MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by billy99k | 2025-09-29 19:38:17+00:00
"And to be honest, the UK surveillance thing is somewhat exaggerated; it's highly London-centric, and they're mostly privately-owned cameras; the main driving factor is the insurance industry."

The big cities is where the most crime happens. It's not really 'exaggerated'. If you legally aren't allowed to protect yourself during a crime, it's best to have a camera in place that catches the person that's doing it (and put fear in others, so the situation is avoided).

"Ireland, say, has some of the strictest gun laws in the developed world, and doesn't have a large number of CCTVs or other forms of surveillance."

This isn't true at all.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-29 19:38:30+00:00
I think Library of Babel by Borges is a static manifestation of Turing complete behaviour via the fact that some L-systems are Turing complete. or put another way. Where in the Library of Babel, does the real Hamlet reside? If we consider finding and replacing names with other names, is it still a Hamlet? And if we bring the full force of edit operations and do these in a reversible manner, then where does the actual Hamlet reside? An equivalence class of Hamlet?
by et-al | 2025-09-29 19:39:38+00:00
From the article:

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.

In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby).
by ghc | 2025-09-29 19:40:04+00:00
I admit thinking this way is tempting, but in your model the number represents some kind of language, whether human-readable or machine-readable. If we accept the number is a non-lossy encoding of some language, we reach an equivalency stating there is no creating, just discovering language "through convoluted mental and technological processes". But can we really equate language and knowledge? I believe Gödel proved that we cannot, in the sense that there is no "perfect" way to encode knowledge in a system of consistent axioms. Ergo, no matter how eloquently you describe your invention of "the wheel", it is by its nature incomplete and imperfect. Some part of the knowledge will always be tacit.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-29 19:40:12+00:00
Interesting. My CS course started right out of the gate with assembly. My fledgling computer course in high school started with Pascal instead of BASIC. Clearly, before "mid 2000s". Maybe I was taking classes out of order??? It was way to long ago for me to remember those details, but I was well underwater trying to jump right into the low level language. I remember struggling with pointers in Pascal until one day it finally clicked. Assembly came across to me as a weed out course right at the beginning.
by ahmedhawas123 | 2025-09-29 19:40:18+00:00
I realize a lot of the comments here are pessimistic, but this is a pretty obvious monetization path that they just can't not take. This is actually a huge angle IMO. ChatGPT is on a path to become a real entry point to the internet - why use Amazon or Google Search when you can embed results and checkout in the

I agree there's a real bias issue, but that is consistent through out any large company - e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc have sponsored results
by Spivak | 2025-09-29 19:41:08+00:00
> Now that I have a mortgage, it’s much less than the rent I was paying for a similar property.

This is what my parents kept telling me would happen but no one in my late 20s social circle who've bought houses (including myself) has been able to make it happen. Even my friends who got locked in at the 2% interest rates still pay about $300 more than the equivalent rent. I live in a, by population, a top 30 city in the US and actually live in the city, not its "surrounding metro area."
by Sailemi | 2025-09-29 19:42:04+00:00
Families abroad are unable to communicate with their family back in even major cities, not sure what kind of precedent there is here? I'm hearing no domestic cell service either.

I'm trying to research what can be used to help family members communicate with family in Afghanistan.

Right now all I can think of is waiting for them to acquire a satellite phone, or grabbing a satellite dish and getting satellite broadband from a foreign provider? If anyone has solutions or pointers I'd really appreciate it.

Stark traffic drop-off visible here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/af?dateRange=2d
by modeless | 2025-09-29 19:42:08+00:00
Yeah, it seems obvious that this is how models will be monetized in the future. The free version of ChatGPT will stop being a loss leader for the subscription and start paying for itself with commissions. The vast majority of people will use the free version.

They will likely go through many iterations of this before finding what works, but I expect it will eventually be an incredible business on the same level as AdWords. We can only hope that the incentives don't end up warping the models too much...
by nomel | 2025-09-29 19:43:14+00:00
> But it will be difficult to communicate such a concept to a user.

This isn't a prerequisite, since the existing naive character sort approach is not communicated either. In fact, it's almost universally unexpected by any user who hasn't written a naive string sort. Apple doesn't do this, and I very much did not need it communicated to me why 10 was coming after 2, because that's what everyone, who's not a programmer, expects.

As a litmus test, go ask some people, who are not programmers, without loading the question beyond "here are some files, how would you expect for them to be displayed in a list?". Show the lists side by side. It should not surprise you.
by zahlman | 2025-09-29 19:43:19+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if the article turned out to be LLM-written itself.

Anyway, the tl;dr is to consider that you're wrong. Not especially insightful, even though I agree that the AI chatbots are indeed not conscious in any meaningful sense. (If I sincerely believed they were, I would have no meaningful advice, as I'd expect any human action from that point forward to be pretty much irrelevant.)
by ozim | 2025-09-29 19:43:24+00:00
That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in.

Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other customer started using by coincidence and is using it in totally wrong way but it somehow works good enough but still initial effort is not paid back and best would be to kill the feature.
by g42gregory | 2025-09-29 19:43:36+00:00
Not saying AI will take anybody's job. It's just that the nature of the job is changing, and we have to acknowledge that. Will still be competitive. Will still require strong SE/CS knowledge and skills. Will still require/favor CS/EE degrees, which NVIDIA CEO told us not to get anymore. :-)

Also, it looks like the OpenAI and Anthropic has completed their fundraising cycles. So the AGI "has been cancelled" for now. :-)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-29 19:43:51+00:00
> If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at least as long as the book, on average.

This isn't quite true. Natural language text compresses extremely well and you would only need length equivalent to the compressed form, not the original form. And if you wanted to go further, you could use a mapping where extremely short strings map to known popular books and only unknown works have longer encodings.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-29 19:44:27+00:00
It's not guesswork at all. It basically just requires knowing what it is allowed to look up rows by. Execution plans generally aren't rocket science. And if someone messes up in writing their query, yes that should show up in query execution time stats. You don't need 10x anything to track average query times and spot outliers.

For runtime-defined queries, those are obviously not going to have global indexes if there are more than a couple possible fields. But as long as you're only iterating over, say, 10K rows that an index can determine belong to that customer, and this query is happening once per page rather than 200 times per page, that's fine. That's why you can search over 10K bug reports for a project without a problem, because they only belong to a specific project. You're not searching all 100M bug reports belonging to all clients.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-29 19:44:46+00:00
> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).

This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.

Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.

> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.

This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.

> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.

We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”
by alexjplant | 2025-09-29 19:44:52+00:00
20 years or so ago FedEx beat the pants off of UPS in my limited experience. The only thing brown did for me [1] was play football with my Newegg packages and bust them open which, for a child spending their entire net worth on a video card, was rather disheartening. Over the years this trend reversed to the point that I actively avoid FedEx so that my package arrives in one piece at my doorstep instead of at their distribution center with a giant hole ripped in the side of it.

I wonder whether Amazon's scale forced UPS to up their game when they were shipping partners. It's also very possible that my experience is completely anecdotal.

[1] https://wanderingeye.marketing/remember-that-ad-campaign-wha...
by arjie | 2025-09-29 19:46:41+00:00
I really like these tools. Yesterday I gave it a filename for a video of my infant daughter eating which I took while I had my phone on the charger. The top of the charger slightly obscured the video.

I told it to crop the video to just her and remove the obscured portion and that I had ffmpeg and imagemagick installed and it looked at the video, found the crop dimensions, then ran ffmpeg and I had a video of her all cleaned up! Marvelous experience.

My only complaint is that sometimes I want high speed. Unfortunately Cerebras and Groq don't seem to have APIs that are compatible enough for someone to have put them into Charm Crush or anything. But I can't wait for that.
by setr | 2025-09-29 19:46:51+00:00
Clickhouse isn’t fast at table scans, it’s just columnar. Indexes are basically a maintained transform from row storage to column storage; columnar databases are essentially already “indexed” by their nature (and they auto-apply some additional indexes on top, like zone maps). It’s only fast for table-scans in the sense that you probably aren’t doing a select * from table, so it’s only iterating over a few columns of data, whereas SQLite would end up iterating over literally everything — a table-scan doesn’t really mean the same thing between the two (a columnar database’s worst fear is selecting every column; a row-base database wants to avoid selecting every row)

Their problem is instead that getting back to a row, even within a table, is essentially a join. Which is why they fundamentally suck at point lookups, and they strongly favor analytic queries that largely work column-wise.
by foxyv | 2025-09-29 19:46:53+00:00
Families are spending more than 20% of their budget on transportation. Even worse, the cost of rent has increased as well. Car prices have doubled in the past 5 years. In addition, road infrastructure is starting to collapse under the weight of vehicles that are twice as heavy on average. Add in wage suppression and we are seeing families with fewer and fewer options when it comes to transportation.

Especially dire is that many people cannot afford insurance. 15-30% of people are uninsured depending on the state. Fewer people are driving with licenses (9-10%) because they cannot afford the fines that come with being a poor driver and have no other options.

While an upper middle class family can afford to just keep shoveling money into the car fire, most families are being stretched thinner every year just to keep a car running.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-29 19:47:32+00:00
This isn't a surprise or even a big deal by itself. Every significantly large, politically-captured organization has its own messaging mandates including preferred, discouraged, and forbidden word/phrases lists.

All this does is underscore this regime's subservience to big coal and oil and against addressing long-term, increasing existential threats to property, the economy, lives, and the planet.
by rbgala | 2025-09-29 19:47:53+00:00
We’ve been working on FFmate for a while, and last week we released version 2.0.

FFmate is an automation layer for FFmpeg. It includes a job queue, REST API, watchfolders, presets, webhooks, a Web UI, and support for pre- and post-processing scripts. he idea is to move beyond shell scripts and provide a cleaner, cross-platform tool to run and scale FFmpeg.

The main change in version 2 is clustering. Tasks are split across multiple nodes using a Postgres queue, and the system keeps running even if a node goes down.

We rewrote the Go codebase using Goyave. The rewrite cut about 2,000 lines, simplified the structure, and gave us a solid base for future features. Webhooks now support retries and execution logs, and watch folders use lock files for more reliable handling

If you’ve worked on scaling or automating FFmpeg, we’d like to hear your thoughts.

Repo: https://github.com/welovemedia/ffmate

Docs: https://docs.ffmate.io
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-09-29 19:48:00+00:00
No that's not what I meant. I'm not talking about the actual conflict or how it works. That's political discussion. My comment was specifically about the action of him posting the photo from a public relations perspective.

There is a controversial world event. Regardless of which side you're on, everybody agrees that there are many people with strong opposing views. As a representative of a company, he should have stayed away from the topic as a whole, because getting involved with it is a PR nightmare with essentially zero upside.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-29 19:48:01+00:00
You continue to argue that I'm saying the exact opposite of what I've said. Are you arguing only for the sake of it?

> It does not mean the event is open to the public.

I have never said any such thing. It is public in the sense that it is publicized, as I've now mentioned countless times. The word "public" also means something that is "official" and out in the open. It doesn't always mean that it is something which the general public is invited to attend. A good example is the one you gave on the royal wedding. All weddings are public weddings in that very same sense.

> You seem to think that more words are needed in English to get the concept across, yet you seem to be the only one with the inability to grasp the concept.

Clearly there are more words needed, since you continue to understand the exact opposite of what I'm saying.

> Why you think that a wedding needs a public announcement because of regulations is relevant or not is something I cannot see the point of making.

Then ponder it.
by levocardia | 2025-09-29 19:48:10+00:00
Pretty sure there is a subset of SWE bench problems that are either ill-posed or not possible with the intended setup; I think I remember seeing another company excluding a fraction of them for that reason. So maxing out SWEBench might only be ~95%.

I'm most interested to see the METR time horizon results - that is the real test for whether we are "on-trend"
by asdff | 2025-09-29 19:48:40+00:00
Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.

Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race. This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
by bot403 | 2025-09-29 19:48:54+00:00
You have to look harder. It's not always explicit as OP says with threats of deportation. Rather there's a huge power imbalance.

Who can we ask to stay late? Who "doesn't mind" 12 hour days? Who "doesn't mind' being on call. Who won't mind if they get a smaller bonus or raise? How about Sandeep who is afraid to say no because if he says no too many times and loses his job him and his entire family have to move back overseas with minimal notice?

That's how real exploitation happens these days. And sometimes even good managers don't realize they're doing it, because, after all, poor Sandeep even said he didn't mind! He's just a really hard worker!
by frankfrank13 | 2025-09-29 19:49:01+00:00
i use Sunshine contacts, its pretty nice. I used to have a work phone, my personal phone, and tons of linkedin and Gmail contacts, and I use Sunshine to sync them all to icloud. Works well! Was always super put off by the photos app, but I just never used it.

I like Marissa Mayer, but I'm shocked at how little investment these apps got over the years, despite being the *only* apps they offered. What was this startup lab even doing? For five years!!
by general1465 | 2025-09-29 19:49:20+00:00
Whole Budapest Memorandum and subsequent unwillingness to act as signed sealed the deal to never give up nuclear weapons for nations which got them and also opened other nations to finding a way how to make or get control over their own nuclear weapons - like Poland, Japan or Germany.

Only the threat of glassing a capital city of an aggressor will keep an aggressor at bay.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-29 19:49:42+00:00
> So I can opt out of training

Even that is debatable. There are a lot of weasel words in their text. At most they're saying "we're not training foundation models on your data", which is not to say "we're not training reward models" or "we're not testing our other-data models on your data" and so on.

I guess the safest way to view this is to consider anything you send them as potentially in the next LLMs, for better or worse.
by cheema33 | 2025-09-29 19:49:48+00:00
We should all be programming in assembly. Or better, 0s and 1s. We are missing out on great friction and growth by programming in higher level languages.

With AI, you can still have plenty of friction. For me, I aim higher and my friction is moved elsewhere. AI is good at very many things, but there are plenty of things it is not good at.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-29 19:49:52+00:00
What is "most" here? Traditional Arctic clothing (e.g. Inuit clothing) has huge fashion aspects. Being able to look good and stay comfortable in a blizzard are both important to many people in the far north.

I highly recommend checking out the clothing and fur stores to accessorize if you're in an Inuit town with nothing but "purely practical" Western clothing. A fashionable design will improve both the look and the cold weather performance.

This sometimes gets taken to the extremes of high fashion, like this design by an Inuit woman:

https://vafashion.ca/pages/the-ukiaksaq-collection-nyfw-2020
by risyachka | 2025-09-29 19:50:02+00:00
Ads in ChatGPT was the most obvious outcome from day 1.

And this is not a bad thing, otherwise you can only image how many businesses will close when google traffic stars to decline.

Everyone likes to hate on ads but the reality is that without ads 99% users even on hacker news would be jobless as the companies where they work will have no way to find clients, and even if they manage to find some - those clients won't be able to sell and will go out of business.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-29 19:50:04+00:00
Plenty of discussions about this:

Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390

Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170

A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792

I'm leaving Ruby Central

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352432

Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371061

Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405221
by GoatInGrey | 2025-09-29 19:50:07+00:00
This would explain the LLM implementing the feature in a way you didn't prefer. But this does not explain why Sonnet would deliver a broken implementation that does not work in even the most basic sense.

Also, there is a threshold in which the time it takes to develop a prompt, allow the agent to run, review its output, and go through iterative loops to correct errors or implementation problems, can exceed the time it takes me (a lazy human) to achieve the same end result.

Pair this with the bypassing of the generation effect, reduced prefrontal dopamine, and increased working memory load (in part due to minimal motor-cognitive integration), and AI-generated code in contexts with legal and financial repercussions can be a much worse deal than using your own fingers.
by mhuffman | 2025-09-29 19:50:25+00:00
>Yes, you could write the code yourself, but keep in mind that this activity is going away for most engineers (but not for all) in 1 - 2 years.

I'm not saying that it definitely isn't going to happen, but there is a loooong way to go for non-FAANG medium and small companies to let their livelihoods ride on AI completely.

>I think a better advice would be to learn reading/reviewing an inordinate amount of code, very fast. Also heavy focus on patterns, extremely detailed SDLC processes, TDD, DDD, debugging, QA, security reviews, etc...

If we get to a point in 1-2 years where AI is vibe-coding at a high mostly error-free level, what makes you think that it couldn't review code as well?
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-29 19:50:46+00:00
> But you're comparing the LLMs to humans

These things are being marketed as super intelligent magic answer machines. Judging them using the criteria the marketing teams have provided is completely reasonable.

> Movies != real life

Nobody claimed it was. This is about desires and expectations. The people charging money for these services and taking stacks of cash that would’ve otherwise been in in dev’s paychecks while doing so haven’t even tried to temper those expectations. They made their beds…