MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stillsut | 2025-09-03 23:39:37+00:00
Got your shovelware right here...with receipts.

Background: I'm building a python package side project which allows you to encode/decode messages into LLM output.

Receipts: the tool I'm using creates a markdown that displays every prompt typed, and every solution generated, along with summaries of the code diffs. You can check it out here: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/blob/master/docs/dev-summa...

Specific example: Actually used a leet-code style algorithms implementation of memo-ization for branching. This would have taken a couple of days to implement by hand, but it took about 20 minutes to write the spec and 20 minutes to review solutions and merge the solution generated. If you're curious you can see this diff generated here: https://github.com/sutt/innocuous/commit/cdabc98
by dmurray | 2025-09-03 23:40:07+00:00
No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good.

Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.

That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
by dreadnip | 2025-09-03 23:40:20+00:00
I don’t agree. HN is full of technical people, and technical people see LLMs for what they truly are: pattern matching text machines. We just don’t buy into the AGI hype because we’ve seen nothing to support it.

I’m not concerned for my job, in fact I’d be very happy if real AGI would be achieved. It would probably be the crowning tech achievement of the human race so far. Not only would I not have to work anymore, the majority of the world wouldn’t have to. We’d suddenly be living in a completely different world.

But I don’t believe that’s where we’re headed. I don’t believe LLMs in their current state can get us there. This is exactly like the web3 hype when the blockchain was the new hip tech on the block. We invent something moderately useful, with niche applications and grifters find a way to sell it to non technical people for major profit. It’s a bubble and anyone who spends enough time in the space knows that.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-09-03 23:40:29+00:00
> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.

Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?

Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")

My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
by munificent | 2025-09-03 23:40:51+00:00
> if the musicians didn't want folks to listen on YouTube then they wouldn't put their music there.

You are giving musicians way too much agency here.

For most musicians on YouTube, they're there because their label and/or their manager wants them there. A big part of why musicians sign with labels and have managers is specifically because they don't have the inclination or expertise to micromanage this stuff.

I'm sure in many cases, musicians would rather not be on YouTube at all, but their already-signed nebulously-worded contract with the label doesn't give them any control over that.

In a world where everyone is a perfectly spherical rational actor in a libertarian vacuum, your argument would make more sense. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world filled with primates doing the best they can with the weird cognitive capabilities nature gave them and trying to get through each day with a little joy and dignity still intact.
by TuringNYC | 2025-09-03 23:41:01+00:00
How does one explain the drop starting January 2023 (esp for things like Customer Service Rep, which is an NLP-heavy task) when most corporations didnt even start LLM/NLP pilots until mid/late 2023? I skimmed thru the 100+ page paper but didnt see an explanation for this strange leading effect.

SWE figures dropped mid-2022 (almost magically in line with interest rate hikes) and LLM-copilots werent introduced for another year. The paper notes they did an adjustment for the end of ZIRP. I dont know enough econometrics to understand whether this adjustment was sufficient, but the chart doesnt make sense since the labor efforts seem to be leading the actual technology by over a year or more. From informal surveys, LLM-copilot usage didnt become widespread until late 2023 to mid 2024, certainly not widespread enough to cause macro labor effects in mid-2022.
Ask HN: Has Claude Code become slower?
by yumraj | 2025-09-03 23:41:01+00:00
I've noticed that Claude Code has become noticeably slower and sometimes gets stuck for sometime. It used to be much more responsive earlier.

Is it just me or my environment/prompts/code or have others noticed it too? Compacting has no impact as far as I can tell.

If others have noticed it, could it be Anthropic throttling or just being stressed due to scaling issues?
by immibis | 2025-09-03 23:41:12+00:00
> First of all, Bluesky the company would have to implement auth on the communication between relay and AppView, cut off everyone from using their relay, and specifically stop ingesting content from non-Bluesky PDSs

Yes, that's as simple as an IP address check, since they own all of it. Could alternatively be a password (bearer token).

> And Bluesky wouldn't likely stop existing altogether,

In fact, the change would be noticed by almost nobody, because 99.9% of users would still see 99.9% of their following (including 100% of the ones who populate the default feed) and would have to go far out of their way to see any change.

> There would be time when we realize that's happening to get another AppView up and running. There are arguably enough resources in either the ATproto dev community or other funding sources that another AppView could pop up within a week or two, and be maintained by the community for months without issue. And Bluesky wouldn't likely stop existing altogether, so people would log into Bluesky, see the news (or hear it elsewhere), and see people talking about how to get access to your account.

All irrelevant since it wouldn't have the content and people go there for the content. Views go where the content is.

> some copies of the entire network exist in the community

All irrelevant since it wouldn't have the new content posted after the block and people go there for the new content. New views go where the new content is.

> and some seriously pissed off community members who would now want to do everything they can to take up the mantle temporarily

Yes, exactly like the people who were pissed off at Twitter so they started Mastodon. Made literally no difference to Twitter. Most of those people even remained on Twitter and posted as much on Twitter as on Mastodon. Because views go where the content is. Thinking anything else is wilful delusion.

> Soon Bluesky the app, as well as Instagram and Twitter, would be flooded with tutorials of how to recover your accounts

Why recover? If you're part of the 99.9%, nothing changed for you.

> and migrate to another PDS.

I have no doubt there would be a flood of tutorials of how to make sure that only 0.1% of former Bluesky users will ever see your tweets, but nobody will follow that tutorial because they don't want to make sure that only 0.1% of former Bluesky users will ever see their tweets.

> If your point is that we'd lose at least half of the users of Bluesky

0.1% would be lost.

> But ATproto would be just fine

but completely useless, since its main use case is getting Bluesky feeds and that would be switched off

> and if people want to get their data back they likely can

This is nobody's goal. People log into Bluesky to see tweets from the people and topics they follow, not to "get their data".
by jeffbee | 2025-09-03 23:41:19+00:00
LaserDisc was a seriously impressive technology, or at least it impressed me as a kid. My school had the (vanishingly rare) Apple Visual Almanac and some other educational LD titles that controlled the player from HyperCard. You could use a LaserActive with the Computer Interface PAC for this purpose, or you could use several other devices because there was an industry-standard serial command protocol. The Visual Almanac came with a book, floppies, a CD-ROM disc, and the LD discs, all of which were required, so it was probably the pinnacle of "multimedia" taken literally.
by Ray20 | 2025-09-03 23:41:52+00:00
>free speech for example, though this is now failing

I don't quite understand what you mean.

The great advantage of the American constitution in terms of freedom of speech is that it sets a relatively clear boundary. And it is obvious that in this regard the constitution copes with its task perfectly: freedom of speech in the USA is currently protected better than in any other country.

It is so well protected that Americans were able to elect Trump as their leader, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of the mainstream media openly opposed him, and the government tried to shut the mouths of all his supporters under the guise of fighting dis- and misinformation (regardless of how we feel about his personality and presidency).

So if we look at the freedom of speech in the current US on a historical scale, we see exactly the opposite of what you saying: we see how freedom of speech in the US has once again stood firm despite the strongest opposition.

> Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics

You describe it as if it is something ordinary, not something catastrophic. Just to understand, if the government gets enough power to deprive capital of ability to influence politics - we get Nazi Germany or Russia. In the best case. At worst - the USSR, North Korea or Kampuchea
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-03 23:42:04+00:00
Interesting how the comments heading this thread ignore the effect of VPNs on surveillance and data collection for the benefit of online advertising, i.e., the stuff that so-called "tech" companies rely on as a "business model"

Must be that these so-called "tech" companies have no problem figuring out who is the ad target behind each VPN IP address, fingerprinting them and tracking their online behaviour acrosss every computer they use

TIL VPNs actually have _no impact_ on the data collection and ad services "business model"
by scotty79 | 2025-09-03 23:42:05+00:00
Simple, you just need to turn language into a game.

You make models talk to each other, create puzzles for each other's to solve, ask each other to make cases and evaluate how well they were made.

Will some of it look like ramblings of pre-scientific philosophers? (or modern ones because philosophy never progressed after science left it in the dust)

Sure! But human culture was once there too. And we pulled ourselves out of this nonsense by the bootstraps. We didn't need to be exposed to 3 alien internet's with higher truth.

It's really a miracle that AIs got as much as they did from purely human generated mostly garbage we cared to write down.
by skissane | 2025-09-03 23:42:16+00:00
> but none of the LLMs (open source or not) are capable of backtracking even though there is plenty of room for a basic Prolog interpreter. This seems like a very obvious shortcoming to me that no amount of smooth approximation can overcome.

The fundamental autoregressive architecture is absolutely capable of backtracking… we generate next token probabilities, select a next token, then calculate probabilities for the token thereafter.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from “rewinding” to an earlier token, making a different selection and replaying from that point. The basic architecture absolutely supports it.

Why then has nobody implemented it? Maybe, this kind of backtracking isn’t really that useful.
Ask HN: What does a happy life look like to you?
by liminal-dev | 2025-09-03 23:42:30+00:00
I’ve been a bit existential lately wondering what life’s about. Worked tech/startup jobs but only found them fulfilling when I had stake.

Last 2.5 years I’ve been building something of my own to become financially independent and focus on art. Still building that life.

So what gets you out of bed each morning?
by jackhuman | 2025-09-03 23:42:57+00:00
Zed has really good vim bindings + mix of native shortcuts making a powerful workflow. The window management keyboard shortcuts are great and is the main reason I switched from some vscode use. Its kind of what I wanted neovim + tmux to be with less work and setup.

Zed doesn’t have file delete undo and I found the AI autocomplete to be so bad I had to turn it off. I still use vscode for work. Zed is kind of in a purgatory state where its lacking in way to be a main for many folks but its close. Just the AI focus is sadly the best way for it to keep investments going, but are really not the top things I think Zed needs.
by davmre | 2025-09-03 23:43:44+00:00
Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc.

The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-03 23:43:51+00:00
The article is one person recording their own use of AI, finding no statistical significance but claiming since that the evaluated ratio of AI:human speed in performing various coding tasks resembled the METR study, that AI has no value. People have already talked about issues with the METR study, but importantly with that study and this blog post, it querying a small number of people using AI tools for the first time, working in a code base they already have experience and deep understanding of.

Their claim following that is that because there hasn't been an exponential growth in App store releases, domain name registrations or Steam games, that, beyond just AI producing shoddy code, AI has led to no increase in the amount of software at all, or none that could be called remarkable or even notable in proportion to the claims made by those at AI companies.

I think this ignores the obvious signs of growth in AI companies which providing software engineering and adjacent services via AI. These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product.

These trends include

1. The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. 2. The massive growth in revenue of companies that use AI including Cursor, replit, loveable etc 3. The massive valuation of these companies

Anecdotally, with AI I can make shovelware apps very easily, spin them up effortlessly and fix issues I don't have the expertise or time to do myself. I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps with capabilities avaliable today when it's clear that many many people can, have done so, have documented doing so, have made money selling those apps, etc.
by skydhash | 2025-09-03 23:44:10+00:00
I've always gone from entry point of the code (with a lot of assumptions) and then do a deep dive of one of the module or branches. After a while you develop an intuition where code may be (or follow the import/include statement).

I've explored code like FreeBSD, Busybox, Laravel, Gnome, Blender,... and it's quite easy to find you way around.
by protocolture | 2025-09-03 23:44:40+00:00
The direct reference was Bill Gates being forced to testify about internet explorer. Its hard to argue with that particular case. There are very few people who argue that the results of that intervention were unwarranted.

I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
by cyanydeez | 2025-09-03 23:45:14+00:00
People who are afraid of the "left authoritarians" seem to think that you can just sum up human history and cherry pick some great "left-branded" authoritarian and equate that to todays.

You're arguing that the people kidnapping people without due process and zero consequences, masked police, are equal to some arbitrary "leftist" in some time that's not relevant to todays political climate.

It truly is bizarre how mental gymnasts survive in this logical incapacity.
Show HN: Convert 1-hour videos into brainstorm-ready mind maps
by xnslx | 2025-09-03 23:46:07+00:00
Hello community,

I recently launched a tool that converts YouTube videos into mind maps.

You can try it out instantly (no signup required, copy & paste url), or sign up to unlock more features like:

–Downloading your mind maps –Saving them to your account –Browsing by pill tags for quick organization

It’s especially handy for brainstorming, SEO keyword extraction, and content summarization.

Would love to hear your feedback!
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-03 23:46:15+00:00
I agree that if there are productivity gains that everyone should benefit, but the only thing that would allow this to happen are systems and incentive structures that allow that to happen. A manager's job is to increase revenue and cut costs, that's how they get their job, how they keep their job, and how they are promoted. People very rarely get free benefits outside the range of what the incentive structures they exist in allow them to.
by diss | 2025-09-03 23:46:22+00:00
This is simply not true… that’s the problem. As much as I like Zed, using it for the sake of not being an electron app doesn’t make any sense when Cursor’s edit prediction adds so much value. I’m not starved of resources and can run Cursor just fine – as far as Electron apps go VS Code is great, performant enough. I value productivity. I’ll very happily drop Cursor for Zed the second edit prediction is comparable. I’m eagerly waiting.
by falcor84 | 2025-09-03 23:46:30+00:00
That's a fantastic piece of short fiction, but it is fiction. In practice though, I've seen so many copy&pasted unsourced open source snippets in proprietary code that I've lost all ability to be surprised by it, and I can't think of any one time where the company was sued about that, let alone anyone facing any personal repercussions, not even those junior devs. And if anything, by being "lossy encyclopedias" rather than copy-pasters, LLMs significantly reduce this ostensible legal liability.

Oh, and then you have the actual tech giants offering legal commitment to protect you against any copyright claims:

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p...
by const_cast | 2025-09-03 23:46:38+00:00
It wasn't ever different when I ran windows on my personal computers, although granted that was back in 8.1. 8.1 was just bad for a variety of reasons, but it definitely still had the rot problem.

The latest in my saga of Windows being annoying is applications just randomly killing themselves when I'm not looking. I don't reboot my work computer because I have far too much precious stuff open.

But, every other day or so, an application or two will mysteriously disappear from my taskbar. Silently. I never catch it, then I get the "hey did you see this email??"

Why no, no I did not. Outlook committed suicide at some point and I'm not pocket watching the windows taskbar. My mistake.

For a while I thought I just hallucinated me closing the application, but I don't close applications, like, ever.

To put into perspective, my work has a policy which forcefully reboots windows once every 14 days. It helps, but not much, because by day 2-3 it's already breaking down. My Debian machine has an uptime of a few hundred days. I legitimately still have applications open from last year.

Maybe I use my computer like a psychopath, or maybe my expectations are too high, but I don't consider windows to take care of itself. Its the most babying-an-OS I ever have to do. iOS and Android are much better as well.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-09-03 23:47:16+00:00
The scaling laws for transformers _deliberately_ factor in the amount of data as well as the amount of compute needed in order to scale.

The premise of this article, that data is more important than compute has been obvious to people who are paying attention.

Sorry but the unnecessary sensationalism in this article was mildly annoying to me. Like the author discovered some novel new insight. A bit like that doctor who published a "no el" paper about how to find the area under a curve.
by dumbledoren | 2025-09-03 23:47:43+00:00
Google became a monopoly in search, advertising and various other things. It uses all of those to extract money from everyone, especially the advertisers with absolutely no accountability. All the large and small businesses have to jack up prices to make up for the money that Google extracts from them through those monopolies, and then reflect that expense on the consumer. Just go to reddits like r/ppc or r/googleads. Google became a company that single handedly amplifies inflation during its endless extraction of profit.
by Ukv | 2025-09-03 23:47:51+00:00
> My point is that your initial argument was missing several key pieces

My initial example was a response to "If you think it is possible then I'd like to see an implementation of a sudoku puzzle solver as Markov chain", describing how a Sudoku solver could be implemented as a Markov chain. I don't think there's anything missing from it - it solves all proper Sudokus, and I only left open the choice of how to handle improper Sudokus because that was unspecified (but trivial regardless of what's wanted).

> I'm not saying it can't be done but that it's actually much more complicated

If that's the case, then I did misinterpret your comments as saying it can't be done. But, I don't think it's really complicated regardless of whatever "ok but now it must encode choice points in its state" are thrown at it - it's just a state-to-state transition look-up table.

> so compiling a sudoku solver to a Markov chain requires more than just tracking the board state in the context.

As noted, you can keep all the same variables as a regular Sudoku solver as part of the Markov chain's state and transition instruction-by-instruction, if that's what you want.

If you mean inputs from a user, the same is true of LLMs which are typically ran interactively. Either model the whole universe including the user as part of state transition table (maybe impossible, depending on your beliefs about the universe), or have user interaction take the current state, modify it, and use it as initial state for a new run of the Markov chain.
by Aeglaecia | 2025-09-03 23:48:08+00:00
this is presenting a question as an imperative, a known hypnotism/manipulation technique. in other words google is taking an optional choice and masking it in a commanding voice - unless your brain is actively and consciously questioning the input it is recieving , it is liable to process the command without question , and unthinkingly answer 'yes'. almost like an SQL injection, in that data can be interpreted as logic. this makes my stomach turn.