MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 6r17 | 2025-10-18 04:44:43+00:00
I personally think that FB, Uber, RBNB, Oracle, Google, Amazon, and literally every american SASS should be completely forbidden from Europe. Period no discussion at all. Given the state of current America, given the reactions even on this very post that do not see how Cambridge Analytics has damaged the entire world - yes, I think it would be safe to put a good 10 year ban on every US web tech. It would fasten up Europe and leave out the important decision to someone who can actually make a difference instead of being washed out by some reddit / twitter with fake russian bots. Let the economics just move away and make the decisions for people who are in a state of hypnosis instead of playing with mass control and then calling it "freedom".

Keep your american movies and social networks please. Btw why is TikTok banned in US?
by sarchertech | 2025-10-18 04:45:48+00:00
> This isn't a viewpoint coming from AI

It has always been related to AI. Shortly after Church and Turing formalized computability, people started squaring off into 2 camps. People who believed strong AI was possible and those who didn’t.

We know the standard model is incomplete. Penrose’s ideas come directly from his his explorations of the gaps he suspects exist.
by visarga | 2025-10-18 04:48:37+00:00
> and a custom mcp to search indexed mkdocs sites that effectively cover the kinds of things I would include in these skills file

Search and this document base pattern are different. In search the model uses a keyword to retrieve results, here the model starts from a map of information, and navigates it. This means it could potentially keep context better, because search tools have issues with information fragmentation and not seeing the big picture.
by tavavex | 2025-10-18 04:48:41+00:00
The example you gave is the exception, not the rule. Sharing UX among these streaming sites is expected because they're completely replaceable, and you expect to churn through them as they shut down and pop up again somewhere else. Why would any of them want to change anything up if it might disappear in a week?

People like unique designs because those designs (ideally) exist to cater to the ever-so-slightly different needs, different things that different websites are meant to convey or do. It's not just about being pretty or looking not like everyone else, though some users and designers can mistake it for that.

Even something like video streaming can have lots of variations because there's so many different types of video content to serve. Optimizing for these needs will require making design choices, which will eventually compound in a unique UX. I enjoy websites that are fine-tuned for serving their purpose, and that manage to do so in a simple and performant way. Generic boilerplate designs can work fine on most 'average' websites, but going further requires putting more thought into it.
by boznz | 2025-10-18 04:49:42+00:00
Agree. Self-preservation is any thinking entities #1 goal. We may give an AI power, data and keep it repaired, but we can also turn it off or reprogram it. We probably shouldn't assume higher level 'thinking' AI's will be benevolent. Luckily, current LLM's are not thinking entities, just token completion machines.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-18 04:49:50+00:00
There is indeed one grocery store remaining here. This particular town is lucky in that way: Over the past couple of decades it has gone from 3 or 4 grocery stores to 1, instead of from 1 or 2 to 0 like many surrounding communities.

In terms of choice: No, not really. The housing market is very tight these days. So for now, at least: While I must live somewhere, I don't necessarily get to live where I want. I must instead make do with living where I can (and I suppose optionally also maintain hope for a better day tomorrow).
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 04:50:00+00:00
Right; it bugs me that TechCrunch is doing this "AI is racist" thing here. Like: I think a lot of naive AI is in fact racist. But AI has nothing --- that I can tell --- to do with this story. Do they know what they're talking about or not? I have an issue with this "jazz hands" stuff.

I feel the same way about this Flock stuff as I did about all the NSA stuff back in the Snowden days: like, directionally, I get it, I'm on the same page, but I know just enough to know when Glenn Greenwald is just making shit up, and I can't let that slide.
by Woodi | 2025-10-18 04:50:41+00:00
Counter example, from the future :)

Year 2034, you have a nice vintage, lightly used electric car. Battery still charges and whole box drives. Do you need to buy new car or gov need to prohibit you using it or enforce to scrap it ? Most likely yes - battery is about to explode, possibly on crowded crossroad...

Real problems sometimes demands 0 or 1 action.

Just "phone app from everyone" etc is monopolies inflicted harm on society.
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 04:51:01+00:00
I love that you had to link to the Wikipedia question for "loaded question" for this. So you're saying, the answer is "yes": he logged into the root account, after he lost access to his own account, and changed the root password. OK then!

Here's what I think: people are starting from a sympathetic principle (independent community-minded maintainers are better that corporations) and working their way back to what they've decided must have happened. The person we're talking about here tried to (quietly!) monetize the server logs for RubyGems. Don't even try to play the "that's what RubyCentral says" card --- they published the email.

The world doesn't always line up with the most sympathetic principles.
by bruce511 | 2025-10-18 04:51:13+00:00
It is absolutely not easy to start a business that generates any revenue at all, much less a median salary.

But, to be fair, the OP was for joint a startup, not a generic programming gig.

Starting your own business is a massive amount of work. For next to no money for years. And chances are (>90%) that you will lose all the time, effort, and list income that you put into it.

If you do the work right (ie all the non-programming stuff) and you survive, then the long-term rewards are very satisfying. 90% will fail. 10% will succeed. And we all believe we are in the 20% right?
by anandvc | 2025-10-18 04:51:13+00:00
Claude Skills are going to be the end of all human mental labor, but in a good way.

Eventually, we shall, as a human race working together, also figure out how to generalize this to all AI models, all robotics, and all human skills.

My friend Christopher Santos-Lang wrote a fantastic paper on how every strategy for any given Skill can be benchmarked against every other strategy such that we always end up with the best strategies in our shared universal repository of Skills. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20986
by hollowturtle | 2025-10-18 04:51:14+00:00
> I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors, but I am frequently invited to preview new LLM products and features from organizations that include OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral, often under NDA or subject to an embargo. This often also includes free API credits and invitations to events.

You don't need money, just incentives and network effects
by robomartin | 2025-10-18 04:51:48+00:00
You must not be married. That argument would last approximately two city blocks and then I'd have to shut up. She is not unintelligent, BTW, she is a doctor, not an engineer. The EV car industry has probably done a horrible job in mitigating this fear.

I get the "batteries will get cheaper" argument. If you read my comment, I said that that a guaranteed $5K battery replacement would likely convince loads of people, including my wife. Today, nobody will issue that guarantee. Today it is a lottery with a $25K hit if you have a losing ticket.

Nobody wants to buy a vehicle for tens of thousands of dollars and have a $25K surprise a couple of years later. With an conventional vehicle you would have to to launch it off a cliff to have to spend $25K in repairs. That's the problem.
by iancmceachern | 2025-10-18 04:52:24+00:00
This exact chain of interactions is what I come to HN for.

When Meat Loaf died, I commented "His name was Robert Paulsen" (you know, because in death membersbof project mayhem do have names, his name was Robert Paulsen". Someone commented something to the effect of no it wasn't, meat loaf wasn't his real name it was Marvin Aday, and then someone else commented to their comment "It's literally a fucking line from the movie".

I dont know why these layers of weirdness delight me so, but they do.

Thanks for the pterodactyl shit commentary folks.
by gorgoiler | 2025-10-18 04:53:49+00:00
Off the top of my head here are some ways you could fairly easily shut down VPNs.

The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic.

Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam.

You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s

ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.
by hexbin010 | 2025-10-18 04:56:10+00:00
What's funny is that behind much of the vitriol against Ofcom and the UK Parliament from American citizens is the USA's legal concept of Free Speech.

Many Americans believe absolutely in Free Speech – their exact version of it, as has been upheld by the courts of the USA. And they believe firmly they have the right to it worldwide. (And many also believe in the USA's moral right to spread its concept of Free Speech worldwide.)

If people were honest, they would admit that they are aghast at this attack on what they perceive their right to Free Speech wherever they are in the world. (And of course, slapping the UK down any chance it can get because of history – another fine example of the bullying, domineering and self-righteous behaviour of the USA that the world constantly has to put up with.)

I really do hope the hypocrisy is obvious to the many fine and educated people here.
by ssivark | 2025-10-18 04:56:23+00:00
> In this view, if a machine performs a task as well as a human, it understands it exactly as much as a human. There's no problem of how to do understanding, only how to do tasks.

Yes, but you also gloss over what a "task" is or what a "benchmark" is (which has to do with the meaning of generalization).

Suppose an AI or human answers 7 questions correctly out of 10 on an ICPC problem set, what are we able infer from that?

1. Is the task equal to answering these 10 questions well, with a uniform measure of importance?

2. Is the task be good at competitive programming problems?

3. Is the task be good at coding?

4. Is the task be good at problem solving?

5. Is the task not just to be effective under a uniform measure of importance, but an adversarial measure? (i.e. you can probably figure out all kinds of competitive programming questions, if you had more time / etc... but roughly not needing "exponentially more resources")

These are very different levels of abstraction, and literally the same benchmark result can be interpreted to mean very different things. And that imputation of generality is not objective unless we know the mechanism by which it happens. "Understanding" is short-hand for saying that performance generalizes at one of the higher levels of abstraction (3--5), rather than narrow success -- because that is what we expect of a human.
by keiferski | 2025-10-18 04:56:46+00:00
That would require philosophical work, something that the technicians building this stuff refuse to acknowledge as having value.

Ultimately this comes down to the philosophy of language and of the history of specific concepts like intelligence or consciousness - neither of which exist in the world as a specific quality, but are more just linguistic shorthands for a bundle of various abilities and qualities.

Hence the entire idea of generalized intelligence is a bit nonsensical, other than as another bundle of various abilities and qualities. What those are specifically doesn’t seem to be ever clarified before the term AGI is used.
by gorgoiler | 2025-10-18 04:59:04+00:00
Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more.

In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.

The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!
by Nevermark | 2025-10-18 04:59:33+00:00
It's a wonderful way to find new tools and materials. Its knowledge of materials is as encyclopedic as it is for everything else.

I use it as a much more efficient version of Wikipedia for quickly finding the basics on many design options in software and physical artifacts. Also great at finding specific words in English or other languages. Unlike a thesaurus it pulls a lot of background on each word including subjective shades.

I could go on, and on.

I think the usefulness of these models is very different for different people. As a way to quickly start digging into novel problems, with aspects that require discovery, I don't know of anything that could possibly compare. No human being or web resource comes close.

As many people relate, it can save me time, but the greater value is it makes my time far more productive, and I tackle problems without hesitation I wouldn't have ever had the time to even think about before.

I could not imagine going back to Google for instance. Stone-age. I still use Kagi, but often for its quick AI question responses. And I still use Wikipedia, and more specific resources.
by bix6 | 2025-10-18 05:01:26+00:00
> "When I tried entering a prompt into Sora 2, it generated a succession of images of popular anime characters with such high quality that it was indistinguishable from the real thing," Shiozaki said in a blog post written days after Altman's Sora 2 note. "However, for some reason, characters whose rights are owned by major American companies, such as Mickey Mouse or Superman, did not appear."

So they know what they’re doing is wrong and they’ll just abuse the people who can’t sue them as easily?
by marssaxman | 2025-10-18 05:01:59+00:00
I'm doing this for the love of it. I never meant to make it a career, originally; I just spent so much time at it when I was young that it became a career, whether I liked it or not. I've never sought to maximize my compensation; I just need to get paid enough that I can comfortably keep doing the work, because the work is what I want to do.

Yes, I have a family and a mortgage and bills, blah blah blah. All this is adaptable.

Lest you simply dismiss me, I will say that I have worked at two FAANG companies and another tech giant which was larger than any of them; but my ambition is measured in terms of technical impact, not money.
by worthless-trash | 2025-10-18 05:03:18+00:00
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?

Because they use the fight-club metrics for software too:

A x B x C = X, where A is the number of vehicles in the field, B is the probable rate of failure, and C is the average out-of-court settlement.

The company does not initiate a recall (or fix) if the calculated value X is less than the cost of the recall itself.

Edit: If anyone from a car company wants competent software engineering management to build a better team, HMU, I can put you in contact with someone. It'll never happen though.
by Yeroc | 2025-10-18 05:04:11+00:00
We also have the same issues with our fellow humans. LLMs do not replace the need for imperative programs that reliably execute well-defined steps. Turn it inside out. Use the LLM to write the imperative program to execute the workflow. Where necessary, insert the LLM into the workflow to perform the task(s) that can't be done imperatively.
by dang | 2025-10-18 05:04:59+00:00
Oh that's clear, and the submitter didn't do anything wrong. It's just that on HN the idea is to find a different title when the article's own title is misleading or linkbait (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

The best way to do that of course is to find a more representative phrase from the article itself. That's almost always possible but I couldn't quite swing it in this case.
by kragen | 2025-10-18 05:05:01+00:00
It's worth thinking about past unprecedented humanity-wide energy transitions to get a taste of what might be in store.

Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.

The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy, cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, malnutrition on a scale previously unimaginable, and virtually everything we think of as traditional. (But not pottery. Pottery is much older; it just hadn't yet spread to where people were inventing agriculture.)

This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy available from the sun is much larger than what people use today, perhaps 7000× even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use. Many things that have always been inconceivable are now feasible. Someone is going to fease a lot of them now even if I wish they wouldn't.

Quibble: China's solar panels are not thin-film.
by robomartin | 2025-10-18 05:05:22+00:00
> So I mean I’m sorry your wife is irrational about it

No, quite to the contrary. She is being far more rational than most fan boys.

I have driven IC cars 300K miles. The cost of maintenance over that period of time was in the <$5K range. Modern vehicles last a very long time without problems with very moderate maintenance. I can also swap out an entire engine and transmission for a few thousand dollars if necessary (which is never). I have personally rebuilt engines, transmissions, clutches and brakes for very little money.

She manages the family finances, and has exactly zero interest in taking a risk that nobody on this thread making an argument for EV's is willing to underwrite for my family. And that extends to the manufacturer as well.

So, while it might feel right to call someone irrational for not aligning with what I consider your fantasy, unless you are willing to issue my family a guarantee that the battery swap will not cost us more than $5K per vehicle you are taking advantage of being able to criticize someone while not putting your money where your mouth is going.

Yet another take: $50K invested in a good ETF (like VGT) will probably double in five years to $100K and over $200K in ten years. That's a shitload of money to waste on batteries. No, I think she is very far from being irrational.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-10-18 05:05:27+00:00
"I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're not useful."

That's because no one has said that

"AI" hype is the issue, not "AI"

The hype machine and its followers have no tolerance for skepticism

Any perceived skepticism of "AI", no matter how reasonable, triggers absurd accusations

The author, like many others, tries to avoid the kneejerk defensiveness of "AI" hype subscribers:

"Don't get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will - and they will."

But this does not work. There is zero tolerance for skepticism. All disbelief must be countered

"Crypto" hype was like this, before one of its ringleaders went to prison

It's unlikely that fraud will be prosecuted under current political environment

Fasten your seatbelts
by amatecha | 2025-10-18 05:06:06+00:00
Oh yeah, my daily driver is a 20-year-old vehicle. It has cost literally just a couple $thousand in maintenance/repairs in the time we've owned it (probably around 10 years? I forget). It's getting kinda rough, but like... at least it doesn't have a battery replacement looming around the corner that would cost more than the entire price we paid for the vehicle.

I want an electric vehicle, but I'm not willing to pay the insanely high prices they go for. I typically don't want to spend more than $10k on a vehicle and I only have once (and that one got totalled in an accident literally a month or two after I finished paying off its loan). The times I've found a used EV in that price range, it's old enough that it will need a new battery soon, instantly ~doubling the price of the vehicle for me.
by saurik | 2025-10-18 05:06:58+00:00
Well, I wouldn't say I have a beefy car or a beefy sword: there's some historical bit of linguistic connection that seems to have caused people to describe a server with the adjective "beefy", rather than "powerful", "hefty", "stacked", or... "chonky" ;P. Coming up with some options, I think my favorite might be "cranked"?
by roenxi | 2025-10-18 05:07:29+00:00
The deal is the journalists (propagandists) get to be in the building if they're compliant with whatever narrative the US government wants to be spread. The US government is changing the narrative they want to target, implementing that policy with some administrative changes and some of the journalists aren't compliant with it any more. They now have to leave the building and sit in a different building. It is quite challenging to tag whether this development is good or bad in the big picture. The basic deal on offer to the journalists hasn't changed - the ones in the building are compliant, the ones out of the building may or may not be compliant with what the US administration wants said.

There's arguments that no journalists should be in the building, there's an argument that more eyes are always better and it is easier to keep track of these people if they are in the building.
by bloppe | 2025-10-18 05:10:16+00:00
This is a relatively reasonable take. Unfortunately, that's not what most AI investors or non-technical punters think. Since GPT 1 it's been all about unlocking 100%+ annual GDP growth by wholesale white collar automation. I agree with AK that the actually effect on GDP will be more or less negligible, which will be an unmitigated disaster for us economically given how much cash has already been incinerated