MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-09-29 15:15:43+00:00
> All the government programs he advocates for are just pale imitations of the vibrant communities that humans were made for and which modern society has done its best to destroy.

Humans were not made for anything, and for most of the existence of our species, there were no churches, indeed no buildings of any kind. Until ~10k years ago, with the development of agriculture and permanent settlements, humans lived in relatively small hunter-gatherer groups. These communities may indeed have been "vibrant", but they were organized around family and survival, not religion.

Contrary to your claim, churches and organized religion have been made possible by modern society, not destroyed by it. It's unclear where exactly you see the destructive causes, apart from the progress of science that has tended to undermine religious belief?

In the United States, churches are tax-exempt. In that sense, they are promoted by the government in a crucial way.
by _blk | 2025-09-29 15:15:46+00:00
It's not like they're the only bullies in town (@bigG: try to remember "do no evil" and you were an actually cool tech company rather worth applying to, worth having on your resume).

I paid for Prime Video to remove ads only to find that now they'll play skipable ads again at the start of a movie and this time I don't even have the option of paying again..

I'm not against big profits, and I'm definitely not in favor of more regulation to attempt to fix it but I am against mico-maximization of profit with obviously consumer-unfriendly behavior. The way to fix it, IMHO, is to start over with yet another small guy that comes in and does it right. Angel Studios is doing pretty good and although the content selection is much more limited, the overall vibe is great, feels safe to leave children around for more than 2 minutes (unlike youtube kids).
by Zambyte | 2025-09-29 15:15:52+00:00
Dude, what? "It's not just free speech when you agree with it"? I'm not infringing on their right to free speech by not using their language model. Free speech does not mean free audience. "Competition remains a good thing [...]" agreed, and that's why, like I said in my original comment, I use multiple models (OpenAI, Qwen, Mistral, Llama, Deepseek...). Just not Grok.

I made an X account and paid for premium specifically to use Grok, and cancelled it after a few months of use, because it literally just wasn't useful to me. I don't see why this is a problem? Competition doesn't matter if you don't have the right to not be a customer.
by 6510 | 2025-09-29 15:15:59+00:00
It is quite surreal to me that this was not the road taken. Optimizing software doesn't have the same potential as optimizing hardware but i'd say 1/70 is significant. If thousands of people would work on this indefinitely the time would drop to seconds. That code would also be completely incomprehensible. The argument that people should just buy a faster computer could just as easily have worked out the other way around, just write faster software. Going the hardware way gave us really really readable code which is great. The other direction however would have given us really really cheap devices. Receiving and sending a signal for [say] a chat application requires very little stuff. It would be next to impossible to add images, word suggestions or spell checkers. We could still bake mature applications onto dedicated chips. But until now those efforts went pretty much nowhere(?) I imagine one could quite easily bake a mail client or server, or a torrent client, irc, perhaps even a gui for windowed applications. Maybe an error console?
by hedora | 2025-09-29 15:16:33+00:00
On top of that, you have to get messaging right. Here’s an example from consumer:

I’m looking for a TV. I buy after careful research, so there’s a 90+% chance I’ll end up with the TV I have in mind before walking into the store.

One device we frequently use (Linux) doesn’t send the “switch to me” hdmi signal when we start using it, so the “switch input” button on the remote is crucial.

The front runner has a One Button (TM) remote. “What fresh hell hast thou wrought?”, I ask.

On page 1, the manual says to change inputs you need to press the gear button, navigate through the settings menu to “inputs”, and then find the right input from there.

Ok, so do I get the crappier panel to avoid the settings menu every time I turn on the TV, or not?

Thankfully, page 10 has a picture of the remote, and it has a quick change input button, so that’s OK.

On top of that, I want the TV to be a dumb TV.

There’s no mention of this in the quickstart guide, but it has “Basic Mode” that which is that, except that calling something “Basic” is right up there with most four letter insults with kids these days.

As a bonus, after reading the manual, I also honestly can’t tell if it’s possible to have four hdmi inputs and also variable volume audio out at the same time.

If you’re going to produce differentiating features (or your competitors are differentiating you via enshuttification) you need to make that clear pre-purchase.

In enterprise it’s at least 10x harder to get this stuff right because you probably don’t use the product on a regular basis, and also, there are many more features.
by massimoto | 2025-09-29 15:16:36+00:00
Super fun idea! That syllables package might not be robust enough for this purpose. Even in its documentation's super simple code samples, it estimates the word estimate wrong haha. I think that's somewhat meant to be an admission by the author that it is an estimate.

>>> import syllables

>>> syllables.estimate('estimate')

4

Doesn't matter in the context of making a fun web app though, cool idea!
by kianN | 2025-09-29 15:16:51+00:00
My applications have focused on noisy, high dimensional small datasets in which it is either very expensive or impossible to get more data.

One example is rare class prediction on long form text data eg phone calls, podcasts, transcripts. Other networks including neural networks and LLMs are either not flexible enough or require far too much data to achieve the necessary performance. Structured hierarchical modeling is the balance between those two extremes.

Another example is in genomic analysis. Similarly high dimensional, noisy, low data. Additionally, you don’t actually care about the predictions, you want to understand what genes or sets of genes are driving phenotypic behaviors.

I’d be happy to go into more depth via email or chat if this is something you are interested in (on my profile).

Some useful reads

[1] https://sturdystatistics.com/articles/text-classification

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5028368/
by closewith | 2025-09-29 15:16:57+00:00
> 80%+ at peace time.

No, in any time, as is the definition of latent capacity.

> Edit in not even touching RoI vs UK army. I'm not pretending any show down would be bloodless, but the UK has a few plain numerical overwhelming superiorities. Again stating simple facts.

The Cold War British Armed Forces were unable to hold the farmland of Northern Ireland against 3,000 members of PIRA, let alone the current forces against the island now. Those are the facts in the history books.

You are delusional, living in a worldview that never matched reality and diverges more each day.
by khalilravanna | 2025-09-29 15:17:09+00:00
Take a company already known for its cynical “value extraction” approach to games, barely fostering enough life within its doors to squeeze out acceptable versions of games that used to be truly Great from among their vast hoard of IP—take that company and add 20 billion dollars of debt and private equity overlords and I can only assume we get something akin to the blood orgy from Event Horizon but in game company form.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 15:18:46+00:00
Well, what I don’t mind, are truly relevant ads. This is different from showing me (a man in my 60s) ED medicine ads, unsolicited, whenever I visit a news site.

The behavior I need is typical “honest broker” behavior. These folks have been around for centuries. It’s a totally valid (and valuable) service.

If I can present a specific workflow and requirements description to ChatGPT, and it responds with paid recommendations that actually match my needs, I don’t really mind. I would still like to know about alternatives, but I will still have something that will fit the bill.
by gms7777 | 2025-09-29 15:19:12+00:00
The thing I've seen at a few weddings recently is that right after the processional, they have a period of like 30 seconds where they allow everyone to take a picture of the couple, then phones away for the rest of the ceremony. I'm sure it's not 100% effective, but it does seem to scratch the itch for most people. I think also by calling such explicit attention to the rule at the beginning of the ceremony, it makes it seem ever more rude to violate it later.
by byoung2 | 2025-09-29 15:19:15+00:00
I have been a member of HN since 2009. Back then I was fascinated by startup culture after seeing major exits like AdMob and Zappos. I used to think there was something magical or lucky about achieving startup success. But what I learned from 15 years on HN is that the secret to a successful startup is pretty straightforward (if not easy). Solve a problem that a lot of people or businesses have, charge money for your solution, talk to customers, stay lean early on, fail early and often, iterate and improve, and don't run out of money.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-29 15:19:16+00:00
Lots of discussion and submissions in 2024 when this was fresher news:

Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41562750

Larry Ellison: vast AI surveillance can ensure citizens are on best behavior

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42825097
by ibejoeb | 2025-09-29 15:19:17+00:00
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.

> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.

I feel the same way, but that's just not reality anymore. If you go outside your home, you're on camera. If your home faces your neighbor's door, you're probably on camera even in your own home unless you have constant obstruction of your windows and doors. I regularly see camera on apartment doors surveilling the interior of secure high-rise residential buildings. Guess you just gotta know when unit 18A takes out the trash...
by marcodiego | 2025-09-29 15:19:50+00:00
Come on: "Specifically, [Dave] is using bifacial solar panels– panels that have cells on both sides. In his preferred orientation, one side faces South, while the other faces North. [Dave] is in the Northern Hemisphere, so those of you Down Under would have to do the opposite, pointing one face North and the other South."

That is not the kind of thing I come here for.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-09-29 15:19:51+00:00
In my experience, the hiring managers with the best track record have these in common, which mostly boil down to the hiring teams doing their homework:

(1) The expectations for the position are clearly defined (2) The hiring team members coordinate on questions and expected responses, and they are consistent in interviews. (3) The hiring team members know how to spot potential issues (e.g., excessive bad-mouthing of previous employers, etc.) (4) The hiring teams effectively leverage their networks for references. Ideally, there are not-too-distant trusted relationships between the candidate and the hiring team. In the absence of this, references are followed up on carefully (this has become an art form in modern times.)

These reduce the risk of someone slipping through the cracks. Hiring teams also get better with experience, so any mistakes should be carefully analyzed and corrective actions incorporated into the hiring process.
by danaris | 2025-09-29 15:19:55+00:00
> Because the vast majority of job interviews are with terrible candidates, even if the majority of candidates are excellent. This apparent paradox has a simple explanation: excellent candidates selectively apply to a few companies and get interviews/offers at almost all of them. On the other hand, terrible candidates are rejected at every step of the hiring process, and have to constantly reenter the interview pool.

Do you have actual data showing this? Or is this just your intuition?

Because if it's the latter, my intuition is pretty different.

No one is an "excellent candidate" for every position, and many people who are "excellent candidates" for a given position might not even recognize that excellence in themselves. Therefore, they're not going to be only applying for positions at the very best companies; they're going to be applying for any position they think they have a chance at, assuming they think they can actually be OK with the job (eg, they might not want to apply for a job in adtech if they are personally repulsed by the ethics of surveillance capitalism).

Additionally, your scenario sounds like it paints the candidate pool for jobs in general as a bimodal distribution, with one peak of "terrible candidates" and one peak of "excellent candidates", with very little in the middle. My intuition says that it's much more likely to resemble a normal distribution.

No; what's much, much more likely is that most people are decent candidates for many jobs in their field, and excellent candidates for a few, but their chances of actually getting the opportunity to apply to those few (between the position being open and them searching at the same time, and them finding out that it's open) are slim, so they have to apply for a great many of the positions that they're only decent candidates for. That means that they'll try many times before finding something. This can lead to a lot of frustration and even desperation, creating a willingness to engage in some shady techniques to actually get a human to talk to you and recognize your value.

Then there are a few people who are, indeed, nothing but shady techniques, and they are likely to flood all channels with as many AI-generated or otherwise low-quality applications as they can manage.

So no; even if most applications any position sees are terrible applications, most interviews are likely to be with decent-but-not-excellent candidates, and most people are still going to have to interview with a few or even tens of companies before they are actually offered a position.
by ddtaylor | 2025-09-29 15:20:06+00:00
There was a time in the earlier days of EA where the company had value. That time has passed. The company mainly sits on exclusive licenses and makes minimal changes to the franchises in an attempt to milk cash. The cash milking part has gone downhill recently.

I genuinely hope they lose ALL of their exclusive sports licenses. They shouldn't be exclusive to begin with, but enabling these companies to hold the entire place hostage with their inferior and poorly crafted games just drives away competition and makes everyone play something else.

I have zero interest in football, soccer, basketball games, etc. but I did play them as a kid and I know young kids play sports games more. The fact that Madden has been re-publishing that game with the same Groundhogs Day release notes for 20+ years speaks volumes.
by naikrovek | 2025-09-29 15:20:21+00:00
Would you like to know why some people are lonely? Because they have interacted with people before and found the experience to be quite objectionable.

I am lonely because I have dealt with too many assholes. And if it kills me sooner, good. Humanity is a garbage species full of opportunistic and adversarial people just waiting to find new people to exert power over.

I can't wait to leave this hellhole.
by wredcoll | 2025-09-29 15:20:25+00:00
This comment annoyed me so much I had to get an actual keyboard to respond.

First off, the concept of "good taste" is much, much broader than only applying to clothing based fashion. You can have good taste in practically any field that involves any amount of creativity/choice: cooking, painting, writing, music, programming, video game design, etc, the list is practically infinite.

As such, the idea that most "engineers and technical persons" don't "understand good taste" is incredibly silly. It's entirely possible, perhaps even probable that the average programmer lacks good taste in terms of fashion, but that says nothing at all about good taste in other areas.

Secondly, having good taste and being able to apply it is also wildly different. I can recognize what looks good in fashion or paintings without being myself able to achieve that.

Thirdly, there's really no such thing as a "normal human". The longer you live, assuming you're willing to actually examine your experiences, the more you'll learn that the trite expression "everyone is unique" really is accurate.

Just as a semi-random example, it might be tempting to think of watching football (nfl) as "normal". According to a quick google, the average nfl game gets like 17-20million viewers, and even assuming that's accurate/all unique people/etc, it's a very large number in absolute terms but its less than 10% of the population of america.

So if you took a random group of 100 americans, something like 6-7 would have watched a football game last week[1]. Now that's still many times larger than the number of people who wrote code last week, but it's not some kind of overwhelming majority that "everyone" does.

[1] Yes these numbers are extremely imprecise, it's rhetorical
by slightwinder | 2025-09-29 15:20:34+00:00
Why? Both are probably also buying to participate in the media/culture-war. So it's in their interests to also have some good products to sell. The worst that might happen is that all the good games are now leaning more to Arabian/Chinese culture, instead of US/Europe, which is not even a new development, Asian culture has been quite prominent in Western Countries because of Japan and South Korea, and China has been also growing in the last years. And China has some really funded productions, usually playing in the top of their genre.

Though, the cancer of gambling will continue spreading.
by matula | 2025-09-29 15:21:05+00:00
This post (aside from the title) is fairly nuanced, with the reality that "let an LLM do all the things" is going to be fraught with problems... but "let an LLM do some very specific things that saves me an hour or so from boilerplate code or tests" is very nice. Of course, I doubt a blog post titled "Sometimes AI is ok, sometimes it's not" would get the clicks.
by luc_ | 2025-09-29 15:21:19+00:00
I think that there's something to be said about brain cycles being freed up for different things. We were relieved of some manual tasks during the industrial revolution. Now what else are our brains free to do?

That's not to say that this notion I raise should not be also considered with others. We are indeed offloading some brain processing to a machine... what have we lost?

What will we gain?
by stronglikedan | 2025-09-29 15:21:20+00:00
I don't ever tall a junior that they are doing something in a less-than-optimal way. I always ask them why they're doing it that way. At the end of each conversation, one of us has learned something. Sometimes I learn an alternate approach, and sometimes they learn why their alternate approach won't work in the long run. Either way, it's never a confrontational conversation.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-29 15:21:31+00:00
>I wonder if the USA has a lot of school shooters because the teachers and administrators are dumb like this and not because of other reasons. If adults misunderstand situations like this you feel like nobody has your back.

They don't misunderstand. They are incentivized by the system to behave this way. The ones that can't adapt their morals change their line of work. See also: cops.
by ezst | 2025-09-29 15:22:34+00:00
> I'm still hopeful for matrix to become easier to deploy and easier to use, as it has real potential.

I mean, I'm admittedly biased here, but the "easy to deploy, $10 shared host IM" already exists and is XMPP. Matrix is doomed to be inefficient, and that's baked at the protocol level. It won't ever get easy and cheap to deploy and run, judging from the recent year's trajectory, with more and more components being added to the mix.

> somebody get matrix to run via one click with softalicious / fantistico like abilities please!

https://www.process-one.net/download/ejabberd/ ← Docker, RPM, DEB, binary, pick your poison. It really doesn't have to be that hard.

> I also think Matrix would be better as a no federated self hosted install and connect some sort of bridge on a different server if someone wants to connect the federated stuff

You just described federation. Anyhow, do you know what's the world's largest non-federated ejabberd instance? It's WhatsApp. Yes, that WhatsApp: https://www.process-one.net/blog/whatsapp-facebook-erlang-an...

Another software delivering a slack-lite experience geared towards corporations is prose: https://prose.org/ it's also XMPP, their client can be used with ejabberd but they have an easy-deployment bundle that ships Prosody instead (yeah, unlike the Matrix ecosystem, XMPP has multiple completely viable and compatible implementations, ejabberd and prosody being only the two most popular).
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 15:22:45+00:00
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?

I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.

I can understand some people preferring not to be filmed in public or shared commercial spaces, but ultimately if you are truly in public then being photographed or recorded is just part of the deal.

I don’t think some people have thought about the second-order effects of things like requiring model release forms for everyone who enters the frame. Imagine getting a ticket or being sued by your busybody neighbor because you took a video of your kids in the backyard and they walked past. Laws like this are frequently abused by people who want to wield power over others, not simply people who simply want to protect themselves.

When you extend the thinking to topics like news reporting and journalism it becomes obvious why you don't want laws requiring everyone to give consent to have video shared of themselves in public: No politician would ever allow footage of themselves to be shared unless it's picture perfect and in line with what they want you to see.
by thiago_fm | 2025-09-29 15:22:45+00:00
Interesting feature, but I'm afraid of using it on Excel.

It's so easy to mess up on Excel, there are no crystal clear diffs like on Git. And even if that on Git we make mistakes.

Very often you have data that affects other data etc.

Also, we have DBs and other resources (even MS Access...) because we know how error-prone are Excel sheets.

If using AI adds another layer of potential problems with my Excel sheets, I'm not sure how using it would improve my overall work.

I believe they'd need to change the Excel quite a lot in order to make using AI 'excel'.

Maybe the new Excel is a new Excel-esque application with a new layer of tools to enable it to work properly with AI.

Like something that allows you to validate against a set of values described by prompt etc.

There are so many possibilities now with LLMs and I feel those integrations are very shallow, more of the same thing.

I don't need a Clippy on steroids. I want a new experience.