MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simoncion | 2025-09-05 08:44:31+00:00
> But those aren't the ones that explicitly say "here is how to block us in robots.txt"

Facebook attempted to legally acquire massive amounts of textual training data for their LLM development project. They discovered that acquiring this data in an aboveboard manner would be in part too expensive [0], and in part simply not possible [1]. Rather than either doing without this training data or generating new training data, Facebook decided to just pirate it.

Regardless of whether you agree with my expectations, I hope you'll understand why I expect many-to-most companies in this section of the industry to publicly assert that they're behaving ethically, but do all sorts of shady shit behind the scenes. There's so much money sloshing around, and the penalties for doing intensely anti-social things in pursuit of that money are effectively nonexistent.

[0] because of the expected total cost of licensing fees

[1] in part because some copyright owners refused to permit the use, and in part because some copyright owners were impossible to contact for a variety of reasons
by samvillaf | 2025-09-05 08:45:03+00:00
Been working for the past five months on Danta, a platform to build, scale, and deploy AI agents. Progress has been good, and my cofounder and I finally reached the point where we think it is ready to test the market waters.

Why it took that long? Because we wanted it to be as simple as possible to create agents and connecting them. Think it as Vercel but for agents with autoscaling and managed memory.

To see if our ideas actually work, we thought a hackathon could be a good way to get people to try it out. Have you seen other companies do this? Did it work for them? We are targeting junior devs and university students. Feel free to share your thoughts
by CMay | 2025-09-05 08:45:19+00:00
The potential for misinterpretation didn't escape me, but I was also confident that there was sufficient context to understand it. An Oxford comma there would have suggested a more careful cadence if it were spoken, which is not what I wanted.

As you said, it can be rare to see a case where it truly is ambiguous, but the context here negates that well enough.
by simonw | 2025-09-05 08:45:21+00:00
There's a subtle but important difference between crawling data to train a model and accessing data as part of responding to a prompt and then piping that content into the context in order to summarize it (which may be what you mean by "regurgitation" here, I'm not sure.)

I think that distinction is lost on a lot of people, which is understandable.
Tell HN: Top 3 GitHub Community Discussions of the Past Year Are Critical of AI
by latexr | 2025-09-05 08:45:33+00:00
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions?discussions_q=is%3Aopen+sort%3Atop+created%3A%3E%3D2024-09-05

Submitted as a Tell HN since HN strips URL parameters on link submissions, and those are important for the last year filtering. Observation was made by a user on one of the posts: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/171322#discussioncomment-14301138
by moritonal | 2025-09-05 08:45:38+00:00
Watching a checker-board of laser-light scattering across your eyes is a highly uncomfortable and wildly unique experience. I agree with the other comment that it's a very safe process, done hundreds of thousands of times, and improves your quality of life measurably.

The Dr asked me to please be quiet because I was in awe describing the whole process out loud.
by lucideer | 2025-09-05 08:46:04+00:00
Firstly let me agree with both current sibling commenters: zero bias is impossible & the brand & extent of Wikipedia's biases is distinctly bad.

That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.

Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.

I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-09-05 08:46:48+00:00
The problem with this conflict is not logical, it's emotional. You can not solve it by reason - many smart people tried in the past and everybody failed. The amount of negative emotions boiling for decades prevents any possible chance for peace. Even if there is a kind of truce, you can be 100% sure that someone will break it sooner or later and the amount of bad blood will grow exponentially.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-05 08:47:01+00:00
Or "anything left of right is left-leaning", I suppose. It's the Overton window and the steady decline of moderation; centrists are wrong no matter who you ask ("pick a side you coward", "silence is complicity"), moderate Republicans are RINOs, Republican In Name Only [0], and their disloyalty to the Party is shamed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_in_name_only
by viking123 | 2025-09-05 08:47:29+00:00
There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.
by RossBencina | 2025-09-05 08:47:51+00:00
Computer graphics is not my field, so forgive my ignorance, but could you explain the pros and cons of your "traditional graphics pipeline" approach and more "modern" approaches (I'm guessing that means doing most of the work in shaders)? At the moment, and looking towards the future, do you think hardware (mobile and mainstream desktop) will continue to support your approach just as well, or are shader-based approaches (I guess using multi-channel SDFs) likely to gain the upper hand at some point?
by raducu | 2025-09-05 08:49:00+00:00
> Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?

Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed.

There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down.

This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7.

My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me.

That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff.

My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse".
by kulahan | 2025-09-05 08:49:09+00:00
Yeah, I dunno about you, but I’m not using the same kinds of stuff as billionaires.

It will be the same - because of economics. If you think you’ll be just as healthy as long-lived as them, you’re crazy. It’s literally not the case anywhere else in life. Food, housing, opportunities, healthcare ALREADY, transportation, and kitchen sinks.

> besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies?

Man, when you’re so melodramatic about something as benign as aging, you’re really hard to take seriously.

If you can’t see my point of view by now, and how it’s a hell of a gamble to hope we stop doing the thing we’ve been doing pretty much since the dawn of man, I don’t think I have anything else to add to the conversation.

I also just think it’s mentioning that you are your body, in its entirety. We almost certainly have more than one brain, at the very least.
by robertfall | 2025-09-05 08:49:22+00:00
It's quite exciting to see how much movement there has been in Async ruby. It's not a silver bullet for traditional Rails-like apps, but it's a whole new frontier for Ruby, and is particularly timely and helpful for LLM integrations.

It's also been done in a way that is transparent and practically colorless (in contrast to async/await), AND is competitive performance wise with the big dogs.

I expect it to gain in popularity over the coming years.
by prmoustache | 2025-09-05 08:49:44+00:00
Well in the case of alcohol and tobacco it is a bit different, it is a physical good that can't be cloned infinitely and distributed through many medias. If you don't want your kids to have access to the internet at home and fap all afternoon it is quite easy. If you don't want them to look at smartphone from other kids, all bets are off.

As an under 12y old, my first encounter with porn was as porn paper magazines rolled and stored between the wall and the radiators of my school class. No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.

As a parent I'd rather pay for access to an ethical porn website that promote pleasure for all parties and safe sex and give access to it to my teenagers than trying at all cost to prevent them from seeing all porn.
by tomhow | 2025-09-05 08:50:01+00:00
Thanks! Big discussions too.

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (415 comments)

95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments)

AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944 - Aug 2025 (235 comments)
by nh2 | 2025-09-05 08:50:25+00:00
You are conflating Consistency and Durability in a way that is not necessary.

FS snapshotting can be useful to work on files on which fsync() is never called, but for which you need a consistent cross-file view nontheless while the system is online.

Another example is the case of sqlite with default settings as discussed recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45005866), where the presence of a file determines whether or not transactions will be missing on next access. Because SQLite does not fsync the file's parent directory by default, transactions would be correctly recorded in by FS snapshotting, but lost in a block device snapshot. Your argument is correct that they would also be lost in power loss, but that does not matter for the fact that there exists a valid way to use that software in some situations where you care about consistency and not about power losses.

This is why having such a feature in file systems is useful.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-09-05 08:50:43+00:00
Got to a local "free" jam session in an artsy underground club. Half of them play avant-garde, half noise rock. Most are not sure what the difference is. Most feel great by not being constrained by following the rules or having the skills of playing the instruments. Cute on a good day.

Go to a jazz jam where non-pros are not afraid to go. Still usually a downer for the listener. However, they all know they suck.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-09-05 08:51:13+00:00
I bet we'd have better lawyers if they did teach them how to manage paralegals to do the grunt work. I really wouldn't hold the legal profession up as "this is how to do it".

And doctors do not "have nurses" in the way that you've said; they're entirely different professions. I'll allow that it's just a poor example of the point you're trying to make.

> That a tool is common in the real world is not an excuse to let students outsource the work that is the heart of learning.

This is, I think, the point: the work is not the heart of the thing. A blacksmith using a power hammer is not less of a blacksmith; the heart of being a blacksmith is not being able to hit a piece of metal really hard. As we are finding out with coding; writing code is not the heart of software development. The grunt work that an AI can do is not the heart of the learning that needs to happen. Guiding an AI to write software is similar to a blacksmith using a power hammer.

I spent the day using an AI to write documents. They're good documents. We need them. I was able to get way more done by using the AI to write them. I don't think this is bad. And if it's not bad for me, why should it be bad for a student?
by SunlightEdge | 2025-09-05 08:51:30+00:00
One of the things that doesn't seem to be emphasised enough is that LLMs can be great as Tutors for students. E.g. They could really help students not understanding fully a section of Mathematics and really break down the logic.

Teachers can also use them to mark homework.

They are a boon as much as they are a bane.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-09-05 08:52:13+00:00
It may not be theft, but it is stealing :

---

Stealing: the action or offence of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft.

---

Regardless if there is anything physical missing, you're still obtaining something for which you don't have the ownership rights, therefore another persons property.

And somewhere there's a starving artist that would get $0.25 per purchase that now gets nothing, so you could argue that you're stealing from the artist.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-09-05 08:52:30+00:00
I think at least partially, it's not an anti-LLM stance, it's an anti-"kill my website" stance. Many LLM crawlers behave very poorly, hurting websites in the process. One result of that is that website owners are forced to use things like Anubis, which has the side-effect of hurting everybody else, too.

I prefer this approach because it specifically targets problematic behavior without impacting clients who don't engage in it.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-05 08:52:34+00:00
Proof carrying code is efficient at runtime; the verifier only ever has to run once to verify the binary, which in principle can simply be done at install. Even the verification itself can be fast enough because it's only checking the soundness of existing proofs, not having to generate new ones from scratch. Where there are genuine needs to "make the proof system more expressive", this can be done by adding trusted axioms which will generally be simple enough to manually check; the verifier itself need not become more complex.

We've seen a lot of complexity happen with Java but that was generally in the standard library facilities that are bundled with the language and runtime, not really the basic JVM type checking pass. Proof carrying code is closer to the latter.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-05 08:54:14+00:00
I went down a similar path.

I was already tainted by starting on 8 an 16 bit home computers, the magic of Amiga and OS/2, before getting into UNIX via Xenix.

The wonderful dungeon of the university library did the rest, showing me all the alternative universe.

It also helped my university was keen into teaching the ways of Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Oberon, in addition to classical UNIX lectures.

I was really lucky in that regard.
by rajatkulk | 2025-09-05 08:54:18+00:00
I used it during dev for debugging, figured to just expose it for anyone that is used to having a counter on top of their games :)

If an fps counter makes an app seem illegitimate to you, and the countless changelog, user testimonials don’t help, then nothing I say will convince you otherwise, so I’m not going to waste either of our times :)
by miki123211 | 2025-09-05 08:55:10+00:00
Stablecoins are a necessary legal hack.

The US has regulated itself into a corner when it comes to AML/KYC. Those regulations ended up causing more problems than they solve, but they can't ever be undone. If something ever happens, like a terrorist attack funded by money laundering activity that the existing regulations could possibly have prevented, the blame will fall squarely on the shoulders of the politicians who decided to undo them.

It's much easier (and politically safer) to say that stablecoins are just a different asset class, and hence very different regulations should apply to them. This essentially lets politicians design a parallel, much more permissive financial regulatory system from scratch, with many lessons learned from the existing one. If something ever happens, it can always be blamed on "those pesky stablecoin issuers who keep prioritizing profits over the security of our nation."

From a purely technical perspective, any stablecoin could be replaced by a centralized database mapping public keys to balances, at much lower cost and with very little loss in functionality. That, however, would look too much like a bank from the regulatory side.
by tene80i | 2025-09-05 08:56:26+00:00
I’m really not sure what you’re arguing. You want a precise test for being a good PM, that can be marked like an examination with correct and incorrect answers? It’s not engineering - it’s a role largely to do with learning and measuring and facilitating streams of work across multiple different (highly opinionated!) types of professionals - user researchers, engineers, designers, marketers, copywriters, data scientists - all of whose expertise is needed to ensure good outcomes. The fact that it can’t be measured as a multiple choice test doesn’t mean it isn’t skill. But if you really want to go down that route, then you’d ask a PM to explain some ways of proving the value of a potential feature, or the different ways to prioritise a roadmap, or how to manage challenging stakeholders, or indeed how to get good outcomes from colleagues who insist that only they are the people with any kind of skill…

Don’t worry, PMs are also used to working with engineers who view their profession as the only special one. Managing that is part of how to get good outcomes.

If you’ve mainly encountered bad PMs, then hey I’m sorry for you. Find somewhere to work with better colleagues?

But you’ll not convince me that one profession is just inherently better than another. That’s silly, and speaks to a lack of empathy that is, if you’re still looking for a checkbox test for the role, the type of thing that would cause you to fail it immediately.
by IanCal | 2025-09-05 08:56:48+00:00
That's the one! It's not even that weird of a case compared to others but is an excellent example.

Here's the history of the Paris example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Paris where there was one, then many, then fewer universities. Answering a question of "what university is referred to by X" depends on why you want to know, there are multiple possible answers. Again it's not the weirdest one, but a good clear example of some issues.

There's a company called Merk, and a company called Merk. Merk is called Merk in the US but MSD outside of it. The other Merk is called Merk outside the US and EMD inside it. Technically one is Merk & Co and used to be part of Merk but later wasn't and due to trademark disputes, which aren't even all resolved yet.

This is an area I think LLMs actually have a space to step in, we have tried perfectly modelling everything so we can let computers which have no ability to manage ambiguity answer some questions. We have tried barely modelling anything and letting humans figure out the rest, as they're typically pretty poor at crafting the code, and that has issues. We ended up settling largely on spending a bunch of human time modelling some things, then other humans building tooling around them to answer specific questions by writing the code, and a third set who get to actually ask the questions.

LLMs can manage ambiguity, and they can also do more technical code based things. We haven't really historically had things that could manage ambiguity like this for arbitrary tasks without lots of expensive human time.

I am now wondering if anyone has done a graph db where the edges are embedding vectors rather than strict terms.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-05 08:57:55+00:00
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with family computers, our access was limited usually to porn magazines. For us magazines were a bit of a ritual—find one and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the library.

Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.

Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.

---

I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).
by leftcenterright | 2025-09-05 08:57:58+00:00
In the title you have written 'Remote (Worldwide)" while on the jobs page it says "Remote (United States)" https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Railway/6ddcfe47-6cce-469b-ba6d-4f0... and the same for https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Railway/b8072f95-043f-404d-a313-f0b...
by devoutsalsa | 2025-09-05 08:58:22+00:00
I'm a Wise user. Transfers are mostly fine for currencies they support. The transfer is usually pretty fast. I tried paying for a guided Hike in Tbilisi, Georgia a few years ago, and the transfer took almost a week, so it's slow in some cases. For currencies Wise doesn't support, you need to look at other options, such as Western Union or crypto.
by ragazzina | 2025-09-05 08:58:27+00:00
If a corporation walks up to you, taps you with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate of you slowly materializes, then walks away with the duplicate, would you consider it theft or copyright infringement?

You would argue they are depriving you of a scarce material resource: your knowledge and experience that make you a valuable, esteemed professional. The corporation would argue that nobody is removing your copy of knowledge and experience, and they would not have hired you in the first place anyway.
by sgt101 | 2025-09-05 08:59:38+00:00
EV's look like EV's because they don't have the same constraints on space that ICEV's do. There is no engine in the front/back, no water pump, no oil pump, no water cooled radiator, no starter motor... so on so on. There's also a great big battery under the floor pan and no gas tank.

They are also heavier, so need different set ups in order to handle decently.

But, that's why they look so different.
by dangus | 2025-09-05 08:59:56+00:00
MS access still exists and is still maintained and offered for sale.

You should not look back on those solutions and neglect to acknowledge their limitations. Access can only handle small databases (maximum 2GB) and about 100 simultaneous connections.

Access is basically a product of the technological limitations of its time. It isn’t designed the way it is because that way is the best design.

The kind of business that relied on Access is going to find that solutions like Airtable are far easier and more powerful, and certainly less prone to data loss than mom and pop’s shared drive. There are even open source self-hosted alternatives like NocoDB and Baserow (or cloud hosted).

You’ll inevitably complain about the subscription cost of SaaS solutions but it’s not like MS Office business licenses were ever cheap.