MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miltonlost | 2025-09-30 17:59:30+00:00
Ok... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least.

And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. "

That should be a colon after "two choices". (There's also clearly more than two options, one of which does not involve run-on sentences with his otherwise poor grammar. James seems like a shitty prose crafter if he's unable to avoid run-ons.)
by kevcampb | 2025-09-30 17:59:36+00:00
> 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?

This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-09-30 17:59:52+00:00
> Experimental, to me, means "it might eat your data, have backups" not "we might decide to remove this module from the kernel for non-technical reasons, good luck users"

I don't think the kernel devs share that definition.

> Reiserfs sat in the kernel for years after he went to prison and didn't get removed on such short notice even though it was equally if not more unmaintained.

Reiserfs wasn't marked experimental.
by whakim | 2025-09-30 18:00:23+00:00
Ok, but what was the cost of labor put into curation of the training dataset and performing the fine-tuning? Hasn’t the paper’s conclusion been repeatedly demonstrated - that it is possible to get really good task-specific performance out of fine-tuned smaller models? There just remains the massive caveat that closed-source models are pretty cheap and so the ROI isn’t there in a lot of cases.
by mnkv | 2025-09-30 18:00:37+00:00
> the generation of 281,128 augmented examples, from which 1,000 were held out as a benchmark test set.

This model is trained on a custom dataset of 280k examples then tested on 1k very similar examples from the same dataset. Of course it is specialized to outperform general models on this specific task in this specific domain with this specific json format for output.

This is a reasonable hobby project and interesting approach to synthetic data generation but not impressive research.

At minimum you should test your model on other benchmarks that have similar tasks e.g. docbench
by LeFantome | 2025-09-30 18:00:57+00:00
I am not going to advocate to put bcachefs on 200 production machines.

However, I would like to push back on that article.

It says that bcachefs is "unstable" but provides no evidence to support that.

It says that Linus pushed back on it. Yes, but not for technical reasons but rather process ones. Think about that for a second though. Linus is brutal on technology. And I have never heard him criticize bcachefs technically except to say that case insensitivity is bad. Kind of an endorsement.

Yes, there have been a lot of patches. It is certainly under heavy development. But people are not losing their data. Kent submitted a giant list of changes for the kernel 6.17 merge window (ironically totally on time). Linus never took them. We are all using the 6.16 version of bcachefs without those patches. I imagine stories of bcachefs data loss would get lots of press right now. Have you heard any?

There are very few stories of bcachefs data loss. When I have heard of them, they seems to result in recovery. A couple I have seen were mount failures (not data loss) and were resolved. It has been rock-solid for me.
by imiric | 2025-09-30 18:01:01+00:00
> We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.

I agree, but how do you envision that happening? Journalism died a long time ago, arguably around the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, and it was further buried by social media. A niche tech company can only provide a better way to consume what's out there, not solve such large societal problems.

> There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed.

I don't think their intent is to change how people are informed. What this aims to do is replace endless doomscrolling on sites that are incentivized to rob us of our attention and data, with spending a few minutes a day to get a sense of general events around the world. If something piques your interest, you can visit the linked sources, or research the event elsewhere. But as a way of getting a quick general overview of what's going on, I think it's great.
by willahmad | 2025-09-30 18:01:10+00:00
I wonder about the implications of this tech.

State of the things with doom scrolling was already bad, add to it layoffs and replacing people with AI (just admit it, interns are struggling competing with Claude Code, Cursor and Codex)

What's coming next? Bunch of people, with lots of free time watching non-sense AI generated content?

I am genuinely curious, because I was and still excited about AI, until I saw how doom scrolling is getting worse
by Rooster61 | 2025-09-30 18:01:28+00:00
> Reviews are the filter.

While gaming is indeed a concern, I think a bigger one is that the power behind reviews is derived from just that, the reviewers.

Human beings, playing the part of reviewers, are from my perspective becoming rapidly dumber due to a number of factors that are discussed ad nauseam here on HN. Or they are at least desensitized to the things that would prompt a negative review due to the sheer amount of shitty things they are exposed to that would prompt said review. If you shovel enough shit, the smell begins to not bother you any more.
by eastbound | 2025-09-30 18:01:56+00:00
I think this is the wrong method to deal with racist people. You’re talking to someone while criticizing the other and hoping the message will be read, this can be construed as passive-aggressive.

More importantly, by aiming for a strict exclusion, you make it into a us-or-them stake. Without discussion, they’ll just have to get rid of you, or you of them, but no entendre is possible. In this day and age, I think we should rather listen to each other and try to work on a centrist solution rather than leading to the current situation, which we’re all paying.

By being closed-minded, you miss informing yourself about racism prevention. By doing this, you do not try to resolve the problems, but create your own opponent.

Fourth, it may very well happen that GP became racist after a rape, for example. By segregating victims, you help criminals reproduce the crimes. As a matter of fact, if you chose racism, like the one made by your political leaders when they used race in their criteria to filter the location of the jobs, to derive the strategy of Boeing, and it mades planes crashes, and you cover it up with your accusations, it makes more planes crash.
by kossTKR | 2025-09-30 18:02:07+00:00
Wow that is dark, after Ghiblis staunch stance on AI.

These companies and their shareholders really are complete scum in my eyes, just like AI in miltech.

Not because the tech isn't super interesting but because they steal years of hard work and pain from actual artists with zero compensation - and then they brag about it in the most horrible way possible, with zero empathy.

Then comes losing the little humanity left the mainstream culture, exactly as Miyzaki said, leading to a dead cold and even more unjust society.
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-30 18:02:12+00:00
Maybe they should be trained on the understanding that making up a source is not "doing what you ask of them" when you ask for a source. It's actually the exact opposite of the "doing what you asked, not what you wanted" trope-- it's providing something it thinks you want instead of providing what you asked for (or being honest/erroring out that it can't).
by anonyfox | 2025-09-30 18:02:12+00:00
I don't know, my own DevOps practises evolve around straightforward shell/go/js snippets that try to enforce the absolute bare reasonable minimum of infrastructure as cheap as possible, but with scaling paths laid bare if needed ever. sometimes a few lambdas/workers+CDN solve problems for essentially zero cost, sometimes people are amazed how far a single VPS can carry them nowadays. Or how fast SQLite can be. DevOps is about the art of shipping value to customers as fast as possible, at scale, with minimum cost (but not being the developer itself usually). With continuous improvement loops. But I can count on a single hand how often I actually needed to "scale up" something so hard I needed full on data migrations and all.

Small, sharp tools, my friend.
by themafia | 2025-09-30 18:02:15+00:00
> The point of a financial market is to allocate capital to its most productive uses. Someone who is very good at allocating capital should be allocating a lot of capital, not her own Robinhood account.

These two facts are not connected at all. There's no reason to assume the market cannot work or reliably find the "most productive" uses of capital in the aggregate.

> And an efficient market would allocate a lot of capital to her

Then that would give a single individual more control over the market than is healthy and would naturally tend towards inefficiency. The basic presumption here is that centralization of the economy around a limited number of entities is great for efficiency. I can find no examples in history of this and I can find many where this actually just increases corruption.

Given everything we learned about the "too big to fail" era I find articles like this to be obvious and grotesque lies.
by larusso | 2025-09-30 18:02:47+00:00
I also don’t understand what people expect. Also it seems that everybody is constantly grilling their machines. Otherwise I can’t understand this need for even more power. I have the iPhone 16ProMax and upgraded from a 13ProMax. I didn’t really feel a difference. Mainly because I don’t use my phone for high performance applications or gaming.

[edit] typo
by kkukshtel | 2025-09-30 18:03:05+00:00
One of the best news sites (still running) that I use frequently is http://68k.news/ - it's sort of like this minus the AI summary and info part of the article.

It's just plain text web 1.0 page that uses some ranking algo to figure out the top stores of a given day across categories, and shows that headline and under it similar headlines across different news sources.

It used to pull in RSS from the sources so you could also read the articles in plaintext, but that broke a bit ago and the dev hasn't fixed it.

Regardless, I still find it a great site to quickly get up to speed on top stories of the day!

But also I really like (and pay for!) Kagi so happily support their own effort here.
by johnfn | 2025-09-30 18:03:21+00:00
> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform

I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a significantly better job at blocking out light. I've recommended them to all my friends, and many of them now swear by them as well. And don’t just take my word on it - Consumer Reports also says they’re the top rated sleep mask brand.

There is a certain irony (or not?) to talking about how the good is indistinguishable from the bad, and then accidentally mentioning the best. The Internet did bring me a lot of bad knock-off brands, but it also brought me MZOO, so I'm not sure if I should be complaining.
Show HN: Simple 'photobooth' app inspired by "The 28 AI tools I wish existed"
by maxaw | 2025-09-30 18:03:26+00:00
Enjoyed this article on the front page yesterday: https://sharif.io/28-ideas-2025 and thought I'd hack together No.22 - an app where you can take photos and apply filters (nano banana prompts under the hood)

Hopefully its a bit of fun!
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-30 18:03:46+00:00
Just finished reading this. If you've read about or heard some of the other Thiel Antichrist talks, this article actually adds to the conversation unlike many of the other articles that have been coming out about this. It goes deeper into what Girard's views were, and another theologian, Palaver, and his writings and how it relates to Thiel's views.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-09-30 18:03:52+00:00
Well, yes, I omitted anything that may or may not happen to explain the general principle. Cardinality-based optimizations can and do take place, but they depend on the db being aware of the shape of your data (you need to analyze the tables often) and depend on internal factors and heuristics that are subject to change between releases, can't be assumed across different databases, and may or may not actually speed up the query (pathological cases certainly exist, even in the real world).
by neop1x | 2025-09-30 18:04:02+00:00
iPhones are terrible with their link to an icloud account and their terrible repair situation with hardware component pairing.

I had an iPhone 7 for testing I bought on eBay. I had my icloud account logged into it. One day, I couldn't log in to the account despite having a correct password - "account is locked and cannot be used". It won't let me log off from the account on the device. So now I have an icloud-locked e-waste paperweight. It was an old device so I don't care much but purely on this experience I am not buying an apple device ever again.

I hope there will be more truly open devices in the future eventually... otherwise I will just start considering smartphones being 2FA/banking bullshit proprietary tracking/spying devices and avoid use them sporadically..
by ajross | 2025-09-30 18:04:16+00:00
> can't figure out what to do with even a fraction of the horsepower

That's sort of the funny thing here. Apple's situation is almost the perfect inverse of Intel's. Intel fell completely off the wagon[1], but they did so at exactly the moment where the arc of innovation hit a wall and could do the least damage. They're merely bad, but are still selling plenty of chips and their devices work... just fine!

Apple, on the other hand, launched a shocking, world-beating product line that destroys its competition in basically all measurable ways into a market that... just doesn't care that much anymore. All the stuff we want to spend transistors on moved into the cloud. Games live on GPUs and not unified SOCs. A handful of AI nerds does not much of a market make.

And iOS... I mean, as mentioned what are you even going to do with all that? Even the comparatively-very-disappointing Pixel 10 (I haven't even upgrade my 9!) is still a totally great all-day phone with great features.

[1] As of right now, unless 18A rides in to save them, Intel's best process is almost five YEARS behind the industry leader's.
by rapind | 2025-09-30 18:04:32+00:00
> On the desktop front I think AMD has been killing it but both companies need to start from scratch for laptops.

IMO Apple is killing it with the mac mini too. Obviously not if you're gaming (that has a lot to do with the OS though), but if you're OK with the OS, it's a powerhouse for the size, noise, and energy required.
by shijithpk | 2025-09-30 18:05:02+00:00
Suppose there's a pdf with lots of tables i want to scrape. I mention the pdf url in my message and with gemini's url context tool, i now have access to the pdf.

I can ask gemini to give me the pdf's content as a json and it complies most of the time. But at times, there's an introductory line like "Here's your json:". Those introductory lines interfere with programmatically using the output. They're sometimes there, sometimes not.

If I could have structured output at the same time as tool use, I can reliably use what gemini spits out as it'll be in a json, no annoying intro lines.
by chubot | 2025-09-30 18:05:05+00:00
Yeah that is nice, but ironically we can only have this discussion because Hacker News itself is not full of lemons

I can click on the profiles, and see "created 2009 or 2014", and think "OK this is probably a real person"

Whereas if this were Reddit or Instagram, and the account was created recently, I might think "that's AI spam".

So yeah someone has to do real work to create spaces that are not lemon markets. I guess people who have experienced that have coined "Dead Internet Theory"

(Although ironically, I would trust HN more on non-tech stuff like sleep masks, than I do on tech stuff. The tech stuff does have a bias towards what CEOs/investors think, although plenty of opposing opinions get voiced as well)
by Ericson2314 | 2025-09-30 18:05:10+00:00
I did not call everyone that uses LaTeX a cultist, I called everyone that is a fan of it a cultist.

> because it solves a problem that does not exist

No, the problems with LaTeX are real, objective, and undeniable.

> I am also weary of any piece of software that is controlled by a private entity, no matter how good the initial intentions are. Being open source is not really a guarantee of anything.

That is valid, but it does not excuse the accumulation of bad technical quality in LaTeX. Living in the stone age is not an efficacious solution to the problem of Typst's governance.
by jtbayly | 2025-09-30 18:05:19+00:00
> No, the citations don't guarantee that there weren't any hallucinations, but if you read something that makes you go "huh" – the citations give you a low-friction opportunity to read more.

Either you mean every time you read something interesting (“huh”) you should check it. But in that case, why bother with reading the AI summary in the first place…

Or you mean that any time you read something that sounds wrong, you should check it. But in that case, everything false in the summaries that happens to sound true to you will be confirmed in your mind without you ever checking it.
by alphazard | 2025-09-30 18:05:40+00:00
What everyone gets wrong about news curation is thinking people want the same news as everyone else, or "both sides" of a situation, or whatever mechanism for exposing them to things that someone else thinks are true.

What I actually want is a curated set of things that are useful to me personally given my situation. The most important things about my situation to give me useful news are things like: net worth, income, citizenship, family situation, where I live, what industries I work in, current investments, travel destinations, regulatory and political risks associated with any of those things, etc.

Because those are the things that dictate how the parts of the world I can't control are going to affect me (especially if I don't react). I don't want to hear about random things that aren't going to affect me when I'm looking at the news. Sometimes I want to learn new random/useless things for fun, but that's a leisure activity. It's totally separate from the "news", which is a thing that adults consume as a chore to better plan their lives.

The fundamental problem is that myself and others are not going to willing give out the personal information required to curate useful news feeds, so the news will always be filled with noise. Maybe local AI can help with that.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-30 18:05:42+00:00
Traditionally, "unwell" monarchs, even if absolute, were dethroned for the safety and well-being of the realm. That could be done gently, with "best effort" legalities - such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_Acts#Regency_Bill_1789

Unfortunately, there seems to be no equivalent tradition for plutocrats.
by geor9e | 2025-09-30 18:06:12+00:00
I wonder what really happened here:

"The judge said Javice had assembled a “very powerful list” of her charitable acts, which included organizing soup kitchens for the homeless when she was 7 years old and designing career programs for formerly incarcerated women."

At least for all my classmates doing the college application process, claims like that were almost always wild exaggerations of what we really did.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-30 18:06:15+00:00
Amazon ending commingling is going to be interesting. Instead of having 1-gallon Tide laundry detergent we'll have 20 listings for it? Or will these folks have price authority, no one else able to sell Tide 1-gallon except Tide themselves?

This feels like a potential massive shift, seems fated to raise prices significantly & flood users with way way way more results.
by doctorhandshake | 2025-09-30 18:06:20+00:00
I built an MVP of this [1] with images (not video) and in more of an Instagram style (not tiktok) back in ‘22, with the tagline ‘What if social media were literally fake?’

I am bullish on this, albeit with major concerns in many domains. It was fun and addictive as hell with images. With video it will be wild.

[1] https://hardwork.party/cheese/
by coldtea | 2025-09-30 18:06:54+00:00
Because it reached it's peak - when community interest was big, FOSS participation interest was big, even corporate interest was big, and desktop OS interest was also big - and didn't manage to fully catch up to the areas it was lacking.

It's still better in other areas, and of course, freedom and lack of surveillance, but regarding catching up to Windows and macOS in UI maturity and convenience, it's too late.

(And programmer/admin types, or people who "set it for their 70 year old parents and they use it just fine" are not a counter-argument).

Fortunately, macOS and Windows are going downhill UI wise too, so maybe they'll meet Linux further down, and Linux might even surpass them.
by a456463 | 2025-09-30 18:07:34+00:00
It is totally a parenting issue. Nothing to be solved by regulation or anybody else. That is the "BIG BAG WORLD". And this is from someone who absolutely loathes all Big Tech companies, Apple, FB, Google, MSFT and AMAZON. And I work in tech for 18+ years

EDIT: What adults need to understand is that IG is an ad platform first and not an IM or connection platform. And leave it. If you can't convince adults then children are totally lost cause. Adults also face the same problems. These don't go away when you are not a teen. Where your teen goes and what they do, is up to you as a parent.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-30 18:07:52+00:00
There is plenty of pernicious discourse to go around. I think some people take on marginalized identities (there are some you aren’t born into but can self-attest) for the sense of purpose, meaning and community it gives. Someone who is neurodivergent, weird and awkward has certain problems but by adding a fashionable identity to the mix they can find meaning attacking people like DHH gives their life meaning and then get attacked by clinically crazy marginal people who like Trump at the community center and feel vindicated in their world view.

This is a “meme” which ultimately spreads or doesn’t spread and I’d argue that’s the right frame to discuss it as opposed to frames that attribute some meaning to the words or try to situate them in one cause or another, especially any sort of unicause of the left or the right. It is not violent but it causes harm to the host the same way a DNA or RNA virus does. DHH is caught up in it because he doean’t understand that it is pointless to treat this as a ‘discussion’ or a ‘debate’ or communication in the conventional sense.

The people who are fighting with him are not doing anything to make workplaces better, that kind of slacktivism tends to create an equal and opposite backlash and creates a set of people who will oppose what they are doing and precludes any kind of activism, discussion or debate that would make things better. But it’s self-reinforcing the same way a dog will keep barking because it feels good to bark.