MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glenstein | 2025-09-05 17:18:48+00:00
I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but I think this phrasing can be abused by burn-it-all-down skeptics, and I would prefer to say the notion of forward iteration depends on there being some such real thing as truth. The "relativity of wrong" essay by Isaac Asimov, recently upvoted on HN, captures the idea pretty well imo.
Ask HN: Why hasn't Google monetized ReCAPTCHA with ads?
by ATechGuy | 2025-09-05 17:19:05+00:00
ReCAPTCHA is used on millions of websites to verify human users. Given the massive scale and visibility of these widgets, it looks like a potential goldmine for impressions. Yet, Google has never added ads to it.

Considering their focus on ad revenue, this seems like a missed opportunity, or maybe a deliberate decision.

Was it an ethical choice, a UX concern, or a legal limitation? Or is it that the data collected through ReCAPTCHA is already more valuable than showing ads?

Curious to hear your thoughts.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-05 17:19:06+00:00
ICE has also made a number of claims about "illegals" detained in California...who were actually U.S. citizens by birth.

When confronted with this, they then attempted to claim that those citizens actually attacked ICE agents.

When confronted with video evidence to the contrary, they attempted to pursue charges, and have failed in almost all cases.

ICE and ATF claims aren't worth the air they use up to say.
by sswanson | 2025-09-05 17:19:17+00:00
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by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-09-05 17:19:17+00:00
Strange the Soviets would fetishize a strategy they defeated in WWII.

It actually fails in all scenarios. If the West perceived the Soviets as rational— which they did— they would not at all expect the Russians to trigger MAD. In an acute conflict there is no stopping point, both will continue to escalate expecting the other to back down. This happened repeatedly in the “non-stop wars” you reference resulting in conventional proxy conflict, not more, partly because the Soviets did act rationally and not according to your strategy . Conversely, if the Soviets convinced the West they truly were committed to mutual annihilation lest the West surrender incrementally, or worse, convinced the West the Soviets could not be prudent stewards of such weapons by willie-nillie glazing this city or that, this would have also triggered an unconstrained response and unlimited escalation spiral.

Had the Soviets really gambled and gone all-in with your hyper-rational, inhuman bluff, it’s most likely that we would not be here to have this discussion.
A/B testing and LLM personalization on Cloudflare Workers using Visual Editor
by puzanov | 2025-09-05 17:19:35+00:00
I wanted to find out this: How many people use workers for A/B testing and personalization on their CloudFlare sites? Is there a need for a visual editor where you could create experiments that would then be applied to the website through workers?

We're actually creating such a tool for the Cloudflare community and want to understand how much demand there is for it. Essentially, server-side experiments offer a lot of benefits, and it seemed like Worker technology solves this perfectly.
by BoorishBears | 2025-09-05 17:19:39+00:00
I worked at a company that had their own homegrown Protobuf alternative which would add friction to life constantly. Especially if you had the audacity to build anything that wasn't meant to live in the company monorepo (your Python script is now a Docker image that takes 30 minutes to build).

One day I got annoyed enough to dig for the original proposal and like 99.9% of initiatives like this, it was predicated on:

- building a list of existing solutions

- building an overly exhaustive list, of every facet of the problem to be solved

- declare that no existing solution hits every point on your inflated list

- "we must build it ourselves."

It's such a tired playbook, but it works so often unfortunately.

The person who architects and sells it gets points for "impact", then eventually moves onto the next company.

In the meantime the problem being solved evolves and grows (as products and businesses tend to), the homegrown solution no longer solves anything perfectly, and everyone is still stuck dragging along said solution, seemingly forever.

-

Usually eventually someone will get tired enough of the homegrown solution and rightfully question why they're dragging it along, and if you're lucky it gets replaced with something sane.

If you're unlucky that person also uses it as justification to build a new in-house solution (we're built the old one after all), and you replay the loop.

In the case of serialization though, that's not always doable. This company was storing petabytes (if not exabytes) of data in the format for example.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-05 17:19:46+00:00
And your company now won't progress. Won't have insight. Sure you can keep on keeping on, but that is all. You also farm out expertise instead of building it.

AI is an entropy machine for everything it touches. Companies that runs off of AI is a zombie company. Without people to understand an industry, what does your company ad? Without people to see new revenue streams, new directions, and most importantly NEW RISKS to your business model, you are a dead zombie company living off what the previous living, growing company built. But does that matter to owners when they get $500,000 more a year in their pockets?
by shawndrost | 2025-09-05 17:20:14+00:00
I think of you as a direct person, so it's strange to hear you dismiss "stablecoins are regulatory arbitrage" as misguided or incurious. Maybe I am wrong about something.

Would you agree that "actual regulatory evasion" has been a top-three use case across the history of stablecoins? (That is: hackers, money launderers, sanctioned entities, and crypto exchanges do things with stablecoins expressly because doing them with dollars in banks would be illegal in an enforceable way.)

And, would you agree that GENIUS is a formalization of the low-regulation status quo of stablecoins? (That is: the bank system does KYC, AML, and reporting on both sides of every transaction; the stablecoin system generally only does that for onramps and offramps.)

This is not to say "regulatory arbitrage" is the only thing going on with stablecoins. Existing payment rails are imperfect and rent-seeking for reasons that don't have to do with the above. I'm just surprised you're describing the arb as such a non-issue.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-05 17:20:26+00:00
>a Tums, etc

not all antacids are the same, so I reach for your "etc" instead of the Tum. the liquid antacids that contain an aluminum compound active ingredient (in the US, Mylanta and Maalox and buy the store brand anyway, always liquid tho) provide a pH buffer, which is to say they "calibrate" their effect to the scale of the problem at the moment and the effect lasts longer than simply neutralizing acid with a base. I find this is the superior middle way.

PPIs? I really liked zantac's "ranitidine" ingredient which got banned for some infinitesimal risk of cancer. great product. I do not like the way these others leave my tummy feeling (or... is that the cancer? :)

>Why do they link it to stress and not to the virus?

how about, risks from the vaccines were ignored as possible confounding factors and presto, a mystery condition emerges which can only be attributed to the time period
by schiem | 2025-09-05 17:20:54+00:00
People who heavily utilize any of those _do_ have the associated skills atrophied. It's just that in all of the listed cases, the actual associated skill may not have actually been important.

The younger people at my job have atrocious spelling.

My ability to do mental math is much worse than it was when I was regularly doing math without a calculator.

People who have exclusively learned digital art do not have the muscle memory built up to seamlessly transition to analog art.

Almost everyone I know has awful handwriting.

So the question then is "What is the actual skill that AI tools are replacing?" And if the answer is "thinking," then that should be terrifying.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-09-05 17:20:59+00:00
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. It occurred to me last week that the mini desktops I list might be better and cheaper than a Raspberry Pi in a lot of situations.

https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling/Mini-Desktops/_i....
by flail | 2025-09-05 17:21:06+00:00
That's just another great vantage point to consider when looking at product development.

Accompanying many early-stage startups in their journey, I see how often the development (which we're responsible for) takes a back seat. Sometimes the pivotal role will be customer support, sometimes it will be business development, and often product management will drive the whole thing.

And there's one more follow-up thought to this observation. Products that achieved success, inevitably, get into a spiral of getting more features. That, in turn, makes them more clunky and less usable, and ultimately opens a way for new players who disrupt the niche.

At some point, adding more features in general makes things worse--too complicated, too overwhelming, making it harder to accomplish the core task. And yet, adding new stuff never ceases.

In the long run, the best tactic may actually be to go slower (and stop at some point), but focus on the meaningful changes.
by uhura | 2025-09-05 17:21:17+00:00
This kind of stance cannot be made without properly setting the context for the software. It is very clear that different software backgrounds have different needs a different development strategies that are more efficient.

LLMs are a tool that added a new dimension to explore. While I haven't like many felt actual gains, others are finding, and time will allow us to better judge if those can lead to long term impacts in the economy.

Just based on what I've been reading and experiencing: - Short term POCs can reach validation stage faster. - Mature cloud software needs a lot of extra tooling (LLMs don't understand the codebase, lack of places to derive good context from, and so on). - Anything in between for cloud seems to be a hit or miss, where people are mostly trading first iteration time for more refactoring later down the line.

From another perspective, areas of software where things are a lot more about numbers (cpu time, memory consumption, and so on), may benefit a lot from faster development/coding as the validation phase is either shorter or can be executed in parallel.

The key reality here is that I've been observing higher expectations for deliveries without a proof that we actually got better at coding in general. Which means that sacrifices are being made somewhere.
by haberman | 2025-09-05 17:21:21+00:00
I advocated for PrefixVarint (which seems equivalent to vint64 ) for WebAssembly, but it was decided against, in favor of LEB128: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/601

The recent CREL format for ELF also uses the more established LEB128: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41222021

At this point I don't feel like I have a clear opinion about whether PrefixVarint is worth it, compared with LEB128.
by ciconia | 2025-09-05 17:21:42+00:00
> total revenue: $4B > compute for training models: -$3B > compute for running models: -$2B > employee salaries: -$700M

Though not really representative of what users of said models may experience financially, at this point the question should be raised: if AI compute is 7x more expensive than developer salaries, what's the point? I thought the whole idea was to save money on human resources...
by chrismorgan | 2025-09-05 17:22:16+00:00
I used to go for 250ms, now I go for 200ms. I find that about the sweet spot for UI transitions where it helps you to understand what’s changing and how and why. And if it doesn’t meet those criteria, don’t transition it.

200ms is also nice and short to write in CSS, .2s. I contemplated shorter, but I found that by 150ms a transition can start to feel like it’s a mistake, a brief rendering glitch, especially if the first few frames of the animation are dropped, as can be common (.2s is already down to only ~10 intermediate frames). It’s too short to get the benefits of an animating transition, but too long to be or look or feel instant.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-05 17:22:17+00:00
> Regardless, this is going to cost Hyundai a lot of time and money, which will disincentivize them from hiring illegal workers again.

Assuming they did hire illegal workers, which hasn’t been remotely proven - are you sure that’s the incentive? Or is it more like “don’t do business in the US, it’s chaos” or more likely the intended effect: “make sure you pay off MAGA before you start construction”
by addaon | 2025-09-05 17:22:32+00:00
I can see either side of it, but in my mind animation (in this context) means the generation and timed display of synthetic tween states to smooth the transition between the display of actual states. The mouse-down case is (in this context) an immediate change from the up- to down- states, without additional frames in between, so is not an animation by this particular domain-specific definition.
by DamonHD | 2025-09-05 17:22:33+00:00
Almost definitionally most of the ads would be shown to visitors thought to be bots, which might not impress advertisers, even if G was careful to only count those that passed the CAPTCHAs (though the LLM bots can too, it seems).

There is also the reputation risk that advertisers and their brands might become associated with the stress points of having to do a CAPTCHA or being denied access etc.

Just two off the top of my head.
by grep_name | 2025-09-05 17:23:42+00:00
I use orbstack, but I never look at it, it just opens when I start up the computer. I used to use docker desktop, which I never looked at either. The docker daemon has always just been broken on Mac for as long as I've been trying to work with it (about 4 years, at least as far as Mac environments).

Idk what the problem is, but it's ugly. I switched to orbstack because there was something like a memory leak happening with docker desktop, just using waaaaay too many resources all the time, sometimes it would just crash. I just started using docker desktop from the get-go because when I came on I had multiple people with more experience say 'oh, you're coming from linux? Don't even try to use the docker daemon, just download docker desktop'.
by mothballed | 2025-09-05 17:24:20+00:00
>What did you actually end up avoiding that would cost so much?

(yes means yes it was avoided)

Architect/plans/structure permitting? yes yes partially yes (rubber stamp permit)

Minimum space/setbacks? avoided square foot requirements, but there were required setbacks that were legally meaningless since they were smaller than the road easements.

Grid hookups ? yes

Merely skipping inspections, or did you skimp on actual code compliance? skipped inspections and code compliance was not checked.

AZ, area with lots of stable jobs
by mgkimsal | 2025-09-05 17:24:22+00:00
That assumes that you can, in fact, install that software in the first place. "Developers" sometimes get a bit of a pass, but I've been inside more than a few companies where... no one could install anything at all, regardless of whether there was a cost. Requesting some software would usually get someone with too much time on their hands (who would also complain about being overworked) asking what you need, why you need it, why you didn't try something else, do you really need it, etc. In some scenarios the 'free' works against, because "there's no support". I was seeing this as late as 2019 at a company - it felt like being back in 1997.
by chrislattner | 2025-09-05 17:24:28+00:00
Thank you for all the great interest in the podcast and in Mojo. If you're interested in learning more, Mojo has a FAQ that covers many topics (including "why not make Julia better" :-) here: https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq/

Mojo also has a bunch of documentation https://docs.modular.com/mojo/ as well as hundreds of thousands of lines of open source code you can check out: https://github.com/modular/modular

The Mojo community is really great, please consider joining, either our discourse forum: https://forum.modular.com/ or discord https://discord.com/invite/modular chat.

-Chris Lattner
by lotyrin | 2025-09-05 17:24:34+00:00
Well... yeah? If you exist in as an individual or part of a group which is integrated (shared trust, goals, knowledge etc.) then yeah, obviously you do not have the problem (tragedy of the commons) that splitting things up (including into containers, but literally any kind of boundary) solves for.

The container split is often introduced because you have product-a, product-b and infrastructure operations teams/individuals that all share responsibility for an OS user space (and therefore none are accountable for it). You instead structure things as: a host OS and container platform for which infra is responsible, and then product-a container(s) and product-b container(s) for which those teams are responsible.

These boundaries are placed (between networks, machines, hosts and guests, namespaces, users, processes, modules, etc. when needed due to trust or useful due to knowledge sharing and goal alignment.

When they are present in single-user or small highly-integrated team environments, it's because they've been cargo-culted there, yes, but I've seen an equal number of environments where effective and correct boundaries were missing as I've seen ones where they were superfluous.
by OfflineSergio | 2025-09-05 17:24:41+00:00
- Do I relaly get "Unlimited documents" for $14.99? Or there is a an actual limit preventing me from converting, like 10 Million characters?

- Why should one use this and not Speehify?

Also, I just uploaded a PDF and its reading the footers of each page as well. I prefer to upload text so I can edit it myself.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-05 17:24:50+00:00
And when you are out sick, can AI do his role? When you are on vacation, can AI do his role? When you leave, can AI at least help define/interview your replacement, like he could have, even if he's too junior to step into the role?

There is so much else that people do. So many details that are just being ignored because of short term 'gains' that justify ignoring so many details.
by khazhoux | 2025-09-05 17:25:09+00:00
On the other hand, there’s tons of people here on HN who will claim that there’s zero connection between lines of code written and developer productivity. Obviously, deleting bad/unused code is good. And obviously, some tricky bugs are fixed in one line. But you can’t build something new without some (usually, very many) lines of code.

No code -> no software.
by x0x0 | 2025-09-05 17:25:23+00:00
I'd call it realpolitik. The eu doesn't write its own software. This is the downside case of that.

I personally would be open to trying to change that, but I keep looking at the EU and they don't want to. Many countries are actively hostile to entrepreneurs and eg can charge taxes/fees/exit fees on unrealized cap gains. etc.
by boilerupnc | 2025-09-05 17:25:27+00:00
Related: The book "The Victorian Internet" [0] by Tom Standage was very interesting. I never realized how many social things that were impacted by the broad use of the telegraph would have future analogs during the dotcom age. Highly recommend!

"For centuries people communicated across distances only as quickly as the fastest ship or horse could travel. Generations of innovators tried and failed to develop speedier messaging devices. But in the mid-1800s, a few extraordinary pioneers at last succeeded. Their invention--the electric telegraph--shrank the world more quickly than ever before.A colorful tale of scientific discovery and technological cunning, The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. By 1865 telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The telegraph gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. And attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be completely rethought.The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Its saga offers many parallels to that of the Internet in our own time--and is a fascinating episode in the history of technology."

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28949978
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-09-05 17:25:31+00:00
This is all already happening, that's why we know about it. But there's also nuance. Was piracy Meta corporate strategy, as implied ad nauseam on here, or was it some guy taking a shortcut?

Is it actually bad that Meta trained their AI on books? No, court already decided that it's substantially transformative and doesn't harm the publishers. Should Meta employees have stolen the books? No, obviously not. The middle men need their cut.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-09-05 17:25:48+00:00
I'm not making any claims as to whether AI will become profitable or when, but if there's a new tech that has high potential or is highly desirable, I think it's expected that initially money will be lost.

Simply because strategically if there's high long term potential, it initially makes sense to put more money in than you get out of.

Not saying that AI is this, but if you determined that you have a golden goose that laid out 10 trillion USD worth of eggs when it got 10 years old, how much would you pay for it in the auction, and what would you have to show for it for the initial 9 years?

Now what if the golden goose scaled to 10 trillion each year linearly? First years people sound of mind would overpay for what it makes.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-09-05 17:25:48+00:00
They dislike each other but my understanding is that, at least in the EU, they view each other as stable and trustworthy. No jokes about invasions, no deporting (or worse, imprisoning) legal immigrants, in general no caprice. Meanwhile the US simply cannot be counted on to be the historically stable and trustworthy partner that had defined us over the past 75-odd years.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-05 17:26:01+00:00
The liars can say whatever they want, but if you want to counter them you have to be very specific. You’ve just constructed a trap that encourages lies.

In less than 24 hours ATF atlanta is confidant all 450 people arrested were working illegally? Not likely possible, so they just lied.

But if you want to refute that you have to have a specific number. So your options are go slow, take a week to validate the legal status of all 450 people, or lie also.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-09-05 17:26:22+00:00
It is actually even worse than this! Owners intentionally hire undocumented workers knowing they'll be able to exploit them because they can't call enforcement for safety or labor violations because of the risk they put them in. Being able to use ICE to resolve any brewing labor disputes or unionization efforts is a sweet perk too.

And they love this shit btw. It's not just cold opportunistic use of the incentives and systems they find. They love the unjust power it gives them in their personal domains and over the people around them. It's why they so reliably support trump in the end. They want serfs and he wants them to have serfs.