MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taylodl | 2025-11-14 17:16:27+00:00
It's all part of their scheme to undermine scientific inquiry and scientific results. They're angry that the facts don't align with their preferred ideology so they're attacking the very system yielding those facts. We can dismiss this as being sophomoric, but I'm afraid it can lead to disastrous results - because what they're really attacking is Truth itself. If they can dissuade you from believing facts and truth, then they can fill your head full of their "alternative facts." This was laughable back in 2017, but now we see it's no joking matter because it works.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-11-14 17:17:15+00:00
I went down that “water use” rabbit hole a month ago and basically… it’s just a bunch of circular reporting that was based on some paper published in 2023[1]. For ChatGPT 3.5 they claimed “500ml for 10-50 responses”. In 2024, Washington Post published an article that took their claim and said “519 milliliters per email”[2] but didn’t source that from the original paper… that “shocking headline” took off and got widely circulated and cited directly, treating the WaPo calculation as if it were the original research finding. Then tech blogs and advocacy sites ran with it even harder, citing each other instead of any actual research[3].

If you look at the original paper they are quite upfront with the difficulty of estimating water use. It’s not public data—in fact it’s usually a closely held trade secret, plus it’s got all kinds of other issues like you don’t know where the training happened, when it happened, what the actual cooling efficiency was, etc. The researchers were pretty clear about these limitations in the actual paper.

Basically, it’s urban legend at this point. When OpenAI’s CEO later said ChatGPT uses ~0.3ml per query, that’s roughly 100x less than the viral claims.

[1] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271> [2] <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-...> [3] <https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai>/
by ryandrake | 2025-11-14 17:17:21+00:00
The pushiness is just insane. These companies are totally out of control. I just want to use your software the way I've used it for the past decade. Stop getting in my face. I get it--you're so excited that you just launched this new AI feature and you really, really want me to know about it. How nice for you. Now leave me alone! Stop putting it on every screen, making every button invoke it, interrupting me with popups designed to wear me down and give in... It's so pathetic and desperate!
by georgemcbay | 2025-11-14 17:17:28+00:00
> I’m bullish on AI as tech

I'm not bullish in the stock market sense.

Which isn't the same as saying LLMs and related technology aren't useful... they are.

But as you mentioned the financials don't make sense today, and even worse than that, I'm not sure how they could get the financials to make sense because no player in the space on the software side has a real moat to speak of, and I don't believe its possible to make one.

People have preferences over which LLM does better at job $XYZ, but I don't think the differences would stand up to large price changes. LLM A might feel like its a bit better of a coding model than LLM B, but if LLM A suddenly cost 2x-3x, most people are going to jump to LLM B.

If they manage to price fix and all jump in price, I think the amount of people using them would drop off a cliff.

And I see the ultimate end result years from now (when the corporate LLM providers might, in a normal market, finally start benefiting from a cross section of economies of scale and their own optimizations) being that most people will be able to get by using local models for "free" (sans some relatively small buy-in cost, and whatever electricity they use).
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-14 17:17:36+00:00
Yes. The main reason I do not want to take notes on paper is the lack of instant backup and sync. These devices seem to have the same drawback.

Maybe you could have networking enabled, but only in the background and without any software at all that could distract, just a background service syncing files?

I used to have a laptop running FreeDOS for distraction free hobby programming. Used a USB floppy drive and moved files using floppies, which seemed appropriate for a DOS laptop, but was not very convenient. If I set something like that up again I would probably use Linux or some BSD instead, with network in the background somehow. (But possibly DOSBox or QEMU+FreeDOS for the user interface to be less distracting).
by herewulf | 2025-11-14 17:17:47+00:00
I can personally vouch for a great deal of consternation among players of Valve's games at the time of Steam's launch and I have the IRC logs to prove it!

I was also personally resistant to the new thing and to this day have "only" a five digit Steam ID rather than maybe a four or even three digit one.. Haha!

Since then I can say that PC gamers have only benefited greatly from Valve's benevolent dictatorship compared to the alternatives.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-14 17:18:06+00:00
How refreshing to see an AI realistic view on HN these days! As the author said, no one is claiming transformer tech useless, the issue is the relentless drive to claim loudly that transformers will lead to AGI in the next few years and solve all existing problems and that it is worth the current negative damage to society and the environment.

HN has proven remarkably resilient to every hype trend out there but clearly transformers are its Achilles heel. That or/and massive transformer astroturfing
by guizadillas | 2025-11-14 17:18:07+00:00
It's not the same lol I become a paying customer of Samsung and Google because Samsung paid for it (you have to pay for your device to be verified and access Google Play Services) and some of the cost is absorbed by me

I don't become a PAYING customer of Linus because Thinkpad didn't pay for Ubuntu (and if anything was paid I would become a customer of Canonical)
by ActorNightly | 2025-11-14 17:18:19+00:00
>skill issue

Lol, this is actually very ironic considering Rust is handholding you because you don't have the skills to write memory safe code.

Like I said in my other posts, Rust makes sense in very niche situations. The article just proves that it works for the niche case where its applicable. That doesn't mean Rust automatically wins.
by lkjdsklf | 2025-11-14 17:18:29+00:00
Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed

That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water.

The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something

The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels
by epistasis | 2025-11-14 17:18:45+00:00
With people like Andreessen it's important to realize that he's saying whatever will most accomplish his goals, rather than using discussion as a method for investigating for truth.

That means there will be a mix of honesty in everything.

This fact is true of everyone to some degree, but to an extreme in Andreessen. He will not be talking to someone unless there is a specific goal around his empire. And his goals diverge from those of the random engineer in very large ways.
by everfree | 2025-11-14 17:18:49+00:00
Firefox development is funded almost entirely out of Google's massive donations to Mozilla. For Google, it's no more than a regulatory hedge - something they can point at and say that Chromium and Webkit are not a duopoly. But the flip side is that if Firefox were to ever become a real threat, Google pulls funding and Firefox is toast.

So if we want Firefox to ever seriously compete with Google products, the first thing we need to do is fund Mozilla. When a company's entire capex comes from a monopolistic competitor that would rather see it dead, any talk about capex is bikeshedding.
by re-thc | 2025-11-14 17:18:49+00:00
> I guess that makes some kind of sense? Oracle raises 4x the debt of e.g. Google?

The problem is why is Oracle raising this debt? It's to do the buildout for OpenAI. So Oracle buys GPUs from Nvidia. Nvidia invests in OpenAI. OpenAI then pays Oracle for the GPUs.

i.e. we're going around in circles.
by Merinov | 2025-11-14 17:19:00+00:00
True and good catch on the German text. Fair point, AI image generation struggles with non-English text rendering. This is a known issue I've been wrestling with.

Options I'm considering: 1. Text-free abstract patterns for non-English articles 2. Language-specific image validation before publishing 3. Manual review queue for non-English images

The pattern-based approach was meant to avoid generic "holographic businessman" images, but clearly the execution needs work for multilingual content.

Thanks for the detailed feedback: this is input I need. Herzlichen dank!
by suddenlybananas | 2025-11-14 17:19:23+00:00
That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d'olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun composition.
by bob1029 | 2025-11-14 17:19:44+00:00
There are some tradeoffs in the other direction. Digital neurons can have advantages that biological neurons do not.

For example, if biology had a "choice" I am fairly confident that it would have elected to not have leaky charge carriers or relatively high latency between elements. Roughly 20% of our brain exists simply to slow down and compensate for the other 80%.

I don't know that eliminating these caveats is sufficient to overcome all the downsides, but I also don't think we've tried very hard to build experiments that directly target this kind of thinking. Most of our digital neurons today are of an extremely reductive variety. At a minimum, I think we need recurrence over a time domain. The current paradigm (GPU-bound) is highly allergic to a causal flow of events over time (i.e., branching control flows).
by DrewADesign | 2025-11-14 17:20:06+00:00
Most artists don’t give a flying fuck about what you do on your own. Seriously! They really don’t. What they care about is having their work ripped off so for-profit companies can kill the market for their hard-won skills with munged-up derivatives.

Folks in tech generally have very limited exposure to the art world — fan art communities online, Reddit subs, YouTubers, etc. It’s more representative of internet culture than the art world— no more representative of artists than X politics is representative of voters. People have real grievances here and you are not a victim of the world’s artists. Most artists also don’t care about online art communities or what you think about them. Not even a little bit.
by tim333 | 2025-11-14 17:20:24+00:00
I actually use Chrome over Firefox largely because of a couple of 'AI' features though they aren't really chatbot slop AI. Google translate built in is very handy - I know there are add ons for Firefox but they don't work well for twitter etc, and Google Lens is also very handy especially for text in image format.

I guess they key is not in your face when you don't want them and actually useful.
by dwheeler | 2025-11-14 17:20:35+00:00
I love having built-in local natural language translation implemented by AI, which Firefox provides. Local models have different properties than remote properties, and natural language translation is a useful thing. AI should be added when it solves a real need, and the risks can be minimized (or at least controlled). The goal shouldn't be to use AI, the goal should be to solve problems for humans.
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-14 17:20:42+00:00
Well in my comment I said they established modern art. Keyword: established.

And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives.

But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition.

They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this.

He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones.

He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
by Krssst | 2025-11-14 17:20:53+00:00
> The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu.

It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.
by davidclark | 2025-11-14 17:21:01+00:00
On the other hand, when people who claim success with AI share their prompts, I see all the same misses and flaws that keep me from fully buying in. For the person though, it seems like they gloss over these errors and claim wild success. Their prompts never actually seem that different from the ones that fail me as well.

It seems like “you’re not doing it correctly” is just a rationalization to protect the pro-AI person’s established opinion.
by virtuous_sloth | 2025-11-14 17:21:30+00:00
Yes. And most importantly, the Incus API and CLI client (which uses the API) presents a consistent management language for system containers (the default ones with a init/systemd-controlled userspace), OCI containers (unpacked, not layered), and VMs. Well, as consistent as makes sense for each. There are a number of options/properties that are specific to each, but it feels very consistent.

The Incus server inside IncusOS is the same software. The difference is as little userspace as possible alongside it (not even busybox).
by tejassuds | 2025-11-14 17:21:33+00:00
Yes! Largely inspired by Anthropic's work on code execution with MCP!

The idea of more sophisticated, autonomous units instead of raw tool functions really clicked for me. Skills in SkillGraph can orchestrate multiple tools, manage state, and handle multi-turn workflows.

Thanks for the feedback on the markdown/filesystem approach - progressive discovery has been great for debugging and understanding agent behavior properly!
by zkmon | 2025-11-14 17:21:55+00:00
It's not about being late. They don't need to get into those. Companies should stick to their identity once they settled somewhere, instead of becoming color-changing chameleon. Database is still very relevant tech and they missed a whole lot in that domain. Infact, if anything, world is even more dependent now on data and databases. Why did Oracle not rule this kingdom?
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-14 17:22:29+00:00
The colloquial muddying of language concerning "conspiracy theory" was probably a government psyop in response to the JFK assassination. There, the officially endorsed theory was a lone wolf theory, that one guy did it by himself without any help or encouragement, and virtually all other theories were theories that involved one or more people conspiring in some way. From there, "conspiracy theory" morphed in media to mean any theory running counter to the official theory, even when the official theory was itself a theory about a conspiracy.
by theramm | 2025-11-14 17:22:37+00:00
Just published the detailed analysis with all findings and document citations:

https://theramm.substack.com/p/what-2895-documents-reveal-a-...

The article covers: - Mar-a-Lago recruitment evidence (including Epstein's own email: "of course he knew") - 46+ offshore entities across 8 jurisdictions - Policy correlations with document mentions - Intelligence community indicators - What's still sealed (co-conspirator names from 2008)

Every finding is reproducible using the search tool. The article includes step-by-step verification instructions.

The House votes next week on the Epstein Transparency Act to release thousands more sealed documents.
by asdfman123 | 2025-11-14 17:22:54+00:00
But it's a boon to gathering investment capital and talent.

Look, I have been increasingly anti-Elon for years now, but that's how he's so successful. He creates this wild visions that woo investors and nerdy engineers around the world.

That's the whole point. If his pitch was "we can create better chat bots" no one would care.

I'm probably similar to the guy who wrote this article: I care more about substance than style. That doesn't get you ahead in this world, though. Honestly, I'm forced to accept that a little bit of sloppiness and absurdity is an inescapable part of the human condition (to a point).
by Lapel2742 | 2025-11-14 17:23:09+00:00
> I'd be happy if Firefox was a Chromium patched with better extension support and a mobile version.

The main reason I still use Firefox is that it is the only serious engine beside chromium and I do not want Google to get a monopoly in this area (although practically they already have).

Firefox is not bad. It does its job and I'm not needing more. It's even fast enough. I dislike the management and its decisions. I'm constantly looking at Ladybird. I even subscribed to their YouTube channel and if one day it is a usable Browser on Linux and on phone there is a high chance that I will ditch Firefox.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-14 17:23:51+00:00
I think it will largely come down to price and DRM support from the AAA studios for multiplayer gaming and media apps. On the former, at $400 with one controller it will probably sell well, at over $600 I think more people might choose a PS5 instead.

With regards to DRM, it doesn't have to be as restrictive as Windows' versions, but there needs to be some cooperative effort with the game studios, and the media companies as more people expect to be able to stream Netflix/AppleTV/HBO etc. from these devices on top of gaming.

As gaming only, the most popular games tend to have a multiplayer aspect and thus far haven't been cooperative with functioning under Proton... there are solutions, but it's a matter of getting studio buyin and the effort to make it happen.

Without these, it will be a niche product and may still sell well, just not gain anything near what the consoles achieve in terms of sales.
by underlipton | 2025-11-14 17:23:59+00:00
>Can you elaborate on the mechanical point you mentioned?

Not really, because I don't really understand the specifics myself. I guess it's a situation where you either believe the conspiracy theories or you don't. I've still yet to have someone explain how a company like Oracle could jump 40% in a day and it not be either Dot Com Bust-level speculation, or else someone holding Oracle needing the company to be at a certain valuation. Things happened the day before the jump, and a week after it, Oracle was signing a deal to integrate with TikTok.
by lkey | 2025-11-14 17:24:14+00:00
My definition is the definition. You cannot nuance wash the material conditions that are increasing tribal polarization. Rising inequality and uncertainty create fear and discontent, people that offer easy targets for that resentment will have more sway.

The rise of populist polemic as the most effective means for driving public behavior is also downstream from 'neutral technical solutions' designed to 'maximize engagement (anger) to maximize profit'. This is not actually a morally neutral choice and we're all dealing with the consequence. Adding AI is fuel for the fire.
by godelski | 2025-11-14 17:24:37+00:00
There are plenty of us that have no problem with Firefox and use it. But I notice people love to hate Firefox. You also get a lot of people complaining who've never used it.

Truth is it's a perfectly fine browser and the average person doesn't really notice the difference when you switch them over. Okay, "you" might be special and we're on a tech forum but most people don't.

But we're also on a tech forum where people don't realize that a chrome/chromium dominance means Google controls how the internet operates. People love to complain about Firefox's lack of standards as if those aren't first protocols in chrome and then Google votes for them to become standards. That's the entire problem right there
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-14 17:24:56+00:00
FTE can mean either:

* “Full Time Employee” (which can itself mean “not a part-timer” in a place that employs both, or “not a temp/contractor” [in which case the “full-time” really means “regular/permanent”]) or

* “Full Time Equivalent” (a budgeting unit equal to either a full time worker or a combination of part time workers with the same aggregate [usually weekly] hours as constitute the standard for full-time in the system being used.)
by jmadeano | 2025-11-14 17:24:58+00:00
I've also noticed the fragmentation of the ecosystem. There is still some powerful stuff out there, but it is hard to find and UX has a lot of room for improvement (especially for laypeople).

Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenance mode since it was a big undertaking. MV3 certainly has been a pain to work with on our side.
by Merinov | 2025-11-14 17:25:10+00:00
RSS feed is on the roadmap. Planning to implement: - Per-language RSS feeds (/en/news/feed.xml etc.) - Manually curated (articles are already human-selected from sources)

Newsletter is an interesting idea too. Im thinking about a weekly curated roundup per segment. What would your preference be? Thank you for your feedback, well appreciated.
by nineplay | 2025-11-14 17:25:58+00:00
> Compounding these issues is the omnipresence of cameras and social media, which has made privacy more precarious.

Buried in an article about shifts in attitudes towards nudity and porn is the actual cause. As a child of the 70s I've never given nudity in the locker rooms a second thought but now, no thank you. For my daughter? Out of the question.

I'll bring up the third rail. I am, despite all my ultra-liberal blue sensibilities, uncomfortable with individuals with XY chromosomes in my locker room. I can put in a bunch of qualifiers - if they're on hormones, if they're post op, if there's really no physical difference then I'm not concerned but there is no guarantee of course. If I look over at the locker next to me and see a penis, I'm out.
by proteal | 2025-11-14 17:26:25+00:00
I think a succinct way to describe my thoughts on linear algebra/language is that language has high dimensionality (ie many different basis vectors that may not necessarily be orthogonal) and that individual languages use a unique coordinate system to express thought. Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought and some languages can more efficiently represent the “all thoughts” vector space because they have basis vectors that point in more uncommon directions (like the go to japan example). So while you can more or less point to any thought in any language, some thoughts are easier to express in certain languages, which the post (and me) agree to be untranslatable words.

I tried to find the really interesting article about language and color that describes how some cultures use different naming schemes for colors but couldn’t find it. It talked about how back in the day we don’t know orange as a color, we just thought it was red-yellow and only after the fruit was distributed did the word for the color catch on. Here’s the best article I can find that talks about this phenomena https://burnaway.org/magazine/blue-language-visual-perceptio...