MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GavinAnderegg | 2025-09-09 11:36:03+00:00
Author here. I woke up to a surprising amount of traffic! Some notes based on the discussion.

This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]

I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]

On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.

This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...

[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...
by ben_w | 2025-09-09 11:36:38+00:00
> They'll judge us the way we judge people who manually calculated ledgers before spreadsheets existed. Impressive dedication to craft, but ultimately unnecessary effort spent on problems that got solved by better tools.

One of my dad's anecdotes was of someone who was very proud of the fact that they could multiply numbers with a slide rule faster than any of the then-newfangled electronic hand calculators.

A lot of stuff changed between him being born in 1939 and when he took early retirement in the late 90s.

Kinda weird that it's possible he might be one of the first generation programmers and I might be one of the last.

Such rapid change.
by bumby | 2025-09-09 11:37:00+00:00
Except the current premise is largely based on constraining humans to the drudgery that AI cannot do. Current AI is more focused on creative works, not on folding the laundry and replacing faucets.

I had a professor decades ago who was near retirement who related how when he was an undergraduate he had to write a paper about what humans would do with all their newfound free time since they would only need to work a dozen hours a week. I’m sure similar conversations were had at the onset of steam power and electricity; we’ve been crafting the same pipe dream for generations.

My point is that we should care about quality of life as the main measure. Economic output is a proxy for that, and sometimes a poor one.
by donatj | 2025-09-09 11:37:18+00:00
You want to see something "fun" check out Apple's Numbers XML format from before they switched to protobuf. A simple 1,2,3 resulted in over 1 megabyte of XML.

At a previous job I'd been tasked with developing support for importing Numbers files along side our existing Excel and CSV support. After a couple days we rightly gave up as the tiny fraction of people who actually wanted to import Numbers files was outweighed by it's massive complexity.

We ended up just adding instructions for Numbers users to export to CSV
by freehorse | 2025-09-09 11:37:37+00:00
I don't consider myself/users responsible for solving the broken business model of a big part of the modern web. The problem of ads is not just "I do not like ads", which is also a valid reason imo concerning how intrusive and distracting they are blinking and yelling around and making everything slower, but a matter of privacy and safety. There is no social contract that accepts this. Moreover, I have no way to actually know or consent to be served ads before actually loading them, so I have to use an adblocker just in case. I would not mind if a website detects my adblocker and not serving me the content either. So in this sense, imo if a website decides to serve me the content without ads it is up to them, not me.

I would care much less if tracking/personalisation was not part of the ad systems and we were just shown ads based on the content of a webpage. Actually, I am ok with stuff like sponsor segments from content creators, sponsored articles etc. There are ways to serve ads without invading privacy or making it disturbing, but modern advertising industry has chosen a different path.

There are also alternative models, subscriptions, actually buying and *owning* the content (how outdated! let's have ads instead), donations, having a "pro" version with extra optional features etc. There is important stuff in the internet (eg wikipedia) that works fine without ads at all. But if you want to scale to a billion $$$ business maybe it makes sense to rely more on ads, but I do not find this compelling as an argument for users to suffer ads or part of any social contract.
by davydm | 2025-09-09 11:37:54+00:00
fta:

A - “true & useful, AND new to me”

B - “true & useful, but NOT novel”

U - “unclear, undefined, unknowable, or just flat out wrong”

This clearly defines my experiences with codegen ai - 1% A, 30-50% B (true, but not useful, like telling me the --count parameter sets the count) and the rest U - loads and loads of complete bullshit, sprinkled with enough confidence and subject-appropriate wordage that it looks valid, but someone who actually knows what they're doing will find the flaws - ironic, since it's people who _don't_ know what they're doing who are the major target audience
by lazide | 2025-09-09 11:38:27+00:00
Cynically, if you’re someone trying to make a lot of money, why wouldn’t you take a well run system, convince people they can save a bunch of money by ‘cutting waste’, then pocket as much money as you can by cutting long term maintenance and pocketing the difference - and when it blows up, sell them the solution at inflated prices too?

It seems like the voters actively encouraged this kind of behavior.

Eventually people figure it out (maybe) and go all fire and pitchforks - but that sounds like a problem for ‘future me’ eh?

And if you’re good at structuring everything, maybe they’ll never even have anyone concrete to blame but themselves! (Classic referendum/politician behavior there)
by alexey-salmin | 2025-09-09 11:40:07+00:00
> Ideally, of course! This is a really high standard that I'm afraid isn't enforced in a lot of commercial or even sensitive applications. 86 million permutations is probably good enough and even if someone was clever enough to synch clocks and narrow to 200k permutations, then I'm not convinced there was actually any harm.

Of course not, this is ridiculous. If your job is to shuffle the deck, shuffle it well. It's like doing a 80/20 coinflip and arguing that 50/50 is a "really high standard". And that for a company that sells bet-money-on-coinflips software.

If you don't know how to do it well -- read a book or use std::random_shuffle. Somehow Stepanov was able to do it right (assuming a good RandomNumberGenerator input) from the first try in 1993, without Wikipedia poor guy. And this wasn't even his main job, random_shuffle was one of a dozens of algorithms he envisioned and implemented for the STL.

> This is circular as you're taking the article's narrative at face value without getting any primary sources confirming gross negligence or "arrogance" as you imply.

I did some quick research and it seems that ASF Software had indeed developed the Planet Poker online platform. Which comes down to failing at your main job, I don't really see what other evidence you expect here?

I strongly believe that people in general and software engineers in particular should be held up to high standards. Finding excuses for how school-level math is too hard for them is condescending. It is disrespectful to the very people you're talking about.

If you say they couldn't even understand that N^N is not divisible by N! you basically say that they're mentally challenged. I on the contrary say that they most certainly would've been able to understand it if they made an effort -- which they didn't. So negligence.
by Lumoscore | 2025-09-09 11:40:11+00:00
Crypto adoption has grown a lot in the past 3–4 years compared to how rarely it was talked about before. I recently bought airplane tickets and booked hotels directly with crypto, even in a country where it’s regulated — no banks in the middle, no extra taxes on the transactions. That’s a clear real-world use case of crypto enabling direct, peer-to-peer value transfer. Of course, your point is valid that much of the space feels dominated by speculation and short-term hype projects. But beyond that noise, there are solid areas of long-term utility: cross-border payments (remittances without 10% fees), stablecoins for inflation-hit regions, decentralized identity and reputation, and platforms that make tokenization/governance easier for communities. These are things that already help people today and could still grow into meaningful companies if built right.
by stpedgwdgfhgdd | 2025-09-09 11:40:53+00:00
I hear that multiple MCP tools eat up your context. See last video Indy Dev Dan.

Maybe one day this becomes now relevant, but today? Isn’t it better to stick to CLI tools? Lesser chance of supply chain attack if you stick to the vendor’s cli.

(I use 2 MCP servers in daily life, hesitant to add more)
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-09-09 11:41:12+00:00
Mullvad has a free DoH service, FYI. It can potentially replace your self-hosted service, at least for your phone, so you don't forget to set it up when you leave home.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
by GavinAnderegg | 2025-09-09 11:41:13+00:00
I wrote up notes here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45180555 but this wasn't coordinated. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of the post, I was following a thread on Bluesky where Adrian and Jeff were chatting. I posted the article there. I didn't know Jeff had posted on Hacker News about this already, and I didn't know he would post my piece. I definitely would have done another editing pass if I had known!
by throwaway2037 | 2025-09-09 11:41:25+00:00
> Massachusetts is one of the safest

For those unaware, Boston (largest city in Massachusetts) has a reputation for incredibly aggressive drivers (so does New York City). Is Massachusetts relatively safer because it has so few freeways? I find it hard to believe this can be explained by "quality of drivers". Another idea: Maybe local police are very, very strict about drink/driving, thus reducing the number of deaths.
by psd1 | 2025-09-09 11:41:31+00:00
Sure, the SE isn't the rainiest place in Europe, but it's not a dry region. So sure, not "very" rainy, but somewhat rainy.

The rain that falls across the Thames basin has historically been distributed relatively evenly across months, compared to regions with monsoon seasons. That makes management easier.

I do expect supply to meet current demand. And afaics, it would, if the pipes didn't leak.
by davydm | 2025-09-09 11:42:03+00:00
FTA: "But with billions of dollars pouring into generative AI every year, we will see instant voice-to-code capabilities + bug-free quality in 2-5 years."

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

omg, thanks for the laugh - "bug-free quality in 2-5 years" pfffffft I'm not holding my breath - rather, I think that by then, the hype will have finally lost some steam as companies crash and burn with their shitty, "almost working" codebases.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-09 11:42:08+00:00
> I would not mind if a website detects my adblocker and not serving me the content either.

How do you feel about ad blockers continually trying to evade detection, though?

Or guides about how to avoid things that block access to users of ad blockers?

I think the "you're free to block me for using an ad blocker!" argument doesn't mean much when said ad blockers do their best to not let that happen in the first place.
by priteau | 2025-09-09 11:42:29+00:00
The page for this graph links to the source of the data, which is at: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/deaths-by-demograph...

As I suspected, poisoning most likely includes drug overdose. They have this comment about the 2023 data:

> #1: Poisoning: 100,304 deaths

> Largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States

You can see more recent data than 2004 in their interactive charts. It is interesting to see that deaths from road accidents has much reduced for teenagers and young adults, compared to the rest of the population.
by JCM9 | 2025-09-09 11:43:02+00:00
Market is super frothy and we’ve reached a plateau of what this tech can do right now. Unless someone comes forth with a true step change enhancement things gonna get messy soon.

The current pace of meh models releases and everyone converging on the same quality of tech can’t sustain the number of players and valuations out there. Not even close. Even the AI grifters on LinkedIn are running out of grifting steam.
by aswegs8 | 2025-09-09 11:43:29+00:00
Experts are often worse than laymen in predicting macro developments because they are narrowed by their focus and biased towards it. Tetlock's Superforecasting is a great book on this.

Some condensed source I found on the topic:

https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/News/The-more-famous-an-expert-...
by dijit | 2025-09-09 11:44:21+00:00
My word doesn’t have to be law, however anyone who has touched any system outside of Teams is universally stating that Teams is bad.

That is an important consideration to have if you’re going to be telling people that its fine to inflict it on your workforce. You used cost as a reason but:

1) Teams is a seperate paid license now (since it was anti-competitive- the only way they could have grown such a market share with such a terrible product).

2) There are superior free alternatives.

Don’t come up in here, (in a thread where I am asking, genuinely, about what makes Teams a viable and active preference for people) saying its fine without any fucking follow up on why and then get bent out of shape when challenged.

Teams is not fine, if you’re working on the product or you have inflicted it on your workforce you should be better- I won’t pretend its ok so that you feel better.
by pama | 2025-09-09 11:44:23+00:00
Of course theoretically lots of things are possible with probabilistic systems. There is no difference with open source, openweight, chinese, french or american llms. You dont give unfettered web access to any models (locally served or otherwise) that can consume critical company data. The risk is unacceptable, even if the models are from trusted providers. If you use markdown to see formatted text that may contain critical data and your reader connects to the web, you have a serious security hole, unrelated to the risks of the LLM.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-09-09 11:44:23+00:00
> Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

Well, pregnant women create such systems routinely.

Due to the presence of the weasel word "factual" (it's not in the sentence I quoted, but is in the lead-up), no contradiction actually arises. It may well be intractable to create a perfectly factual human(-like or -level) AI -- but then, most of us would find much utility in a human(-like or -level) AI that is only factual most of the time -- IOW, a human(-like or -level) AI.
by ForHackernews | 2025-09-09 11:45:04+00:00
Is the NHS "starved for money"? I don't disagree that it's verging on collapse, but they keep giving it more and more money. The budget goes up, both in real terms and as a percentage of GDP: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00...

How much would be enough? 15% of GDP, 20%, 50%?

I'm generally in favour of public services over ruthless privatization but I don't understand how Britain is to survive as a nation of nurses and pensioners supported by a tax base of Uber Eats riders.
by tho23i23434234 | 2025-09-09 11:45:15+00:00
I've come to wonder if this just because the culture of Japan itself has been so "crabby".

It's just too inward looking these days - probably why technical innovations in Japan don't get shaped to meet the worlds needs, but gets sold as if it were a luxury artisan-product (ala "swiss-made" stuff).

The trouble with people who criticize Japan (incl. Japanese) is that they think this is because of "old people & culture" - but actually, no, the "old" Japanese (in the 1900s-1980s) seemed to have been extraordinarily curious about the world, and also very clever in marketing things. The issue is most definitely "modern", but ofc. saying that is verboten in the dogma of liberalism.
by jerrythegerbil | 2025-09-09 11:46:16+00:00
“thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers”

Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.

I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
by mrweasel | 2025-09-09 11:46:43+00:00
I have reasons to believe that my sister works like this. We joke that she has "office hours". She will rarely answer messages or calls that she does not expect right away. Then at around eight in the evening, every other days or so, messages will start trickling in.

At first it was a bit annoying, but once you know that she works like that it perfectly fine. I'm starting to think that she's doing modern communication correct.
by alt227 | 2025-09-09 11:46:45+00:00
> we did this to ourselves

I would argue that a small minority of the human race did this to the rest.

> the lack of foresight

Everybody on the planet is well aware of what is happening and why. Its not lack of foresight, it is pure ignorance and apathy of those who are making money off the backs of these tragedies.
by lonelyasacloud | 2025-09-09 11:49:33+00:00
Given current leaderships; it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where access to leading AI models from the US or China could be cut-off, restricted or otherwise compromised.

ASML, while European, has significant exposure to Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and is therefore vulnerable to risks from both sides. At the same time, the EU is aware of the danger of falling behind in its AI capabilities compared to the US and China.

In that light, the investment seems likely to be a mix of tax efficiency, building goodwill with the EU leaders, and a strategic hedge by ASML to ensure some degree of AI capability closer to home.
by Rzor | 2025-09-09 11:49:33+00:00
I'm in the same camp as you where I don't think the hype is justified, but when it comes to the medium and long term adoption I can easily see LLMs getting good enough so that programmers will be more like plumbers than system designers and maintainers. At the very least it's going to be hard to justify big teams. I do wonder if tech is ready for more competition then because starving is a hell of a motivator.
by antonybrahin | 2025-09-09 11:49:35+00:00
"How do I clone you?"

A past supervisor once asked me that. With AI agents now being hyped as workforce replacements, I decided to actually try and automate my job as a Senior Software Development Manager.

I went beyond prompts and built automations to mimic my specific workflow, testing if AI could handle:

Emails: Analyzing requests using our actual source code and internal wikis for context to draft replies.

Solutioning: Automating requirement analysis, technical documentation, and task creation.

Code Reviews: Building an AI to review pull requests in Azure DevOps.

The results were surprisingly close. AI isn't ready to replace me yet, but my experiment revealed its real-world limitations and just how important "context engineering" will be.
by n0w | 2025-09-09 11:49:46+00:00
A CRDT is any data structure that meets the definition (associative, commutative, idempotent, etc...)

Event Sourcing is not strictly designed to achieve eventual consistency in the face of concurrent writes though. But that doesn't mean it can't be!

I've also been considering an intent based CRDT system for a while now (looking forward to checking out GPs link) and agree that it looks/sounds very much like Event Sourcing. It's worth while being clear on the definition/difference between the two though!
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-09 11:51:14+00:00
You only need to check between caller and callee. If their constraints always match, it can't be triggered, if they contradict always, it will be triggered, else it can't be decided and the programmer can add annotations if he cares about, or the compiler can check what it would be like if the caller is inlined into his calling functions if that is trivial enough.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-09 11:51:20+00:00
> I can only hope steel manufacture can someday be as efficient and competitive as US boat building.

Better have expensive boats than no boats, particularly when preparing to wage war with a country that can be reached either by air - which means either missiles or nuclear bombers - or by water, the only option allowing for conventional warfare.

That's the thing we all have to prepare for, the inevitable confrontation with China.

In any case, the secret to cheap building is scale. When all you build is a few boats, planes or god knows what a year, of course each will be expensive. But if you build dozens, hundreds or - just look to WW2 - thousands of units, suddenly efficiencies of scale and standardization really kick in.
by muzani | 2025-09-09 11:51:42+00:00
Money is like blood. It transfers resources from one part to another part. If you don't have enough money, it's pretty bad.

If it flows too fast, it's bad. If it's too slow, it's even worse. Central banks control the flow to make sure it's not too fast or too slow. Stuff like AI is like caffeine, meth, a stimulant. You risk problems with resources moving too fast, even if they moved to the right areas.

If you needed more blood, you'd work out. You'd improve muscle efficiency or lung effectiveness.

If you needed more money, you can't really chase the money, you'd chase productivity or cut costs.

Some people might say the analogy doesn't work because you can just hoard money. But it has to move. To quote Finite and Infinite Games, property must be seen as compensation. And property must be seen to be consumed - wealth is performance. If someone with wealth does not show that they are worthy of it, it will be taken from them by force e.g. taxes. The thief does not take someone else's property, he takes what he believes is rightfully his.
by dinfinity | 2025-09-09 11:51:46+00:00
I think the key insight is that AI is (undoubtedly going to be) better at analysis and diagnosis than radiologists, but isn't yet widely deployed because:

1. The medical world doesn't accept new technologies easily. Humans get a much higher pass on bad performance than technology and especially than new technology. Things need to be extensively tested and certified, so adoption is slow.

2. AI is legally very different than a radiologist. The liability structure is completely different, which matters a lot in an environment that deals with life or death decisions.

3. Image analysis is not language analysis and generation. This specific machine learning part is not the bit of machine learning that has advanced enormously in the past two years. General knowledge of the world doesn't help that much when the task is to look at pixels and determine whether it's cancer or not. Now this can be improved by integrating the image analysis with all the other possibly relevant information (case history etc.) and diagnosing the case via that route.