more harm if they stay with the capabilities they currently have, where they are most useful for scams, spam and slop or if the promises actually hold and most white-collar jobs are automated away.

I hate that AI is going for the stuff I like (creating art, writing software) while I still have to do all the chores I dislike (doing the dishes, washing clothes).

I genuinely think that LLMs will have a strong negative effect on my life and society as a whole.

It looks to me like software engineering could be dead in the near future. Note that AI doesn't need to be as good as human programmers to replace them. It just needs to be good enough.

I'm thinking of switching careers as long as I still can. The second it becomes clear that software engineering is dead the job market will burst into flames and finding something else will become almost impossible. Even if this doesn't happen I absolutely despise the idea that my job will now include drudge work like reviewing AI slop merge requests.
by the_snooze | 2025-09-30 18:08:59+00:00
I think "standing out" in a market of lemons is playing the wrong game. The winning move is to sidestep the market altogether and find a niche where there's a barrier to entry that's both high enough to deter most other competitors but low enough that you can clear it.

It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.
by gappa | 2025-09-30 18:09:07+00:00
Their first reply was "we have passed your question to a higher technical team", then they came back four days later with the above reply. I was enquiring about the A7R mark V, which introduced the much needed "lossless" option. I think I asked because I wondered why they kept the uncompressed option and because experts warned that Sony did that before with "lossless" formats.
by downrightmike | 2025-09-30 18:09:13+00:00
Hey hey hey, the $9/hr software engineer will be doing all the work, unless they can find a $1/hr guy. The first guy should just become a vendor and subcontract down to the $1/hr guy, that's what the rest of Boeing's supply chain is doing already.

https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...
by Cornbilly | 2025-09-30 18:09:13+00:00
> The answers don't even matter that much, I am always more interested in the demonstrated ability to recognize and reason through the implications of constraint changes when there are no correct answers. People with solid computer science skills can usually muddle their way through it, whereas many people with immaculate leetcode skills fail the most basic versions of this.

> The most important skill of juniors was demonstrating that they could effectively reason about and were motivated to dive into problems they had never seen before. These were always the juniors that could be rapidly developed into strong senior engineers, which is more or less the objective when you hire juniors.

I agree 100%.
by krull10 | 2025-09-30 18:09:26+00:00
The simplest approach is to always read the interface of packages one wants to use, and if one isn't provided look at the code / open an issue to interact with the developers about their input assumptions. One should also make tests to ensure the interface behaves in the expected manner when working with your code.

Using this approach since 2017 I've never really encountered the types of issues mentioned in Yuri's blog post. The biggest issue I've had is if some user-package makes a change that is effectively breaking but they don't flag it the associated release as breaking. But this isn't really a Julia issue so much as a user-space issue, and can happen in any language when relying on others' libraries.
by leobg | 2025-09-30 18:09:28+00:00
It’s a theory. But what if it’s wrong?

> Second is by clear communication by European leaders, that any act of sabotage, aggression and other acts of hybrid warfare will have analogous and larger scale responses on the Russian soil. You send 20 drones? We will send 40.

Had Kennedy listened to advice like that in 1961, chances are we wouldn’t be here today.
by centiar | 2025-09-30 18:09:48+00:00
I avoid readig news due to the obvious bias that has seemingly infected all publications. However, tried Kagi News today and here is the summary of the shutdown:

"Republicans are pressing a clean stopgap bill to fund agencies through November 21, while Democrats insist on extending health-care subsidies and reversing recent Medicaid cuts in any deal."

https://kite.kagi.com/ecc8e0de-f9d3-421c-99cb-9b165e14e9c6/w...
by bangaladore | 2025-09-30 18:10:01+00:00
> Of course, it is specialized to outperform general models on this specific task in this specific domain with this specific json format for output.

My understanding is generally this is not considered an obvious result. In that high parameter generalist models largely outperform lower parameter specialists.

The real issue is they tested on data in their training set. *

* Incorrect-- Edit misread parent comment.
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-09-30 18:10:08+00:00
There is DHH Omarchy/Omakub attempt to create a Linux system of convention over configuration, this is making me give it one last shot.

But damn some aspects are really annoying. One other issue is one package installation at a time with a lock which you can't do from other terminal.

Here's what GPT says:

> The APT package manager uses a lock file (usually /var/lib/dpkg/lock or /var/lib/apt/lists/lock) to ensure that only one process (like apt-get, apt, or the GUI Software Center) is modifying packages at a time.

To me this seems like a serious limitation
by mikepurvis | 2025-09-30 18:10:25+00:00
They can still say "more like this" and group the listings on the frontend, but the point would be have a clear chain of accountability between what you buy, who you buy it from, and what actually arrives.

Like, when I purchased an Apple laptop charger "ships from and sold by Amazon.ca" but what arrived was an obvious counterfeit, that was... bad.
by tyleo | 2025-09-30 18:10:51+00:00
It’s surprising to me MacBooks have such low market share. I got my first Mac after using Windows all my life and I’m stunned. The laptop: 1. Lasts all day on battery 2. Doesn’t get hot 3. Compiles code twice as fast as my new Windows desktop

I really don’t like macOS but I’ve shifted to recommending Mac to all my friends and family given the battery, portability and, and speed.
by pirates | 2025-09-30 18:10:59+00:00
Google thinks the same of me and I don't even edit the URL. I can have a session working just fine one night and come back the next day, open a new tab to search for something, and get captcha'd to hell. I'm fairly sure they just mess with Firefox on purpose. I won't install Brave, Chrome, or Edge out of principle either. Safari works fine, but I don't like it.
by gretch | 2025-09-30 18:11:42+00:00
> keep objects consistent

I think this is not nearly as important as most people think it is.

In hollywood movies, everyone already knows about "continuity errors" - like when the water level of a glass goes up over time due to shots being spliced together. Sometimes shots with continuity errors are explicitly chosen by the editor because it had the most emotional resonance for the scene.

These types of things rarely affect our human subjective enjoyment of a video.

In terms of physics errors - current human CGI has physics errors. People just accept it and move on.

We know that superman can't lift an airplane because all of that weight on a single point of the fuselage doesn't hold, but like whatever.
by jordanb | 2025-09-30 18:12:10+00:00
During the MCAS scandal I saw a report that the software developers who wrote it were offshored and being paid something like $13/hr.

While there weren't actually coding flaws in MCAS in that it did what the spec said, I've met people who work in avionics and they would have pushed back against the specification because they tend to think about how their component integrates into the system.

Obviously it's impossible to prove that, had the software been developed by people specializing in avionics they would have caught the problem but it's just another hole in the swiss cheese model: when you outsource your avionics software development to an offshore contractor who was making a webstore yesterday and will be making an iphone app tomorrow, you eliminate the possibility that the implementers could do an informed critique of the spec.
by toss1 | 2025-09-30 18:12:12+00:00
>>Coercing who, exactly? Do you have any examples?

Seriously? #2

We now have the President and Commander In Chief (elected with the essential help of a quarter-$$billion++ of Elon Musk's money) just addressed an unprecedented gathering of Generals declaring the most important war is in "[US cities .....That's a war too. It's a war from within"

The most important potential war is not Russia, China, or even Transnational Drug Cartels, it is US citizens

And the Secretary of War also addressed the same group telling them that "We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for war fighters,"

So, the very top leadership of the country is declaring to the top militery that greatest enemy is US citizens and the military will be deployed to US cities to fight, and without rules of engagement, so they can more effectively "intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill" everyone, including those US citizens and residents.

This is the most authoritarian, and frankly straight-up fascist move I've seen in the US in my lifetime, if not ever.

Please explain how these actions (again, directly supported by massive amounts of money and effort from Elon Musk) are in any way "Libertarian". Seriously.

[0] https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-pi...

[1] https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2025/Sep/30/intimidat...
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-30 18:12:16+00:00
Record things with 2 cameras.

Today's Sora can produce something that resembles reality from a distance, but if you look closely, especially if there's another perspective or the scene is atypical, the flaws are obvious.

Perhaps tomorrow's Sora will overcome the the "final 10%" and maintain undetectable consistency of objects in 2 perspectives. But that would require a spatial awareness and consistency that models still have a lot of trouble with.
by simonw | 2025-09-30 18:12:22+00:00
I updated this post to link to the Claude Code docs that suggest running YOLO mode using their Docker dev container: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract... - which locks down network access to just a small set of domains: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/5062ed93fc67f...
by marxism | 2025-09-30 18:13:27+00:00
Here's an example of gold plating from a CLI I created this past weekend.

I did not like the terse errors when parsing JSON. "invalid type: boolean `true`, expected a string", line: 3, column: 24

So I asked for Elm style friendly error messages that try to give you all the information to fix things right up front.

https://github.com/PeoplesGrocers/json-archive/blob/master/s... https://github.com/PeoplesGrocers/json-archive/blob/master/s...

And then since I had time, I asked for some documentation to show/explain the various edge case handling decisions I made.

https://github.com/PeoplesGrocers/json-archive/blob/master/d...

It's gold plating because no one wants or needs my little tool. If I spent that same hour iterating on the output format to be more user friendly while at work, I would be taken out behind the woodshed and shot. It's pure wasted effort.
by coldtea | 2025-09-30 18:13:45+00:00
No. Liquid glass wont even make it past 1 macOS/iOS release. In fact Apple has already scaled back many of the glass UI parts they've shown in the earlier demos and betas.

It's an ill-though change for change's sake. Nobody is that impressed.

Flat design was more fully thought. But even that was useless and ultimately user hostile.

"Skeuomorphic" (which is mistankenly called that, few parts of OS X or Windows at the time were actually skeuomorphic in nature) was just better UI.
by plqbfbv | 2025-09-30 18:13:46+00:00
My fairly recent experience with some timelines, posted 20d ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45210911

Some of the most catastrophic ones were 3 years ago or earlier, but the latest kernel bug (point 5) was with 6.16.3, ~1 month ago. It did recover, but I already mentally prepared to a night of restores from backups...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-30 18:14:03+00:00
That is an insight that my age simply didn't bring.

I am not sure about the accuracy of it as I was there after the AI era and I have only seen the slow but steady creep of it.

> This place used to make stories, not just Digg them

This does give me goosebumps.

Honestly, I like this place because it has a lot of nice people and we are more alike and different and it's just that this seems to be the place I have decided to call a home to all of my ramblings/thoughts on essentially everything.

The only other social media that I operate is maybe discord and a very small dose of reddit.

it does seem to me that somewhere along the internet, we might have lost it, or atleast its hidden, waiting to be discovered.

I can't help but share things like julia evan's zines and how he inspired one day when I messaged him on mail about being worried about AI when he shared me somebody who had created a better UI for the man pages and so many other interesting pages which really reflected personality that I didn't know exist.

I don't really think that we can do over hackernews but there is certainly a possibility of atleast having niche discussions like erlang and discussing them could lead to more people exposure's to it... which can benefit them or the community!

I can maybe think of that we might need to use something like matrix to atleast create a public community with better moderation if that's the issue.

I think the HN mods are also trying their best but if we want opinions, the best way I right now could think of to fixing this as an issue might be to creating a hackernews but not for AI which I had actually suggested once but everybody just said to me to block posts about AI or to create a tracker which removes all AI references at most, the post is definitely lost in my comments but I definitely remember it.

I can understand where you are coming from and I think that this place isn't a substitute for a place like that and we still might need a place like that too if we become too pessimistic of y-combinator.

Never give up hope I suppose :)
by pants2 | 2025-09-30 18:14:05+00:00
I'm optimistic about the Sora app! My hope is that it becomes much more whimsical and fun than TikTok because everyone on the app knows that all content is fake. Hopefully that means less rage-bait and more creative content, like OG YouTube. Nobody's going to get their news from Sora because it's literally 100% fake.
by SOTGO | 2025-09-30 18:14:34+00:00
There's enough places where em-dashes are inconvenient to type that I find it to be a reasonable indicator, particularly on the web. I don't think most people know how to generate an em-dash with a hotkey, so if I see one in a Reddit comment for example there's a high likelihood that the comment was either LLM generated or at least copy-pasted from somewhere else. Generally speaking in the past I observed a low prevalence of em-dashes on the internet except in more formal writing, so if I see an em-dash in a context where I ordinarily wouldn't expect one I do get suspicious. It's the same thing with the green check emoji, it's possible that a regular user typed it, but pre-LLM I can't recall ever seeing them, so these days I automatically assume it's AI generated content
by fidotron | 2025-09-30 18:14:42+00:00
> to describe apples, bananas and everything countable

An apple is an abstraction over the particles/waves that comprise it, as is a banana.

Euclid is no more abstract than the day to day existence of a normal person, hence to claim that it is unusually abstract is to ignore, as you did, the abstraction inherent in day to day life.

As I pointed out it's very possible to create formal reasoning systems which are not symbolic or abstract, but due to that are we to assume constructing or studying them would not be a mathematical exercise? In fact the Pythagoreans did all sorts of stuff like that.
by uhoh-itsmaciek | 2025-09-30 18:15:02+00:00
>Long-press on the dash on mobile (in Google keyboard at list) gives you two em-dash options.

One is an em-dash (—); the other is an en-dash (–). See, e.g., https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-... for an overview.
by krull10 | 2025-09-30 18:15:09+00:00
I've nearly exclusively used Julia since 2017. I don't think this is a perverse use of such functions -- long ago I naturally guessed I could use `cumsum!` on the same input and output and it would correctly overwrite the values (which now gives a similar warning in the documentation). However, when I first used it that way I tested if it did what I expected to verify my assumption.

It is good the documentation is now explicit that the behavior is not guaranteed in this case, but even better would be if aliasing were detected and handled (at least for base Julia arrays, so that the warning would only be needed for non-base types).

Still, the lesson is that when using generic functions one should look at what they expect of their input, and if this isn't documented one should at least test what they are giving thoroughly and not assume it just works. I've always worked this way, and never run into surprises like the types of issues reported in the blog post.

Currently there is no documentation on what properties an input to `sum!` must support in the doc string, so one needs to test its correctness when using it outside of base Julia data types (I haven't checked the broader docs for an interface specification, but if there is one it really should be linked in the docstring).
by maz1b | 2025-09-30 18:15:20+00:00
Cerebras has been a true revelation when it comes to inference. I have a lot of respect for their founder, team, innovation, and technology. The colossal size of the WS3 chip, utilizing DRAM to mind-boggling scale, it's definitely ultra cool stuff.

I also wonder why they have not been acquired yet. Or is it intentional?

I will say, their pricing and deployment strategy is a bit murky and unclear. Paying $1500-$10,000 per month plus usage costs? I'm assuming that it has to do with chasing and optimizing for higher value contracts and deeper-pocketed customers, hence the minimum monthly spend that they require.

I'm not claiming to be an expert, but as a CEO/CTO, there were other providers in the market that had relatively comparable inference speed (obviously Cerebras is #1), easier onboarding, better response from people that worked there (all of my experience with Cerebras have been days/weeks late or simply ignored). IMHO, if Cerebras wants to gain more mindshare, they'll have to look into this aspect.
by cromka | 2025-09-30 18:15:37+00:00
Since Apple actually makes a significant amount of money selling hardware itself, I really wonder why they actually wouldn't allow people to install Linux on it, with a full support. After all, it's not like this would jeopardize macOS/iPadOS AppStore earnings — Linux users would simply buy into Apple Hardware they haven't even considered before, and only a fraction of macOS/iPadOS users would switch to using Linux.