MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sigbottle | 2025-10-02 12:12:39+00:00
I think it's true that AI does deliver real value. It's helped me understand domains quickly, be a better google search, given me code snippets and found obscure bugs, etc. In that regard, it's a positive on the world.

I also think it's true that AI is nowhere near AGI level. It's definitely not currently capable of doing my job, not by a long shot.

I also think that, throwing trillions of dollars at AI for a "a better google search, code snippet generator, and obscure bug finder" is a contentious question, and a lot of people oppose it for that reason.

I personally still think it's kind of crazy we have a technology to do things that we didn't have just ~2 years before, even if it just stagnates right here. Still going to be using it every day, even if I admittedly hate a lot of parts of it (for example, "thinking models" get stuck in local minima way too quickly).

At the same time, don't know if it's worth trillions of dollars, at least right now.

So all claims on this thread can be very much true at the same time, just depends on your perspective.
by tripzilch | 2025-10-02 12:13:01+00:00
I get your point but I still disagree (also about the percentages btw). Can you also get _my_ point?

Well-designed machines quite _often_ operate against "user" expectations when those expectations are wrong.

For instance say if I charge my phone for an hour, it'll last for a day. How long will it last when I charge it for two hours? Because in practice the answer is either "also a day" or it is "the battery catches on fire", this machine acts _against_ user expectations and stops charging the phone after an hour.

Maybe an even better example: coins! I dunno about coins in the US but but get this: the 5 eurocent coin is _bigger_ than the 10 eurocent coin! I dunno why, or if there even is a good reason for that, but it doesn't seem to bother "users" of money (e.g. everybody) when they have to sort out cash.

Anyway my point is that even if _some_ (but definitely not all!) people may expect numerical sorting, doesn't mean that they're right ... and it's not like lexicographic sorting is rocket science and zero padding .. well I think you said you don't like the way it looks, but I actually think it looks very neat because things line up and it's actually easier to read for me, as well :)

It's dumbing things down, in a bad way. It's like hiding the inner workings of stuff, and it's a mistake to think that even if somebody is not familiar with computers that they are _stupid_. People might even get curious and figure out that numbers come before uppercase and those come before lowercase. And maybe one day someone comes along and says "you know that's because of ASCII?" and they learn a thing! Which is cool.

Instead it's like you're painting people scratching their heads wondering "why number not go up?"
by justupvoting | 2025-10-02 12:13:02+00:00
I think McCarthy is one of the greatest American writers, but I will say my two main gripes with him are his tendency to drift over the line into overwrought (sometimes the biblical language is incredibly powerful, sometimes not), and his utter inability to write women.

He did ok with Alicia in his last couple books, but even there he flounders some. "If I had a baby I wouldn't care about reality"? Hmm, ok?

"His face was all covered in girljuice"? C'mon bud.

But no writer is flawless.
by mattlondon | 2025-10-02 12:13:07+00:00
The article makes it sound clear sure. But then the article has been edited.

I would not have been surprised if the 5 million user thing was couched as some sort of "we need to generate some realistic test data to load test our systems <WINK WINK> - please create 5 million accounts very similar to these paying ones, remember this is testing so they need to be as realistic and believable as possible <WINK WINK>".

If I got that request (perhaps without the winking!) come down the line through the usual channels I'd probably have gone along with it without realising it was for anything nefarious. ...but then would that be a viable defense?!

Context is everything.
by notindexed | 2025-10-02 12:13:42+00:00
For one of my works, a 50 x 3.5m insitu concrete sculpture, i had about 10 subcontractors. Architects, concrete specialists, engineers, construction firm, gardeners and so on

You often lack the resources/skill thus you subcontract. Nothing wrong nor surprising with that.

Artworks are often 100% prototypes so it's already challenging finding subcontractors that understand the work and are willing to take the risk of producing the work.
by aurareturn | 2025-10-02 12:15:01+00:00
No she’s less productive. She just use it because she wants to do less work, be less likely to get promoted, and have to stay in the office longer to finish her work.

/s

What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder? Like ChatGPT is some kind of addiction similar to drugs? Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-02 12:15:03+00:00
> The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat.

From an economy-wide perspective, why does that matter?

> users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out.

Great, that means there might be real competition! This generally keeps prices down, it doesn't push them up! It's true that VCs may end up unhappy, but will they be able to do anything about it?
by daitangio | 2025-10-02 12:15:07+00:00
I set up my personal mail server https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver and I have wrote about it here https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker

I am GMail-free from 2020 and I am a lot happier.

I keep my GMail account, but I use just as failsafe or as seconday account. In the meantime, I have very little trouble managing my mail-server.
by echelon | 2025-10-02 12:16:13+00:00
Serious thought.

What if people are using LLMs to achieve the same productivity with more cost to the business and less time spent working?

This, to me, feels incredibly plausible.

Get an email? ChatGPT the response. Relax and browse socials for an hour. Repeat.

"My boss thinks I'm using AI to be more productive. In reality, I'm using our ChatGPT subscription to slack off."

That three day report still takes three days, wink wink.

AI can be a tool for 10xers to go 12x, but more likely it's also that AI is the best slack off tool for slackers to go from 0.5x to 0.1x.

And the businesses with AI mandates for employees probably have no idea.

Anecdotally, I've seen it happen to good engineers. Good code turning into flocks of seagulls, stacks of scope 10-deep, variables that go nowhere. Tell me you've seen it too.
by jacknews | 2025-10-02 12:17:03+00:00
How so?

The maximum possible benefit of fusion (aside from the science gained in the attempt) is cheap energy.

We'll get very cheap energy just by massively rolling out existing solar panels (maybe some at sea), and other renewables, HVDC and batteries/storage.

Fusion is almost certain to be uneconomical in comparison if it's even feasible technically.

AI, is already dramtically impacting some fields, including science (eg deepfold), and AGI would be a step-change.
by hemloc_io | 2025-10-02 12:17:03+00:00
Yeah I've used it for personal projects and it's 50/50 for me.

Some of the stuff generated I can't believe is actually good to work with long term, and I wonder about the economics of it. It's fun to get something vaguely workable quickly though.

Things like deepwiki are useful too for open source work.

For me though the core problem I have with AI programming tools is that they're targeting a problem that doesn't really exist outside of startups, not writing enough code, instead of the real part of inefficiency in any reasonably sized org, coordination problems.

Of course if you tried to solve coordination problems, then it would probably be a lot harder to sell to management because we'd have to do some collective introspection as to where they come from.
by breakingcups | 2025-10-02 12:17:21+00:00
Anything that is vaguely present in their training data (see, a wine glass filled to the brim [1][2]), that is.

https://medium.com/@joe.richardson.iii/the-curious-case-of-t... https://medium.com/@joe.richardson.iii/openai-slaps-a-band-a...
by Chris2048 | 2025-10-02 12:17:37+00:00
You still have to register with them, I'm not sure that is common among NC licenses. I assume this also means its not really open-source (or compatible with open collaboration) if they are gatekeeping (via licences) the free dev licence.

Also consider this - If you got a licence would this "taint" you if you ever wanted to work on a project like OPs? As in, the registration is proof you could access the proprietary QNX code, forming the basis of a lawsuit.
by ____mr____ | 2025-10-02 12:18:02+00:00
If the tech is here to stay, my question is: how and why? The how: The projects for the new data centers and servers housing this tech are incredibly expensive to build and maintain. These also jack up the price of electricity in the neighborhoods and afaik the US electrical grid is extremely fragile and is already being pushed to its limit with the existing compute being used on AI. All of this for AI companies to not make a profit. The only case you could make would be to nationalize the companies and have them subsidized by taxes.

But why?: This would require you to make a case that AI tools are useful enough to be sustained despite their massive costs and hard to quantify contribution to productivity. Is this really the case? I haven't really seen a productivity increase worth justifying the cost, and as soon as Anthropic tried to even remotely make a profit (or break even) power users instantly realized that the productivity is not really worth paying the actual compute required to do their tasks
by volfpeter | 2025-10-02 12:18:27+00:00
It's a shame you did all the rendering manually :) FastHX would have simplified your life a bit.

devpush seems really interesting! I wasn't aware of it, but I'll check it out! It also looks great (no surprise there, it's Basecoat).

Although I usually go with DaisyUI, Basecoat is a vey good source for ideas and more complex component patterns. This is why I feel translating Basecoat snippets to htmy wouldn't be that much trouble, and I'm seriously considering starting it.
by antonyh | 2025-10-02 12:18:33+00:00
Your implementation might be static json files, but it's not impossible to force other filetypes in there. This in itself makes it high risk?

Allowing force-push is considered an antipattern for Git, and generally best avoided. It's a safeguard against lost history and prevents data loss.

That aside, the comments are the history. Git is the wrong tool for the job. Why would you choose a generic version-control system designed for source code diffs & merges for the specialised task of chronologically-ordered comments? A database such as PostgreSQL is a far superior choice in just about every possible way. I admire your ingenuity here to make something out of what's available, but I respectfully disagree with this being a good way to capture user-generated content when there are better alternatives.
by diggan | 2025-10-02 12:18:42+00:00
Doesn't seem like it:

> 5.3. orders Meta Ireland to pay BoE a penalty of €100,000.00 for each day or part thereof that it does not, or does not fully, comply with the orders under 5.1 and/or 5.2, up to a maximum total of €5,000,000.00.

Original:

> 5.3. veroordeelt Meta Ierland om aan BoE een dangsom te betalen van € 100.000.00 oor iedere dag of gedeelte daarvan dat zij niet of niet volledig aan de beelen onder 5.1 en/of 5.2 oldoet. tot een maximum an in totaal € 5.000.000.00 is bereikt.

It seems like usually they start with smaller fines, and if the offense is repeated, they ramp it up. Kind of makes sense.
by agedclock | 2025-10-02 12:18:58+00:00
No. I didn't think what I said was that difficult to understand. But I will break it down.

- Designers were not working with HTML and CSS (this was about ~2008-2011). I met one "designer" who would do HTML and CSS back in about 2015. I met another woman that could do it in 2022. I've worked in a bunch of web agencies and corps.

- Some designers due to emergence of smart phones had started experimenting with using HTML 5 and CSS 3 to create responsive designed.

- There were articles in online publications and blogs where people were extolling the virtues of it, trying to convince others.

- This ultimately didn't happen. People are still using Photoshop if they are not using Figma. You have dedicated front-end devs and/or teams in most orgs if they actually care about the UX/UI quality. Otherwise they just just use a bootstrap/tailwind theme and call it a day.

I stopped doing frontend dev primarily back in 2023 after I realised I was still fixing the same stupid iOS bugs from a decade before hand.
by redhale | 2025-10-02 12:19:05+00:00
Agree. This may seem nice and easy for simple demo scenarios, but things always get more complicated ("I just need an if statement here and a switch statement there") and imo code always wins in the end. Perhaps for truly pure data processing pipeline use cases this makes sense.

But code-first approaches to this problem, like that of Temporal [0] (no affiliation), are much nicer in the long run imo.

[0] https://temporal.io/blog/introducing-temporal-dotnet
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-02 12:19:38+00:00
The cost of serving an "average" user would only fall over time.

Most users rarely make the kind of query that would benefit a lot from the capabilities of GPT-6.1e Pro Thinking With Advanced Reasoning, Extended Context And Black Magic Cross Context Adaptive Learning Voodoo That We Didn't Want To Release To Public Yet But If We Didn't Then Anthropic Would Surely Do It First.

And the users that have this kind of demanding workloads? They'd be much more willing to pay up for the bleeding edge performance.
by pdimitar | 2025-10-02 12:20:07+00:00
Not a business, just a library for other devs.

Finishing up https://github.com/dimitarvp/xqlite -- an Elixir library for working with SQLite, with the FFI code written in Rust via the `rusqlite` crate.

The Elixir ecosystem lacks a super stable driver for this. I've heard reports that the currently used library -- `exqlite` -- crashes every now and then. I aim to fix that once and for all, with Rust and careful programming.

Last items remaining are to make sure users can get precompiled native library + start doing proper release tagging. The software is functional otherwise.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-02 12:20:21+00:00
This is 5 million for this particular court case. Nothing is preventing others from filing their own, very similar cases. If Meta ignores the court's decision, a second lawsuit may end much worse for them.

Though, practically speaking, America has been threatening to make the trade war they started much worse for the EU if it tried to enforce things like DSA and GDPR fines. We'll have to see how enforceable these laws really are.
by Timon3 | 2025-10-02 12:20:29+00:00
> You can fix bright and loud.

Not in socially acceptable ways - people look at you strangely when you have sunglasses on indoors, and when I'm wearing headphones people usually gesture for me to take them off when they want to talk. It's even worse to have the loud noise suddenly crashing in while I have to talk to the cashier - better to have gotten used to it before.

> Shouldn't a list be a positive here?

In some ways yes, but it also brings new problems. What if a specific product isn't in stock? It's also pressure to really get everything - I sometimes can't get everything on my list because it stresses me out enough that I'd rather order some stuff.

> What's bad about "packing bags and paying", with "paying" being separate from human interaction?

Packing bags isn't an issue for me, but paying takes enough concentration that I often stumble over my words, e.g. by combining two colloquial responses. It's always embarrassing and makes the next times I go shopping even more stressful.
by rightbyte | 2025-10-02 12:20:39+00:00
Our board would be packed with Scrum lords smacking down on missing field entries in Jira tickets.

I would like more 'philosophy' in CS education. Just that people are aware of the methods used against them helps alot. It is hard and takes time to discover stuff on your own. It took me like 5-10 years of working before I realized how the sausage is made.
by thrance | 2025-10-02 12:20:49+00:00
If vegetarians did side with Hitler, then yeah, I would have an issue with them as a group. But that's completely different, can't you see? TERFs are consistently found to be supporting right-wing candidates, a lot of whom hold anti-feminist views. That's the issue.

Again, and please read it this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-critical_feminism#Polit...
by jsheard | 2025-10-02 12:21:31+00:00
IIRC you can still log into a lapsed Workspace account, but the core "business" products like Gmail, Docs and Meet are completely disabled until you reactivate your subscription. The rest of Google still works to the extent that it ever did under the weird Workspace limitations.

You cannot migrate a Workspace account into a regular Google account, you're stuck with Workspace forever unless you start over on a brand new account.
by moron4hire | 2025-10-02 12:21:43+00:00
Many years ago, I was working for a consulting firm doing work for a, erhm, "large insurance provider headquartered in Illinois". I was building a tool their insurance adjusters could use to use GPS devices to check how far houses were from the coast line and deny flood coverage to anyone within a certain boundary. Note that this was during the time of Selective Availability, so GPS devices were only good to 100m precision.

The client saw my first version where I marked an "indeterminate" buffer zone to account for the precision problem. They complained it was "confusing" and insisted I use the raw value without any buffer. Oh, and also, round the numbers in such a way to put all indeterminate points inside the denial zone. This would effectively add hundreds of square miles to the denial zone. A denial zone set by law, i.e. this was the some the government was allowing the insurance company to blanket deny flood coverage.

Giving them the benefit of doubt, I explained that the proposed changes didn't make mathematical sense and would over count people near the edge of the denial zone. I had access to some market data at the time and was able to estimate it would be a few thousand extra homes. They did the standard "avoid acknowledging the issue" whenever someone is trying to pressure you into doing something unethical it illegal.

I told my boss at the consulting company. He started putting the screws on me. Told me we needed to do this. Told me my job was on the line. Intimated it would be hard to find a new job considering the client was the largest employer in the area. Told me he could get anyone to do it.

I had two weeks of PTO planned, during which I was supposed to come back to Pennsylvania and move my stuff out to Illinois. After my PTO, I was supposed to show back up in Illinois. Instead, I went to our HQ in PA (much to the surprise of everyone, "what are you doing here"), told the CEO what happened, and when he doubled down on doing the wrong thing, I quit on the spot, no notice period.

I learned later they did not "get anyone to do it". My actions put the contract in a lurch, the client dropped my former employer, and cancelled the project.

I feel pretty good about that one.

There have been other issues since then, but I've noticed a pattern. They always happen at places I had to talk myself into joining. There were red flags and I rationalized them away, "well, I'm just over reacting. I don't have any evidence anything is wrong here. It's just the way people talk that's bothering me. And I really need this job." Since I've gotten more stable and better about not taking jobs that show red flags, somehow the ethical issues seem to have magically gone away.
by jbstack | 2025-10-02 12:21:44+00:00
There are plenty of scenarios where you want to work with a new language but you don't want to have to dedicate months/years of your life to becoming expert in it because you are only going to use it for a one-time project.

For example, perhaps I want to use a particular library which is only available in language X. Or maybe I'm writing an add-on for a piece of software that I use frequently. I don't necessarily want to become an expert in Elisp just to make a few tweaks to my Emacs setup, or in Javascript etc. to write a Firefox add-on. Or maybe I need to put up a quick website as a one-off but I know nothing about web technologies.

In none of these cases can I "use a toolset I'm experienced in" because that isn't available as an option, nor is it a worthwhile investment of time to become an expert in the toolset if I can avoid that.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-02 12:21:53+00:00
Smalltalk and professional exchange aren't politics, the author is conflating the too.

When people say "no politics" they mean have a position on certain issues that mostly are off topic in a business environment.

For example if I have my group where nobody is religeous. You could rant about how stupid religeous people are because nobody would feel particularly attacked and some would nod along. Disregarding that the pittyful self-revelation from pointing at others calling them stupid, this is a political stance.

But we employ people from all over the world and viewpoints change. Some don't have the most dense main stream belief you find everywhere. You don't go into the next office and pronounce how atheism is the best thing. That is meant with "no politics". It is a requirement for multi-cultural exchange without immediate conflict. It is of course not restricted to religion.

The auther misunderstood what politics means. What he describes is office and relationship dynamics. There is quite a bit of overlap, especially when it comes to signal your viewpoints and perspectives in the hope to get recognition. I would be careful about that in a professional environment though. Depends on the company and how many cultures meet each other in random watercooler talk.

You can convolute the terms here, but it just blurrs the precision of any statement.

That said, relationship dynamics or "power play" leads to an effect where the most competent people often aren't the most well liked people. That is unfortunate and not very new. But the problem cannot be adressed by "talking more about politics". On the contrary, it would make things much, much worse.
by mrbungie | 2025-10-02 12:21:54+00:00
> What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder?

That's just an appeal to masses / bandwagon fallacy.

> Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?

We need data, not beliefs and current data is conflicting. ffs.