MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrsilencedogood | 2025-09-24 20:56:07+00:00
fortunately it is now easier than ever to do small-scale scraping, the kind yt-dlp does.

I can literally just go write a script that uses headless firefox + mitmproxy in about an hour or two of fiddling, and as long as I then don't go try to run it from 100 VPS's and scrape their entire website in a huge blast, I can typically archive whatever content I actually care about. Basically no matter what protection mechanisms they have in place. Cloudflare won't detect a headless firefox at low (and by "low" I mean basically anything you could do off your laptop from your home IP) rates, modern browser scripting is extremely easy, so you can often scrape things with mild single-person effort even if the site is an SPA with tons of dynamic JS. And obviously at low scale you can just solve captchas yourself.

I recently wrote a scraper script that just sent me a discord ping whenever it ran into a captcha, and i'd just go look at my laptop and fix it, and then let it keep scraping. I was archiving a comic I paid for but was in a walled-garden app that obviously didn't want you to even THINK of controlling the data you paid for.
by permo-w | 2025-09-24 20:56:43+00:00
>I regard any theory based on an allmight homo-economicus as hopeless, disproven times and times over, and mostly an ideological attempt to blame shit on the people and justify privileges.

and here we are. this is what I was trying to express. I don't believe you actually don't believe that the sum of human actions is not made up of human actions, that essentially being what you've been trying to argue

I think you believe that it's nicer and less prejudiced, less harsh, to not "blame" people for the actions of their culture, and you're artificially constructing arguments to support that emotional conclusion. I completely get it, it's difficult to conscion that a particular culture might be more prone to authoritarianism, or careful economic management, or crime, or other, but, unfortunately, that is the case. what you're missing in the equation is that culture, national character, isn't people's fault. it exists, and it dictates matters, but people aren't to blame for it. you don't choose the culture you grow up in, and it shouldn't be anathema to describe cultures because you feel like it's blaming people. people are not molecules in a box, and yes, that is where we're disagreeing, because you think that's a viable analogy when it's not, when it's provably not. and anyway, even if it were a viable analogy, molecules in a box act differently when they're different molecules

the rest of your comment is essentially just mentally delegation to outside theories, without actually using your own brain to address the reality. I'll address this paragraph though:

>Wages, like any prices, are rarely decided in practice. "dictated by what people demand"? In which theorical world? Most people are not even asked what compensation they expect. There is a market that decide what a "reasonable salary" should be for any job in any place, and this market is set by a lot of regulations, by the level of unemployment, the cost of living, etc, all of which are not decided by anyone.

>"dictated by what people demand"

first of all, this quote is out of context, and the full quote says "in large part". secondly, the reason this is so is because to a large degree, when there is demand for a job, then businesses will try to fill that demand. if people do not want to do that job, or there are not enough people educated to do that job, then--barring migration--what happens to the wages for that job? I do not have to answer that for you, I'm sure. so here we have a perfect example of culture and personality--people's particular educations and desires for particular jobs--either dictating wage levels, or dictating part of the level of migration. you may say that people's ability to dictate like this is reliant on them being comfortable and not being forced to take whatever job will keep them alive, and that's another part of the equation, but it's irrelevant, because people's cultures and personalities are still a huge part of it

>The link to outline.com is dead by the way.

the article is an economist piece in the top reddit comment in the link
by rpdillon | 2025-09-24 20:57:02+00:00
You're glossing over the fact that the journalist is not technical at all (she covers policy stuff) and so she can't be adversarial at all in the technical realm. But she's also not adversarial in any way I can see. Off the top of my head, from memory:

How can you get browsing history off of SIM cards? If this case is historically large, how many other SIM farm cases as USSS investigated? If this is so unusual and dangerous, why does McCool say there's no reason to believe there aren't a lot more around the country? Why is the USSS only telling us about this the day of Trump's speech at the UN, when the SIM farms were found back in August? What evidence do these experts have that this could have only been pulled off by a nation-state? Is it that it is technically sophisticated? Is it because it cost so much? Is it because the hardware can't be easily obtained? What degree does this expert hold, and in what subject? They heavily rely on an "expert" that has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1984. What did he study? Is it even technically possible to have a SIM farm 35 miles away from a target and cause the towers to crash? Why is the journalist for the NYT choosing to repeat statements about this being a threat to the UN when there is zero evidence this has anything to do with the UN at all? Why are officials from the agency publishing the press release being cited anonymously?

I could go on, but there are so many pieces that don't fit. This was the first article I've read, maybe ever, where I got a very strong vibe of "This is U.S. government propaganda!"

> A major problem with society is that some anonymous low-karma recent-joiner rando spews things on HN

Not so sure about that. Sometimes the message is delivered in a sloppy way. I'm working here to not deliver my message sloppily, to show why simply disregarding what you read from a rando might not be the best.

> Not because of any kind of objectivity, analysis, proof, or thought.

Exactly my concern.
by dmkii | 2025-09-24 20:57:30+00:00
By far the stupidest version of this to me has been Snowflake’s implementation of previews. This is a database, where people preview the content of a table, not in an app, not on a phone, and someone thought it was a good idea to make that an image. I have no idea who ever thought this was a good idea, but here i am constantly tricked into thinking I can select some preview data, only to realise I have to go on a 10 clicks and a SQl query diversion to get it done.
by opwieurposiu | 2025-09-24 20:57:33+00:00
Yes, and you also get feedback from your butt as the machine tips and wobbles, particularly on smaller machines. Hearing the engine straining helps also. Often you can not clearly see what you are digging, this feedback lets you know if you are running into a rock or something.

One big advantage would be cameras mounted on the boom and rear view cameras, as many machines have obstructed views.
by cortesoft | 2025-09-24 20:58:13+00:00
> This is a great example of how this whole requirement hasn't been properly thought out.

I think this is more an example of you misunderstanding the desires of the people pushing for this.

They want to actually ban this content, they just know that is a harder sell than restricting to adults. So for them, making it harder or impossible to access the content is a feature, not a bug.
by adamtaylor_13 | 2025-09-24 20:58:30+00:00
It's clear you've never even watched the very videos you claim to be citing.

1a. He's referencing DEI, citing how it debases people. He literally says, _in the video_, "I don't want to have these thoughts, but that's what DEI does." I know you won't go watch it, but you're just parroting a false statement that Charlie Kirk never made.

1b. He never said that. He said that Black families had better standards of living before the Civil Rights Act, referencing both household incomes, rates of fatherlessness, and crime rates. All objective facts that are true. It's hardly racist to point out how America is not getting better for black Americans.

2. I've not heard this one. Feel free to cite a source and I'll take a look.

3. I've also not heard this one. Once again, I'll go look if you'd like to provide sources.
by JoblessWonder | 2025-09-24 20:58:32+00:00
> Anyone know where can we see parent commenter's code or something that demonstrates their knowledge of computers, computer networks or particular knowledge of "SIM farms"

The parent commenter literally never questions the post's technical conclusions or assumptions. Why are you acting like they did?

The commenter appears to be trying to make a point about how the post addresses sources, tone, and confidentiality.
by jongjong | 2025-09-24 20:59:35+00:00
Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field.

Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector.

In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-09-24 20:59:50+00:00
This is the exact mindset that when used at the level of the grant awarding body causes incremental research to prevail while pushing out outsider thoughts.

Things requiring unorthodox (but not incorrect) combinations of knowledge are met with the kind of skepticism that forgets to be skeptical of its own skepticism.

Things on longer horizons than the short term, corporatized ROI of our research institutions—who are themselves supposed to be less beholden to quick wins at the expense of knowledge generation—leads to a chilling effect on trying anything revolutionary at all.

The outcome is echo chambers, local maxima/minima in research, and promising avenues of research that are underfunded simply because they aren’t popular. Inevitably it also leads to the kind of institutional stagnation that results in p-hacking, and so on.
by beligum | 2025-09-24 21:00:00+00:00
I wanted to use my new Sony DSLR (a6700) in the same way as I use my server: by ssh'ing into it.

This is a one day hackaway helper built on Sony’s official Camera Remote SDK. It sort of mimics an ssh session by connecting to my Sony over Wi-Fi, listens for new photos or specific events... and runs scripts on them.

Thank you Sony, for not forgetting the Linux fan base. And thank you ChatGPT for freshening up my c++ skills!
by smnrg | 2025-09-24 21:00:07+00:00
I understand the sentiment. In principle, I agree with conscious use of these tools.

In this specific case, however, it wasn't for general browsing. After living overseas for more than a decade, you realize that, for some people, these platforms function as essential infrastructure. I can't force my old aunt on Signal or Matrix or whatever. It had become the only channel to call my 76yo uncle. Family I'd just reconnected with. This is especially true during a divorce with far away aging family members.

My post is less about my need for Instagram and more about the systemic problem: what recourse does a person have when a company's automated moderation fails and the original reason for the ban is proven invalid? That's the technical/procedural question I'm hoping to find an answer for.
by edude03 | 2025-09-24 21:00:09+00:00
> Essentially, the drives being HDD are the only real bottleneck

? on the low end a single HD can deliver 100MB/s, 80 can deliver 8,000MB/s, a single nvme can do 700MB/s and you have 4, 2,800MB/s - a 10Gb link can only do 1000MB/s, so isn't your bottle neck Network and then probably CPU?
by timschmidt | 2025-09-24 21:00:16+00:00
Much preferred over pianos which are making unwanted sounds, unexpected sounds, loud crashing sounds, sounds initiated by sheet music which exploits a flaw in the piano's construction, and can therefore not be depended upon to sound appropriately during important events like concerts.

That said, I'm all the time noodling new small programs in Rust. Cargo and crates.io makes this far simpler than with C/C++ where I have to write some code in another language entirely like [C]Make to get the thing to build. And I find that the borrow checker and rustc's helpful errors create a sort of ladder where all I have to do to get a working program is fix the errors the compiler identifies. And it often tells he how. Once the errors are fixed one by one, which is easy enough, and the software builds, my experience is that I get the expected program behavior about 95% of the time. I cannot say the same for other languages.
by cortesoft | 2025-09-24 21:00:34+00:00
Sure, but no matter how big of a hurry you are in, you are going to be sitting on the plane waiting for the door to open and the people in front of you to leave. I always use that time to gather everything up, and a steamdeck is really quite big.. you can’t leave it in the seat back pocket or something.

I am not trying to victim blame or anything, I just can’t imagine a situation where I could forget something so big.
by sharktheone | 2025-09-24 21:00:36+00:00
I attempted to implement the Temporal spec myself and it really isn't fun. After the tc39 meeting in May, I also switched to `temporal_rs` for `yavashark`. My own implementation ways everything else than optimal, I didn't support the RFC9557 timeformat. In theory you could even use temporal_rs to provide an perfect polyfil with wasm.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-24 21:00:40+00:00
> Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.

Historically, there did exist experiments that not each person has the same voting power (for example the Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreiklassenwahlrecht

Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected representants for this class.

The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes should have more influence.

Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-24 21:00:54+00:00
the scaling laws / bitter lesson would disagree

I have to note that taking the "bitter lesson" position as a claim that more data will result in better LLMs is a wild misinterpretation (or perhaps a "telephone version) of the original bitter lesson article, which say only that general, scalable algorithms do better than knowledge-carrying, problem-specific algorithms. And the last I heard it was the "scaling hypothesis" that hardly had consensus among those in the field.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-09-24 21:01:10+00:00
Hope it's better than Uber for Business. I signed up my company for Uber for Business and everything about their pipeline was broken for corporate accounts. They still send me regular reports for an account that I can't use because I can't log into it.

Worthless and a waste of my time. Total joke. For everything I hear about Uber's supposed good engineering, I couldn't see a lick of it.
by liquid_thyme | 2025-09-24 21:01:23+00:00
Edit: nvm, brain fart. OP is correct.

> So being able to make the product without culturing the organism is key.

No, it isn't. The article talks about using chemical synthesis, rather than using a biological platform to express the product via genes.

"To convert the newly uncovered sequences into bioactive molecules, the team applied a synthetic bioinformatic natural products (synBNP) approach. They bioinformatically predicted the chemical structures of natural products directly from the genome data and then chemically synthesized them in the lab. With the synBNP approach, Brady and colleagues managed to turn the genetic blueprints from uncultured bacteria into actual molecules—including two potent antibiotics."
by Prcmaker | 2025-09-24 21:01:55+00:00
A very good synopsis. I recently had the chance to put myself as the intermediate member between those expectations and our technical team. It raised the expectations on me, but helped reduce the unrealistic side of those from impacting my team.

It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-09-24 21:02:23+00:00
That's the point though. Look at any end-to-end image model. Currently I think nano banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash) is probably the best in prod. (Looks like ChatGPT has regressed the image pipeline right now with GPT-5, but not sure)

SD models have a much higher propensity to fixate on proximal in distribution solutions because of the way they de-noise.

For example.. you can ask nano banana for a "Completely full wine glass in zero g" which I'm pretty sure is way more out of distribution, the model does a reasonable job at approximating what they might look like.
by adamtaylor_13 | 2025-09-24 21:02:29+00:00
Very interesting. I stand corrected. I will note, however, that this is literally the only example I've seen of someone getting fired for a legitimately non-celebratory remark. We've got a legal system for stuff like that. For every single example you could give me, I can give you at least a thousand counterexamples. 99.9% of all the folks being fired are getting fired for being reprehensible.
by mrtksn | 2025-09-24 21:02:37+00:00
So? Go protect them the proper way. Do you want also to have all your messages scanned because you may be up to something illegal? Should we refrain from encryption because can help terrorists? That's not my cup of tea, I don't like proxy "protections" that are supposed to protect us from evil at some huge cost like loosing privacy or human connection.

I don't subscribe to the idea that we should ban knives because someone can use them to stab someone.
by oblio | 2025-09-24 21:02:40+00:00
That's the thing, I can't visualize (and I don't think most people can) what "tokens" represent for image or video outputs.

For text I just assume them to be word stems or more like work-family-members (cat-feline-etc).

For images and videos I guess each character, creature, idea in it is a token? Blue sky, cat walking around, gentleman with a top hat, multiplied by the number of frames?
by lordofgibbons | 2025-09-24 21:02:42+00:00
We don't have a data scarcity problem. Further refinement to the pretraining stage will continue to happen, but I don't expect the orders of magnitude of additional scaling to be required any longer. What's lacking is RL datasets and environments.

If any more scaling scaling does happen, it will happen in the mid-training (using agentic/reasoning outputs from previous model versions) and RL training stages.
by hendersoon | 2025-09-24 21:02:53+00:00
So they're essentially charging $5/month for unlimited tab completions, when you get 2k for free. That seems reasonable, many could just not pay anything at all.

But in the paid plan they charge 10% over API prices for metered usage... and also support bring your own API. Why would anyone pay their +10%, just to be nice?

This is the same problem cursor and windsurf are facing. How the heck do you make money when you're competing with cline/roocode for users who are by definition technically sophisticated? What can you offer that's so wonderful that they can't?
by lucb1e | 2025-09-24 21:03:18+00:00
> the first time you're required by law to install government software on your devices

If it were only that. We could sandbox it, deny it permissions it doesn't need, or inspect what it does. All fine and dandy.

No, it's the first time a democratic government requires you to carry a 5G video recorder that you can't turn off short of smashing it to pieces if the manufacturer is ordered to make it so. But then you can't do half the things a normal person can do so you won't smash it to pieces if you don't have evidence it's currently acting as a bug.

The EU software tries to detect when you put it in a sandbox or when you merely try to inspect what it's doing. Attach a debugger and it'll refuse to verify your age to social media so you can't use that anymore. Install an open source OS on your phone and you can't so much as legally obtain your own government's software in the first place.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-24 21:03:40+00:00
> The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add.

This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.

The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.
by jfengel | 2025-09-24 21:03:47+00:00
It's not a merge sort, it's just a partition. Mark every element greater than your pivot as "move right". Then step 4 marks every smaller element as "move left". Step 5 actually does that.

You don't really need to split that into 3 steps, though it looks a bit more like a real IKEA diagram with the extra steps.
by Animats | 2025-09-24 21:04:01+00:00
Does vast amounts of lower and lower quality data help much? If you can train on the entire feeds of social media, you keep up on recent pop culture trends, but does it really make LLMs much smarter?

Recent progress on useful LLMs seems to involve slimming them down.[1] Does your customer-support LLM really need a petabyte of training data? Yes, now it can discuss everything from Kant to the latest Taylor Swift concert lineup. It probably just needs enough of that to make small talk, plus comprehensive data on your own products.

The future of business LLMs probably fits in a 1U server.

[1] https://mljourney.com/top-10-smallest-llm-to-run-locally/
by renewiltord | 2025-09-24 21:04:16+00:00
Yeah, all sorts of pointless crap. 7 years of updates, that's the iPhone X? Yeah I couldn't care less. USB-C? Don't care. I use wireless charging. If we could lose all of that in exchange for losing cookie banners I would take it in a heartbeat.

In another couple of decades the EU will be an irrelevant market as their population becomes even poorer. Then we can finally be free of their nonsense. The only risk is that the Eastern European countries become more prosperous than the Western European ones and prop up their influence.