MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-09-03 22:51:25+00:00
People drop dead in Japan from their jobs frequently as well, regardless of industry. This hasn't anything to do with the job being hard and everything to do with work culture.

I acknowledge that investment bankers have a toxic work culture, but I don't believe the job is inherently harder than teaching, which is unavoidably hard in many ways. Some of the ways are solvable by having more teachers (smaller class sizes, not needing to take work home), but not all of them.
by EMM_386 | 2025-09-03 22:51:55+00:00
> the core models are only slightly bumping YoY rather than the rocketship changes of 2022/23

From Anthropic's press release yesterday after raising another $13 billion:

"Anthropic has seen rapid growth since the launch of Claude in March 2023. At the beginning of 2025, less than two years after launch, Anthropic’s run-rate revenue had grown to approximately $1 billion. By August 2025, just eight months later, our run-rate revenue reached over $5 billion—making Anthropic one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history."

$4 billion increase in 8 months. $1 billion every two months.
by Ukv | 2025-09-03 22:52:01+00:00
> That still won't work b/c there is no backtracking.

It's essentially just a lookup table mapping from input board to the set of valid output boards - there's no real way for it not to work (obviously not practical though). If board A has valid solutions B, C, D, then the transition matrix cell mapping {A} to {B, C, D} is 1.0, and all other entries in that row are 0.0.

> The point is that there is no way to encode backtracking/choice points

You can if you want, keeping the same variables as a regular sudoku solver as part of the Markov chain's state and transitioning instruction-by-instruction, rather than mapping directly to the solution - just that there's no particular need to when you've precomputed the solution.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-03 22:52:30+00:00
Don't most ISPs hand out IPs that are only nominally dynamic?

My IP is dynamic, but in practice only changes ~once/year. Even if I go to my router and release the WAN IP and reboot, when it comes back up, it'll have the same WAN IP. But then that once/year, my Internet randomly goes down and I have to reboot my router and I end up with a new WAN IP.

When that happens, I just go and manually update the IP for a hostname I use. If I wanted to get fancy, I could automate all this, but meh. CBF to spend the time automating something that only takes me 30 seconds to do once/year.

> I assume that ISPs generally don't want people hosting servers on residential connections.

They likely don't care unless you're saturating your upload consistently. Also, some ISPs like Comcast/XFinity are known for having extremely asymmetrical connections. At least, they used to. I'm fairly certain I've heard of some people having 1 gbps down, but only like 16 mbps up.
by daoboy | 2025-09-03 22:53:13+00:00
Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand.

"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
by Nextgrid | 2025-09-03 22:53:40+00:00
This is the answer. Programming was never the bottleneck in delivering software, whether free-range, organic, grass-fed human-generated code or AI-assisted.

AI is just a convenient excuse to lay off many rounds of over-hiring while also keeping the door open for potential investors to throw more money into the incinerator since the company is now “AI-first”.
by charleshn | 2025-09-03 22:53:44+00:00
> We cannot add more compute to a given compute budget C without increasing data D to maintain the relationship. > We must either (1) discover new architectures with different scaling laws, and/or (2) compute new synthetic data that can contribute to learning (akin to dreams).

Of course we can, this is a non issue.

See e.g. AlphaZero [0] that's 8 years old at this point, and any modern RL training using synthetic data, e.g. DeepSeek-R1-Zero [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948
by dabockster | 2025-09-03 22:54:15+00:00
> Stack Overflow isn’t dead because of AI. It’s dead because they spent years ignoring user feedback and then doubled down by going after respected, unpaid contributors like Monica.

They also devolved into a work friendly variant of 4Chan's /g/ board. "Work friendly" as in nothing obviously obscene, but the overall tone and hostility towards newcomers is still there (among other things).
by nadermx | 2025-09-03 22:54:18+00:00
First, I don't see how someone viewing a publicly available stream is an agreement to terms of service. Court cases to back this up ie Netscape.

Second, just because you agree to a contract doesn't mean that contract is consionable, not something that shocks the court.

And it would have to be up to a court to decided just that. Hence you know disney ended up backing out before the court decided. As arbitration can be considered unconscionable.

https://www.newsweek.com/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit-waive...
by jazzyjackson | 2025-09-03 22:54:22+00:00
I couldn’t make heads or tails of how to navigate with OSMAnd until thumbing through GitHub issues and finding out about https://opensupermaps.com/ which, after importing a few gigabytes of text files, allows general search of street addresses - not a great learning curve for adoption!

What I’d really like to do is copy the old school car GPS interface of, select state, select city, select street, house number, where at each stage it narrows down the list of possibilities so you only have to type 3 or 4 letters before auto completion. If there’s any pull request I would make it would be to build that out using the open super maps database
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 22:54:37+00:00
>This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails.

I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.

But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.
by keeda | 2025-09-03 22:54:47+00:00
> That's more than enough data.

Is it? I'm no expert, but while it may seem enough in absolute numbers, I can imagine more nuanced criteria like diversity of queries, results and users may matter more than just volume, and that kind of signal only comes from truly ubiquitious data collection (like say being default on the most popular browser AND on the duopoly of mobile platforms -- which, by the way, also collect tons of location data about the users that is not available to anybody else.)

But as I'm no expert, all I can do is look at the circumstantial evidence:

1. Google paid about 54.9 BILLION in 2024 -- "traffic acquisition costs" or "TAC": https://abc.xyz/assets/77/51/9841ad5c4fbe85b4440c47a4df8d/go... -- to hold on to that traffic and data. The 20 billion going to Apple gets a lot of airtime but it does not tell the whole story.

2. As somebody else said in this thread, MSFT did burn billions on their attempt at smartphones and other markets, so it's not like they're afraid to pour money into big, risky bets.

That really tells us a lot about the realities about the search market.
by grim_io | 2025-09-03 22:55:37+00:00
Unless they get Thanos snapped out of existence, I would probably just switch to inferior local models.

Going back to pre-LLM is not an option for me. Not because I can't, but because I don't want to.

How are you people using AI? I still have to think a lot. The biggest change is that I don't run around in circles trying to fix annoying bugs.
by Severian | 2025-09-03 22:55:44+00:00
I 100% agree with this take: adding Bandcamp to this "media" app is a really shitty thing to do.

I personally know a few musicians who use Bandcamp to either exclusively make a living (along with touring), or to supplement their income. Some are overjoyed when they get a few sales a week on a release. This POS software denies that opportunity.

Either way, 99% of the artists are small independent musicians, and this just skips the Purchase album or track and just freeloads off the small MP3 player on each album page.

Its disgusting.
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 22:56:47+00:00
I don't agree that the inherent nebulousness of the subject extends cover to the likes of Goff, Chalmers (on pansychism), or Searle and Nagel (on the hard problem). It's a both can be true situation and many practicing philosophers appreciate the nebulousness of the topic while strongly disagreeing with the collective attitudes embodied by those names.
by rolph | 2025-09-03 22:57:06+00:00
this scam relies on e-mail as an authority.

the assumption the e-mail is from a certain sender, just because they say so, has to be deleted from the workstream.

anytime there is a need or urgency insinuated, be critical.

cut out the middleman contact using info from what you know is a real source, such as your agents card, or policy documents. never use info from the e-mail

dont ever believe e-mail, dont ever click on anything even if you think its real, go to the actual page through your browser, or call your agent directly
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-03 22:57:11+00:00
> The flavor is enough to keep it relatively self regulating

Not if you make it properly - correct water temperature of less than 100° (maybe as low as 70° for AeroPress), freshly ground beans and beans roasted less than 4 weeks ago or so. Also, drip coffee machines are terrible as they over-extract the coffee in the middle and under-extract the coffee round the outside. And a good grinder is essential to avoid too much dust and boulders that lead to over/under extraction.
by measurablefunc | 2025-09-03 22:57:35+00:00
My point is that your initial argument was missing several key pieces & if you specify the entire state space you will see that it's not as simple as you thought initially. I'm not saying it can't be done but that it's actually much more complicated than simply saying just take an incomplete board state s & uniform transitions between s, s' for valid solutions s' that are compatible with s. In fact, now that I spelled out the issues I still don't think this is a formal extensional equivalence. Prolog has interactive transitions between the states & it tracks choice points so compiling a sudoku solver to a Markov chain requires more than just tracking the board state in the context.
by komali2 | 2025-09-03 22:57:40+00:00
> we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.

I've not heard of this. Which experiments "forced equality" and then as a result caused millions of deaths?

I'm aware of the experiment of capitalism failing in India to the tune of about 100 million dead, is that what you mean? With capitalism's attempts to equalize through meritocracy?
by vidarh | 2025-09-03 22:57:59+00:00
A (2,3) Turing machine can be trivially implemented with a loop around an LLM that treats the context as an IO channel, and a Prolog interpreter runs on a Turing complete computer, and so per Truing equivalence you can run a Prolog interpreter on an LLM.

Of course this would be pointless, but it demonstrates that a system where an LLM provides the logic can backtrack, as there's nothing computationally special about backtracking.

That current UIs to LLMs are set up for conversation-style use that makes this harder isn't an inherent limitation of what we can do with LLMs.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-03 22:58:06+00:00
Yeah to be clear I like this mental model a lot, and I give it extra points for invoking sheaf theory :). I was just saying it doesn't seem complete to me from a psychological perspective.

The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.

Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.
by lumost | 2025-09-03 22:58:23+00:00
The experience in green field development is very different. In the early days of a project, the LLMs opinion is about as good as the individuals starting the project. The coding standards and other items have not yet been established. The buggy/half nonsense code means that the project is still demo able. Being able to explore 5 projects to demo status instead of 1 is a major boost.
by giantg2 | 2025-09-03 22:58:52+00:00
Until AI can understand business requirements and how they are implemented in code (including integrating with existing systems), it will continue to be overhyped. Devs will hate it, but in 10-15 years someone will figure out that the proper paradigm is to train the AI to build based off of something similar to Cucumber TDD with comprehensive example tables.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-03 22:59:09+00:00
Spicy pillows are basically caused by 1 of 2 things:

1. Heat

2. Being fully charged all the time

Recording video consumes a considerable amount of power, leading to heat. The display less so, unless you're operating at maximum brightness all the time.

#2 is what killed my Pixel 3 after only about 2 years. Once I started working from home, I had a bad habit of letting my phone sit on the charger all day and after about 3 months of WFH the pillow got spicy.

For a phone that's going to be repurposed as a server, I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to open the case and attach a heat sink to the battery.
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-03 22:59:36+00:00
> LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a language I do not know, LLMs not only save me time, but they make it so I don't have to learn something that I'll likely never use again.

I wax and wane on this one.

I've had the same feelings, but too often I've peaked behind the curtain, read the docs and got familiar with external dependencies and then realize whatever the LLM responds with paradoxically either wasn't following convention or tried to shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online, used features inappropriately, took a long roundabout path to do something that can be done simply, etc.

It can feel like magic until you look too closely at it, and I worry that it'll make me complacent with the feeling of understanding without actually taking away an understanding.
by adelie | 2025-09-03 22:59:57+00:00
i've seen this fairly often with internal libraries as well - a recent AI-assisted PR i reviewed included a complete reimplementation of our metrics collector interface.

suspect this happened because the reimplementation contained a number of standard/expected methods that we didn't have in our existing interface (because we didn't need them), so it was considered 'different' enough. but none of the code actually used those methods (because we didn't need them), so all this PR did was add a few hundred lines of cognitive overhead.
by jakedata | 2025-09-03 23:00:31+00:00
My company sells them all. Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro, HP (if you insist). I can have anything I want and pretty much for free. Internally we are 90% Dell, our remote employees all have laptops with ProSupport and on-site service because the price is lower than a single day of downtime. They have the infrastructure and logistics to fix anything nearly anywhere. No qualms about recommending them for anything.
by flyinglizard | 2025-09-03 23:00:49+00:00
I get excellent productivity gains from AI. Not everywhere, and not linearly. It makes the bad stuff about the work (boilerplate, dealing with things outside my specialties) tolerable and the good stuff a bit better. It makes me want to create more. Business guys missing some visualization? Hell why not, few minutes on Aider and it's there. Let's improve our test suites. And let's migrate away from that legacy framework or runtime!

But my workflow is anything but "let her rip". It's very calculated, orderly, just like mastering any other tool. I'm always in the loop. I can't imagine someone without serious experience getting good stuff, and when things go bad, oh boy you're bringing a firehose of crap into your org.

I have a junior programmer who's a bright kid but lacking a lot of depth. Got him a Cursor subscription, tracking his code closely via PRs and calling out the BS but we're getting serious work done.

I just can't see how this new situation calls for less programmers. It will just bring about more software, surely more capable software after everyone adjusts.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-03 23:01:05+00:00
What would happen if you deeply insulted a cop at night during a routine check ?

What would be the impact on your life of publicly calling names your company's CEO on social media ? You make it sound like a defamation lawsuit is peanuts, when you'd probably be fighting against an army of lawyer while you're unemployed, if you're in the US that definitely sounds like a life defining event.

I also wonder if most authoritarian régimes even have prison camps ?
by aetherson | 2025-09-03 23:01:47+00:00
That site is weird. As far as I can tell, it's measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality, and it doesn't... appear to know the difference? Quoting it:

> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.

It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!

There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.

However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 23:02:21+00:00
>When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness

Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism.

>Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts

If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.
by pembrook | 2025-09-03 23:02:35+00:00
AI isn't going to be much help unless the customer is comfortable vibe coding in cursor and isn't too intimidated by a git/serverless workflow...but firing up an IDE like cursor and dealing with git + serverless builds is still a huuugge ask for most people who aren't in tech by trade.

Even AI assisted it's going to be rough.

It's important to remember a vast majority of people have never used their desktop computer for more than MS Office and Google Chrome (facebook/youtube) and maybe ChatGPT now (still only 34% of the US population).

Heck, dealing with a file system is already too much complexity for most of the population.

Navigating around some enterprise-y headless CMS UI is already going to be a big ask. If these volunteers are anything like the ones I've dealt with before, they're going to struggle to even get past basic auth (which email did I use? What's my password again? What the hells a password manager???)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-03 23:02:50+00:00
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask.

The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
by dabockster | 2025-09-03 23:03:01+00:00
Chrome is the "best" because all of the other browsers continue to fail at real world marketing. The best ads and marketing continue to be real life stuff - billboards, bus signage, people handing out flyers, etc etc etc. You can't just hype a browser on social media or web forums, and you can't hype it solely to those who are tech savvy.

A solid example of this right now is all of the Mullvad VPN ads I've seen on the Seattle Light Rail lately. Google used to have ads everywhere for Chrome. The only time I saw Firefox stuff was the rare t-shirt at a tech conference.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-09-03 23:03:25+00:00
> You can have dangling indices if the underlying object is reused or cleared.

You can just wrap your pointers, and then say the underlying collection they point to must outlive the pointers returned. Granted, that doesn't work so well if the collection allows removal. But if your collection is append only you've hit the sweet spot for this pattern, because with the lifetime constrained pointers and no deletions literally nothing can go wrong.

He says he's only seen it in Zig. I guess that means he hasn't done much Rust, because the Rust nudges you in that direction. Wrapped pointers are common in the language and it's libraries. They aren't used to save space. They are used to get around lifetime restrictions.

When I've done it in Rust, it has been to save space. A u32 index occupies 1/4 of the space of an Rc on 64 bit. If you're handling millions of them, it's hard to ignore. Ditto using u16 offsets to describe slices into strings I know won't be more than 64k. Again, it's a 4 fold saving on 64 bit.
by fragmede | 2025-09-03 23:03:56+00:00
That's $500k/yr, and I guarantee there's a non-zero amount of humans out there doing exactly that and getting paid that much, because of course we know that lines of code is a dumbass metric and the problem with large mature codebases is that because they're so large and mature, making changes is very difficult, especially when trying to fix hairy customer bugs in code that has a lot of interactions.
by jeremyjh | 2025-09-03 23:04:05+00:00
AlphaZero trained itself through chess games that it played with itself. Chess positions have something very close to an objective truth about the evaluation, the rules are clear and bounded. Winning is measurable. How do you achieve this for a language model?

Yes, distillation is a thing but that is more about compression and filtering. Distillation does not produce new data in the same way that chess games produce new positions.