MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by n8cpdx | 2025-10-09 16:41:31+00:00
This isn’t just an insightful comment. It’s profound.

I’d like to delve into the crucial topic of whether AI generated slop is respectful to the innovative entrepreneurs of Hacker News. If they won’t assert the value of their time, who will?

In this digital age, can we not expect writers to just keep it brief? Or heck, just share the prompt, which is almost certainly shorter than the output and includes 100% of the information they intend to share?

Or is true 21st century digital transformation driven by the dialectical tension between AI generators and AI summarizers?
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-09 16:42:08+00:00
I recently re-read Design of Everyday Things (I think written in the late 80s or early 90s) and noticed that despite all the criticism of interfaces, there was a default assumption that underneath the interface, if you used it correctly, everything works. I agree with the OP here; I think reliability has fallen off a cliff in recent times and LLMs with their lack of determinism is going to make this even worse unless we're careful.
by charcircuit | 2025-10-09 16:42:09+00:00
Isn't this obvious, or at least a common belief people have as opposed to what the article is suggesting the common belief among researches is? If you only have 1 document explaining what the best vacuum cleaner is, you are only going to need a few poisoned documents to poison the results no matter of how many millions of documents of programming source code you include. Taking it as a percent of the overall training data doesn't make sense. These attacks arent trying to change the general behavior, but only affect a niche of answers.
by arnaudbd | 2025-10-09 16:42:20+00:00
This is a product I’ve been imagining for a while. I couldn’t get my head around why it didn’t exist. It felt absurd to me. It became kind of an obsession to be honest. Why can’t I have a place that’s at the same time the place where is store and organise rigourously AND a place for free-flowing thought and creativity. Why can’t I build and design a digital space, freely ? Why are there always constraints ? And aggregate and tag all your content from everywhere. Why can’t I just do what I want ?

It feels to me that digital organization is still, for no good reason at all, too complicated. It should be easier by now. GYST is my answer to that frustration. For me it seems obvious. Of course this is what’s needed. But maybe I’m crazy.
by strangattractor | 2025-10-09 16:42:27+00:00
Agree but at least someone took time and effort to write it before. There were limits on the quantity produced. AI will simply release a flood of this stuff. Social media did similar things by making zero barriers to "Enquireresque" type of misinformation - Weekly World News "Bat Child Found in Cave"

In the 70's we had Environmental Pollution - the 2000s will be defined as a fight against Social Pollution.
by ewoodrich | 2025-10-09 16:42:46+00:00
Hah I also happened to use Claude recently to write basic MQTT code to expose some data on a couple Orange Pis I wanted to view in Home Assistant. And it one-shot this super cool mini Python MQTT client I could drop wherever I needed it which was amazing having never worked with MQTT in Python before.

I made some charts/dashboards in HA and was watching it in the background for a few minutes and then realized that none of the data was changing, at all.

So I went and looked at the code and the entire block that was supposed to pull the data from the device was just a stub generating test data based on my exact mock up of what I wanted the data it generated to look like.

Claude was like, “That’s exactly right, it’s a stub so you can replace it with the real data easily, let me know if you need help with that!” And to its credit, it did fix it to use actual data but I re-read my original prompt was somewhat baffling to think it could have been interpreted as wanting fake data given I explicitly asked it to use real data from the device.
by iamleppert | 2025-10-09 16:42:53+00:00
There are more issues than just the lack of physical movement while you experience visual movement being uncomfortable and disorientating.

Most people who play video games do so as a leisure activity. It works because it allows you to be put into a world that requires little physical exertion - just eye/hand coordination. You don't need to to use your legs to jump in a video game. You don't even need to have legs.

In the vision of VR you're selling, it requires getting up and doing a lot of physical movement. The bulk of most gamers just want to play their game after work or school and relax. Most of my friends feel the same way about VR as they did when I was young and wanted them to play with the NES power pad when I was younger.

There are better, more entertaining options available on the 2D screen that don't require much physical movement. In fact, I'd say that anything other than eye/hand movement distracts from game play. "Jumping" in the video game isn't fun because you actually have to jump, it's fun because you don't. And that's a feature that appeals to people who will never be appealed to VR.
by nogridbag | 2025-10-09 16:42:55+00:00
If anyone else was confused, they're referring to the Audio Readers' Briefs. I didn't immediately recognize it as AI. To be honest the voice sounds exactly like my coworker responsible for doing our product video demonstrations.

I skipped through it and heard it pronounce nginx as en-gee-onix and only then did I realize it was fake.
by hbn | 2025-10-09 16:42:57+00:00
I recently found a fun CLI application and was playing with it when I found out it didn't have proper handling for when you passed it invalid files, and spat out a cryptic error from an internal library which isn't a great UX.

I decided to pull the source code and fix this myself. It's written in Swift which I've used very little before, but this wasn't gonna be too complex of a change. So I got some LLMs to walk me through the process of building CLI apps in Xcode, code changes that need to be made, and where the build artifact is put in my filesystem so I could try it out.

I was able to get it to compile, navigate to my compiled binary, and run it, only to find my changes didn't seem to work. I tried everything, asking different LLMs to see if they can fix the code, spit out the binary's metadata to confirm the creation date is being updated when I compile, etc. Generally when I'd paste the code to an LLM and ask why it doesn't work it would assert the old code was indeed flawed, and my change needed to be done in X manner instead. Even just putting a print statement, I couldn't get those to run and the LLM would explain that it's because of some complex multithreading runtime gotcha that it isn't getting to the print statements.

After way too much time trouble-shooting, skipping dinner and staying up 90 minutes past when I'm usually in bed, I finally solved it - when I was trying to run my build from the build output directory, I forgot to put the ./ before the binary name, so I was running my global install from the developer and not the binary in the directory I was in.

Sure, rookie mistake, but the thing that drives me crazy with an LLM is if you give it some code and ask why it doesn't work, they seem to NEVER suggest it should actually be working, and instead will always say the old code is bad and here's the perfect fixed version of the code. And it'll even make up stuff about why the old code should indeed not work when it should, like when I was putting the print statements.
by nikolay | 2025-10-09 16:43:05+00:00
Okay, I get it, but they also abandoned maintaining their Terraform provider! What a joke! They don't even want to open its maintenance and development to the community! How can you manage hundreds and thousands of repos manually?! It's always been a terrible provider - slow, buggy, and severely behind the latest GitHub features, but now it's literally dead! They openly claimed to be focusing their energy on API development, and until the API is fixed, they will continue working on the provider. This is unacceptable!
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-09 16:43:16+00:00
Depending on how you wrote or worded it, that IS instigating violence.

"We should just execute them and save money" is instigating violence.

If you aren't willing to spend resources because it's "obvious" to you, you do not care about Justice.

Cops always think they got the right guy, and they are regularly blatantly wrong, including for people on death row.
by kalap_ur | 2025-10-09 16:43:45+00:00
There is no need. The personnel cost multiplier is 3.6x, the non-acute drug multiplier is 6.25x and the "something else" multiplier 77x. So we can debate that there are ~4x more people in the US and CoL is higher maybe by 0.5x turns, but there is no debate that the 77x shows something is awfully wrong.

My bet is the private insurance because we dont have transparent data on how much does the same procedure (broken down by personnel (doctor, nurse, admin), implied equipment amortization, rent, drugs) cost with and without insurance.

I could totally imagine that there are plus personnel expenses buried within the "something else", or acute drug prices, which are administered during an emergency at a hospital. But we don't know, because healthcare spending is a black box in the US.
by portaouflop | 2025-10-09 16:43:52+00:00
I’m thankfully no crypto nut and use windows only for gaming, so I’m prepared for any and all consequences of me pirating it. Btw it’s just downloading the official image and unlocking it with open source software, so I would argue there is no risk at all.

Btw did you audit all the Linux source code to check for malware?
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-09 16:43:52+00:00
Even 1 Gbps is plenty to handle 1,000 connections unless you're serving up video.

That's 1 Mbps per user. If your web page can't render (ignoring image loading) within a couple seconds even on a connection that slow, you're doing something wrong. Maybe stop using 20 different trackers and shoving several megabytes of JavaScript to the user.
by sailingparrot | 2025-10-09 16:44:01+00:00
"Utilization" tells you the percentage of your GPU's SM that currently have at least one thread assigned to them.

It does not at all take into count how much that thread is actually using the core to it's capacity.

So if e.g. your thread is locked waiting on some data from another GPU (NCCL) and actually doing nothing, it will still show 100% utilisation. A good way to realize that is when a NCCL call timeout after 30 minutes for some reason, but you can see all your GPUs (except the one that cause the failure) were at 100% util, even though they clearly did nothing but wait.

Another example are operation with low compute intensity: Say you want to add 1 to every element in a very large tensor, you effectively have to transfer every element (let's say FP8, so 1 byte) from the HBM to the l2 memory, which is very slow operation, to then simply do an add, which is extremely fast. It takes about ~1000x more time to move that byte to L2 than it takes to actually do the add, so in effect your "true" utilization is ~0.2%, but nvidia-smi (and this tool) will show 100% for the entire duration of that add.

Sadly there isn't a great general way to monitor "true" utilization during training, generally you have to come up with an estimate of how many flops your model requires per pass, look at the time it takes to do said pass, and compare the flops/sec you get to Nvidia's spec sheet. If you get around 60% of theoretical flops for a typical transformer LLM training you are basically at max utilization.
by sotix | 2025-10-09 16:44:12+00:00
> if its big SUVs, why are pedestrian deaths for sedans increasing too?

The article is well researched but doesn't seem to account for the increase in weight and size of the sedans it mentions as a counter to the rise of SUVs being a leading factor.

I'd be interested in the data on a small that remained the same size and/or got smaller in the window: the Mazda Miata.

| Model | Year | Length (in) | Width (in) | Height (in) | Curb Weight (lbs) | |----------------------|-------|--------------|------------|-------------|-------------------| | Honda Civic | 2009 | ~177.3 | ~69.0 | ~56.5 | ~2,600 - 2,700 | | Honda Civic | 2023 | ~184.0 | ~70.8 | ~55.7 | 2,877 - 2,935 | | Honda Accord | 2009 | 194.1 | 72.7 | 58.1 | ~3,193 | | Honda Accord | 2023 | ~192.2 | ~73.3 | ~57.1 | 3,239 - 3,280 | | Toyota Corolla | 2009 | ~179.7 | ~70.1 | ~57.7 | ~2,358 - 2,623 | | Toyota Corolla | 2023 | ~182.3 | ~70.5 | ~56.5 | 2,955 - 3,150 | | Toyota Camry | 2009 | ~192.1 | ~72.4 | ~58.1 | ~3,193 | | Toyota Camry | 2023 | ~192.1 | ~72.4 | ~56.9 | 3,244 - 3,280 | | Nissan Altima | 2009 | ~191.1 | ~72.0 | ~57.0 | ~3,192 | | Nissan Altima | 2023 | ~192.9 | ~72.0 | ~56.9 | 3,244 - 3,053 | | Mazda MX-5 (NC) | 2009 | ~157.5 - 158.3| ~67.7 | ~48.8 - 49.4| ~2,450 - 2,542 | | Mazda MX-5 (ND) | 2023 | ~154.1 | ~68.1 | ~48.6 | ~2,183 |
by paulcole | 2025-10-09 16:44:17+00:00
> When the cities are designed for cars with everything else being an afterthought, people are going to driver everywhere.

Not if they really hate driving and want to live differently!

You can say you're a victim of circumstance or you can say I care a lot about something and have more control over your life.

I'm biased because I'm 45 and have never driven a car in my life. I grew up in a very rural area in Florida, went to a big state college, and then moved to Portland, OR because it was a decent place to live without a car.

I knew from a very young age that driving a car seemed like a dumb way to live and so wondered why everyone did it and why nobody decided to try something different?
by FinnKuhn | 2025-10-09 16:44:56+00:00
While this is only one data point, looking at the stats for r/selfhosted, self-hosting seems to be exploding in popularity since last year. The subreddit now has 2.2 on average million daily unique visitors with 175 million total views over the last 12 months, which is up 132 million visitors in comparison to the 12 months before.
by Leherenn | 2025-10-09 16:45:03+00:00
I mean, that was over 40y ago. Same thing for the Ariane 5 failure which is a staple of safety-critical classes (at least in Europe), it's not getting any younger.

If all the examples you can conjure are decades old*, is it any wonder that people don't really take it seriously? Software power the whole world, and yet the example of critical failure we constantly hear about is close to half a century old?

I think the more insidious thing is all the "minor" pains being inflicted by software bugs, that when summed up reach crazy level of harm. It's just diluted so less striking. But even then, it's hard to say if the alternative of not using software would have been better overall.

* maybe they've added Boeing 737 Max to the list now?
by asveikau | 2025-10-09 16:45:05+00:00
I have a lot of Catholic family, is there some connection between Catholicism and sourdough that I'm unaware of?

As someone whose family comes from the more left wing Catholic culture, which is a thing, I sometimes am disappointed when Catholics are thoughtlessly lumped into right wing culture war topics. It feels like this assumption is particularly common in the US vs. other places.
by parliament32 | 2025-10-09 16:45:35+00:00
I certainly see you whining a lot about SAML in your history. This lines up with my "SAML is hard" comment above -- SAML is filled with footguns and various perils, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. OIDC is certainly better in a few aspects (note trading XML parsing for JSON parsing is not one of them), but the killer SAML feature that you (and by you, I mean fly.io, to be clear) is missing is being IdP-agnostic. You cannot reasonably expect that those two vendors will cover even half of your potential enterprise user base; and yes, for anyone working in an even remotely regulated industry, not being compatible with our SSO ensures you get dropped even before the evaluation phase.

My favourite slop-generator summarizes this as "While SAML is significantly more complex to implement than OIDC, its design for robust enterprise federation and its maturity have resulted in vendors converging on a more uniform interpretation of its detailed specification, reducing the relative frequency of non-standard implementation quirks when dealing with core B2B SSO scenarios." That being said, if your org is more B2C, maybe it makes sense you haven't prioritized this yet. You'll get there one day :)
by NobodyNada | 2025-10-09 16:45:51+00:00
In this case, the implementation is not free to ignore calls to reserve or reserve_exact -- the documentation makes explicit guarantees about this: "After calling reserve, capacity will be greater than or equal to self.len() + additional".

This matters for performance reasons, and also because unsafe code is allowed to use the extra capacity of the vector -- e.g. you can write to the unused space and then call set_len to insert elements in-place. If `reserve` did not guarantee the requested capacity was allocated, this would cause buffer overflows.

The documentation for these functions is very carefully worded to explain exactly what each method does and does not guarantee. Both functions have the exact same hard guarantees: after calling the function, the vector will have at least enough capacity for the additional elements.

The difference is in what the methods try to do without guaranteeing exact behavior: reserve follows the usual amortized growth pattern, while reserve_exact tries to avoid overallocating. These are described as best-effort performance optimizations rather than guarantees you can rely on because 1) the amortized growth strategy is subject to change between platforms and compiler versions, and 2) memory allocators typically don't support arbitrarily-sized blocks of memory, and instead round up to the nearest supported size.
by guywithahat | 2025-10-09 16:46:09+00:00
Yeah but then you can't easily visit specific subs. When I was younger and didn't have an account, I would just go to the url to view my favorite subs, and uuid's would make it less intuitive.

One other option sites like scored.co do is they allow subs to use their own url (like their Trump sub is called patriots.win). The site admins have kind of given up on the site though so I'm not sure if you can still do it, but it seemed like a clever idea.
by imiric | 2025-10-09 16:46:32+00:00
Code readability has nothing to do with it.

I suppose it could be quantified by the amount of financial damage to businesses. We can start with high-profile incidents like the CrowdStrike one that we actually know about.

But I'm merely speaking as a user. Bugs are a daily occurrence in operating systems, games, web sites, and, increasingly, "smart" appliances. This is also more noticeable since software is everywhere these days compared to a decade or two ago, but based on averages alone, there's far more buggy software out there than robust and stable software.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-10-09 16:46:38+00:00
Variance doesn't affect generated code because it acts earlier than that: determining whether code is valid or not and in doing so preventing invalid code (UB) from being compiled in the first place.

The simplest example of incorrect variance → UB is that `&'a mut T` must be invariant in T. If it were covariant, you could take a `&'a mut &'static T`, write a `&'b T` into it for some non-static lifetime `'b` (since `'static: 'b` for all `'b`), and then... kaboom. 'b ends but the compiler thought this was a `&'a mut &'static T`, and you've got a dangling reference.

`&'a mut T` can't be covariant in T for a similar reason: if you start with a `&'a mut &'b T`, contravariance would let you cast it to a `&'a mut &'static T`, and then you'd have a `&'static T` derived from a `&'b T`, which is again kaboom territory.

So, variance’s effect is to guide the compiler and prevent dangling references from occurring at runtime by making code that produces them invalid. Neither of the above issues is observable at runtime (barring compiler bugs) precisely because the compiler enforces variance correctly.
by ikawe | 2025-10-09 16:47:17+00:00
One tricky thing about maps, as they relate to privacy, is that the earth is large.

Compare that to encrypted email: if I’m sending you an encrypted message, the total data involved is minimal. To a first approximation, it’s just the message contents.

But if I want “Google Maps but private,” I first need access to an entire globe’s worth of data, on the order of terabytes. That’s a lot of storage for your (usually mobile) client, and a lot of bandwidth for whoever delivers it. And that data needs to be refreshed over time.

Typical mapping applications (like Google Maps) solve this with a combination of network services that answer your questions remotely (“Tell me what you’re searching for, and I’ll tell you where it is.”) and by tiling data so your client can request exactly what it needs, and no more, which is also a tell.

The privacy focused options I see are:

1. Pre-download all the map data, like OrganicMaps [1], to perform your calculations on the device. From a privacy perspective, you reveal only a coarse-grained notion of the area you’re interested in. As a "bonus", you get an offline maps app. You need to know a priori what areas you’ll need. For directions, that's usually fine, because I’m usually looking at local places, but sometimes I want to explore a random spot around the globe. Real-time transit and traffic-adaptive routing remain unaddressed.

2. Self-host your own mapping stack, as with Headway (I work on Headway). For the reasons above, it’s harder than hosting your own wiki, but I think it’s doable. It doesn’t currently support storing personal data (where you’ve been, favorite places, etc.), but adding that in a privacy conscious way isn’t unfathomable.

[1] https://organicmaps.app (though there are others)

[2] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway (see a hosted demo at https://maps.earth)
by 4m1rk | 2025-10-09 16:47:31+00:00
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by nixpulvis | 2025-10-09 16:47:34+00:00
I have no way of knowing, but I will say I'm already fatigued with comments claiming something is AI slop. It's only going to get worse.

You're so quick to be dismissive from a claim that they "tracked" something, when that could mean a lot of things. They clearly list some major issues directly after it, but yes fail to provide direct evidence that it's getting worse. I think the idea is that we will agree based on our own observations, which imo is reasonable enough.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-09 16:47:43+00:00
Yes, then we could put wheels on my grandmother and we would have invented a bicycle badly

https://youtu.be/A-RfHC91Ewc?si=uMjPf00zqbJHfSwn

We are so smart that we can take good things and modify them in stupid ways to make bad things. This is, in fact, very smart of us.

Winch launching is already a thing https://youtu.be/U3ztaJ0yfxE?si=1AjAS8F8-pCaUFZI
by cuckoos-jicamas | 2025-10-09 16:47:57+00:00
str.split() function does the same:

>>> s = "line1\nline2\rline3\r\nline4\vline5\x1dhello"

>>> s.split() ['line1', 'line2', 'line3', 'line4', 'line5', 'hello']

>>> s.splitlines() ['line1', 'line2', 'line3', 'line4', 'line5', 'hello']

But split() has sep argument to define delimiter according which to split the string.. In which case it provides what you expected to happen:

>>> s.split('\n') ['line1', 'line2\rline3\r', 'line4\x0bline5\x1dhello']

In general you want this:

>>> linesep_splitter = re.compile(r'\n|\r\n?')

>>> linesep_splitter.split(s) ['line1', 'line2', 'line3', 'line4\x0bline5\x1dhello']