MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by filoleg | 2025-09-03 15:00:48+00:00
Cannot speak for the rest, but the whole “Amazon didn’t turn a profit for years” (as an argument about their profitability now coming solely through quasi-monololy routes) is incredibly misleading and bordering on disingenuous.

Since before AWS was even a thing, Amazon was already turning up great revenue and could’ve easily just stopped expanding and investing into the company growth, and they would be profitable easily. Instead, Amazon decided to reinvest all their potential profits into growth/expansion (with the favorable tax treatment on top) at the expense of keeping the cash profits. At any given point, Amazon could’ve stopped reinvesting all potential profits into their growth, and they would be instantly profitable.

This is not the same as Uber, which ran their core service operations at a net loss (and was only cheap due to their investors eating the difference and hoping that Uber will eventually figure out how to not lose money on operating their core service).
by rafterydj | 2025-09-03 15:00:55+00:00
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or misunderstanding you. Shouldn't it matter that they are using 70mb of RAM more or less totally wastefully? Maybe not a deal breaker for Brave, sure, but waste is waste.

I understand the world is about compromises, but all the gains of essentially every computer program ever could be summed up by accumulation of small optimizations. Likewise, the accumulation of small wastes kills legacy projects more than anything else.
by automatic6131 | 2025-09-03 15:01:05+00:00
>- LLMs utility is high enough that it is now going to be a standard tool in the toolbox of every software engineer, but it is definitely not replacing anyone at current capability.

Right! Problem, billions of dollars have been poured into this wrt to infrastructure, datacenters, compute and salaries. LLMs need to be at the level of replacing vast swathes of us to be worth it. LLMs are not going to be doing that.

This is a collosal malinvestment.
by cj | 2025-09-03 15:01:34+00:00
I can't link since it's in an enterprise account.

Interestingly I tried the same question in a separate ChatGPT account and it gave a similar response you got. Maybe it was pulling context from the (separate) chat thread where it was talking about Zealandia. Which raises another question: once it gets something wrong once, will it just keep reenforcing the inaccuracy in future chats? That could lead to some very suboptimal behavior.

Getting back on topic, I strongly dislike the argument that this is all "user error". These models are on track to be worth a trillion dollars at some point in the future. Let's raise our expectations of them. Fix the models, not the users.
by balamatom | 2025-09-03 15:01:58+00:00
Hahaha. What post. Forgot to add (!): that I have finally transcended the agony of the frontend space, does not mean a facet of my spirit does not perpetually lurk on that threshold in half-mockery, half-still-agony. (After all, cognitive science is yet to make a pronouncement as to whether it is possible to forget TypeScript.)

Do you want to be a spirit haunting the threshold in half-agony, half-but-also-mockery? It's accomplished by the "Figuring Out How NPM Packaging Actually Works So You Can Write Proper Isomorphic Business Logic" ritual, a fell rite from the forbidden "Uncomfortable Truths About The Presentation Layer" grimoire, and one that a lot of them would be better off with you not knowing, and now you do ;-)
by cl3misch | 2025-09-03 15:02:03+00:00
I read the blog post. Then I thought "surely the eels in my local southern German lakes can't be from the sea". But sure enough, the European eel hatches close to the Bahamas.

I audibly wtf'ed multiple times while going down this rabbit hole. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_eel
by forgetfreeman | 2025-09-03 15:02:05+00:00
Your belief that comprehension of consequences isn't part of the definition of "adult" suggests you are young and presents a stark commentary. Past generations considered this character the bedrock that adult behavior rested upon. Additionally, casually tossing out the term "mammal", as though human behavior lends itself to comparison with the activities of groundhogs (etc) seems like a bit of a non sequitur.
by _heimdall | 2025-09-03 15:02:19+00:00
It seems more malicious or intentional than only trying to gate keep. More often then not when I dig deeper into a news article referencing a scientific paper or study, the details they pull out are very much out of context and don't tell the same story as the research.

I have to assume the journalist writing such an article knows that they are misrepresenting the research to make a broader point they want to make.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-03 15:02:33+00:00
What seems bizarre though is that the language problem was fully solved first (where fully solved means AI can learn it through pure observation with no human intervention at all).

As in language today is learnt by basically throwing raw data at an LLM. Board games such as chess still require a human to manually build a world model for the state space search to work on. They are indeed totally different problems but it's still shocking to me which one was fully solved first.
by mercenario | 2025-09-03 15:02:34+00:00
I dont agree.

> This may be stored as a boolean column, is_confirmed, in the database. It makes a lot of sense. But, you're throwing away data: when the confirmation happened. You can instead store when the user confirmed their email in a nullable column.

When I'm looking at a database schema and I see a boolean is_confirmed I can be 99% sure what it means. Now if I see a datetime confirmed column, can I be sure that if I want to know if it was confirmed this will not be null? I'm definitely not 99% sure anymore and I would be scared of making this assumption in my code. Obviously I would still think I can use, but going from 99% sure to 80% sure is a recipe to making brittle code.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-03 15:02:39+00:00
> This scapegoat's death unites the community again. The victim gets mythologized, inscribed into sacrificial rites that control future rivalries. When these sacrificial mechanisms weaken, rivalry intensifies.

People like Thiel, Musk or Trump certainly became sacrificial lambs. You don't have to like either of them or any of the ideas they propose. But I think the "criticism" of them certainly looks like they might be onto something.

I don't personally believe it is correct in generael, but there certainly is a subset that needs this religious hate. There is little self-reflection, only that they often tend to diagnose this hate in others.
by theptip | 2025-09-03 15:03:03+00:00
Just beware the “real programmers hand-write assembly” fallacy. It was said that compilers would produce a generation of programmers unable to understand the workings of their programs. In some sense, this is true! But, almost nobody thinks it really matters for the actual project of building things.

If you stop thinking, then of course you will learn less.

If instead you think about the next level of abstraction up, then perhaps the details don’t always matter.

The whole problem with college is that there is no “next level up”, it’s a hand-curated sequence of ideas that have been demonstrated to induce some knowledge transfer. It’s not the same as starting a company and trying to build something, where freeing up your time will let you tackle bigger problems.

And of course this might not work for all PhDs; maybe learning the details is what matters in some fields - though with how specialized we’ve become, I could easily see this being a net win.
by zahlman | 2025-09-03 15:04:11+00:00
> The Context Dependency Injection stuff was so great, allowed creating things on demand and in different scopes of demands so easily.

OP is currently working in Python, so that seems to me like a wild justification to go back to Java.

Elsewhere ITT someone is praising Java for having the ability to keep large codebases organized and comprehensible. But my experience of Java was that the overall boilerplate, focus on classes, manifest typing, functions not being first-class objects, etc. make the codebase large. Then it gets ballooned even further with systems designed to introduce dynamism into a fundamentally static language.

As I've pointed out in other threads before, "dependency injection" in a dynamic language is approximately a fancy term for "passing an argument to a function". Oh, but it already looks for a global and you don't want to rewrite it for some reason (even though your compilation step is trivial)? That can be addressed with a pretty small decorator. It seems like a lot of why these frameworks exist in Java is so you can reuse implementations of "design patterns" that fix problems Python doesn't have in the first place. By the way (since I just checked it out of curiousity), the code for the Spring framework is comparable in length to the entire Python standard library, including tests.
Show HN: Easy Adhoc Sandboxing on NixOS
by rttti | 2025-09-03 15:04:37+00:00
As a developer I often need to run code I cannot trust, especially dependencies from NodeJS and Python projects, on my dev machine. In order to protect my system from potentially malicious code, I built NixWrap, an adhoc sandboxing tool for NixOS.

NixWrap wraps bubblewrap (oh dear), running it with convenient defaults and offering easy to use command line flags to toggle custom options. An invocation to NixWrap is typically way shorter than the bubblewrap equivalent.

E.g. `npm install` can be wrapped with `wrap -n npm install` to gain network access and write access to the current working directory.
by florbnit | 2025-09-03 15:04:51+00:00
Yes, and we should factor in a $ amount per child you’ve had, also subtract a $ amount per time you yell at said child. Also how much should a compliment given to a stranger be worth? Should the value be different if it’s in sincere?

The important point is that it’s the net sum at the end that qualifies if you are a good person! If you help out 1000 people and have 12 kids, but also you contribute to a racially motivated genocide, you’re still a good person as long as the net $ sum at the end is positive. /s

Absolutely everything about the idea seems wrong. Both the idea that it’s all about accounting and the idea that you can ascribe a definite value to actions that should sum to some moral statement.
by rob_c | 2025-09-03 15:04:52+00:00
Yep, they cooperate to a point and then decide that they're doing their own thing anyway. This isn't new.

When they were small nobody cared about firewire (even if it was better). Then they did it with lightning to keep hold of their devices again. Then there is the whole not supporting USB 3.X but 3.0 and 4 for "reasons". Now they also don't care about software and web standards, same company, same problems. They clearly see "standards" as "competition" at a corporate/management level.
by lynx97 | 2025-09-03 15:04:53+00:00
I cobbled together llm-tts to run as many local (and remote) TTs models s I could find and get working.

https://github.com/mlang/llm-tts

Strictly speaking, even music generation fits the usage pattern: text in, audio out.

llm-tts is far from complete, but it makes it relatively "easy" to try a few models in an uniform way.
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-09-03 15:05:13+00:00
Madrid has heat waves like Toronto has never seen, Oulu has tons of snowy winters that would cause Toronto to Call In The Army (Torontonians will get the reference), Porto and Lisbon have lots of hills, etc. etc. All these cities have modern, 21st century, first-world public transit appropriate for their size. They have sidewalks that don't make people not currently inside a car feel like second-class citizens. They have cycling infrastructure and they even maintain it in winter! Toronto, and essentially all other big North American cities, don't have these things, or are currently making baby steps toward getting them. (Even NY's system is neglected for decades and simply riding on the coattails of past decisions made when the city was run by adults).

What possible difference does it make that Toronto might have both weather extremes if there are so many examples of better-designed and better-run cities successfully dealing with any of them? Just intellectually lazy excuses.

>Yes, people walk and take public transit. But that's because they can't afford a car.

No, they very often do it by choice. You'd see people making that choice in the US too, but they can't. Their choice is car or stay the fuck home. Millions of Americans also can't afford a car, but they buy one anyway because they can't get to work in any other way. They are forced to pay through the nose (relative to their income) for one, whereas in Europe they'd be far more likely to have a viable public transit option. By viable I mean frequent, convenient and comfortable. There are probably a dozen such systems in North America, if not fewer, and even those systems don't reach most of the population of their city. NY, Montreal and Toronto are the partial exceptions, and Toronto only because of the best bus system in North America.

>And their economic counterparts in the U.S. similarly bike, walk, or take public transit.

You'd need a moderate to severe death wish to routinely walk or bike outside your little bubble of a subdivision in the majority of North American suburbs. Much worse in the US, but true of Canada as well. Downtowns are every bit as bad. As soon as you hit a stroad [0], you start re-evaluating your life choices.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
by causal | 2025-09-03 15:06:24+00:00
Yeah I feel like HN is being Reddit-ified with the amount of reposted clickbait that keeps making the front page :(

This study in particular has made the rounds several times as you said. The study measures impact of 18 people using ChatGPT just four times over four months. I'm sorry but there is no way that is controlling for noise.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that overusing AI causes atrophy but this is just clickbait for a topic we love to hate.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-09-03 15:06:33+00:00
It looks like the URL won't load without both the p (presumably page?) and s (presumably subscriber?) parameters, and there was no other way to share it.

I wonder what the point is of having a newsletter that doesn't have an indexed web version. It's just a blog, right? Just one that happens to arrive in your inbox as well. What's the downside of listing the entries on the author's homepage as well, making them available to everyone?
by onetimeusename | 2025-09-03 15:06:34+00:00
The US used to post videos of ISIS being blown up for propaganda purposes since ISIS loved to release their own snuff flicks. The cartels also love video propaganda. Venezuela is an actual enemy of the US, it just hasn't sunk in. They have now had two elected presidents that Maduro refused to allow into power. Maduro's administration is working with the cartels. He himself has profited from drug cartels. At this point it's being dishonest to mischaracterize Venezuelan cartels as simply just low level criminals when they are working with the occupied Venezuelan government.

Therefore this falls into operations presidents have the power to do. Was it democratic when the US bombed ISIS? I don't know what you mean by democratic. Should there be a vote before every bombing? Should a (un-elected, mind you) judge sign off on targeted strikes before they happen?
by cameldrv | 2025-09-03 15:06:50+00:00
When I first started using computers, they were a tool like a hammer. You buy the hammer, and it sits in your toolbox until you need to use it, then you use it and put it away. You are always in total control of the hammer and it does not try to influence you in any way.

Modern software tries to invert this control loop and make you the tool. Pop up a message to remind you to use their software. Automatically pick the next item in your social feed to convince your hind brain to spend more time in their app. Convince you to turn on location services to see the weather in your current location, and then use it to track all of your movements. AI is bound to do even more of this, where it tells you in various ways how to live your life.

I don’t quite know the solution, because software that influences the user has better survival characteristics than tool software, but it feels like things are starting to come to a head where people are feeling overwhelmed by their phones’ constant demands.
by chithanh | 2025-09-03 15:06:52+00:00
> Meat was important as a calorie source but it has many drawbacks in modern society totally unrelated to animal ethics; cancer risk, inefficient land use, methane production, etc.

I think the most important drawbacks which actually threaten modern society are deforestation and zoonoses. Both can be largely avoided by raising only insects for meat, which reduces water and land use by 80%, and CO2 emissions even more if feed is mostly food waste. It is however a hard sell and has to be hidden in products in order to be accepted by consumers.
by JeremyNT | 2025-09-03 15:06:55+00:00
I think the parent is suggesting that these things could be maintained in a cost effective way indefinitely. It's not like you hit year 50 and throw it away because of some inherent quality of the tech (as with nuclear plants or lithium batteries which fundamentally degrade in ways that are cost prohibitive to "fix").

The thing is, I'm unsure whether this holds true. Could you actually replace pipes inside a huge sand battery without bringing the entire thing offline? And at some point are you basically rebuilding it?
by myhf | 2025-09-03 15:07:57+00:00
In the 1940s, the CIA wrote the Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] explaining methods to damage their rivals' operations through largely bureaucratic means.

Today, we have fully automated the methods from this manual in the form of LLM Chatbots, which we have for some reason deployed against ourselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual
by mistyvales | 2025-09-03 15:08:02+00:00
LD's could also have digital PCM audio tracks in addition to the analog tracks. Some of them later on had Dolby Digital 5.1 as well as some rare discs with DTS.

Look into Hi-Vision as well, which was HD LaserDisc back in the 90s in Japan. Muse was used to broadcast really high def signals for the time.

I have a player that can play both sides without having to get up and flip - CLD-D703
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-03 15:08:04+00:00
This is incorrect, they are improving, you just don't understand how to measure and evaluate it.

The Chinese models are getting hyper efficient and really good at agentic tasks. They're going to overtake Claude as the agentic workhorses soon for sure, Anthropic is slow rolling their research and the Chinese labs are smoking. Speed/agentic ability don't show big headlines, but they really matter.

GPT5 might not impress you with its responses to pedestrian prompts, but it is a science/algorithm beast. I understand what Sam Altman was saying about how unnerving its responses can be, it can synthesize advanced experiments and pull in research from diverse areas to improve algorithms/optimize in a way that's far beyond the other LLMs. It's like having a myopic autistic savant postdoc to help me design experiments, I have to keep it on target/focused but the depth of its suggestions are pretty jaw dropping.
by dj_gitmo | 2025-09-03 15:08:23+00:00
> The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre".

I worked at a large insurance company and this was definitely the approach. There was a website, but you had to call to realistically get almost anything done.

One product manager's big innovation was to completely remove passwords. Every time you wanted to log in, you had reset the password and be sent a link via email. Of course the didn't announce this, so you would be probably spend 20 minutes frantically looking for your password that didn't exist.
by rayiner | 2025-09-03 15:08:34+00:00
There’s two different issues. First, can it work? Can you successfully defeat dangerous quasi-state actors by killing enough of them. I think the answer is “yes,” based on the experience of various moderate Muslim countries with Islamist groups, and the US’s experience with ISIS. My comment is directed to this issue.

Second, can the U.S. constitutionally pursue military tactics against cartels? The answer is “sometimes.” The U.S. can pursue military responses against non-citizens in international water or foreign territory, as was the case here. Contrary to your assertion, it’s not a “small step away” from pursuing military action against “US citizens on U.S. soil.” It’s a very bright line, that’s been pretty easy to enforce for the 200+ years since Jefferson sent the U.S. navy to blow up the Barbary Pirates.
by majewsky | 2025-09-03 15:08:37+00:00
Does it work better when the AI is instructed to describe a method of answering the question, instead of answering the question directly?

For example, in this specific case, I am enough of a domain expert to know that this information is accessible by running `man systemd.service` and looking for the description of command line syntax (findable with grep for "ExecStart=", or, as I have now seen in preparing this answer, more directly with grep for "COMMAND LINES").
by cnst | 2025-09-03 15:08:40+00:00
Actually, no, they don't quite plan to take that away yet. In this sub-thread, we're talking about installing 3rd-party apps without having an Apple Account or a Google Account as an end-user of the device.

What Google has recently proposed to trial next year in just 4 countries, is blocking of unverified apps, but all apps you install from Aurora Store are verified and signed directly through Google, so, they will not be affected.

Basically, even if the 2026 trial succeeds, and becomes worldwide in 2027 or later — both huge ifs to start with — as an end user, you could still install F-Droid, Aurora Store, and then any Google Play Store app without providing an ID, as long as F-Droid and/or Aurora Store developers themselves would be willing to undergo the procedure.
by hedora | 2025-09-03 15:09:02+00:00
Conterpoint: We had a new samsung washer dryer pair with a 90 day warranty; they advertise something like 10 years, but it is a lie. The electrolux in the article is probably similar.

Anyway, it said it lost communication between two boards. I opened it up, checked the wiring harness, and found zero visible problems. I replaced both boards. Same error code. There are 3-4 other computers in that model, so I guess the next step was to replace all of them.

The first two were already a substantial fraction of the price of a new washer, so the entire setup went to the dump (or, hopefully a parts reuse company, but I doubt it). Most technicians refuse to touch Samsung appliances because they are impossible to debug.

Anyway, we replaced the pair with a brand that’s supposedly repairable. Fingers crossed.

I wonder if they ever made front loaders that were affordable, energy efficient and reliable/repairable. There’s no reason these things shouldn’t last more than 20-30 years on average. Maybe there’s a market for such hypothetical old machines.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-03 15:09:04+00:00
As long as, and some suppliers seem to find this onerous, the sticker can be peeled off cleanly.

(I once bought a grass rake with 2 or 3 dozen metal tines, and it arrived with a huge sticker across all the tines. Which when I attempted to peel off, left a scattered layers of paper hard glued to all the tines. Not happy.

Same with a rolling hot dog cooker. Glued “temporary” sales sticker covering half the transparent hinged top. Not happy.)