MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by signorovitch | 2025-10-27 17:02:03+00:00
I tend to agree, though not in all cases. If I’m reading because I want to learn something, I don’t care how the material was generated. As long as it’s correct and intuitive, and LLMs have gotten pretty good at that, it’s valuable to me. It’s always fun when a human takes the time to make something educational and creative, or has a pleasant style, or a sense of humor; but I’m not reading the blog post for that.

What does bother me is when clearly AI-generated blog posts (perhaps unintentionally) attempt to mask their artificial nature through superfluous jokes or unnaturally lighthearted tone. It often obscures content and makes the reading experience inefficient, without the grace of a human writer that could make it worth it.

However, if I’m reading a non-technical blog, I am reading because I want something human. I want to enjoy a work a real person sank their time and labor into. The less touched by machines, the better.

> It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead.

And I would totally ready handwritten blog posts!
by codyb | 2025-10-27 17:02:04+00:00
I sincerely doubt it'll do much, but my next computer will not be Apple. Sadly, I just upgraded a year and a half or so ago, and sadly, good lord those damn arm chips are nice.

So hopefully in 8 years or so when I need a new machine, there's some decent options available to me.

But nice aint worth the cost when it comes at the expense of supporting something which is undermining everything else you believe in.
by sireat | 2025-10-27 17:02:29+00:00
This 30 Euro jump in Europe was a kick in the pants for me.

Even though it is still a relatively good deal for a Family Plan (compared to say Google Drive or Dropbox) for OneDrive, I finally dropped my Microsoft 365 Family plan.

The final straw was that the Copilot was completely unhelpful and hallucinated features Office portal does not have.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-27 17:02:31+00:00
>but LLMs are quite literally working by predicting the next token - which works incredibly well for a fascimlie of intelligence because there is an incredible amount of written content on the Internet which was written by intelligent people

An additional facet nobody ever seems to mention:

Human language is structured, and seems to follow similar base rules everywhere.

That is a huge boon to any statistical model trying to approximate it. That's why simpler forms of language generation are even possible. It's also a large part of why LLMs are able to do some code, but regularly fuck up the meaning when you aren't paying attention. The "shape" of code and language is really simple.
by yencabulator | 2025-10-27 17:02:33+00:00
The readme at https://github.com/google/building-secure-and-reliable-syste... does say this book is found there, and sure enough it's the first one on the list: https://google.github.io/building-secure-and-reliable-system...

It seems this github.io URL is more like a CI run of the book, and the one on sre.google is the "published" one.
by neilv | 2025-10-27 17:02:34+00:00
I suspect that the majority of people who are shoveling BS in their blogs aren't doing it because they actually want to think and write and share and learn and be human; but rather, the sole purpose of the blog is for SEO, or to promote the personal brand of someone who doesn't want anything else.

Perhaps the author is speaking to the people who are only temporarily led astray by the pervasive BS online and by the recent wildly popular "cheating on your homework" culture?
by bhouston | 2025-10-27 17:02:54+00:00
I am not totally sure about this. I think that AI writing is just a progression of current trends. Many things have made writing easier and lower cost - printing press, typewriters, word processors, grammer/spell checkers, electronic distribution.

This is just a continuation. It does tend to mean there is less effort to produce the output and thus there is a value degradation, but this has been true all along this technology trend.

I don't think we should be a purist as to how writing is produced.
by gumby271 | 2025-10-27 17:03:01+00:00
Last time I tried using Gemini in Google Sheets it hallucinated a bunch of fake data, then gave me a summary that included all that fake data. I'd given it a bunch of transaction data, and asked it to group the records into different categories for budgeting. When asking it to give the largest values in each category, all the values that came back were fake. I'm not sure I'd really trust it to touch a spreadsheet after that.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-10-27 17:03:24+00:00
"Bullshit job" has a specific meaning that's less about being in a pointless field-of-work (like adtech or many parts of fintech) and more about occupying a pointless role, regardless of the field. David Graeber (the originator of the term) gave the following examples [0]:

— Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters

— Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists

— Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage

— Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration

— Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
by intended | 2025-10-27 17:03:33+00:00
I used to live in excel.

The issue isn’t in creating a new monstrosity in excel.

The issue is the poor SoB who has to spelunk through the damn thing to figure out what it does.

Excel is the sweet spot of just enough to be useful, capable enough to be extensible, yet gated enough to ensure everyone doesn’t auto run foreign macros (or whatever horror is more appropriate).

In the simplest terms - it’s not excel, it’s the business logic. If an excel file works, it’s because theres someone who “gets” it in the firm.
by ludamn | 2025-10-27 17:04:15+00:00
> This stuff is so overhyped and yet so under hyped at the same time. I can’t really wrap my head around it.

perfectly stated, I had to play a lot with some models to get a better picture of how they work and their limitations, before that all the articles I read about them were either "LLMs are the greatest thing ever, totally perfect and made me a 100x engineer" or "LLMs are complete BS and don't provide any value"

I do think we can build great products on top of them, but the way they're being sold implies we'll need no more new product because a chat interface w/ some tool calling is all you'll ever need.
by illiac786 | 2025-10-27 17:04:43+00:00
I never said I have data, I said what you are mentioning is anecdotal.

I know it’s easy to be a critic, but I think it’s important to remember what is statistically relevant and what is not. Might sound very harsh and cold considering the topic we are discussing, I understand this.

The analogy of jumping out of a plane is really a false equivalence: there is logical, physical, reasoning, as to why that would be a bad idea. Statistics is not the only option. Extrapolating a decision affecting hundreds of thousands of people from a single occurrence is, in my opinion, never a solution.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-27 17:04:51+00:00
Both are passed to consumers... the difference is a tariff is a point for international negotiation, there are competing options to a tariffed product, and it's a relativistic approach.

The U.S. has lost so much in terms of even being able to produce anything that it's in a weak position not just in terms of trade, but in domestic security in and of itself. The lesson from COVID should be that ensuring domestic production of at least SOME of everything that CAN be produced domestically in the US should be ensured to exist.

As examples... IMO, all prescription medications/devices should require dual sourcing and at least 50% domestic production. This ensures actual patent licensing as well as being able to ramp up from 50% in case of a need (war/pandemic). It's nearly impossible to ramp up from 0, but easy to ramp up from 50%. This can/should be extended to essential infrastructure, communications and technologies.

Most countries don't have the size/scale/scope to do this... the U.S. and a handful of other countries are and should take advantage of that and ensure it for their own critical security.

I don't say any of this from an isolationist PoV, I think trade is important... I think diplomacy is important... I just feel that a level of domestic security in terms of self-reliance at a certain level is more important.
by data-ottawa | 2025-10-27 17:04:55+00:00
I think another thing is a lot of modern stuff is under thought, either in trying to be overly broad or just misunderstanding the user.

Google Shopping is an example. It has enforced opinions about what a product looks like, so you have to force a square peg through a round hole.

They’ve got a lot of stuff about pricing and loyalty and quantities, but if you dig into tons of categories they have almost nothing that represents the real categories sellers and buyers care about.

Look at the collectibles category. If you sell Pokémon cards and collectibles there is zero merchandising info that actually matches your products or how they’re sold.

That means your analytics, automatic listings, ads, etc. are too generic for your customers. All your automated stuff is going to come through wrong.

Meanwhile niche and deep sellers who avoid that forced genericisation, like McMaster-Carr[1] can have these incredibly valuable, useful, and compelling catalogs.

I’d say that deep user knowledge is why Aperture had such a strong fan base too.

I struggle with this buying from Lee Valley. Their caralogs are fantastic, but I have trouble finding things on their website.

This turned into a rant, but maybe a TL;DR is a lot of modern software has no skin in the game of specialization, and so they inadvertently limit these experiences.

[1] mcmaster.com
by latexr | 2025-10-27 17:05:14+00:00
> The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources

And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either.

In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they don’t exist.

Asking for sources isn’t a magical incantation that suddenly makes things true.

> It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either.

This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with humans is that you learn who you can trust about what. With LLMs, you can never reach that level.
by verdverm | 2025-10-27 17:05:27+00:00
Intermixing tools and processes like that will create a bunch of pain. Even Atlas seems to realize this (probably from customer feedback) as they offer the "versioned" mode that looks exactly like what we do today.

https://atlasgo.io/versioned/intro

Note how this section of the docs is much longer than the declarative version. One of the hard parts about adopting something like this is that it's easy for new projects, but hard to start using in an existing project.

I've built something similar myself: https://hofstadter.io/getting-started/data-layer/

You always need escape latches when there are things you cannot define in your declarative (DSL). This makes things more mentally and contextually difficult, so most people opt for the simple and clearly understandable.
by deepu_bansal87 | 2025-10-27 17:05:50+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the builder of LinkPatrol.

As someone who works with content creators, I was frustrated by the problem of "link rot." Creators who monetize with affiliate links are constantly losing revenue because links in their old content (blog posts, YouTube descriptions) silently break, leading to 404s or out-of-stock product pages.

I looked for a tool to fix this, but the existing solutions were either locked into a single ecosystem (like Amazon-only scanners) or were overly complex, expensive enterprise platforms. There was no simple, free tool for the average "prosumer" creator who uses multiple affiliate merchants.

So, I built this MVP. LinkPatrol is a 100% free, merchant-agnostic web app.

Technically, it's a simple scanner. You give it your youtube channel (website coming soon), and it crawls your videos' descriptions to identify broken hyperlinks (404s) and, just as importantly, links to product pages that are "Out of Stock." The goal is to give creators a simple report so they can go fix the links that are costing them money.

It's still very much an MVP, and I'm posting it here to get honest technical feedback on the scanning process, its utility, and any bugs you find. The app is at www.linkpatrol.in. I'll be here all day to answer questions.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-27 17:05:53+00:00
> Now: that same European instance goes down. Proxies in Asia need to know about that, right away, and this time you can't afford to wait.

But they have to. Physically no solution will be instantaneous because that’s not how the speed of light nor relativity works - even two events next to each other cannot find out about each other instantaneously. So then the question is “how long can I wait for this information”. And that’s the part that I feel isn’t answered - eg if the app dies, the TCP connections die and in theory that information travels as quickly as anything else you send. It’s not reliably detectable but conceivably you could have an eBPF program monitoring death and notifying the proxies. Thats the part that’s really not explained in the article which is why you need to maintain an eventually consistent view of the connectivity. I get maybe why that could be useful but noticing app connectivity death seems wrong considering I believe you’re more tracking machine and cluster health right? Ie not noticing an app instance goes down but noticing all app instances on a given machine are gone and consensus deciding globally where the new app instance will be as quickly as possible?
by benzible | 2025-10-27 17:05:53+00:00
I've enjoyed this exchange, but I think we've hit a point where our worldviews lead us to different conclusions about probabilities. You're drawing a distinction between "technical change decisions" and strategic ones, but that's exactly the illusion I'm talking about. Policy and market cap considerations always trump technical ones - they just rarely conflict directly, so you build up what seems like overwhelming evidence that management doesn't interfere with engineering. Until they do, and then it gets rationalized as something else, or the old "for the greater good".

You see your direct personal experience at Apple as giving you insight into how the company operates. I think that experience can actually cloud judgment - when you've invested years in an institution and know people there, and have some of your own identity tied up in that institution and how it's perceived, you're naturally inclined to interpret ambiguous situations charitably. That's not a criticism, it's just human nature.

As for "bending the knee to a fascist government" not being evidence of sacrificing privacy stance - you're describing the mechanism by which principles get compromised while claiming it doesn't count. When you acknowledge that Apple's actions are driven by "significant influence over a good chunk of their revenue and regulatory control" from a government that's deploying zero-click spyware through ICE, the removal of forensic artifacts for detecting that spyware stops being "just a technical decision" that happened to occur at a really convenient moment.

I don't actually know what happened here in this specific instance - whether the iOS 26 change was deliberate, accidental, or something in between. I'm basing my priors on general corporate behavior and the observation that Apple isn't special, just that circumstances have allowed them to take positions that aligned with what you and I both see as right. I don't doubt the people at the top genuinely believed in those positions when they were cost-free or profitable. But we're past that now.

At some point we'll likely know more - this stuff tends to come out eventually through investigative reporting, court filings, or the Trump administration bragging about it. Until then, I guess we have different base assumptions about how much institutional conviction survives when it costs tens of billions.
by alphazard | 2025-10-27 17:06:10+00:00
This implies a kind of efficiency gain that is pretty much unheard of outside of acquisitions and layoffs. Inefficient organizations need huge culture and incentive shifts to move the needle on efficiency. Humans (especially the bureaucrats) resist changes in culture, so it's often necessary to shift the culture by shifting the humans. LLMs that don't quite fully replace any role aren't going to do it.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-27 17:06:19+00:00
I get your point, but reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.

As insulting as it is to submit an AI-generated PR without any effort at review while expecting a human to look it over, it is nearly as insulting to not just open the view the reviewer will have and take a look. I do this all the time and very often discover little things that I didn't see while tunneled into the code itself.
by dasil003 | 2025-10-27 17:06:24+00:00
I agree on the cause of waste, but I'm skeptical AI will move the needle on a solution. The longer I work in big companies the more I realize that things happen because someone has the strength of will combined with the right levers and incentives to make it happen despite organizational inertia. AI is potentially a powerful tool when judiciously used by those who understand what they're doing, but it can also be an amplifier of noise that filibusters real progress when hands-on leadership and good judgement is in short supply.
by photonthug | 2025-10-27 17:06:26+00:00
In philosophy 101 the usual foil for Rousseau vs.. would be Hobbes, but that framing with a realist/pessimist would not be popular with the intended audience, where the goal is to lionize the nationalist, the inventors/owners, the 1%.

> Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through the construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. He thereby invented the first newspaper chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Newspaperman

To be clear Franklin's obviously a complicated historical figure, a pretty awesome guy overall, and I do like American pragmatism generally. But it matters a lot which part of the guy you'd like to hold up for admiration, and elevating a preachy hypocrite that was an early innovator in monopolies and methods of controlling the masses does seem pretty tactical and self-serving here.
by TiredOfLife | 2025-10-27 17:06:28+00:00
> Microsoft Office used to come bundled with Windows, as an office suite.

Never was. You probably got it installed by friendly it guy or the store was just installing pirated versions.

> Now it's a subscription product.

There is also pay once version. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

> But, $100/year for personal use??

The subscription comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage. Look up how much 1TB of storage costs usually

> What's so great about MS Office that LibreOffice can't do??

Work with spreadsheets more complicated than two cells.
by eggy | 2025-10-27 17:06:43+00:00
Enjoyment is part objective and a lot subjective. Mitchell Hashimoto who wrote Ghostty in Zig speaks about it here: https://youtu.be/YQnz7L6x068?si=VtH2FEAuW-SiFPHr&t=1415

I started with 6502 assembly and PET Basic in 1977, so for me, Zig is simpler, and jives more with me than Rust. OTOH, I chose Ada/SPARK for our product for the high-integrity, mission-critical aspect of our automation software. I programmed in Pascal back in 1988, and it has the same syntax, which I always found verbose and boring, but it is clear and structured and the concepts to achieve this level of high assurance are not too difficult. For ultiimate fun, I program in J/APL and now mainly BQN, so I am not a fan of verbosity!

I would have been more attracted to Rust if it had kept ML-like syntax from OCaml and not the Algol-like curly braces of C/C++.
by devsda | 2025-10-27 17:06:50+00:00
> I have PR's at work I and coworkers fully AI generated and fully AI review.

I first read that as "coworkers (who are) fully AI generated" and I didn't bat an eye.

All the AI hype has made me immune to AI related surprises. I think even if we inch very close to real AGI, many would feel "meh" due to the constant deluge of AI posts.
Show HN: Git Auto Commit (GAC) – LLM-powered Git commit command line tool
by merge-conflict | 2025-10-27 17:07:05+00:00
GAC is a tool I built to help users spend less time summing up what was done and more time building. It uses LLMs to generate contextual git commit messages from your code changes. And it can be a drop-in replacement for `git commit -m "..."`.

Example:

feat(auth): add OAuth2 integration with GitHub and Google - Implement OAuth2 authentication flow - Add provider configuration for GitHub and Google - Create callback handler for token exchange - Update login UI with social auth buttons

Don't like it? Reroll with 'r', or type `r "focus on xyz"` and it rerolls the commit with your feedback.

You can try it out with uvx (no install):

uvx gac init # config wizard uvx gac

Note: `gac init` creates a .gac.env file in your home directory with your chosen provider, model, and API key.

Tech details:

14 providers - Supports local (Ollama & LM Studio) and cloud (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Cerebras, Chutes, Fireworks, StreamLake, Synthetic, Together AI, & Z.ai (including their extremely cheap coding plans!)).

Three verbosity modes - Standard with bullets (default), one-liners (`-o`), or verbose (`-v`) with detailed Motivation/Architecture/Impact sections.

Secret detection - Scans for API keys, tokens, and credentials before committing. Has caught my API keys on a new project when I hadn't yet gitignored .env.

Flags - Automate common workflows:

`gac -h "bug fix"` - pass hints to guide intent `gac -yo` - auto-accept the commit message in one-liner mode `gac -ayp` - stage all files, auto-accept the commit message, and push (yolo mode)

Would love to hear your feedback! Give it a try and let me know what you think! <3

GitHub: https://github.com/cellwebb/gac
by xk3 | 2025-10-27 17:07:07+00:00
What's the benefit of this compared to rsync or scp $hostname:.config/<TAB>?

I put my whole home folder in git and that has its benefits (being able to see changes to files as they happen) but if I'm just copying a file or two of config I'll just cat or scp it--introducing git seems needlessly complex if the branches are divergent
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-10-27 17:07:12+00:00
Twitter's failures are solely due to Musk's changes in corporate governance (e.g. boosting fringe right-wing content causing its existing userbase and advertisers to flee the platform), not due to any engineering problems caused by reducing headcount. Strictly from an engineering standpoint, Twitter works just as well as it did before Musk took it over.

As I wrote in another post, if Musk had never purchased Twitter and Jack Dorsey performed the same reduction in engineering staff, I doubt the site would be materially different from how it was pre-Musk.