MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-21 13:14:29+00:00
>My smart home is barely hanging on to turning my lights on at dusk (something photo-sensors for lights just did without issue from the 90s on).

Presumably, you were already well aware just how much new technology and apps tend towards hostility and enshittification, given what you describe.. So why in the world would you have wired up your very home to be a "smart" home? Did you really expect the technology for such a juicy trove of user data so easily, parasitically collected through manipulation to ever have a chance in hell of not being just as awful as anything else?
by cogogo | 2025-09-21 13:14:41+00:00
And the losers that neither (gross generalization here) the bike people or the car people care about are the pedestrians. We are lucky to live in an urban environment where our family of 5 usually walks everywhere. Crossing the street with children is an unwelcome adventure. But you are absolutely right I would ride an ebike with the kids if it did not seem so dangerous.
by bamboozled | 2025-09-21 13:15:21+00:00
I personally understand people wish they were better off, and I do understand the sentiment myself as a middle class, tax paying citizen with a family but in my opinion, people were just told America is bad and horrible and needs fixing, I don't think America is a bad place at all. Those who wanted to get elected just told a lot of people it was horrible and a lot of people bought it.

Whatever issues existed economically, I think the "rip the country apart and tear down the government" approach was the most stupid path we could've taken,,,and here we are.

The USA and other western countries have their issues, but to pretend like western countries are bad places to live... IDK anymore.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-21 13:15:43+00:00
$500k is nothing to scoff at. However, it’s also not like they won the lottery. Depending on where she lives, her financial situation, how frequently she writes/publishes, etc. that number can mean very different things.

Also, at the very top before the article even begins:

> Sarah Wynn-Williams faces $50,000 fine every time she breaches order banning her from criticising Meta

And further down:

> However, the former diplomat was barred from publicising the memoir after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, secured a ruling preventing her from doing so.

I think it’s fair of me to say that maybe we shouldn’t downplay her situation.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-09-21 13:16:03+00:00
As a scholar, I use libraries to find and access materials. I think that is the traditional function?

If I want to access a book (or frankly anything else), chances are I can do so in minutes on the Internet archive — I can’t say the same for my university library. Or the library of Congress.

The internet archive has more materials (and more kinds of materials) and serves more than 10x the number of people (digitally).

I recognize that a community library and the LOC have different purposes from the IA. But the scale is huge — and it is extremely useful in scholarship.

Also: did you used to work there? You know a lot about it, but maybe had a bad experience?
by ohyoutravel | 2025-09-21 13:16:12+00:00
What is up with the absolutely terrible and obtrusive ads on this page? They take up 80% of my phone screen space, then I tried to scroll down and they pop up again. Awful, I can’t even read this post (and it sounded interesting). Yuck.

I’ll read it when I get back to my home network with my pihole. Websites like this remind me why I block all ads.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-09-21 13:17:05+00:00
> When LLMs say something true, it’s a coincidence of the training data that the statement of fact is also a likely sequence of words;

Do you know what a "coincidence" actually is? The definition you're using is wrong.

It's not a coincidence that I train a model on healthcare regulations and it answers a question about healthcare regulations correctly.

None of that is coincidental.

If I trained it on healthcare regulations and asked it about recipes, it won't get anything right. How is that coincidental?
by little_epsilon | 2025-09-21 13:17:25+00:00
Hi, I made a collection of fraction games (for iOS/Mac/Android). I currently have three games ready: a classic extension of 2048-style fraction combining (1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2, or 1/8), fraction matching with blind mode, and Foey de Foey (an original reaction game to catch falling fraction problems). The first two have multiple difficulty levels and the last one features auto-progressing difficulty. I'm planning to add more fraction-related games over time. I'd like any feedback or suggestions. Thank you for trying them and I hope you enjoy!

*Foey de Foey from French "feuille de feuille" (leaf of leaf)
by 4bpp | 2025-09-21 13:18:01+00:00
The problem is that essays like this are always written, preserved and propagated with the benefit of hindsight, producing the mistaken feeling that an actionable lesson is contained within.

"A bad thing happened. We had been a little uneasy, but did not act on it. Well, of course it was hard to act on mere unease. Still, if only we had acted on it sooner...". And thus, what we take away is a simple lesson and call to action - are you feeling uneasy now? If so, it is time to stop and work to derail society from whatever track it is on.

Something that never makes it into these essays are all the times when people felt uneasy and overwhelmed, and yet nothing happened that in our backward-looking perspective ought to have been prevented. Were those feelings of unease distinguishable, to those who had them, from those experienced by the protagonists of this essay?

Something that is discussed even less are all the instances where people experienced the same unease and alienation and did act on them. The story of Nazi Germany is told as one of evil purpose-driven agitators, their evil enabling cronies, and a whole host of good people who were vaguely uneasy but did nothing. A parallel story unfolded throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, though. Germany had lost an existential war, and was under crushing pressure from the victors which wanted to be paid their dues in flesh. Society was tearing at the seams, the massive country to the East had fallen to a totalitarian revolution and rumours of repression and atrocities were trickling in every day even as their sympathisers engaged in street violence and made no secret of wanting to establish the same system at home. First the global financial crisis destroyed whatever semblance of stability and prosperity was left, and then government was paralysed due to lack of majorities even as a repeat loomed. Then, too, good people were vaguely and then increasingly uneasy - and then they decided to actually do something about it. That something was a last-ditch stabilising effort by setting aside factionalism and forming a unity government of anti-communist parties. The rest is history.

As far as more modern comparisons are concerned, I find it difficult to read this essay and not draw a comparison to the COVID years. "Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "Believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand"? "or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"? Unfortunately, for the Terminally Online, that period has now receded into history as a cute extended staycation that normalised remote working. This obscures the extent to which, right now, the US may be experiencing the results of good "big men" (on the other side) having decided to act on their increasing sense of unease.
by ziml77 | 2025-09-21 13:18:33+00:00
I think it's funny how expectation defying the Air is. Most people were assuming that being so thin would mean it's super easy to bend by hand. Zack certainly isn't a weak man and he was unable to easily bend it by hand. People have also been assuming the battery must be terribly small, but its capacity is larger than the iPhone 15 battery was and only 100 mAh smaller than the iPhone 16 battery was.

Apple has seriously good engineers to be able to make that happen in a device that's so thin.
by nerdponx | 2025-09-21 13:18:39+00:00
It's inaccurate to blame Trump. He is a greedy egotistical idiot. Blaming Trump is like blaming a rock that hit you in the head. Look up and pay attention to who threw the rock. Blame them.

The Trump presidency is the culmination of a roughly 45 year campaign to return the United States to the Gilded Age, and to ensure it stays that way until it's bled dry and nothing remains of its corpse. The political and social problems that led to his second election have been a long time coming.

What's interesting is that the gaps in our political system that allow him to do so many illegal and distasteful things have always been there. The framers of the constitution never anticipated all three branches of government colluding together in alignment and bad faith, with the vociferous support of roughly half the voting population.
by redserk | 2025-09-21 13:19:49+00:00
The old “book smart vs street smart” rings loudly.

I completely disagree with much of what the Trump Administration is pushing, but they seemed to execute on the “street smarts” while policy wonks and others who want to analyze are preoccupied discussing policy.

Frankly it’s embarrassing how gullible and easily tricked much of the intellectual class is.
by DavidPiper | 2025-09-21 13:20:09+00:00
I listened to the audio book a few months back - probably the last time it appeared on HN, I'm not sure how else I would have stumbled across it. It's well worth the time.

I remember particularly the teacher's statement that (paraphrasing, it's been a while) "if I could not resist, it means that anyone else of my station or below could also not resist".

The idea that an admission of impotence is not just a personal note, but also an observation of an actionable waterline that anyone with fewer means will also be unable to rise above...

"If I am unable to do X, who else is unable to do X?" is such a powerful question to consider.
by noosphr | 2025-09-21 13:20:11+00:00
Just use Pillow and python.

It is the only way to do real image work these days, and as a bonus LLMs suck a lot less at giving you nearly useful python code.

The above is a bit of a lie as opencv has more capabilities, but unless you are deep in the weeds of preparing images for neural networks pillow is plenty good enough.
by gherkinnn | 2025-09-21 13:20:44+00:00
Don't use a microwave to fry a steak then. This is an irritating post and I have plenty of skepticism towards AI. LLMs were always bad at this kind of task, simple to us humans as it may be. This post proves nothing that wasn't known for two years.

However, I do superficially agree with some of the links at the end. LLMs as they have been so far are confirmation machines and it does take skill to use them effectively. Or knowing when not to use them.
by billy99k | 2025-09-21 13:20:51+00:00
"The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they've had time to decompress, they'll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They're professional email forwards."

Perception increases value in many companies. Some people's job is just to add a nice coat of paint to the corporate machine, to make it look more attractive from the outside.

I've never had or wanted this kind of job. The people that do should consider themselves lucky.
by rasz | 2025-09-21 13:21:02+00:00
I mean, even FBI director cut was mere $25K https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/07/...

"Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be FBI director, was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a Russian national who also holds U.S. citizenship and has produced programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories and anti-Western views advanced by the Kremlin, according to a financial disclosure form Patel submitted as part of his nomination process and other documents."
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-21 13:21:06+00:00
> I think it’s fair of me to say that maybe we shouldn’t downplay her situation.

Right - if she had actually gone through the PIDA channels, the courts might treat it differently. But skipping straight to a $500k advance and a commercial book makes it harder to see this as whistleblowing. Truth or not, it looks less like a principled disclosure and more like monetizing criticism of Meta.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-09-21 13:21:30+00:00
I don’t really feel bad for the author. Most of these separation agreements - especially at higher levels - are generous golden parachutes with the stipulation that you don’t do damaging things like working for a competitor (while on garden leave) or disparage the company.

I am not aware of their separation agreement being published, but you have to be a special type of stupid to work for Facebook as an exec, get a $500k advance on a book you wrote about Meta, and then go bankrupt. From the limited information I have I can see why Facebook fired her.
by hobofan | 2025-09-21 13:22:07+00:00
Then criticize the providers on their defaults instead of claiming that they can't solve the problem?

> Or, if LLMs are so smart, why doesn't it say "Hmmm, would you like to use a different model for this?"

That's literally what ChatGPT did for me[0], which is consistent from what they shared at the last keynote (quick-low reasoning answer per default first, with reasoning/search only if explicitly prompted or as a follow-up). It did miss one match tough, as it somehow didn't parse the `<search>` element from the MDN docs.

[0]: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cffb5c-fd14-8005-b175-ab77d1bf58...
by alan-crowe | 2025-09-21 13:22:24+00:00
It is tricky to boycott Amazon because when I search for a product using Google, I get lots of links to Amazon, and not much else. So I look at the Amazon pages to get search terms and then type those in to other search engines, such as Bing, Brave, or Yandex, and keep going to find online shops. Since Yandex is Russian, I add my country code to my search terms. I also try adding my city name and sometimes find a bricks-and-mortar shop close enough.
by moomin | 2025-09-21 13:22:24+00:00
I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.

I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people and even political movements were just as slippery then as they are now. But you may come away with something completely different. It’s an odd but interesting book.
by maddmann | 2025-09-21 13:22:58+00:00
“Defaults are shit” — is that really true though?! Just because it shits the bed on some tasks does not mean it is shit. For people integrating llms into any workflow that requires a modicum of precision or determinism, one must always evaluate output closely/have benchmarks. You must treat the llm as an incompetent but overconfident intern, and thus have fast mechanisms for measuring output and giving feedback.
by em500 | 2025-09-21 13:23:07+00:00
Alongside increased bike infrastructure funding, the Dutch effort certainly did involve disincentivizing car use by higher fees (both parking and ownership), reducing parking availability (and also non-parking car accessibility), and slowing down car speeds (speed bumps, cameras, narrowing roads, calming road design, reducing city speed limits to 19mph), and generally reducing car allocated space. It's typically done during scheduled road maintenance, where separated bike lakes are installed, often by converting the street parking space or turning a two way street into a one way (for cars) street or even banning car access.

See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARjrpb_FOcs (skip to about 5:00 or 8:00 so get a sense of some of the redesign).
by kraussvonespy | 2025-09-21 13:23:29+00:00
It would be interesting to know the who and how of the fiber cut. We're a tiny company in the heartland and have seen two separate fiber cuts in different parts of the state. Both tickets indicated that they were believed to be malicious, intentional cuts. In one case, fiber was cut in two places many hundreds of meters apart.

What may be outdated here is our trust in humans to not destroy critical parts of our infrastructure.
by mijoharas | 2025-09-21 13:23:38+00:00
The article is on his blog[0], and is written in the first person. I assume we're agreeing that he wrote that?

Are you saying that the blog did not say that he wants fewer non-white people in London? I picked out the specific parts in [1].

In addition there is this quote:

> I thought I might move there one day. That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.

He wouldn't dream of moving to London now because it now has a large proportion of non-"White British" people[1]. Is that not saying that he "wants fewer non-white people in London"?

Which part do you think is incorrect? The post reads quite clearly to me. I don't think he's being oblique.

[0] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303305
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-21 13:23:51+00:00
> I think it comes down to how familiar you are with the domain and its constraints. When I watch a medical drama, I have no idea if they're using realistic language. It sounds good, but real doctors probably cringe at the inaccuracies.

By now, numerous notable programmers have reported positive experiences with all forms of AI-assisted coding, which this conclusion arrogantly fails to account for.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-21 13:23:53+00:00
People have to make a living, that’s capitalism for you. You expect her to spend years on this and just release it for free? Then pay her rent and stock her fridge for her.

There is nothing wrong with making money writing a tell-all so far as the work is rigorous and truthful. Attacking her for profiting is a cheap way to discredit her without having to assess the merits of her work.

Yes it’s valid to critique the source and see where funding is coming from, that’s important information, but discrediting someone out the gate for making money on something is simply lazy and requires no critical assessment at all.
by Lapel2742 | 2025-09-21 13:23:59+00:00
> No "lists" were being compared.

How would you solve that problem? You'd probably go to the internet, get the list of TLDs and the list of HTML5-Element and than compare those lists.

The author compares three commercial large‑language models that have direct internet access, but none of them appear capable of performing this seemingly simple task. I think his conclusion is valid.
by JackSlateur | 2025-09-21 13:24:00+00:00
Think "cloud providers"

Today, you can grab a physical NIC and create some number of virtual NICs. Same for GPUs.

I guess the idea is that you have some hardware, and each kernel (read "virtual machine") will get:

- some dedicated CPU - some physical memory - some virtual NICs - some storage, maybe (if dedicated; if through network, then nothing to do here) - maybe a virtual GPU for the AI hype train

Every kernel will mostly think it owns real hardware, while in fact it only deals with part of it (all of this due to virtualized hardware support that can be found in many places)

This feature does not seem like a general-usage feature, which can be used in our laptop
by orwin | 2025-09-21 13:24:03+00:00
On this particular issue, i think all parties that reach power want the same thing: more educated people, cheaper (because let's be honest, a "left-wing" party in Europe that conquer power in Europe is at most a "third way"-type party, sometime with a green tint), and are all equally at fault for the situation.

The meaningfull difference between right-wing and left-wing parties is how the University should be organized, with right-wing party pushing for centralized, more powerful unis that can reach international "power rankings", and left-wing parties usually push for a decentralization (that's how you get university branches in small towns usually). Also most right-wing/third way parties seems to want the admin staff to have power over the education staff, that there's that shift too (the exact same stuff is happening in hospitals).
by noosphr | 2025-09-21 13:24:06+00:00
>Eventually, after I continued to insist that it was indeed Polish, it got offended and told me it would not try again, accusing me of attempting to mislead it.

I once had Claude tell me to never talk to it again after it got upset when I kept giving it peer reviewed papers explaining why it was wrong. I must have hit the tumbler dataset since I was told I was sealioning it, which took me back a while.
by mathewsanders | 2025-09-21 13:25:06+00:00
Something I think would be interesting for model APIs and consumer apps to exposed would be the probability of each individual token generated.

I’m presuming that one class of junk/low quality output is when the model doesn’t have high probability next tokens and works with whatever poor options it has.

Maybe low probability tokens that cross some threshold could have a visual treatment to give feedback the same way word processors give feedback in a spelling or grammatical error.

But maybe I’m making a mistake thinking that token probability is related to the accuracy of output?
by Blahah | 2025-09-21 13:25:31+00:00
Not really. This works great in Claude Sonnet 4.1: 'Please could you research a list of valid TLDs and a list of valid HTML5 elements, then cross reference them to produce a list of HTML5 elements which are also valid TLDs. Use search to find URLs to the lists, then use the analysis tool to write a script that downloads the lists, normalises and intersects them.'

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
by simianwords | 2025-09-21 13:26:10+00:00
Author seemed to have used a weak model since the strong models get the answer. They should have put more thought into it and at least provide a comparison.

As a ChatGPT user I would have reached for the thinking model for such questions. I understand if the “auto” model doesn’t pick the right model here - but confident claims from the author should be backed up by at least this much.
by fsloth | 2025-09-21 13:26:43+00:00
This. You _have_ to write the spec. The result is that instead of spending X units of time on spec and THEN y units of time on coding, you get the whole thing in x units of time AND you have a spec.

The trick is knowning where the particular LLM sucks. I expect in a short amount of time there is no productivity gain but when you start to understand the limitations and strengths - holey moley.
by thunky | 2025-09-21 13:26:48+00:00
> You were given opportunities you refused to engage with

That's not what I read at all. They went to a good university and got good grades. They did what they were supposed to do.

Then they later realized how little of value the actual education was.

The university missed an opportunity to educate them, not the other way around. The student is not responsible for having a bad teacher.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-21 13:27:40+00:00
This is also why SQL is cursed for LLMs. For queries that are actually valuable to the business we tend to have more constraints than these models can tolerate.

By the time you get done explaining the meaning of your schema, you might have run out of context. Not that it would matter either way. I've never seen the attention mechanism lock onto more than ~10 hard constraints at a time.