MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vouwfietsman | 2025-11-14 16:38:41+00:00
Not naming numbers is precisely the point, because you obfuscate the reality of the size of the gap, which in the end is what everything is about. The gap creates the offense. Everybody knows there's rich people, but being confronted by exactly how rich, to the detail of a number, is the offensive part (if done by that rich person without any clear reason).

I'm not sure why people keep piling up to pretend this is such a normal thing, this is literally why people don't discuss salaries despite it technically being in their own interest: specifics ground the fuzzy notion of inequality into reality like nothing else.

The offensive post inflates the perceived inequality from "500$ pants is too much for pants" to "10k means nothing to me" while my version leaves the specifics outside of the conversation. In my version, the person could put the level of "too expensive for pants" at 1k, still an order of magnitude lower than the offensive post.

Finally, I acknowledge that this is a privileged position to be in explicitly, because that signals that you are aware that this is an exceptional situation to be in (which I'm not sure the offensive post author is aware of, even now).
by shade | 2025-11-14 16:38:45+00:00
I'm deaf, so I test a lot of speech to text and transcription apps from an accessibility point of view.

My answer to "why have a monthly subscription" would be that you need capabilities that Whisper doesn't handle well, like real-time transcription in noisy environments.

That's not the niche you're targeting here, though. :)

My experience is that Whisper - not being built for real time speech to text - isn't as good at it as other tools are. You can hack something together by stacking together progressively more audio frames to feed to Whisper to give it context, but IME, you're going to get better results from a model that's designed for real-time STT in the first place, or by using a service like Azure Speech to Text which has excellent noise resilience... but which is also an ongoing cost which would justify a subscription. Real-time Whisper also devours your battery quickly.

That said - while I've had very good experiences with Parakeet in MacWhisper, I'm curious if you evaluated Apple's SpeechAnalyzer APIs at all. It's unfortunately limited macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26+ since it's a new API, but it's on device, has comparable quality of results to Whisper Large v3 Turbo and Parakeet, and seems to be better on battery usage.
by keeganpoppen | 2025-11-14 16:38:52+00:00
yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes it was closer to the top, but societies in which people are willing to die for abstract ideas tend to be one... where the value of life isn't quite as high as it is nowadays (ie no matter how much my inner nerd has a love and fascination for that time period, no way i'm pressing the button on any one-way time machines...).
by danudey | 2025-11-14 16:39:00+00:00
1. AI is generating a lot of buzz

2. AI could be the next technology revolution

3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor

4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind

5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment

6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the feature

7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're offering so we should opt them in automatically

Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in. See also: 'stories' making their way into everything (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out something like ten percent of GDP.

So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-14 16:39:08+00:00
It's a problem in the software industry today that is bigger than AI, probably the greatest controversy in software marketing.

Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product.

Trouble is using a product like that is like walking out of the Moscone Center and getting harassed by mentally ill people and addicts or like creating an account in Tumblr and getting five solicitations for pig butchering and NFT scams in DM in the first week -- you boot up the product, spend 20 seconds looking at the splash screen, then you have to clear five dialog boxes that you might not have time to deal with right now. Sometimes I open up a product because I have to do a task I have to do but don't really want to do and feeling a lot of stress and I just don't need to deal with any bullshit when I am under the gun.

I've seen Adobe trying gentler methods to point out new features in Lightroom, such as a filter that can automatically weed out photos where people have their eyes closed. It takes a lot of UX work to do that though.

Personally I'd like it a lot better if the nagging started after I finished a task, if I was feeling satisfied with the product and now relieved that the task is over that's a moment when I'd be receptive to learning more about the product.

[1] And also a lot of "free" software, it's not just money-grubbing, but the model of always rolling updates.
by jldugger | 2025-11-14 16:39:24+00:00
> the bottom 7 lowest-margin industries ... (CRISPR, gene therapy, hydrogen fuel cell, genomics and mRNA therapeutics) arguably have some of the greatest potential to improve quality of life and help the planet.

Critically, all the revenue for things you mention have yet to materialize, so they will show up in this naive analysis as losers. What they really represent is _opportunity_. Some may materialize but others have been around for decades and it turns out the "application for profit" step is much harder than anticipated.

> margin (profit) is inversely correlated with value to humanity.

You say this like it's a bad thing, but arguably the most valuable things to humanity are food, water, and shelter. These are simultaneously so important and so cheap that they embody the term "commodity," and that's a good thing! A _ton_ of human ingenuity from every society and culture has been applied to making these things better and cheaper and more plentiful. The same thing is happening to solar power (mostly for geopolitical reasons), which is conspicuously not on either of your lists.

Shelter is the one bit in the hierarchy of needs that got weird. Since it's not a consumable, there's incentive to treat it as an investment. In theory there's nothing wrong with that, but the incentives combined with local politics can become toxic. So many voters in the US own real estate (with leverage!) that everyone agrees by default that prices must never go down. That leads to a trap where politics revolve around housing prices never falling.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-11-14 16:39:29+00:00
The SNAP rules don't require equal treatment with people who pay with credit cards, debit cards, or checks, only with people who pay cash. Setting aside the politicized USDA public communications during the shutdown, here's the legally binding regulatory text:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-II/s...

"Coupons shall be accepted for eligible foods at the same prices and on the same terms and conditions applicable to cash purchases of the same foods at the same store except that tax shall not be charged on eligible foods purchased with coupons."
by acrophiliac | 2025-11-14 16:39:40+00:00
Here's what I did: $ pip install beets $ beet config -e $ beet import Music/BillEvans The database directory /home/user/.beets does not exist. Create it (Y/n)? y configuration error: import must be a collection, not NoneType

I was momentarily flummoxed by the error message. I pretty quickly realized I had mistakenly commented out all the lines in the import section of the config file. But for a nontechnical person the error message might be a bit hard to interpret. Maybe consider a more beginner friendly message with hints on how to correct the problem?
by markbao | 2025-11-14 16:39:45+00:00
The Dropbox thing is exactly what I was thinking of when I was writing my original comment.

Here is the reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.
by hs586 | 2025-11-14 16:39:59+00:00
There was a point in university when I was trying to find the "best" note taking system to be organized and as efficient as possible. Tried some tablets, did latex live during lectures, markdown, you name it. Each time I wanted to do something I'd get blocked on deciding where to write.

Then I realized that I spend more time about thinking about how to organize my notes than actually taking the notes, or even more importantly focus on the content.

That was a freeing realization that got me unblocked. Now I do not have a "system". My thoughts go wherever is most convenient at that moment, I have papers lying around, docs, Apple notes. If they turn out to be important, they'll naturally become structured.

That being said, whenever I see some tool like this, I still have a passing thought - ah, that's a great system I should have it, it will enable me to be more productive :)
by jmadeano | 2025-11-14 16:40:07+00:00
> This one was a fail: it took 180+ seconds (vs. around 60 seconds of previous query), then some thumbnails got smaller (not all), while the physical space and padding for each entry was still there (so no real density was gained from the change)

Did you try updating that one (click the New Modification drop to select or Library -> click Modify)? It's not always perfect on the first attempt but a follow up can often help.

> Right now, it feels like a very slow iteration process where I write something, it doesn't get it, and I keep trying to refine it and waiting around 60 to 100 seconds between results.

There is a push and pull here. We've spent a lot of time evaluating models and pipelines for this. We can make generation much faster but the results will be worse (so faster iteration, but more required). We can also make generation much better (e.g. if you give me 5 minutes, we can do a bunch of post processing: manually selector validation, LLM-as-a-judge, even test the whole thing in something like playwright). In practice, we chose something in the middle, but everyone's preference is different. We do have a "fast" vs "smart" mode but so far it seems like people just rely on the default ("smart"). Of course, as we keep improving, our goal is to make it much faster and smarter.

> I'd also like to see the actual filters that are being generated and applied on each change.

This is possible. Go to the Library tab, scroll down and click Open Options. You'll be able to see the details of all your scripts there. The options page could be improved a lot (you're kind of seeing the plumbing behind the scenes) but hopefully useful for you.

> A collection of curated changes would be useful. My first instinct was to check if there's a gallery of the most common changes that people request to some popular websites.

We're working on more social/discoverability features. You can already share your individual tweeks and curate your own profile of tweeks at www.tweeks.io/share/profile (here's my profile with some examples: www.tweeks.io/share/jason). This is all early. We are also working on a system to surface top scripts for a given site dynamically as your browse different pages. There is a lot of work to do here.

> Changing website contents was out of reach for the general public before, so this extension could become their door to that.

1000% agree with that.

Really appreciate all your feedback, and we're excited to keep improving. You can reach me any time at contact@trynextbyte.com or https://www.tweeks.io/discord if you have more questions/feedback :)
by udev4096 | 2025-11-14 16:40:21+00:00
I have switched to incus and it's really great. It's lightweight, has a working terraform provider, easy-to-use cli, pre-built images (LXC and VM) of major distros (while in proxmox, you have to create templates all the time for VMs), runs on any distro (on proxmox, you're stuck with debian), clustering is nice, supports bunch of storage drivers (dir, btrfs, ceph, zfs), simple web UI and active community. The project leader is also very active and helpful while in proxmox, it's a little unresponsive. You can even install `incus-base` package which only contains LXC specific components for only running LXC containers.

I have noticed incus has better security configs by default. For instance, all pre-built images come with secureboot enabled and there are ACLs which are easy to configure for fine-grained network rules. The only downside I feel like is lack of something like PBS
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-14 16:41:23+00:00
Longer life expectancy has led to stagnation due to those older in power and owning wealth to have reduced risk appetite for investment and innovation, leading to maintaining the status quo and their quality of life for the balance of life remaining. They are stealing from the future through the demand for profits today.

Peter G. Peterson wrote about this in Gray Dawn 25 years ago, Scott Galloway talks about it today.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL385129M/Gray_dawn

https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...
by n1xis10t | 2025-11-14 16:42:05+00:00
LLMs are garbage that will never replace keyword search. This article shares my opinions on the matter: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10676-024-097...

Google is supposed to have competitors but they keep disappearing mysteriously. This is a good article about that: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline
by jonas21 | 2025-11-14 16:42:12+00:00
The other reason water usage is a bad thing to focus on is that datacenters don't inherently have to use water. It's not like servers have a spigot where you pour water in and it gets consumed.

Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency.

If governments wanted to, they could mandate that datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity / CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and relatively plentiful resource (water).
by neom | 2025-11-14 16:42:42+00:00
No doubt some amazing engineer's work there, but there are little to no adults in the room at that business as far as I can see, and sure they like to tweet about how well they are doing, and I keep hearing this line that they're selling to enterprise, uh, who, Canadian tire? If they actually have more than $150mm in revenue I'd be amazed, and $150mm revenue is still, not at all impressive.

https://www. theinformation.com/articles/openai-challenger- cohere-fell-85-short-early-revenue- forecast
by titusjohnson | 2025-11-14 16:42:51+00:00
I used to budget the bulk of my yearly tax refund for a PC upgrade of some kind. A bit over $1k every year. Something was always due for a replacement in an endless treadmill of avoiding total system obsolescence.

Now, shit just lasts forever. I upgraded from a 1st gen i7 920 _this year_ into some mid-range Ryzen 5. I'm still using the 2070 RTX I bought over 5 years ago to power the HTC Vive and a 1440p monitor; with this new CPU the gfx card is finally getting a workout and has become the bottleneck while also giving me a massively better experience.

I'm tempted by the 9070 graphics cards but honestly, I just don't need it. I can tweak settings on any AAA game and get ~50fps of real frames and I'm just fine with that. I probably won't upgrade the graphics card until I pick up a dramatically better display device that requires it. Maybe the Frame will push the issue, maybe it won't.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-11-14 16:43:03+00:00
It wasn't exactly a "hoax" though, more like sensationalized reporting. Like "so-and-so identified a site where we believe there could be bodies buried" turned into "mass grave uncovered"

Some potential burial sites were investigated, no bodies were found. Unmarked graves in association with residential schools certainly have been found in Canada, and since proving a negative in regards to these claims is untenable, the media is generally reluctant to say "see, there were no mass graves after all"
by dangus | 2025-11-14 16:43:06+00:00
I think the major important difference is that a dockerfile can’t really break after you get your deployment artifact, whereas configuration management can fail on your underlying nodes if they aren’t crafted perfectly and cause post-deployment failures.

Other issues like secrets and environment management is something I find way more annoying using a tool like Chef.

Try doing a chef policyfile bootstrap that gets some secrets using its own built in chef vault. You can’t do it without wild workarounds because the node isn’t granted access to secrets until it becomes a registered node, and it doesn’t register until a chef client run completes successfully. It’s a really dumb catch-22 design.

The solution is “just use a big 3 cloud secrets vault or Hashicorp vault” and that’s fine but it’s really strange that the tool can’t handle something so simple on its own.
by dripdry45 | 2025-11-14 16:43:16+00:00
sorry to reply again, but it also sounds as if the lack of context is causing a problem. The word weird terms on a certain emotion and tone of voice. If this were in person, the other party might have a tone and demeanor that shows that word "weird" indicates a trailing off, a need for pause and contemplation, not a potential pejorative.

questioning someone in an academic matter further, just revert to the academic literature around psychology and therapy, where someone reflects in a literal way upon what they said. The LLM could easily have responded that it was just a trailing stray comment meant to indicate inquisitiveness rather than deflection. if this were real intelligence, it might take a moment to automatically reflect on why it used the word “weird“ and then let the user know that this might be a point of interest to look into?
by pjmlp | 2025-11-14 16:43:38+00:00
Gosling on the matter,

> One of the little experiments I tried was asking people about the rules for unsigned arithmetic in C. It turns out nobody understands how unsigned arithmetic in C works. There are a few obvious things that people understand, but many people don't understand it.

-- https://www.artima.com/articles/james-gosling-on-java-may-20...
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-14 16:43:45+00:00
And also, none of those current use cases are a real benefit to society, outside of maybe research cases.

The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the largest expense).

It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless society, which would have real benefits. No, instead we have AI companies hyping up a product whose purpose (according to them) is so that already wealthy people can hoard more wealth and not have to pay for employees. It's promising to take away a large portion of the only high-paying jobs we have left for the average person without an advanced degree.

Me being able to write software a little faster, without hiring a junior, is a net negative to society rather than a benefit.
by orbital-decay | 2025-11-14 16:44:02+00:00
Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate the rest.

>replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries

I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time.

Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.
by Sharlin | 2025-11-14 16:44:04+00:00
What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.
by mainecoder | 2025-11-14 16:44:12+00:00
My friend told me he likes writing rust because he loves doing things that have already been done his senior pushed management to rewrite in rust and got approved after 2 months, he jokingly told him I guaranteed us a job for the next 3 years rewriting will take time. One paycheck collection strategy push Rust -> get adoption -> rewrite code (now memory safe yay) -> collect paycheck rewriting . In the meantime others will write memory unsafe code for you which is new and provide you a paycheck guarantee and the rust compiler helps you take your time when rewriting you can read the old code while it compiles.
by squarefoot | 2025-11-14 16:44:43+00:00
For what is worth the opinion of one user, I want AI to be available when I need it as external loadable module (extension? plugin?), not bundled in everything no matter if I use it or not because I know it will eventually get in the way. If Mozilla is being offered money by AI companies to bundle it (Google search agreement rings a bell?) then they'll likely adopt it regardless of users opinion, but hopefully Firefox derivatives such as LibreWolf and others will remove that.