MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zigurd | 2025-11-14 16:13:56+00:00
Humans will number 10 to 11 billion before the curve starts pointing downward. Even China, the supposed basket case of population collapse will "collapse" to their level of a few decades ago. The current population was supposed to be catastrophically overpopulated.

I don't agree with them but there are significant numbers of people who think 10 or 11 billion is way beyond sustainability.
by cb321 | 2025-11-14 16:13:56+00:00
These are all big topics, but any "parametric curve fitting" like this tool uses is parameter estimation (the parameters of the various curves). That already makes strong modeling assumptions (usually including IID, Gaussian noise, etc.,) to get the parameter estimates in the first place. I agree it would be even better to have ways to input measurement errors (in both x- & y- !) per your example and have non-bootstrap options (I only said "probably"), residual diagnostics, etc.

Maybe a residuals plot and IID tests of residuals (i.e. tests of some of the strong assumptions!) would be a better next step for the author than error estimates, but I stand by my original feedback. Right now even the simplest case of a straight line fit is reported with only exact slope & intercept (well, not exact, but to an almost surely meaningless 16 decimals!), though I guess he thought to truncate the goodness of fit measures at ~4 digits.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-14 16:14:31+00:00
What data can you encode in an out-of-band return value (exception), that you can't encode in a parameter or in-band return value? An exception isn't a magic data type, there is nothing you couldn't also return as a return value or a parameter.

The filename to be opened is likely passed as a string in an argument, so it IS present in the function interface contract.
by k_bx | 2025-11-14 16:14:35+00:00
Really excited to try this out. I have a fleet of containers on ubuntu + incus. Not only does this do ZFS optimization, I look forward having easy container optimized backup, live cluster migration (to a different machine without downtime) and so much more.

I use Proxmox on fat servers, but for homelab-like setup Incus OS seems more like a sweet spot
by AnonHP | 2025-11-14 16:15:15+00:00
> I fear the day a stockholder meeting occurs and someone wringing their hands see the decommissioned pennies they can save by limiting or stopping these reports.

The Backblaze stock has taken a beating over the years. Recently I saw some news that there were issues with financial reporting (and fraud?). So it’s anybody’s guess as to what may happen or if the company would even be around (as it exists now) in the next decade.

I’d guess they may already have tools in place to prepare the stats and charts, leaving some amount of writing as manual work (which could or would probably be offloaded to generative AI). But analyzing the reliability of drives and publishing the data could also be seen as a competitive advantage when comparing with newer companies (positive and negative).
by hamdingers | 2025-11-14 16:15:17+00:00
> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits.

I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.

It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-11-14 16:15:31+00:00
This is not my claim:

>> "executing Prolog code is reasoning" makes Prolog more useful for LLMs to emit than Python?

I said what I think about LLMs generating Prolog here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914587

But I was mainly asking why you say that Prolog's execution is "not reasoning". I don't understand what you mean that '"?- 1=1." is reasoning by definition' and how that ties-in with our discussion about Prolog reasoning or not.
by jmadeano | 2025-11-14 16:15:34+00:00
There are a few things that could have happened:

1. Maybe the domain matching missed? You can check this by going to the library tab and seeing if it appears in "Modifications for Current Page" when you're on the site.

2. Maybe there was a silent error. Our current error system relies on chrome notifications and we've come to realize that many people have them disabled. That means you don't get a clear error message when something goes wrong. We are actively working on this.

3. The script could be caught be a content policy. Checking console log could help to see if there are any errors.

4. Maybe the script just doesn't work on the first try. Can't guarantee it will work perfectly every time. You can try to update the script (Library -> click Modify on the script) and say that it didn't work/you don't see any changes.

Happy to provide more support via email (contact@trynextbyte.com) or discord (https://www.tweeks.io/discord)
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-14 16:15:38+00:00
I've seen this at a couple banks now. Including my local credit union. One person in the lobby that is really just a helper to point you in the right direction. All the 'tellers' are videoconference machines. Basically an ATM with an ID scanner and videoconference setup. For the moment the teller you talk to is still a real teller with the credit union, just at their main branch, but give it time.

They took away the one reason I had for maintaining my credit union membership.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-14 16:15:44+00:00
I think that LLM hype is hiding a lot of very real and impactful progress in real world/robot intelligence.

An essay writing machine is cool. A machine that can competently control any robot arm, and make it immediately useful is a world-changing prospect.

Moving and manipulating objects without explicit human coded instructions will absolutely revolutionize so much of our world.
by beezle | 2025-11-14 16:15:45+00:00
I go back to pre-Firefox Mozilla browsers. What I want is faster, less bloat and far better memory management - a corrorlary is probably 'fix all outstanding bugs'. Were it me, I'd put a moratorium of three years on adding anything new, AI in particular.

As a beta user I update often: 146.0b1: 83M download. 125.0b1(Apr 2024) 61M 100.0b1(Feb 2022) 53M. 75.0b1(Apr 2020) 49M

Video in particular is the memory killer as Firefox appears unable to properly reclaim after watching and closing tabs. It is not long before Firefox is pushing 10GB used. Twitter is also a killer.
by haxiomic | 2025-11-14 16:16:07+00:00
AI is the perfect low cost tool to enable that. Plantir knows this and has been making strategic moves to build this

Seems quite achievable and sustainable to me

Every human carries dense compute and sensors with them. If they don't they stand out while still surrounded by dense compute and sensors held by others at all times

Not nice to think about but it is the reality we are moving towards – vote accordingly
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-14 16:16:17+00:00
> a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology.

Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail or get outpaced by a competitor if we are not "using AI." Keep in mind this is a small 300 employee, non-tech company with no real local competitors.

Asking for clarification or what they mean by "use AI" they have no answers, just "other companies are going to use AI, and we need to use AI or we will fall behind."

There's no strategy or technical merit here, no pre-defined use case people have in mind. Purely driven by hype. We do in fact use AI. I do, the office workers use it daily, but the reality is it has had no outward/visible effect on profitability, so it doesn't show up on the P&L at the end of the quarter except as an expense, and so the hype and mandate continues. The only thing that matters is appearing to "use AI" until the magic box makes the line go up.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-14 16:16:41+00:00
> Thing is that to know it is good enough you still have to collect and annotate more data than most people and organizations want to do.

This has been the bottleneck in every ML (not just text/LLM) project I’ve been part of.

Not finding the right AI engineers. Not getting the MLops textbook perfect using the latest trends.

It’s the collecting enough high quality data and getting it properly annotated and verified. Then doing proper evals with humans in the loop to get it right.

People who only know these projects through headlines and podcasts really don’t like to accept this idea. Everyone wants synthetic data with LLMs doing the annotations and evals because they’ve been sold this idea that the AI will do everything for you, you just need to use it right. Then layer on top of that the idea that the LLMs can also write the code for you and it’s a mess when you have to deal with people who only gain their AI knowledge through headlines, LinkedIn posts, and podcasts.
by beefnugs | 2025-11-14 16:17:03+00:00
What is it called where capitalism is this constant fight to push out all cooperation or collaboration? Why cant firefox just support whatever extension features would allow other people to create this AI trash and anyone who WANTS it can install it?

Its this constant fight that everyone must CAPTURE all revenue opportunities at the cost of complete overwhelming tsunami of bad forceful decisions on users, all JUST INCASE its an actual revenue stream that they could be missing out on, before even knowing if a single user gives the slightest shit about it
by hansmayer | 2025-11-14 16:17:23+00:00
Maybe get yourself acquainted with a topic before you throw up something like this. For reference here is a video of renowned russian poet Eduard Limonow, shooting at Sarajevo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkjPZvz27mg . I guess this video and the "little" fact that the Italian state prosecutor would not just open an investigation based on some hear/say should make it a bit more believable, shouldn't it?
by resfirestar | 2025-11-14 16:17:27+00:00
>What strikes me as odd is the decision to position itself as just another AI‑enabled web browser, picking a fight with big techs and better‑funded startups whose users are less hostile (and sometimes enthusiastic) about adding AI to web browsing.

By this logic why have a web browser at all if it means competing with better-funded rivals? Firefox got started "picking a fight with" Microsoft at the height of its power, the asymmetry didn't stop them then. But Firefox users at the time were a group that was excited for new ideas, not hostile. Now the project spends years blocking useful stuff like installable web apps while the vocal part of the userbase treats every new feature or API as proof that Mozilla is a mere puppet of Google.
by kjs3 | 2025-11-14 16:17:37+00:00
No?

Be forced to use Gnome because some royal 'We' decided that's what a DM should be? No farking way. Force someone else to use KDE because I think Gnome is kinda awful? No. Give up on low-resource desktop environments because Gnome or what ever is The One True DE? Sorry...no.

I would not like that.
by Bender | 2025-11-14 16:18:04+00:00
The first thing I would look for is if real users both browsers and API clients are capable of doing HTTP/2.0 and if they default to that. If so that an easy win. Block anything lower than HTTP/2.0 and that will nuke most bots outside of headless Chrome. If any real clients are using HTTP/1.1 then make a separate listener/URL for those and limit access by known good CIDR blocks with a firewall assuming this is a corporate GitLab server. Or block this on HAProxy and give trusted networks a way to reach NGinx directly such as a VPN or firewall rule.

If there are archived access logs that would be a good place to try to figure this out.

In NGinx the block looks like this [1] or change it to a redirect to a static landing page.

If this is not an option then restrict repo access to approved SSH clients.

If this is not an option then put authentication on the repos hit hardest and a page that explains what the user/password is along with an acceptable use policy for using the authentication. If AI are trained to learn the authentication they will be violating the AUP written by your lawyers. Make the AI vendors give you enough money to upgrade your infrastructure to handle their load.

TL;DR find the differences between bot behavior and real people then make rules that will break the bots. There's always a difference. When all else fails block the CIDR blocks of all the known AI networks and play whack-a-mole for anything outside of their networks. Not perfect, nothing is but it will lower the load.

If going the blocking route, add all their CIDR blocks and IP's into a text file that gets read by a startup script to

ip route add blackhole "${CIDR} 2>/dev/null

That will prevent HAproxy from being able to complete the handshake and is a much lower CPU and memory load on the server than using firewall rules.

[1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/nginx/inc.d/40_https2_stuff.conf...
by red-iron-pine | 2025-11-14 16:18:23+00:00
Bob the Barber ain't doin shit but that's mostly because he's got a room temperature IQ and is already struggling with taxes and biz-dev. he can do a mean fade, tho.

some weeks if its slow he may struggle to make his rent for his apartment; he doesn't have time or capacity to engage in serious rent-seeking behavior.

but hair cut chains like Supercuts are absolutely engaging in shady behavior all the time, like games with how solons rent chairs or employing questionably legal trafficked workers.

and FYI turns out that Supercuts a wholly owned subsidiary of the Regis Corporation, who absolutely acquires other companies and plays all sorts of shady corporate games, including branching into other markets and monopoly efforts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_Corporation
by 4ggr0 | 2025-11-14 16:18:59+00:00
i see a lot of dismissive comments towards Firefox in general in this thread, so i just wanted to mention that i use it since over a decade on all of my devices. on desktop devices i've recently switched to Zen which has rekindled my love for FF. not that i stopped loving it before, but it feels nice to use a completely different UI after all this time.
by redwall_hp | 2025-11-14 16:19:02+00:00
Automatic translation famously fails catastrophically with Japanese, because it's a language that heavily depends on implied rather than explicit context.

The minimal grammatically correct sentence is simply a verb, and it's an exercise to the reader to know what the subject and object are expected to be. (Essentially, the more formal/polite you get, the more things are added. You could say "kore wa atsu desu" to mean "this is hot." But you could also just say "atsu," which could also be interpreted as a question instead of a statement.)

Chinese seems to have similar issues, but I know less about how it's structured.

Anyway, it's really nice when Japanese music on YouTube includes a human-provided translation as captions. Automated ones are useless, when it doesn't give up entirely.
by Jensson | 2025-11-14 16:19:16+00:00
> Do you imagine AGI as a robot and not as datacenter solving all kinds of problems?

AGI means it can replace basically all human white collar work, alpha evolve can't do that while average humans can. White collar work is mostly done by average humans after all, if average humans can learn that then so should an AGI.

An easier test is that the AGI must be able to beat most computer games without being trained on those games, average humans can beat most computer games without anyone telling them how to do it, they play and learn until they beat it 40 hours later.

AGI was always defined as an AI that could do what typical humans can do, like learn a new domain to become a professional or play and beat most video games etc. If the AI can't study to become a professional then its not as smart or general as an average human, so unless it can replace most professionals its not an AGI because you can train a human of average intelligence to become a professional in most domains.
by theFco | 2025-11-14 16:20:07+00:00
I agree with this. I would add that the important part of the practice of writing is not the tools, but once you are writing you can try tools that help you continue. For my creative writing (that I do mostly as a hobby) I have a nice notebook with a nice pen that I use to write short stories and world building excercises, and characters, etc. I don't need the nice notebook, I did not get it before starting, but it does feel nice to come home having thought of what to write and have a pleasant notebook and pen.

My job includes writing technical documents but I use latex and emacs because that's what I have always used.

But practice > tools!
by Larrikin | 2025-11-14 16:20:45+00:00
The tools aren't going anywhere. Fans were outraged at the look and artists raged against the transition from cel animation to digital. Almost nothing serious is produced via cel now and the art adjusted by making extremely complex and beautiful art that couldn't have been done on cels.

There's a real legal fight that needs to go on right now about these companies stealing style, voices, likeness, etc. But it's really beginning to feel like there's a generation of artists that are hampering their career by saying they are above it instead of using the tools to enhance their art to create things they otherwise couldn't.

I see kids in high school using the tools like how I used Photoshop when I was younger. I see unemployed/under employed designers lamenting what the tools have done.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-14 16:21:08+00:00
That sounds like a heartfelt generalization of modern plutocrapitalism - but meanwhile I have dead-tree-edition bills for groceries, insurance, rent, etc. which show that prices do sometimes go down. Both from coop/mutual, and from for-profit providers.

And if you want lower insurance premiums to be possible - the reality is that any provider has to take in enough money so that their claims checks don't bounce.

Plus, 99% of ordinary people would prefer to live in homes that didn't get wrecked by bad weather.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-14 16:21:09+00:00
It'd be a win for me, probably not for him. Or investors, sadly, at least not in the short term. I would turn off the non-Amazon sales platform. It might be feasible to save the brand, but of course the immediate effect would be a loss of that revenue stream from all the random Chinese "brands" that flood it with cheap garbage and counterfeits.

Or at least make a persistent toggle switch in the UI where you can say "I never want to see a single product that is not shipped-from-and-sold-by-Amazon." And end commingling with any product that Amazon itself sells, if that is occurring.

That's why they don't let morons like me run big business :). I care about things that only matter when you are a small business apparently.
by quitit | 2025-11-14 16:21:16+00:00
I really don't mind having AI-driven features — if it's an improvement.

Turns out that "if" part is fantastically difficult for some types to fathom, and what we're all experiencing now is just the same add-on tech-stench that has been typical of every digital era before us:

1970s: Calculators, calculators, calculators!

1980s: Miniaturised, digital quartz clocks anywhere they can fit.

1990s: Wouldn't this toaster be better.. WITH A LCD SCREEN?

2000s: MP3 players must outnumber the human population. No object or space should be without shitty, tinny music.

2010s: This easy-to-use device would be wonderfully enshittified by removing all of the buttons and switching to a touchscreen aka "Smart"-appliances.

2020s: AI, AI, AI!
by echelon_musk | 2025-11-14 16:21:20+00:00
Every single time something like this comes up I feel compelled to mention Audacious.

See my previous comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32779590

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965620

Like most days, I am using it right now on macOS.
by tomwphillips | 2025-11-14 16:21:26+00:00
Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!).

I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption.

If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe.

It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.

I really recommend the book.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-14 16:21:35+00:00
You don't even have to go as far as fusion reactors. Nuclear bombs are real, and we know they work.

But surely, anyone who's talking about atomic weapons must be invoking religious imagery and the old myths of divine retribution! They can't be talking about an actual technology capable of vaporizing cities and burning people into the walls as shadows - what a ridiculous, impossible notion would that be! "World War 3" is just a good old end-of-the-world myth, the kind of myth that exists in many religions, but given a new coat of paint.

And Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, now retold for the new age. You have to be a doomsday cultist to believe that something like this could actually happen!
by wat10000 | 2025-11-14 16:22:06+00:00
Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from "this multi-ton machine can do arithmetic operations on large numbers several times faster than a person" to "this box produces a convincing facsimile of human conversation, but it only emulates a trillion neurons and they're not nearly as sophisticated as real ones."

I do think we probably need a new hardware approach to get to the human level, but it does seem like it will happen in a relative blink of an eye compared to how long the brain took.
by belter | 2025-11-14 16:22:13+00:00
The factual soundness of my argument is independent of the report quality :-) the report influences comprehension, not correctness...

The fact data centers are already having a major impact on the public water supply systems is known, by the decisions some local governments are forced to do, if you care to investigate...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage

"...in some regions where data centers are concentrated—and especially in regions already facing shortages—the strain on local water systems can be significant. Bloomberg News reports that about two-thirds of U.S. data centers built since 2022 are in high water-stress areas.

In Newton County, Georgia, some proposed data centers have reportedly requested more water per day than the entire county uses daily. Officials there now face tough choices: reject new projects, require alternative water-efficient cooling systems, invest in costly infrastructure upgrades, or risk imposing water rationing on residents...."

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...