MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixl97 | 2025-09-30 15:58:20+00:00
>I see far fewer discussions of open source as compared to AI.

Because the big discussions of open source were decades ago now. If you add up all the discussions of open source in the past I'd assume they'd out number the AI discussions now. Also, there is very little novel to discuss about open source. Now novel and 'important' are different things, but novel is what tends to write articles and get eyeballs.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-30 15:58:32+00:00
Complaining about jargon is lazy. Most communications about complicated things are not aimed at the layman, because to do anything useful with the complicated things, you tend to have to understand a fair amount of the context of the field. Once you're committed to actually learning about the field, the jargon is the easiest part: they're just words or phrases that mean something very specific.

To put it another way: Jargon is the source code of the sciences. To an outsider, looking in on software development, they see the somewhat impenetrable wall of parentheses and semicolons and go "Ah, that's why programming is hard: you have to understand code". And I hope everyone here can understand that that's an uninformed thing to say. Syntax is the easy part of programming, it was made specifically to make expressing the rigorous problem solving easier. Jargon is the same way: it exists to make expressing very specific things that only people in this subfield actually think about easier, instead of having to vaguely gesture at the concept, or completely redefine it every time anybody wants to communicate within the field.
by DennisP | 2025-09-30 15:58:51+00:00
So you can buy one robot that does everything and stays busy all day, or a bunch of robots that each do one thing and otherwise stay in closets.

If you have a factory, idle equipment costs you money. Right now our factories have only specialized robots, but they still have lots of people because it's too expensive to do the remaining tasks with specialized robots. We need general-purpose workers for the tasks we're not doing 24 hours every day.

This makes general-purpose robots look like the cheapest option for many tasks, but that could be offset if they cost a lot more. But the more of anything we build, the cheaper the thing ends up being. A very large number of identical robots will probably end up costing less than smaller numbers of lots of special purpose robots.
by seec | 2025-09-30 15:59:05+00:00
It's not very odd. It's all part of the drift of science, where now things are loosely defined and what passes for science is often political propaganda.

The removal of Aspergers label has a lot more do to with politics (not wanting to be associate with nazi) than anything else.

As far I'm concerned, the only hope is from genetics studies, which greatly accelerated thanks to computing. At some point with enough studies, we will know what's what. In the meantime, it is safe to discard most of the bullshit coming from psychological studies...
by mock-possum | 2025-09-30 15:59:33+00:00
His description of learning to be a programmer in that far future era was fun too, iirc there was just so much ‘legacy code’, like practically infinite libraries and packages to perform practically any function - that ‘coding’ was mostly a matter of finding the right pieces and wiring them together. Knowing the nuances of these existing pieces and the subtlety of their interpretation was the skill.
by projektfu | 2025-09-30 15:59:51+00:00
It's all false advertising. Rosetta Stone was the pinnacle of false language program advertising, but the rest just take their cue from that.

A part of what I was saying, which didn't come across, is that I think Duo lacks a way to get people to move on. Being "free", there is less incentive to give it up when it stops having a benefit. Eventually it becomes a daily accomplishment, like doing the Wordle, that doesn't really improve anyone. That doesn't make it bad, but it hinders progress at learning a language.
by Retric | 2025-09-30 16:00:28+00:00
I think you’re overestimating the number of authors, and forgetting there’s several AI companies. A revenue sharing agreement with 10% going to creators isn’t unrealistic.

Google’s revenue was 300 billion with 100 billion in profits last year, the AI industry may never reach that size but 1$/person on the planet is only 8 billion dollars, drop that to 70% of people are online so your down to 5.6 billion.

That’s assuming you’re counting books and individual Facebook posts in any language equally. More realistically there’s only 12k professional journalists in the US but they create a disproportionate amount of value for AI companies.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-30 16:01:21+00:00
Brother go to something like r/cryptocurrency to see people trying to justify the real utility...

I am not a crypto advocate but there are definitely a lot of similarities.

The only One thing I can respect Sam Altman for is the line that he said about bubbles and "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,”

This is the similarity... Both had some use cases, one might have more and the other but we are being so overexcited, I think being forced to be overexcited about this tech
by jrockway | 2025-09-30 16:01:41+00:00
I am not sure if fake people are a real problem for social media. Real Names ends up being pretty lame, people are more open and interesting when using a pseudonym. To me, it's clear that you understand the value because you are using a pseudonym here! White Lotus the App doesn't have a face, but it can still use social media productively.

What is annoying on social media are bots, reposts, commercial spam, etc. To me, it would make sense to go after undesirable content rather than undesirable accounts.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-09-30 16:01:54+00:00
First of all, good for you, spending your time building something rather than consuming. I see you have a lot of comments about "problems", and that is both typical of engineers and of the internet in general. So make sure you read this 10 times -- Good job going from nothing to something, it's a step people even twice your age struggle to accomplish. Keep going and the more you do it the better you will get!
by jerf | 2025-09-30 16:02:13+00:00
@dang: I'm not sure exactly when this was posted since it seems to have no date, but it's at least (2022) per HN's link from that year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861

I mention this because this is definitely the sort of content that can age poorly. I have no direct experience, I've never so much as touched Julia.
by everdrive | 2025-09-30 16:02:20+00:00
I'm not sure how to feel about this. EA has already been pretty terrible for years; pushing their origin storefront, pushing microtransaction hell in games, lazy [sport franchise] [current year] releases, etc. I think the last good year for EA was probably in the 2000s. Usually these sorts of acquisitions make the product worse, and EA might get "worse" in some strict sense, but there's not much to lose.
by JdeBP | 2025-09-30 16:02:22+00:00
In addition to the video types that mpicker0 and lysace mentioned, here's yet another:

Fake, and dishonest, Christian Country Music.

I learned of this through Fil Henley, who just pointed out Ella Scott (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0wtyIljNns) which is an AI account with AI-generated songs and thumbnails being produced at an unfeasibly high rate for an actual human. There are astroturfing channels under other names that purport, with more AI fakery, to show themselves alongside Ella Scott. There's an Ella Scott psychology channel tapping into the self-help market. There's an Ella Scott Soulnotes channel. There are not-declared-AI linked accounts on other platforms. Until this all got high exposure, there was an active PayPal donation setup for a non-existent Ella Scott charity.

This isn't even the first firehose account of AI-generated CCM that M. Henley has covered. There has been the improbably double-barrelled James Hilton-Cowboy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HORuCSsDLI) for example.

And there is an audience of Christians being taken in by these thinking that they are real performers.
by jimbokun | 2025-09-30 16:02:37+00:00
> the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind.

That's completely different than being your enemy.

What you want to avoid are work environments where most workers are focused on gaming internal politics to get ahead. Those environments are soul destroying.

But that's not all work environments. And most work environments are some mix of internal politics and wanting to actually create good and useful products.
by paulfitz | 2025-09-30 16:02:51+00:00
I'm quietly adding "pull requests" for data to Grist https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/issues/1829 - been wanting to do this for a long time.

I tried doing this years ago as a stand-alone project and it was too much. I wrote a data diff/patch/merge tool called "daff" that worked okay. But I've always wanted to add this to a proper spreadsheet tool like Grist.

I really want people working on data projects to be able to work more like coders, with pull requests and reviews. Not all data projects are as curated as that, sometimes your data is just a big soup, but when it is curated, there should be a better workflow.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-30 16:04:14+00:00
I was at a meeting of a bunch of VCs a while ago (a couple of months). The principal partner of one of the larger funds said that they will now only consider investments that are AI related. Just to give you a data point, I'm not saying that that is a trend. But if that's a market representative you can't fault the supply side for adapting to it.
by throw0101c | 2025-09-30 16:04:18+00:00
Study summary:

> The biannual shift between Daylight Saving and Standard Time leads to meaningful, negative societal health consequences. However, the biomedical impact of remaining in either time policy is poorly understood. By incorporating county-level solar light patterns, time policy, and health data with circadian models, we demonstrate that shifting to permanent Standard Time would lead to a decrease in the prevalence of stroke and obesity. A shift to permanent Daylight Saving Time would also result in a decrease, though less so than permanent Standard Time. These health impact patterns are highly dependent on both latitude and longitudinal position within a time zone. It will be crucial to consider these data in the ongoing debates surrounding time policy.

Study abstract:

> Seasonal changes in time policy, such as switching between Standard Time (SDT) and Daylight Saving Time (DST), have been adopted by many countries, including the United States. While transitioning between SDT and DST has notable acute negative population health impacts, the chronic impact of these time policies on health has not been well evaluated. To estimate the impact of permanent SDT or DST on health, we modeled the circadian impact of SDT, DST, and Biannual Shifting (BAS) across a year in the contiguous, continental United States. We find that BAS produces a greater burden on the circadian system as compared to either permanent SDT or DST. Chronotype as well as location (latitude and location within time zones) impact this burden. Analyzing these data relative to county-level health data (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Places dataset), we find that, under idealized light exposure conditions and after controlling for health and socioeconomic factors, there would be a decrease in the prevalence of both obesity [0.78% (0.06% to 1.49%)] and stroke [0.09% (0.04% to 0.14%)] under SDT compared with the current policy. The prevalence of both obesity [0.51% (0.09% to 0.93%)] and stroke [0.07% (0.04% to 0.09%)] would also decrease under permanent DST, though to a lesser degree. Our data, reflecting the impact of time policy on circadian burden and subsequent health benefits, support the cessation of BAS.

* https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2508293122#sec-1
by __jonas | 2025-09-30 16:04:33+00:00
Just to be clear I'm understanding correctly:

This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?

I'm asking because that is what it looks like, but AI / LLMs are not specifically mentioned in this blog post, they just say news are 'generated' under the 'News in your language' heading, which seems to imply that is what they are doing.

I'm a little skeptical towards the approach, when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those are correct – and it does seem like sometimes they just use pure LLM output, as no sources are cited, or it's quoted as 'common knowledge'.
by yummypaint | 2025-09-30 16:04:46+00:00
Spreadsheets occupy a weird position in many organizations. They are "functional" programs, but most people who make them have no concept of how "functional programming" compares to other paradigms, nor do they need to.

Spreadsheets just work, perhaps so well that they have become victims of their own success. They are such effective tools that they are lumped in with other user facing office productivity software, and as a result they seem to be overlooked by more technical people with programming skills in other languages. I always thought the spreadsheet format could be expanded and improved to be able to handle more use cases and behave more like a normal program, but there has been shockingly little effort put into trying this out. At one point there was something that acted like a spreadsheet where any cell could be a python expression, but I think it's defunct now.

There will be no innovation from Microsoft on this front. We should really decouple the spreadsheet concept from excel the product.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-30 16:04:49+00:00
> Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer not a customer.

Someone recently highlighted the shift from social networks to social media in a way I'd never thought about:

>> The shift from social networks to social media was subtle, and insidious. Social networks, systems where you talk to your friends, are okay (probably). Social media, where you consume content selected by an algorithm, is not. (immibis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403867)

Specifically, in the same way that insufficient supply of mortgage securities (there's a finite number of mortgages) led to synthetic CDOs [0] in order to artificially boost supply of something there was a market for.

Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from strangers into your eyeballs) are the synthetic CDOs of content, with about the same underlying utility.

There is in fact a finite amount of individually useful content per unit of time.

[0] If you want the Michael Lewis-esque primer on CDOs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-30 16:05:14+00:00
Abstraction isn't to gatekeep; it's to increase the utility. It's the same as "dependency inversion" in programming: do your logic in terms of interfaces/properties, not in terms of a particular instance. This makes reasoning reusable. It also often makes things clearer by cutting out distracting details that aren't related to the core idea.

People are aware that you need context to motivate abstractions. That's why we start with numbers and fractions and not ideals and localizations.

Jargon in any field is to communicate quickly with precision. Again the point is not to gatekeep. It's that e.g. doctors spend a lot of time talking to other doctors about complex medical topics, and need a high bandwidth way to discuss things that may require a lot of nuance. The gatekeeping is not about knowing the words; it's knowing all of the information that the words are condensing.
by treetalker | 2025-09-30 16:06:21+00:00
For one, I welcome RSS (back) and say the more, the better. I much prefer to pull specific types of information at my own set intervals when I need them, instead of either having undifferentiated information pushed on me continuously like a blast from a fire hose, or having to reach out to manually check and filter many individual sources. The idea is to schedule my receipt and processing of the information, and then refine the stream itself as well as the intervals I use to view it and the total amount of time I spend on it.

I'm currently on the hunt for an RSS reader that has good filtering and sorting functionality, so I can (for instance) pull several feeds from only certain sources, but not see any posts/articles about terms A or B, yet see and sort any posts with term C by time, followed by either posts from source 1 with terms C and D, or posts from source 2 with terms E or F but not G, which would be sorted by relevance.

I know that's a complicated and probably poorly written explanation; but I'm imagining something like Apple Mail Rules for RSS.
by phoenicyan | 2025-09-30 16:07:13+00:00
I describe my experience in writing a SQL transpiler using AI tools and a PEG parser in C++.

Curious to hear what you think!

Introduction I wanted to demonstrate some of my ideas for a SQL transplilation (conversion between Postgres and T-SQL dialects). I chose an AI from one of the most reputable vendors: gemini.google.com. I limited the goals of my project to: Implement a parser that understands a couple of SQL dialects (Postgres and T-SQL). Implement a builder that converts AST into an internal representation of a SQL statement. Implement the output statement generator in the desired dialect.

For example, the Transpiler should be able to convert a T-SQL statement such as SELECT TOP 10 max([dbo].[col1]) FROM [dbo].[tbl] into an equivalent Postgres statement SELECT max("dbo"."col1") FROM "dbo"."tbl" LIMIT 10 and vice-versa.

As an additional benefit of this exercise, I wanted to learn about a modern parsing system. After learning about lex/yacc at college many years ago, I only had some experience with the Gold parser back in the beginning of the 2000s. And I also knew from my previous attempt to learn Antlr4 - it has unpredictable parsing time and numerous other problems, including “reduce-reduce” conflicts that are very hard to resolve. I googled around and found a modern parsing tool called PEG, along with its C++ variant, cpp-peglib, on GitHub.

Source code for this project is available here: https://github.com/phoenicyan/sql_transpiler.

Conclusion Gemini was making numerous assumptions about my intentions and generated something entirely different from what I wanted. But I definitely improved my skills of telling Gemini what I wanted by asking it to do very primitive assignments. In a few cases, the AI saved me a bit of time, e.g., “write procedure to split text in vector of lines” or “write procedure to iterate all files in specified path and read the files as text.” The AI helped teach me about the PEG parser, the Visitor pattern, etc. The idea behind the SQL Transpiler was to start with a very basic parser that extracts identifiers, numbers, and string literals, and then add various rules, such as LIMIT/TOP. This idea could be fruitful, and I would appreciate your feedback (my contact is phoenicyan at gmail dot com). I want to learn alternative ideas for a transpiler, especially from people who have had previous experience in the creation of transpilers. In Part 2, I’m excited to share with you a fully functional transpiler that brings this idea to life.
by HenryAI | 2025-09-30 16:07:31+00:00
New mathematical framework proves convergence guarantees for high-dimensional sphere packing - the problem underlying error-correcting codes, crystal structures, and optimal data compression. The approach reconciles barrier dynamics with discrete-time guarantees through Riemannian optimization, offering the first rigorous solution to periodic rigidity in contact frameworks. This could unlock breakthroughs in 5G/6G communications, materials discovery, and neural network initialization.
by mothballed | 2025-09-30 16:07:54+00:00
If you spend investor money at a literal casino while advertising a non-casino related business, and pay the investors back, probably people will view you as not committing a crime.

If you get investor money or get a loan on the basis of funding logistics investments, bet it on roulette red, and go bankrupt, I would expect you'd be looking at hard jail time for fraud.

So I'm thinking the crime would be nothing, because he was a winner, and the optics totally changed, and fraud relies on very subjective opinions of a jury.
by mac-attack | 2025-09-30 16:07:57+00:00
Big news junkie but I don't feel the need to buy into Kagi's ecosphere personally as a SearXNG user. The article touches on signal over noise and I have found two solutions that work for me as a news junkie:

News Minimalist [1] and Boring Report [2]. Both aggregate news and (IMO) most importantly provide links from multiple outlets for the same stories. Really made me notice the clickbait and allows me to be more selective in choosing reputable sources.

Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance, while the latter summarizes articles. (That doesn't feel useful for supporting journalism as a whole so I typically click through and read the articles unless I don't like the outlet reporting)

[1] https://www.newsminimalist.com/

[2] https://www.boringreport.org/app
by throw0101c | 2025-09-30 16:08:08+00:00
So the study of how light and biology interact is called chronobiology:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

AFAICT, all national (US, CA) and international (EU) chronobiology societies, as well as many sleep researchers, state that from a health perspective we should (a) get rid of the twice-yearly time switching, and (b) stay on Standard ("winter") Time year-round:

* https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SRBR-Statement-o...

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

* http://www.chronobiocanada.com/official-statements

* https://sleepresearchsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/...

* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
by rijavecb | 2025-09-30 16:08:08+00:00
GLM 4.5 is a great budget option for me. After cancelling Claude sub ($20 USD one), I've been trying Gemini 2.5 Pro through Gemini CLI, and it was okay for landing pages and UI. However, I switched to GLM through Claude Code using their cheapest subscription and it's been pretty good so far. It feels more creative than Gemini when it comes to UI, not Claude Sonnet level (can't compare with Opus), but it's 90% there. It also follows instructions better than Gemini, and makes fewer or no syntax errors. Gemini through Gemini CLI would somewhat often completely mess up Astro files, or be a bit lazy. No such problems on AI Studio though.

A few days I got their quarterly promo plan ($9 USD), so I'm excited to try 4.6.
by guillego | 2025-09-30 16:08:19+00:00
I have an XT-1 from 2015 (still working!) and recently started considering upgrading to an XT-5 but I'm a little hesitant to buy a "new" camera first released in 2023 that still retails for almost the same price as two years ago. I'm so torn between just going for it and waiting (who knows how long) for the X-T6 to come out. Perhaps I should just try to find a good deal on an X-T4.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-09-30 16:08:23+00:00
Here's a weird data point: I was recently doing some physical labor with a neighbor who is probably a recovering addict with what some might call a "partially fried brain." After a bit, I noticed that he liked to have his phone out playing AI slop videos with Star Wars-like stories about Galactic this or Federation that.

He said it settled his brain better than human generated content. It was soothing, consistent and just one or two notches above bland.

I left with the impression that his brain and the AI content had a great impedance match.