MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by camillomiller | 2025-10-08 07:49:38+00:00
Propaganda is painting this as something different than it is. Here we consider speech for what it is: something you can express freely, within the limits of civil society. If you pass those limits, then you incur in problems. Germany let someone speak freely a tad too much in the twenties and thirties, and they don't want to make that mistake again. I understand the point of "absolute free speech", and I would subscribe to it if it wasn't that groups like AfD, or Trump's flavor of conservatism, hide behind it to achieve their authoritarian goals. To avoid that authoritarian result, you have to police certain types of speech like Germany does.

I say it again, it's nasty and needs a very strong set of counterbalances, which Germany - unlike the US - still has. Therefore this remains a much more freer country than Say-whatever-you-like-on-Rogan America. Freedom for us is free healthcare, a welfare state, an ethics-based concept of societal rights and obligations. We don't market ourselves as the beacon of free speech and FREEDOM by making both empty words fueled by extreme individualism. We still believe in Solidarität and on social-oriented policies, both on the right and left side of the isle. We have ferocious political battles about topics that are too violently policed, by the way, like right now about Palestine and Israel, and people take to the streets FREELY, despite some despicable police brutality episodes. We do have the contradictions and complexities of any modern western society.

Yet we don't have too many runaway billionaires that are more powerful than governments, and we are still ALL a bit better off because of that. It's boring, but it works.

AfD is against all this, and it is because it's provenly funded by Russia and other enemies of the west. They appeal to the Volk, but in reality are infested by double-standards, hate, and a specific type of political individualism and authoritarian views that need to be stopped with all legal and societally-acceptable means possible.
by merelysounds | 2025-10-08 07:50:10+00:00
Relevant info from the article:

> the second developer beta of the upcoming iPadOS 26.1 adds Slide Over support back into the operating system

> The new version of Slide Over isn't quite the same as the old one; only one app can be in Slide Over mode at a time, whereas the old version would let you switch between apps in the Slide Over interface. But the new Slide Over window can be repositioned and resized, just like other windows in iPadOS 26.

For the record, I updated the title of this submission to the current: "Newest beta backtracks on an iPadOS multitasking decision (SlideOver added back)". This seemed helpful as the original looked very clickbaity: "Newest developer beta backtracks on one iPadOS 26 multitasking decision".
by tkgally | 2025-10-08 07:50:31+00:00
Around the time GPT-4 was released in early 2023, a similar issue arose with another profession: translation. It was at that point that machine translation between languages like English and Japanese (the language pair I have worked with) started to approach human level for the first time.

I took part in a lot of discussions then with other professional translators, and the reaction of many was similar to that of some of the commenters here: not only were they discouraged because their hard-earned language and translation skills no longer seemed needed, but using LLMs as assistants took the enjoyable challenge out of the translation process.

Nearly everyone I spoke with then worked from home as a freelancer, carefully crafting one translation at a time. They didn’t like the idea of becoming managers of large-scale translation projects, even if it meant they would be able to apply their higher-order intercultural communication skills.

I do only a little professional translation myself now, but I try to keep up with AI developments and I often use translation tasks to test the latest models and frameworks. Over the past few months, I have vibe-coded some multi-LLM translation systems where texts were passed through multiple models that checked, critiqued, and improved each other’s translations. For the texts I tried them on, the results were much better than any single-LLM translation, approaching the level of the very best human translation. The API calls weren’t cheap, but for high-stakes translations such a system would more than pay for itself.

When designing that “vibe translation” system, I did apply my experience as a translator, similarly to what Simon is recommending programmers do now with vibe engineering. At this stage in my life (I’m sixty-eight), I am fine with that. But if LLMs had arrived when I was, say, just five or ten years into my translation career and still proud of my nuts-and-bolts skills, I might very well have looked for another career rather than becoming a vibe translator.
by sersi | 2025-10-08 07:51:01+00:00
I've found that to be very true. For bigger projects, I've had rather mixed results from ai but for small utility scripts, it's perfect.

But like the author, I've found that it's usually better to have the llm output python, go or rust than use bash. So I've often had to ask it to rewrite at the beginning. Now I just directly skip bash
by simianwords | 2025-10-08 07:51:22+00:00
> And Claude is more expensive than ever, efficiency gains and all

This is not true for any LLM and not just Claude.

> I don’t think it’s a matter of efficiency at current pricing but increased pricing.

I don't know what this means - efficiency determines price.

> It would be a lot more sane if the use cases became more advanced and less people used them, because building enormous data centers to house NVIDIA hardware so that people can chat their way to a recipe for chocolate cake is societal insanity.

Do you think same thing could have been said during the internet boom? "It would be more sane if the use cases become more advanced and less people used them, because building enormous data centers to house INTEL hardware so that people can use AOL is societal insanity".
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-08 07:51:34+00:00
I'm 99% confident there's currently multiple companies active in the "curated LLM dataset" space, where they go through heaps of data to organize them into curated datasets for just that purpose.

But it's a huge undertaking. Google had the objective of indexing all data in the world 20-odd years ago, and that's just putting it all on a big pile; curating it is an even bigger job that can only partially be automated. Compare it with social media moderation, which is a full-time job for tens- if not hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and that's after the automated tools have had their first pass. And that's sort-of realtime, but there's 30+ years of that to go through if you want to curate a dataset (and more if you include pre-internet media)
by indigo945 | 2025-10-08 07:52:08+00:00
> Wiretapping a chat if the citizen is suspected of a crime AND after a judge > has reviewed the evidence and green-lit such surveillance is - imho - more > acceptable. We do that with phones, why would we not do it with chats?

The problem is that it's not technologically possible. Many major messaging apps - including WhatsApp, which is the market leader by far in Europe - provide end-to-end encryption, and have done so for years. After a judge has ruled that an individual's WhatsApp chats are to be surveilled, how would you achieve this? In the current situation, there's just nothing you can do. You might try to wiretap the phone, but there's really not that many zero-days left: both iOS and Android are quite secure these days, so this isn't even an alternative.

The only way to make court-mandated surveillance possible is to ensure that nobody's chat is encrypted to begin with, such that after a court order has come in, the data can be easily read. So to outlaw end-to-end encryption entirely is what this proposal is really about: break privacy guarantees for everybody to enable surveillance in a few outlier cases.

Of course, once encryption has been broken, three-letter agencies the world over will be reading your chats whether they have a warrant or not.

There is no way to have private communication for good people only. Either you have freedom for all, or freedom for none.
by leokennis | 2025-10-08 07:52:49+00:00
First off, stealing is not allowed. I don't know the finer details of intellectual property law, but if IKEA according to that would be stealing designs than that is not OK.

Second however, engineering products in such a way that you can bring down the price by 95% while quality/niceness/longevity only suffers (let's say) 25% is a thing to marvel at. Having 75% of a €265 design stool in your house for €25 is fantastic.
by JodieBenitez | 2025-10-08 07:52:50+00:00
Minification... how many times have I seen devs claiming that adding a whole toolchain for saving a few kilobytes is crucial to performance and simultaneously failing to serve assets with proper compression and cache headers ? Heck, how many times have I seen "web" devs with no basic understanding of the HTTP protocol ?

And they look at me like I'm the lunatic when I tell them their 3 text fields 2 buttons "app" is over-engineered and needs no build step.
by troad | 2025-10-08 07:53:44+00:00
I think the pushback isn't so much against the existence of the tools per se, more against the pervasive idea that everyone needs them.

When every other learning resource is titled something like "Ten reasons you need to be using the MONGOOSE stack right NOW!", it's no wonder we've got people trying to shove redis into their baking blogs.

Matter of fact is, the average website would be fine without a "stack" of any kind, but no YouTuber sells sponsorships telling their viewers that. Ergo, many junior devs genuinely don't know that.

While I agree that people should be primarily learning the core tech, it's a difficult message to deliver amongst the cacophony of corporations trying to promote their services.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-08 07:53:45+00:00
It's not FUD. Windows has legitimate issues with dark patterns. I think it's safe to say from the proliferation of tools just to play wack-a-mole with the settings alone that there is a problem. Even if you turn some off, they will add new ones. I understand Windows and Microsoft's history and that is precisely why I hate it. I should not need to hunt all over the settings to find a dozen different telemetry options that I want to turn off. It should be one button to turn it all off, on the first page of settings.

Microsoft is trying to make it more difficult to use Windows 11 with no Microsoft account all the time. If you think they won't try to screw you on privacy, you're very wrong.
by moray | 2025-10-08 07:54:06+00:00
On aliexpress for very cheap search for "DT3 Data Cable Detection Board Type-C". I got the one below and seems to work fine for what I needed.

https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/1005007509475055.html

Edit: This will test whether the cable is functioning properly. It will show the connections and indicate whether the cable supports only power or also data transfer. However, it won’t provide information about the USB-C cable type or its speed capabilities.
by csomar | 2025-10-08 07:54:25+00:00
We have hit a plateau for many months for the performance of LLMs. Anthropic recently released 4.5, and while it improved on some contexts, it failed to make a commit message for me a few times on a workflow I had. 3.5 to 4 had close to zero failure rates on this workflow and it was surprising to see 4.5 fail. It seems that gains in certain benchmarks will affect quality elsewhere.

LLMs are very useful, I can’t see myself walking back to the old way of doing things. But the amounts invested expect major breakthrough that we are not anywhere near. It’s a gamble and that’s what innovation is; but you gamble on a small portion of your wealth. Not your house and certainly you do not gamble a huge country like the US on a single thing.
by jasode | 2025-10-08 07:54:27+00:00
Somewhat related is 3D / LIDAR scanning tech of overlapping photo captures using Matterport: https://matterport.com/

It's popular with real estate agents. Not quite "virtual reality" but it also doesn't need expensive glasses. It does seem like future smartphones with AI may be a decent cheaper substitute for $6000 Matterport cameras.
by dspillett | 2025-10-08 07:55:04+00:00
You've got that barse akwards. They aren't telling you how to talk, they are walking away because of how you talk. You are inadvertently gatekeeping, basically working to help “the suits” you are railing against.

To jama211 and everyone else: we aren't all like this, honest!

To globular-toast; this brings to mind the old aphorism:

Always be yourself. Unless you are a bit of a dick, in which case please try to be someone better.
by port11 | 2025-10-08 07:55:56+00:00
I've worked for a Big 3 and can't say this happens that much.

What does happen is that you were pitched/sold by a perfect PowerPoint presented by a senior partner/manager, but all the work afterwards is done by the 26-year old fresh-out-of-MBA consultants. The partner is still responsible for the project, but mostly on a “I'll review your work later from an expensive restaurant I'll bill the client for”.

They'll also invent the wildest things when it comes to tech work. I was working as an expert on software development and integrations, and often had to tell clients that what the consultants promised is simply not possible.
by pj_mukh | 2025-10-08 07:56:03+00:00
I think if you want the public to accept that the government will be a better shepherd of this money than a decentralized smattering of individuals then the government should provide evidence for this, once it actually opens up from a dysfunctional shutdown.

At least in the American context everything from California High Speed rail to bloated defense spending has shown that VC’s are much better shepherds of their own money.
by cronquist | 2025-10-08 07:56:21+00:00
To me, “Vibe engineering” isn’t just a label — it’s a Rorschach test for identity in the AI era.

>> Supporters see it as a bridge between humor and professionalism >> Critics hear it as the sound of their trade being rebranded into a meme.

Both sides, though, agree on one thing: coding is no longer the same craft it was a year ago.

My opinion: I believe “vibe coding” has already broadened to mean any AI-assisted coding, making “vibe engineering” redundant.
by barrenko | 2025-10-08 07:56:21+00:00
Or something like to the tune of "what does it mean that we can eliminate", which is still unclear to me. But a lovely article, the way you (op) introduce the column perspective and really hepful for a novice such as myself.

+ there are many textbooks on LA. Not a lot of them introduce stuff in the same order or in the same manner. I think that's part of why LA is difficult to teach, and difficult to comprehend, and maybe there is no unique way to do it, so we kinda need all the perspectives we can get.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-08 07:56:21+00:00
It's a spectrum of possibilities upon which, as yet, no one is sure where it will land. Invested proponents say it will eat the world. Sceptics say it's all a crock of shit. Anyone who says they know the answer, doesn't.

The two positions there aren't really different, they're mostly that the profitability of AI can be eroded from several sides. One: the cost to run (power and hardware) being high and bring unable to recover it from revenue. Or two, commoditisation and efficiencies (which can also be operational convenience rather than only about power) driving down costs and therefore also revenue, and being unable to compensate by selling more AI more cheaply. Three: AI didn't actually help as many people make money as hoped and thus they don't want to pay, also depressing revenue.

In the middle is the three-axis happy AI place where costs are not too high, but also AI is too hard to have someone else do it cheaper, and it's useful enough to be paid for.

My guess is AI ending up roughly as impactful overall as cloud computing. A big industry, makes a lot of money, touches and enables very many businesses but hasn't replaced the entire economy, profitable especially if you can stake out a moat, with low-margin battlegrounds for the price-sensitive.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-08 07:56:52+00:00
Investing is choosing how to put your money to work just like how you choose what vendor to give your business.

Here's a though experiment. If you could invest today in a company that will result in the destruction of your town (say a mining company) but you got 1% higher return compared to others, you're saying that's a perfect investment and would do it right away?

And if the answer is yes to the above, you can make that a lot darker if you want. See how far your belief goes.
by piva00 | 2025-10-08 07:56:53+00:00
People like LLMs, will they pay for LLMs to offset the investments? Will they pay enough so these companies can stay afloat when the slush funds inevitably run dry?

Will LLMs create a significant shift in productivity where its usage will create enough overall value to the economy to justify the hoovering of capital from other industries?

Those are the unknowns, I don't think many people are saying that LLMs have no value like NFTs, it's that the money being pushed onto this novelty is such an absurd amount that it might pull down everything else if/when it's discovered that there won't be enough value generated to compensate for trillions of USD in investments. Hence the comparison to the dotcom bubble, we came out of that with the infrastructure for the current internet even though it was painful for a lot of people when it crashed, will we have a 2nd internet-esque revolution after this whole thing crashes?

The technology is definitely valuable, and quite fantastic from a technical standpoint, is it going to lift all the other boats in the rest of the economy like the internet did though? No one can tell that yet.
by leokennis | 2025-10-08 07:56:58+00:00
> When was the first CD rack?

And when will be the last... Recently a webshop accidentally sent me my order of two fantastic jazz CD's twice and they did not want me to return them. I tried to offload them for free on anyone I know who vaguely likes jazz. None of them had a CD player, none of them wanted two CD's for free...

One of the things I like best when visiting friends, is to have a look at their bookcases and CD racks. But I think I won't be able to much longer.
by Scoundreller | 2025-10-08 07:57:35+00:00
Most of the time the failed part is either the power supply board or a backlight and they’re usually available as aftermarket if you can’t be bothered to isolate the failed micro component or LED “bulb” and solder one in from a donor. Or a flex cable that just needs reseating.

PS is probably harder nowadays since it might be more integrated but not 10+ years ago.
by nearbuy | 2025-10-08 07:57:56+00:00
The smartest, fastest investors are the ones who make a profit by incorporating their information into the stock price in the EMH. The stock price can't move on its own. Under the EMH, someone has to be the first to trade stock based on information so that the stock price reflects it. When they say "the market rapidly responds to new information", that means investors with the new information are buying or selling accordingly. It's not opposite at all.

How the information gets produced is irrelevant to the EMH. Whether it's obvious or takes hard thinking, either way, once investors obtain the information, they will trade based on it, and that will move the stock price.
by M95D | 2025-10-08 07:58:12+00:00
> Not sure why you’re focusing on gene editing, though. The perspective doesn’t address that point at all.

It's not at all useful to focus on "building blocks" directly (I really don't like that term, but let's use it anyway). With every cell division, each one gets half the quantity of initial buiding blocks the cell was initially constructed with. If DNA can't direct the creation of new buiding blocks, in max 2 generations there won't be enough for a new cell division. So, you see, it doesn't matter what building blocks (except DNA) the initial cell started with, synthetic or from an existing cell. In just a few generations the initial material is all gone.

In a living cell, all building blocks (cell structural components, functional components, metabolism, etc.) are derived directly or indirectly from DNA. DNA may directly encode ribosomal RNA (a functional component), or a cytoskeleton protein (a structural component), or a series of enzymes that process non-protein building-blocks [1]. So, in an artificial cell, the focus is always genes. The article may not focus on gene editing, but that's the 99.9% of the work - making DNA that makes building blocks.

> enabling non-canonical chemistries, alternate macromolecular architectures

Ah, this is the point you were trying to make!

It is very difficult to create new proteins that work for some purpose other than enzymes (current examples: synthetic antigens (vaccines), enzyme inhibitors (Imatinib), receptor blockers, receptor activators). Remember folding@home? It's an order of magnitude harder than that to create new enzymes . I can't even give you an example. And it's an order of magnitude harder still to create DNA/genes that makes enzymes. It's literally creating a molecular folding@home program [2] using folding@home.

It's not realistically possible today to create complex cellular machines such as the DNA replication enzymes [3], which are the most important parts of a living cell. There's absolutely no way to create a completely new synthetic cell without having those machines. And then, remeber folding@home? We don't need the machines - we need the DNA that makes the machines that fold the machines (no, it's not a typo, it's that complicated).

We can, at best, convince bacteria to syntesize new drugs for us. No need for a new synthetic organism for that. E.coli can do it just fine.

As reaserch only, entirely new, very simple cell components can be created, probably even convincing some host cell to make them for itself, but we're very, very, very far from bottom-up building a living cell. Cold fusion and interstellar travel are closer than that.

When you read an article like that, think "money", as in "grant money" and "investors", not "future tech".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_synthesis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperone_(protein)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_replication#DNA_replicatio... (you should read a bit about each one)
by pzmarzly | 2025-10-08 07:58:26+00:00
It was some address in Warsaw, so if I needed that domain badly, it'd be one Ryanair flight away, and definitely an interesting experience :) But I was only using it for a small blog, so I just let it expire. I hoped I would be able to register it again immediately after it expires, but some scammers beat me to it (probably scanning for expiring domains with good reputation/SEO), so last time I checked, the domain is used to advertise some magic pills.
by auggierose | 2025-10-08 08:00:15+00:00
Don't worry about it. Don't let anyone else tell you how best to use AI, use AI in a way that suits YOU, then it is so much fun. I would go crazy if I had multiple streams simultaneously working on stuff that need constant supervision (that would be different if I could trust they do 100% what I intend them to do), but AI is still very helpful in other ways (research, exploration, and writing tests).
by hdersch | 2025-10-08 08:00:32+00:00
"Viewsheds" of any location can be calculated and matched with photographs using "GeoImageViewer", an application I wrote a couple of years ago. Any feature in the image can be interactively identified in a mapview and vice versa, including the boundary of the viewshed. As has been mentioned in the comments, it is essential to include atmospheric refraction in the calculation, at least for distances above ~100km.

[1] https://hdersch.github.io/Viewing.html