MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-02 12:22:16+00:00
>There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail.

I agree with this concept and what's worse is when a project is technically sound but still fails, or even when a complete high-performance accomplishment fails to be deployed.

But I'll bend the terminology of "always" and "business" because it applies even wider than that.

If you've ever worked for a 19th century company that is an actual bureau by definition, and has had literally over a century to develop from those roots into a much more resilient bureaucracy than could be accomplished in less time, you know what I mean.

What if it's not always a business reason for failure but a bureaucratic component that rises above a tolerable level?

i.e. a non-business reason for "businessmen" to fail.

In a pure bureaucracy that exists solely to maintain standards of some kind, the focus can not be on making money, or the standards could be compromised.

Others will fall by the wayside and only the most successful bureaucrats will prevail in their efforts. Handsomely rewarded sometimes through fees and taxes paid by the real money-makers whom the bureau has evolved to serve.

Yes, rewarded for their efforts, none of which are business-like at all and without any internal focus on making money whatsoever.

These organizations can be some of the most stable and long-evolved of all, plus set the most consistent example of political hierarchy that people in all kinds of places can tend to emulate when they don't have any better ideas.

So when bureaucracy creeps into a business where it has not yet made an incursion, it has to do so under the radar because it's the opposite of trying to make money.

People get good at this and move up in the hierarchy, and eventually there's nobody who's even good enough at actually trying to make money any more. It's a full-time effort just building & maintaining the bureaucracy.

You end up with people that "look" like businessmen, act the way they think businessmen should act, golf like businessmen, etc.

But haven't got a clue how to make a dollar from a functional technical success that's a complete no-brainer :\
by squidbeak | 2025-10-02 12:22:51+00:00
> That's a password manager or authenticator app. You don't need a government to do anything to have that.

Too reductive. Password managers and authenticators don't give you any means of passing your official data in an authoritative way.

> The only way to actually prevent this is to make the data the user presents to the second service indistinguishable for all users meeting the qualification

Where ZKPs are used (eg for proof of age over 18) you're describing exactly what the proposal seems to expect.

> You can't fix this by making it illegal because you don't have a mechanism to identify when they're doing it. You give them data that could identify you and then whether they use it for that happens behind closed doors.

The system provides for an auditing service to ensure this doesn't happen without user consent.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-02 12:22:57+00:00
> All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors.

It's like asking big pharma if medicine should be less regulated, "all the experts agree", well yeah, their paycheck depends on it. Same reason no one at meta tells Zuck that his metaverse is dogshit and no one wants it, they still spent billions on it.

You can't assume everyone is that dumb, but you certainly can assume that the yes men won't say anything other than "yes".
by mixedbit | 2025-10-02 12:23:03+00:00
Back of the envelope calculation: Nvidia market cap is 4.5T$, their profit margin is 52%. This means Nvidia would need to sell 1067$ worth of equipment per human being on Earth for investors that buy Nvidia stock today to break even on the investment. Nvidia, unlike Apple, doesn't sell to end users (almost), but to AI companies that provide services to end users. The scale of required spending on Nvidia hardware is comparable to tech companies collectively buying IPhones for every human on Earth, because the value that IPhone users deliver to tech companies is large enough that giving away IPhones is justified.
by donatj | 2025-10-02 12:23:04+00:00
I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings.

I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years ago with non-AI ChatBots. No users actually wanted to do anything important by talking to a chatbot then, but every company still pushed them out. I don't think an LLM improves that much.

Every time some tool I've used for years sends an email "Hey, we've got AI now!" my thought is just "well, that's unfortunate"...

I don't want AI taking any actions I can't inspect with a difftool, especially not anything important. It's like letting a small child drive a car.
by spicyusername | 2025-10-02 12:23:12+00:00
I mean... there are many situations in life where people are bad judges of the facts. Dating, finances, health, etc, etc, etc.

It's not that hard to imagine that your friend feels more productive than she actually is. I'm not saying it's true, but it's plausible. The anecdata coming out of programming is mostly that people are only more productive in certain narrow use cases and much less productive in everything else, relative to just doing the work themselves with their sleeves rolled up.

But man to seeing all that code gets spit out on the screen FEEL amazing, even if I'm going to spend the next few hours needing to edit it, for the next few months managing the technical debt I didn't notice when I merged it.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-02 12:23:15+00:00
Yes, if people are interacting with them, which they are.

HN seems to think everyone is like in the bubble here, which thinks AI is completely useless and wants nothing to do with it.

Half the world is interacting with it on a regular basis already.

Are we anywhere near AGI? Probably not.

Does it matter? Probably not.

Inference costs are dropping like a rock, and usage is continuing to skyrocket.
by sz4kerto | 2025-10-02 12:23:27+00:00
> I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure

Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and so on.

> I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage

It can absolutely do exactly this.

https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/
by bakugo | 2025-10-02 12:24:21+00:00
You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragraph, but that doesn't mean I'm 20x more productive.

And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.
by rco8786 | 2025-10-02 12:25:06+00:00
AI, if nothing else, is already completely up-ending the Search industry. You probably already find yourself going to ChatGPT for lots of things you would have previously gone to Google for. That's not going to stop. And the ads marketplaces are coming.

We're also finding incredibly valuable use for it in processing unstructured documents into structured data. Even if it only gets it 80-90% there, it's so much faster for a human to check the work and complete the process than it is for them to open a blank spreadsheet and start copy/pasting things over.

There's obviously loads of hype around AI, and loads of skepticism. In that way this is similar to 2001. And the bubble will likely pop at some point, but the long tail value of the technology is very, very real. Just like the internet in 2001.
by jacknews | 2025-10-02 12:25:54+00:00
When you can use AI as though it's an employee, instead of repeatedly 'prompting' it with small problems and tasks.

It will have agency, it will perform the role. A part of that is that it will have to maintain a running context, and learn as it goes, which seem to be the missing pieces in current llms.

I suppose we'll know, when we start rating AI by 'performance review', like employees, instead of the current 'solve problem' scorecards.
by Izkata | 2025-10-02 12:26:24+00:00
That's politics in the office, not office politics.

But you are right that the author is mixing things up: Office politics isn't collaboration as described in the article. Office politics refers to things like one-upmanship, taking credit for stuff, playing the blame game - making yourself look good and others look bad, to get raises or promotions. Or for a phrase used in the article, office politics is about becoming a scheming backstabber.
by bArray | 2025-10-02 12:27:00+00:00
> You are absolutely delusional if you truly believe that. It was the raison d'être of the entire UKIP cause.

Then you should be able to easily find sources for that point?

Bare in mind that UKIP, Reform and the right-wing in the UK hold the likes of Churchill and the UK's efforts in WWII against the Nazis as a point of national pride. The UK sacrificed almost everything to save Europe, and those people would do it all over again.
by coderjames | 2025-10-02 12:27:16+00:00
> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore.

It doesn't say she chooses to use it; it says she can't work without using it. At my workplace, senior leadership has mandated that software engineers use our internal AI chat tooling daily, they monitor the usage statistics, and are updating engineering leveling guides to include sufficient usage of AI being required for promotions. So I can't work without AI anymore, but it doesn't mean I choose to.
by maeln | 2025-10-02 12:27:17+00:00
> Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU )

> So only looking at video capabilities, or at coding capabilities, it's already ready to automate and upend industries worth trillions in the long run.

Can Sora2 change the framing of a picture without changing the global scene ? Can it change the temperature of a specific light source ? Can it generate a 8k HDR footage suitable for re-framing and color grading ? Can it generate minute long video without loosing coherence ? Actually, can it generate a few seconds without having to reloop with the last frame and have these obnoxious cuts that the video you pointed has ? Can it reshoot the same exact scene with just one element altered ?

All the video models right now are only good at making short, low-res, barely post-processable video. The kind of stuff you see on social media. And considering the metrics on ai-generated video on social media right now, for the most part, nobody want to look at them. They might replace the bottom of the barrel of social media posting (hello cute puppy videos), but there is absolutely nothing indicating that they migth automate or upend any real industry (be used in the pipeline, yeah maybe, why not, automate ? Won't hold my breath).

And the argument of their future capabilities, well ... It's been 50+ years that we should have fusion in 20 years.

Btw, the same argument can be made for LLM and image-gen tech in any creative purposes. People severly underestimate just how much editing, re-work, purpose and pre-production steps are involved in any major creative endeavor. Most model are just severly ill suited for that work. They can be useful for some stuff (specificaly, for editing images, ai-driven image fill do work decently for exemple), but overall, as of right now, they are mostly good at making low quality content. Which is fine I guess, there is a market for it, but it was already a market that was not keen on spending money.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-02 12:27:27+00:00
We're very off topic, but if you're truly interested in Ezra Klein's worldview, I highly recommend his recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. At minimum, I think you'll discover that Ezra's feelings are a lot more nuanced than you're making them out to be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
by uladzislau | 2025-10-02 12:28:17+00:00
Calling this an “AI bubble” reads like pure sour grapes from folks who missed the adoption curve. Real teams are already banking gains - code velocity up, ticket resolution times down, and marketing lift from AI-assisted creative while capex always precedes revenue in platform shifts (see cloud 2010, smartphones 2007). The “costs don’t match cash flow” trope ignores lagging enterprise procurement cycles and the rapid glide path of unit economics as models, inference, and hardware efficiency improve. Habit formation is the moat: once workers rely on AI copilots, those workflows harden into paid seats and platform lock-in. We’re not watching a bubble pop; we’re watching infrastructure being laid for the next decade of products.
by scott_w | 2025-10-02 12:28:19+00:00
I imagine so. Bear in mind that the concept isn't particularly a bad idea, however they are very easy to abuse and the laws need to restrict them to where they're strictly necessary (and force the court to prove they're still needed).

The Afghan data leak scandal is a great example of where it made sense to use a super-injunction at first but also where its application continued long past when it should have done for (frankly) political reasons. Lewis Goodall's reporting on this is pretty excellent and fairly balanced, in my opinion.
by Majromax | 2025-10-02 12:28:24+00:00
Not just the scientific replication crisis, but also the scientific media replication crisis.

For all of the p-hacking and file drawer effects that modern research (noting this is an older piece) tries to avoid, the incentives for popular scientific media including blog posts all run in the other direction. Even if limited to just good, replicable studies in journals, anything we hear about via popularization is likely to be attached to a stronger-than-real effect size.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-02 12:28:51+00:00
Even if somebody gave no pretext, I don't think that, in and of itself, is illegal. Though it could be used for illegal things. For instance early on Reddit actively created fake accounts, fake votes, fake comments, and all other sorts of stuff in the process of trying to reach critical mass. I really doubt that was illegal.

OTOH if somebody sent a message saying, 'Hey we need to increase our apparent paying users in order to defraud some potential investors.' then obviously you've become part of a criminal conspiracy, but I think nobody would ever* overtly say that.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-02 12:28:56+00:00
Yes and no. The judge can choose to tack on zeroes to make Meta comply, but they may also find that monetary fines are not sufficient and take other measures. This is not just a money printing machine you can keep coming back to.

If Meta can provide a reasonable time frame for compliance, the judge may also choose to let the existing limit on reparations stand rather than increase it, despite them not complying the day they hit the 5 million euro mark.

It's all up to what the judge deems reasonable to make Meta comply with the court's orders.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-02 12:29:10+00:00
Why would we want AGI? I've yet to read a convincing argument in favor (but granted, I never looked into it, I'm still at science-fiction doomerism). One thing that irks me is that people see it as inevitable, and that we have to pursue AGI because if we don't, someone else will. Or more bleak, if we don't actively pursue us, our malignant future AGI overlords will punish us for not bringing it into existence (roko's basilisk, the thing Musk and Grimes apparently bonded over because they're weird)
by ofcourseyoudo | 2025-10-02 12:29:22+00:00
What is the "false information" being pushed here? That transgender people exist?

Anyone who has watched "Dead End" knows the only "propaganda" it is pushing is that trans kids exist and one particular one (Barney) feels more comfortable expressing what they feel is their most authentic identity.

Also what is the comparative exposure of LGBTQ experience as seen in children's programming versus the amount of heterosexual experience they are shown?
by ivape | 2025-10-02 12:29:32+00:00
AI figured out something on my mind that I didn’t tell it about yesterday (latest Sonnet). My best advice to you is to spend time and allow the AI to blow your mind. Then you’ll get it.

Sometimes I sit in wonder at how the fuck it’s able to figure out that much intent without specific instructions. There’s no way anyone programmed it to understand that much. If you’re not blown away by this then I have to assume you didn’t go deep enough with your usage.
by lloeki | 2025-10-02 12:30:08+00:00
> Humans (or at least programmers) "build the tools to solve the problem" so intuitively and automatically when the problem starts to "feel hard", that it doesn't often occur to the average programmer that LLMs don't think like this.

Hmm. My experience of "the average programmer" doesn't look like yours and looks more like the LLM :/

I'm constantly flabbergasted as to how way too many devs fumble through digging into logs or extracting information or what have you because it simply doesn't occur to them that tools can be composed together.
by gorgoiler | 2025-10-02 12:30:33+00:00
What’s the theoretical total addressable market for, say, consumer facing software services? Or discretionary spending? That puts one limit on the value of your business.

Another limit would be to think about stock purchases. How much money is available to buy stocks overall, and what slice of that pie do you expect your business to extract?

It’s all very well spending eleventy squillion dollars on training and saying you’ll make it back through revenue, but not if the total amount of revenue in the world is only seventy squillion.

Or maybe you just spend your $$$ on GPUs, then sell AI cat videos back to the GPU vendors?
by roxolotl | 2025-10-02 12:30:48+00:00
This has been reported many places over the past year the percent seems to be all over the place though.

Yesterday “As much as 1/3rd”: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/if-ai-is-bubble-econo...

A week ago “More than consumer spending(but the reality is complex)”:https://fortune.com/2025/09/17/how-much-gdp-artificial-intel...

August “1.3% of 3% however it might be tariff stockpiling”: https://www.barrons.com/articles/ai-spending-economy-microso...
by TomBers | 2025-10-02 12:30:52+00:00
What is a good way to test for better than human intelligence?

Proposal - The Skibidi toilet test

So the test is very simple:

Could an artificial intelligence create a piece of media on demand that reached similar levels of cultural impact as Skibidi toilet?

Why?

1) This is not currently humanly possible. Many try, and some are better than others, but it is fundamentally impossible to predict.

2) Out of distribution By definition it has to be something unique, eliciting a thats cool response.

3)Models other minds The tone \ content \ semiotics has to speak to a large enough group of people and worth sharing.

4) Surfing the Geist To both understand and respond to the Geist, to directly observe the "anima mundi, spiritus universi"
by softwaredoug | 2025-10-02 12:31:41+00:00
Things can be a bubble AND actual economic growth long term. Happens all the time with new tech.

Dotcom boom made all kinds of predictions about Web usage. That decade plus later turned out to be true. But at the time the companies got way ahead of consumer adoption.

Specific to AI copilots. We currently are building hundreds that nobody will use for every one success.
by ForHackernews | 2025-10-02 12:31:58+00:00
The same way that NFTs of ugly cartoons apes were a multi-billion dollar industry for about 28 months.

Edit: People are downvoting this because they think "Hey, that's not right, LLMs are way better than non-fungible apes!" (which is true) but the money is pouring in for exactly the same reason: get the apes now and later you'll be rich!
by isamuel | 2025-10-02 12:31:59+00:00
> And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much easier it makes the life of the user. That’s not a bad thing.
by scott_w | 2025-10-02 12:32:04+00:00
I remember a lot of fuss being made about these but, as time goes on, I'm very sceptical they can work. Looking at the Afghan data leak reported earlier this year: courts can make it practically difficult for most of the organisation to even know they're subject to court orders!

The person updating the website asks "have we received a court order?" and the person under injunction must answer "not me." The website author isn't lying, but the website contains incorrect information (as the result of a legally-enforced lie).

You could ask your lawyer but, once again, they'd also answer "no we haven't" because answering anything else is contempt of court at best.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-02 12:32:32+00:00
Average programmers do not produce average software; the former implements code, the latter is the full picture and is more about what to build, not how to build it. You don't get a better "what to build" by having above-average developers.

Anyway we don't need more efficient average programmers, time-to-market is rarely down to coding speed / efficiency and more down to "what to build". I don't think AI will make "average" software development work faster or better, case in point being decades of improvements in languages, frameworks and tools that all intend to speed up this process.
by Oxyn | 2025-10-02 12:33:41+00:00
I don't work with data but are dataset formats really so similar that a single reading API can fit all of them, including future ones which may have strange and new forms of data we find useful?

Do you not also then have to worry about bugs in the web assembly tainting results produced from this data? its not like a managed library for reading where you can simply update the library if you find a bug. you would have to redownload the dataset which is bundled with the anyblox reader? or maybe patch the file which would be more involved. Im assuming these datasets would be large enough for this to be an inconvenience.
by closewith | 2025-10-02 12:37:44+00:00
Yes, I once made a bug report based to a client's supplier (overly permissive API endpoint was leading user data) and became the subject of the a spurious defamation letter. It was obviously unwinnable on the supplier's part, never went past solicitor's letters, and still cost high four figures to defend.

Nothing like some of the real horror stories, but still a significant chilling effect.
by eek2121 | 2025-10-02 12:38:23+00:00
In my eyes, it'd be cheaper for a company to simply purchase laptops with decent hardware specs, and run the LLMs locally. I've had decent results from various models I've run via LMStudio, and bonus points: It costs nothing and doesn't even use all that much CPU/GPU power.

Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).