MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jajko | 2025-09-03 13:19:16+00:00
Its as if somebody finds shocking the fact that people are generally lazy. Then you have the other extreme group, deniers. "I work more than ever!", "I ask even more questions!" and so on here and elsewhere.

Sure you do, and maybe its really an actual benefit for ya. Not for most though. For young folks still going through education, this is devastating. If I didn't have kids I wouldn't care, less quality competition at work, but I do (too young to be affected by it now, and by the time they will be allowed to use these, frameworks for use and restrictions will be in place already).

But since maybe 30% of folks here are directly or indirectly dependent on LLMs to be pushed down every possible throat and then some more, I expect much more denial and resistance to critique of their little pets or investments.
by komali2 | 2025-09-03 13:19:26+00:00
It was even crazier in Japan and to this day I don't quite understand how their 90s- era "videogame sent over television" and "videogame sent over ancient cell network" features and dongles worked. I'm trying to remember the names of these features exactly but can't, I just know that it was like, the NES or SNES you could "download" games onto somehow from a TV signal, and then the GB or perhaps GBA had something similar if you connected your console to your phone.
by charlie-83 | 2025-09-03 13:19:46+00:00
Not OP but there's a difference between needing to ask more questions and asking more questions because its easier now.

Personally, I find myself often asking AI about things I wouldn't have been bothered to find out about before.

For example I've always these funny little grates on the outside of houses near me and wondered what they are. Googling "little grates outside houses" doesn't help at all. Give AI a vagueish description and it instantly tells you they are old boot scapers.
by MGriisser | 2025-09-03 13:20:04+00:00
I personally find Claude Code has no real issues working and producing code in the 40k LoC Ruby on Rails repo I work in nor in the 45k LoC Elixir/Phoenix repo I work in. For the last few months I'd say 99% of all changes I do to both are purely via Claude Code, I almost never use my editor anymore at all. It's common things don't work on the first try or aren't exactly what I want but usually just giving an error to Claude or further instructions will fix it in an iteration or two.

I think the code organization isn't amazing, but it's fine and frankly not that much of a concern to me usually as I'm usually just reading diffs and not digging around in the code much myself.
by krig | 2025-09-03 13:20:10+00:00
I don’t think he works for me. I am not paying him. To the contrary, if anything _I_ am in debt since I am using all this code that he put out there for free.

I guess there are a few things I could do in that situation. Move on to something else, try to figure out why he didn’t like it on my own, fork the language if it’s big enough and important enough to me.

But yeah, maybe he is busy? Maybe he thinks you are capable of working it out yourself?

Not to be too harsh about it, but yeah, that’s just the way it is sometimes. Maybe he was having a bad day, that happens to people.
by raffael_de | 2025-09-03 13:20:32+00:00
Thank you for reading! If you would like to comment on this post you can start a conversation on the Fediverse. Message me on Mastodon at @cinimodev@masto.ctms.me. Or, you may email me at blog.discourse904@8alias.com. This is an intentionally masked email address that will be forwarded to the correct inbox.

That post aged like milk.
by inetknght | 2025-09-03 13:20:45+00:00
> Anecdotally, I've seen many geeks use Chrome rather than Firefox, at conferences etc.

Have you asked them why? I'd be willing to bet that it's because of vendor lock-in if you boil down to it. Lots of things only work on Chrome. Video calls are especially prevalent right now, but there's a bunch of bot detection shit that only works on Chrome too.
by SkyBelow | 2025-09-03 13:21:05+00:00
The main issue I see is that the methodology section of the paper limited the full time to 20 minutes. Is this a study of using LLMs to write an essay for you, or using LLMs to help you write an essay? To be fair, LLMs can't be swapped between the two modes, so the distinction is left up to the user in how they engage in.

Thinking about it myself, and looking at the questions and time limits, I'm not sure how I would be able to navigate that distinction given only 20 minutes. The way I would use an LLM to aid me in writing an essay on the topic wouldn't fit within the time limit, so even with an LLM, I would likely stick to brain only except in a few specific case that might occur (forgetting how to spell a word or forgetting a name for a concept).

So this study likely is applicable to similar timed instances, like letting use LLMs on a test, but that's one I would have already seen as extremely problematic for learning to begin with (granted, still worth while to find evidence to back even the 'obvious' conclusions).
by squigz | 2025-09-03 13:21:06+00:00
I considered that, but I think it's a stretch to think that's what they meant - they were clearly referring to actual tangible assets and labor. To be sure there is some merit in what he's saying, but I take great issue with the framing; it seems to me to almost be contradictory to outline the issues with society brought on by, what he calls, the "unproductive elites", while simultaneously framing the success of one's life in a consumerist way.
by cestith | 2025-09-03 13:21:12+00:00
Besides the point already made about firefox-esr being the default package for Firefox, here are a couple of other points. First, that also means there are 5749 installations of non-default Firefox compared to 231 of guix.

Secondly, popcon works on servers and headless systems without X or Wayland. Those systems still use a package manager, and sometimes several. A graphical web browser like Firefox is unlikely to be installed without a GUI. I’ve seen plenty of systems with Snap, Flatpak, or Nix installed besides the OS-related apt, aptible, apt-get, rpm, yum, dnf, and language-related tools like pip, EasyInstall, rubygems, Bundler, cpanm, npm, cargo, OPAM, Composer, go get, or sbt with no GUI.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-03 13:21:12+00:00
No; why would it be? Not everything is fun. Fun is one more reason why I might care, but it's not automatically true. You have to show me that I'm going to have fun.

If you can't show me why it's fun, or why it's relevant in some other way, then I'm out. (And you don't have very long to do it, either...)

[Edit to reply to tikhonj, because I'm rate limited: The "value proposition" is what makes it valuable to the listener. Why should they give you their attention and time? Value is "anything that makes people interested in what you're telling them", as opposed to all the things that don't make them interested. Since the "don't make them interested" set is not empty (far from it!), then no, it's not a tautology.]
by sudosteph | 2025-09-03 13:21:20+00:00
Meanwhile my main use cases for AI outside of work:

- Learning how to solder

- Learning how to use a multimeter

- Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes

- learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries

- learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna

And every single one of these things I've learned I've also applied practically to experiment and learn more. I'm doing things with my brain that I couldn't do before, and it's great. When something doesn't work like I thought it would, AI helps me understand where I may have went wrong, I ask it a ton of questions, and I try again until I understand how it works and how to prove it.

You could say you can learn all of this from YouTube, but I can't stand watching videos. I have a massive textbook about electronics, but it doesn't help me break down different paths to what I actually want to do.

And to be blunt: I like making mistakes and breaking things to learn. That strategy works great for software (not in prod obviously...), but now I can do it reasonably effectively for cheap electronics too.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-03 13:21:22+00:00
I don't think unlimited free speech is the answer anymore. I see a lot of bad actors taking advantage of this. For example a lot of republican anti-LGBT propaganda is flowing across the Atlantic through Instagram and TikTok. A lot of people are now repeating the same tired tropes like the toilet thing (which make no sense of you think about it). A lot of people making themselves angry about made-up scenarios that aren't even real. These are organised manipulation campaigns targeted at demonising entire communities.

This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France. This is not a good thing IMO. We need buttons to be able to push to disconnect from that when it gets too bad.

So I don't think this is a bad thing. Though Thierry Breton was a stooge who was mainly interested in promoting his befriended French tech companies yes. Still, even bad people can produce ok things sometimes.
by KyleTheDev | 2025-09-03 13:21:33+00:00
> The worker got confused and put it on my sandwich.

No, this is where you're completely and totally incorrect. There is no 'worker accidentally making a human mistake that costs you money' here. This is a 'multi-billion dollar company routinely runs scripts that they KNOW cost you money, but do it anyways because it generates profit for them'. To fix your example,

You RUN a Subway that sells sandwiches. Your lettuce provider charges you $1 per piece of lettuce. Your average customer is given $1 worth of lettuce in their sub. One customer keeps coming in, reaching over the counter, and grabbing handfuls of lettuce. You cannot ban this customer because they routinely put on disguises and ignore your signs saying 'NO EXTRA LETTUCE'. Eventually this bankrupts you, forces you to stop serving lettuce in your subs entirely, or you have to put up bars (eg, Cloudflare) over your lettuce bins.
by jsheard | 2025-09-03 13:22:13+00:00
"The UK has become a country that is [...] far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men" says man after expressing a supposed entitlement to punch people in the genitals on suspicion of crimes against gender. Pot meet kettle?

Emphasis on "suspicion" because this paranoid gender policing inevitably ends up putting all women in the crosshairs:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/12/ive-been-spat-...
by devinprater | 2025-09-03 13:22:21+00:00
Oh no, cause screen readers are dumb things. If you don't send them an announcement, through live regions or accessibility announcements on Android or iOS, they will not know that a response has been received. So, the user will just sit there and have to tap and tap to see when a response comes in. This is especially frustrating with streaming responses where you're not sure when streaming has completed. Gemini for Android is awful at this when typing to it while using TalkBack. No announcements. Claude on web and Android also do nothing, and on iOS it at least places focus, accidentally I suspect, at the beginning of the response. chatGPT on iOS and web are great; it tells me when a response is being generated and reads it out when it's done. On iOS, it sends each line to VoiceOver as it's being generated. AI companies, and companies in general, need to understand that not all blind people talk to their devices.
by fulafel | 2025-09-03 13:22:28+00:00
I think it's more like 90C in (winter), 40C out. The temps have been going down in newer infrastructure as it's more energy efficient. See eg https://www.shcbysweden.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Best-P... p. 7

And of course it's still a win if you can heat the return water half of the way to spec with the battery, it's not necessary to have the battery heat it all the way to the plant outgoing temp.

District heating systems have been happily using ~90C water based heat batteries for a long time.
by close04 | 2025-09-03 13:22:41+00:00
> But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees

I think overall you are correct but probably still not safe to generalize. If you're moving to escape persecution then just being "on the other side" achieved this. If you are economically motivated then just leaving doesn't guarantee anything, you can be worse off. This circles back to the idea that the people who are persecuted by a regime paint the public opinion of that regime.

I have friends from Eastern Europe who emigrated to North America (mostly Canada) in the early '90s only to move back shortly after when the reality didn't live up to the hype and their expectations. They had a better life back home. The move was economically motivated, not escaping persecution. Many families under authoritarian regimes had the option to move to a Western country but not being actively persecuted meant they had no hard push and decided for the "comfort of familiarity".

East Berlin slipping into authoritarianism is a good showcase for this. Most people chose to stay in place for long enough to build a wall. We're talking years in which they saw the reality around them but only the ones who actively suffered from persecution chose to leave. Today plenty of East Germans still look back fondly at those times because they didn't feel the objective pain of persecution, only the subjective general suffering of "I could have better but don't".
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-03 13:22:49+00:00
> Not sure what led to that choice.

It's the EU AI act. I've tried their cute little app a week ago, designed to let you know if you comply, what you need to report and so on. I got a basically yes, but likely no, still have to register to bla-bla and announce yak-yak and do the dooby-doo, after selecting SME - open source - research - no client facing anything.

It was a mess when they proposed it, it was said to be better while they were working on it, turns out to be as unclear and as bureaucratic now that it's out.
by newyankee | 2025-09-03 13:23:41+00:00
I really wish a simulated version with very granular transmission and distribution capacity for different type of producers and consumers, from large plants to individual houses to community solar or agrivoltaics could exist.

This might be very helpful in understanding how to correctly allocate the infrastructure to enable distributed production at the right place. What kind of reversible flow is possible ? What types of electrical equipment is needed etc.

I feel finally we are at a place where grid cost might be much higher than solar and batteries when amortized over 20-25 years.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-09-03 13:23:51+00:00
I have a few ideas:

1. The only problem with Douglas-Peucker is that it can remove "convexities", which makes the result no longer a convex hull. A simple modification to D-P to try would be to have it only remove "concavities", i.e., only simplify to a line segment when all intermediate points fall on the "inside". This is simple and guarantees the result will be a convex hull -- though I'm not sure how much simplification it will achieve on mostly-convex polygons.

I can think of ways to simplify convex areas, but these are trickier and may not always work or work satisfactorily. Basically, if we picture the path going left-to-right with the polygon inside below, you somehow decide on a gradient and then "drop" a line with that gradient from above ("the outside") until it hits any of the points being simplified, then push the two endpoints up to meet this line.

But I think there's a better way that's completely different:

2. Make a 2D array of bits representing a coarse grid, and "render" the original geometry into it: if any part of the geometry is inside a grid cell, it is set to 1, otherwise 0. You could get a possibly quite good rectilinear solution just by tracing the outside of each connected component of 1-bits in this grid, greedily compressing runs of steps in the same direction (N/S/E/W) into a single longer line segment. But I think you could do even better:

3. The above edge-tracing approach doesn't minimise direction changes as strongly as it could, leading to "rough" edges and large encodings. We can address this by solving a shortest path problem in a closely related graph, where instead of a single vertex for each grid cell, we have 4 vertices: one for each direction we could be travelling in when we enter that cell. Each vertex has directed edges to its 4 neighbouring vertices, with the cost to its preferred (that is, same-direction) neighbour being, say, 10000, and the cost to each of its other 3 neighbours (each of which require a change of direction) being 10001. For each connected component of 1s, construct the graph by creating these 4 vertices for every grid cell outside the component; then "sever" the graph by picking, say, the cell p to the left of the leftmost 1-cell and the cell q below it, and deleting every edge from any vertex to the left of p (including p itself) to any vertex to the left of q (including q itself). Now look for a shortest path from p to q: Because we "severed" the graph, this can't "short-circuit" anticlockwise from p to q, but must go "the long way" clockwise around the component; and because each step costs 10000 and each direction change costs an additional 1, this will be a path having total length no greater than that produced by the simple algorithm 2, but that additionally minimises direction changes :)
by alephnerd | 2025-09-03 13:24:08+00:00
From TFA:

"Don’t blame the PC business. Dell’s Client Solutions Group had $12.5 billion in sales in Q2 F2026, up seven-tenths of a point, but net income was up 4.7 percent to $803 million, representing 6.4 percent of revenues and marking the highest level seen in the past seven quarters"
by Brajeshwar | 2025-09-03 13:24:14+00:00
About a year or so back, I really wanted to go to the bones and tried Make + Pandoc for my website. I’m sure, one day, I will do something to that or similar. However, for now, as you mentioned—I wanted to host on Github Pages—I stayed with Jekyll. Most of the times, I’m just writing in a Markdown Editor such as iA Writer or Obsidian without even running Jekyll locally (too slow for my website).

https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
by Taek | 2025-09-03 13:24:17+00:00
HN is full of people who say LLMs aren't good at coding and don't "really" produce productivity gains.

None of my professional life reflects that whatsoever. When used well, LLMs are exceptional and putting out large amounts of code of sufficient quality. My peers have switched entire engineering departments to LLM-first development and are reporting that the whole org is moving 2x as fast even after they fired the 50% of devs who couldn't make the switch and didn't hire replacements.

If you think LLM coding is a fad, your head is in the sand.
by Ruphin | 2025-09-03 13:24:23+00:00
I estimate the vast majority of "web projects" begin with npm installing something of some sort, yes. React is dominating the web development space (judging from the average "popular web stack 2025" search result), and it and a significant portion of the competing platforms start with installing some dependencies with npm (or yarn, or what have you). Especially projects that compete in the same space as Lit.

That isn't a criticism of projects that don't use npm, and it doesn't make them less valid, but it makes sense for the documentation to match the average developer's experience.
by JohnnyRebel | 2025-09-03 13:24:50+00:00
I totally agree; the liability is real, which is why we don’t let the LLM “invent” numbers. We use the model as the interface, but all financial data comes from a structured database. In practice, it works like RAG: the LLM interprets the user’s question, retrieves the right data, and explains the result in plain English. That way the math is deterministic, the answers are grounded, and the AI layer just makes it accessible.
by notrealyme123 | 2025-09-03 13:25:25+00:00
This might be written somewhere, but you have to trust those words.

Most big players in the LLM field are getting their training data by at-least shady, if not illegal measures.

And if they don't care about laws on one side, why should anyone believe that they care on the other?

Amazon already uses their customers privat data to train models [1].

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/06/hey-alexa...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-03 13:25:39+00:00
Depends on who you are and what you want.

Let's say I'm a writer of no skill who still wants attention. I could spend years learning to write better, but I still might not get any attention.

Or I could use AI to write something today. It won't be all that interesting, because AI still can't write all that well, but it may be better than I can do on my own, and I can get attention today.

If you care about your own growth (or even not dwindling) as a human, that's a trap. But not everyone cares about that...
by anywhichway | 2025-09-03 13:26:08+00:00
A lot of digital ones are "local" too in that they are context specific. As long as it stays context specific, your Uber rating is closer to being liked by your local bar tender than it is to the Chinese social credit system. Even your local bartender has a little context leakage.

I agree there is a scarier potential there. And also some do, on occasion, escape their context (mostly credit score). They also have bigger contexts, but not so big that I would jump to the Chinese social credit comparison.
by cj | 2025-09-03 13:26:10+00:00
> a problem with LLM users

I think the flaw here is placing blame on users rather than the service provider.

HN is cutting LLM companies slack because we understand the technical limitations making it hard for the LLM to just say “I don’t know”.

In any other universe, we would be blaming the service rather than the user.

Why don’t we fix LLMs so they don’t spit out garbage when it doesn’t know the answer. Have we given up on that thought?
by jmmv | 2025-09-03 13:26:23+00:00
The content in the article is good and important. That said, I don’t find it “practical” enough so… I’ll link to my own tips on preparing and giving presentations ;-)

https://jmmv.dev/2020/07/presentation-tips.html

https://jmmv.dev/2020/07/presentation-preparation.html

(These were originally Twitter threads so apologies for the abuse of emojis hehe.)

I used to dread speaking in public but have come to enjoy it, and all of the above tips have made it easier over time. I think the vast majority of them came to me from more experienced presenters (and even a class I took in college about public speaking).

As others have mentioned in the discussion below, keeping it fun and providing the motivation for the talk are important. And my pet peeve is to remind people that “your slides are not the presentation: what you say is”.
by stitched2gethr | 2025-09-03 13:26:33+00:00
This contains some specific data with pretty graphs: https://youtu.be/tbDDYKRFjhk?t=623

But if you do professional development and use something like Claude Code (the current standard, IMO) you'll quickly get a handle on what it's good at and what it isn't. I think it took me about 3-4 weeks of working with it at an overall 0x gain to realize what it's going to help me with and what it will make take longer.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-03 13:26:33+00:00
> This is not open source. It is weights-available.

> Also, there is no training data, which would be the "preferred form" of modification.

This is not open source because the license is not open source. The second line is not correct, tho. "Preferred form" of modification are weights, not data. Data is how you modify those weights.