MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JonathanBeuys | 2025-11-02 08:46:19+00:00
Is cloud usage really high?

Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?

I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.

10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
by Borg3 | 2025-11-02 08:46:36+00:00
It seems that people do NOT understand its already game over.. Lost.. When stuff was small, and we had abusive actors, nobody cared.. oh just few bad actors, nothing to worry about, they will get bored and go away. No, they wont, they will grow and grow and now most even good guys turned bad because there is no punishment for it.. So as I said, game over.

Its time to start do own walled gardens, build overlay VPN networks for humans. Put services there, if someone misbehave? BAN his IP. Came back? BAN again. Came back? wtf? BAN VPN provider.. Just clean the mess.. different networks can peer and exchange. Look, Internet is just network of networks, its not that hard.
by Animats | 2025-11-02 08:47:07+00:00
> Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps don't suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them?

Yes. The reality is well known. PlentyOfFish used to publish statistics. About 10% of dating app users are "date bacon" and find matches they like. Everyone else is a dissatisfied loser. The losers provide the repeat business and the profits, just like the gambling industry.

What women want is > 6' tall, over $100K a year, reasonably good looking, and reasonably young compared to the woman. This is about 1% of the US male population.

But a much higher fraction of dating service profiles. Two good-looking women I know have shown me their side of a dating app. Each had over 1000 matches, but the ones they met did not live up to their resume. (Fun fact: the organization of ex Navy SEALS says that there are at least 10x as many people claiming to be ex-SEALS as actually exist. There aren't that many of those guys. Only a few thousand. But on dating apps...)
by Razengan | 2025-11-02 08:47:10+00:00
> There’s a complete lack of project leadership

I mean, that's fine, if there is no overarching vision. Just let users CUSTOMIZE the UI the way we want. That's it.

That would actually be easier on the UI designers too. Perhaps just a trifle bit complicated for the coders, but they have ＊AI＊ now, right??
by r_singh | 2025-11-02 08:48:26+00:00
What I'm working on: Unwrangle.com - An API for developers to query SERP, PDP and reviews data from online retailers and marketplaces.

Current focus: Ant-ban strategies for higher / lower cost throughput. Trying to identify constraints to calculate feasibility, both technical and financial. This may be slightly controversial here since many are averse to bots and scraping. I’ve actually increased per-request costs because I suspect scraping will become more restricted and less tolerated over time — the supply-side signals point that way.

Ideas I'm thinking about: Since I'm steering away from the higher concurrency/low cost scraping option — the new ideas I'm thinking about are: increasing data granularity, retailer coverage, adding an MCP server to help users query and analyse the E-commerce data they're extracting with the APIs as well.

Background: I’ve been building this solo from India for about four years. It began as freelancing, then became an API product around a year ago. Today, I have ~90 customers, including a few reputed startups in California. For me the hardest parts are social, not technical or financial — staying connected to US working culture can feel inverted from here. I’ve applied to YC a few times and might again.
by jjav | 2025-11-02 08:48:32+00:00
> I think you're viewing the "good old days" of interviewing through the lens of nostalgia. Old school interviewing from decades ago or even more recently was significantly more similar to pledging to a frat than modern interviews.

Yeah, no, not at all. Interviewing in the 90s was just a cool chat between hackers. What interesting stuff have you built, let's talk about it. None of the confrontational leetcode nonsense of later years.

I still refuse to participate in that nonsense, so I'll never make people go through such interviews. I've only hired two awesome people this year, so less than a drop in the bucket, but I'll continue to do what I can to keep some sanity in the interviewing in this industry.
by Etheryte | 2025-11-02 08:51:10+00:00
Another reason I think attributes to it at least partially is that other languages use em-dashes. Most people use LLMs in English, but that's not the only language they know and many other languages have pretty specific rules and uses for em-dashes. For example, I see em-dashes regularly in local European newspapers, and I would expect those to be written by a human for most part simply because LLM output is not good enough in smaller languages.
by tim333 | 2025-11-02 08:51:12+00:00
Hinton came out with a new idea recently. He's been a bit in the doomer camp but is now talking about a mother baby relationship where a super intelligent AI wants to look after us https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2025/08/12/geoff-h...

I agree though that much of the debate suffers from the same problem as much philosophy that a group of people just talking about stuff doesn't progress much.

Historically much progress has been through experimenting with stuff. I'm encouraged that the LLMs so far seem quite easy going and not wanting to kill everyone.
by sandworm101 | 2025-11-02 08:51:20+00:00
>lower cooking temperature of about 120°C

At what point is it easier to just use a microwave? For all the effort to biuld an insulated box, a small microwave consumes maybe 600w, easily doable with batteries and an inverter. Microwaves also get hotter (useful if you want to do more than poach food at 120c).

Actually, forget the inverters. It turns out loads of 12v/24/48v microwave ovens exist for the RV market.
by bombcar | 2025-11-02 08:51:57+00:00
Exactly. There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period. And nobody is willing to bring it back (and perhaps for very good reasons, mind you).

What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is an embarrassment and black stain; had we been openly evil and empirical (?) we'd have killed less with a better result.
by larusso | 2025-11-02 08:52:26+00:00
Sorry. I will answer on this because I feel people got a bit hung up on the “new” thing. Might be a language barrier. I really understand the reasons why with backwards compatibility etc. The point I tried to make is that we really spend tons of time either to maintain software that where written or “born” 50 or so years ago or rewrite things in the same spirit. I mixed my comments wit the the security aspect which might muddled a lot what I tried to say with the “new” part. One sees this also on HN. I love the UNIX philosophy and also the idea of POSIX. But it’s treated as if it is the holy grail of OS design and in case of POSIX the only true cross platform schema. Look also at the boot steps a CPU has to run through to boot up. By pretending to be 40 year old variant and then piece by piece startup features. Well I hope I cleared my point :)
by deadbabe | 2025-11-02 08:53:49+00:00
There is only one way to beat the paradox of choice: fall in love.

Then, it won’t matter that there are richer, more attractive, more intelligent options out there: you love what you love and that’s what you should pursue, and when you get it, that’s when you will know peace. It will feel like you won at life.

If people cannot overcome the paradox, it is because love in this world has become short in supply.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-02 08:54:18+00:00
I would consider that arrange marriages work solely for evolution. Usually, arrange marriages / their families usually advocate the people who married to become parents. Thus for evolutionary purpose, maybe they can be good but at the same time, they might only be together later because of their chidren and that is a tough cycle for a children and some anti natalist points can be made in that regards.

I do think that we humans have such complex brains and hyper-specialization and the amount of intellect in the world when you look at it is ridiculous. So the ideas of arrange marriage working in favour of evolution, and not in favour of the person, while somebody does that is, very interesting...

I think cultures play a major impact in how one approaches dating.
by imiric | 2025-11-02 08:56:20+00:00
Well, you're right that reviewing someone else's work isn't new, but interacting with these tools is vastly different from communicating with a coworker.

A competent human engineer won't delude you with claims not based in reality, and be confident about it. They can be wrong about practical ways of accomplishing something, but they won't suggest using APIs that don't exist, or go off on wild tangents because a certain word was mentioned. They won't give a different answer whenever you ask them the same question. Most importantly, conversations with humans can be productive in ways that both parties gain a deeper understanding of the topic and respect for each other. Humans can actually think and reason about topics and ideas, they can actually verify their and your claims, and they won't automatically respond with "You're right!" at any counterargument or suggestion.

Furthermore, the marketing around "AI" is strongly based on promoting their superhuman abilities. If we're led to believe that these are superintelligent machines, we're more inclined to trust their output. We have people using them as medical professionals, thinking that they're talking to a god, and being influenced by them. Trusting them to produce software is somewhere on that scale. All of this is highly misleading and potentially dangerous.

Any attempt at anthropomorphizing "AI" is a mistake. You can get much more out of them by using them as what they are: excellent pattern matching probabilistic tools.
by theguitarman | 2025-11-02 08:57:48+00:00
A concern I have for modern day mapping systems is that digital maps, like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap (OSM), typically operate on the assumption of a static, rigid Earth. I don’t know much about it, but from what I understand, they use coordinate systems like WGS84, which are a snapshot in time. These would be great for local precision but less so for tectonic precision, due to tectonic plate activity (continental drift), post-glacial rebound (areas still rising after ice sheets melted), and sudden seismic events (earthquakes).

And then there’s GPS coordinate shift. From what I read, ITRF, ETRS89, and coordinates associated with epoch dates attempt to deal with this.

So, even though it may not matter as much for FlightAware maps, autonomous and GPS-based systems are a little worrying. Being overly dependent on them may have some be risk over time.
by gchadwick | 2025-11-02 08:58:06+00:00
It's for a CS course at Stanford not a PyTorch boot camp. It seems reasonable to expect some level of academic rigour and need to learn and demonstrate understanding of the fundamentals. If researchers aren't learning the fundamentals in courses like these where are they learning them?

You've also missed the point of the article, if you're building novel model architectures you can't magic away the leakiness. You need to understand the back prop behaviours of the building blocks you use to achieve a good training run. Ignore these and what could be a good model architecture with some tweaks will either entirely fail to train or produce disappointing results.

Perhaps you're working at a level of bolting pre built models together or training existing architectures on new datasets but this course operates below that level to teach you how things actually work.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-02 08:58:07+00:00
If you're going to do this, I wish people would go the other way. Don't work to prevent the worst from happening.

Write a law that end-users have an unlimited right to execute their own programs on their own devices, on par with the producers of said devices, just any code they want. A device doesn't support that? No selling in the EU for you ...

Such a right would make chat control impossible and unworkable as well, for the same reason that open source encryption can't be hacked. It will be impossible to prevent secure messengers to be installed.
by nivertech | 2025-11-02 08:58:11+00:00
I use symbolic links, and Claude Code often gets confused, requiring several iterations to understand that the CLAUDE.md file is actually a symbolic link to AGENTS.md, and that these are not two different, duplicate files

The recommended approach has the advantage of separating information specific to Claude Code, but I think that in the long run, Anthropic will have to adopt the AGENTS.md format

Also, when using separate files, memories will be written to CLAUDE.md, and periodic triaging will be required: deciding what to leave there and what to move to AGENTS.md
by augment_me | 2025-11-02 08:58:13+00:00
Impossible requirement. The inherent quality of abstractions is to allow us to get more done without understanding everything. We dont write raw assembly for the same reason, you dont make fire by rubbing sticks, you dont go hunting for food in the woods, etc.

There is no need for the knowledge that you propose in a world where this is solved, you will achieve more goals by utilizing higher-level tools.
by epiceric | 2025-11-02 08:58:14+00:00
Duper certainly won't outperform the native JSON implementation (and it likely never will), though I do think benchmarks would be a great addition. Bundle size and binary representation are definitely things I'll keep in mind!

The config file transpiration to JSON idea is quite interesting. It's pretty similar to how I'm already defining the TextMate grammar used by the website's syntax highlighter, so I'll certainly try to incorporate that into the tooling.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-02 08:58:45+00:00
> The classic example is a list or array. You don't add a value to an existing list. You create a new list which consists of the old list plus the new value. [1]

Getting back to this, though - where would this be useful? What would do this?

I'm not getting why having a new list that's different from the old list, with some code working off the old list and some working off the new list, is anything you'd ever want.

Can you give a practical example of something that uses this?

Why doesn't the list just have a mutex?
by cess11 | 2025-11-02 09:01:39+00:00
I think you have misunderstood something. As far as I know no state has ever declared that its own behaviour can amount to terrorism, and one reason for this is that the state applies to some degree arbitrary violence for ideological gain.

I also suspect that there is more to the regulation you're referring to, like something along the lines of 'that disturbs the state, its foreign relations or inter-state organisations'. Is it in StGB? If so, where?
by froobius | 2025-11-02 09:01:54+00:00
> Any leakiness in BackProp is addressed by researchers who introduce new optimizers

> As a developer, you just pick the best one and find good hparams for it

It would be more correct to say: "As a developer, (not researcher), whose main goal is to get a good model working — just pick a proven architecture, hyperparameters, and training loop for it."

Because just picking the best optimizer isn't enough. Some of the issues in the article come from the model design, e.g. sigmoids, relu, RNNs. And some of the issues need to be addressed in the training loop, e.g. gradient clipping isn't enabled by default in most DL frameworks.

And it should be noted that the article is addressing people on the academic / research side, who would benefit from a deeper understanding.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-02 09:01:56+00:00
Due to weird historical reasons [0] [1], every modern browser's User-Agent starts with "Mozilla/5.0", even if they have nothing to do with Firefox.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_header#Format_for_h...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
by kubb | 2025-11-02 09:03:08+00:00
I was slightly surprised that my colleagues, who are extremely invested in capabilities of LLMs, didn’t show any interest in Karpathy’s communication on the subject when I recommended it to them.

Later I understood that they don’t need to understand LLMs, and they don’t care how they work. Rather they need to believe and buy into them.

They’re more interested in science fiction discussions — how would we organize a society where all work is done by intelligent machines — than what kinds of tasks are LLMs good at today and why.
by andersmurphy | 2025-11-02 09:03:17+00:00
Sqlite is fine you need to read the extensive documentation though to get the most out of it. It also has terrible defaults.

I think the author od this article missed sqlite_busy.

Once you do have it set up correctly, are handling a single writer at the application level and have litestream set up your off to the races assuming your app can scale on a single box (it most likely can).
by throwaway81523 | 2025-11-02 09:05:24+00:00
I always figured it was because of training on Wikipedia. I used to hate the style zealots (MOStafarians in humorous wiki-jargon) who obsessively enforced typographic conventions like that. Well I still hate them, but I'm sort of thankful that they inadvertently created an AI-detection marker. I've been expecting the AI slop generators to catch on and revert to hyphens though.
by lordnacho | 2025-11-02 09:05:53+00:00
My pet theory is similar to the training set hypothesis: em-dashes appear often in prestige publications. The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, and a few others that are considered good writing. Being magazines, there's a lot of articles over time, reinforcing the style. They're also the sort of thing a RLHF person will think is good, not because of the em-dash but because the general style is polished.

One thing I wondered is whether high prestige writing is encoded into the models, but it doesn't seem far fetched that there's various linkages inside the data to say "this kind of thing should be weighted highly."
by tsoukase | 2025-11-02 09:06:11+00:00
Western governments prefer to earn a day's income than sacrifice a whole African tribe since the last centuries up until now. So, no wonders Sudan felt in a hell hole where intertwined interests take place. Only the public outcry through mass media can stop a genocide which in this case does not sell. After a few years the balance of power will settle and may be a movie will be produced, like Hotel Rwanda.
by bakql | 2025-11-02 09:06:55+00:00
I always use the lockers in a specific part of the locker room and since we’re meant to bring our own padlocks I just look for mine. No need to memorise anything.

Which btw made me realise cheap padlocks all open with the same key - imagine my surprise when I opened a locker that had the same padlock as mine with my key and found that the stuff inside was not mine. Mine was a couple lockers next to it!
by julian-klode | 2025-11-02 09:07:35+00:00
It's certainly what we aim for in APT. We do have an overwrite of course, since we need to copy uninitiated data around: The cache file is allocated as a whole and written at the end, but not all parts of it are used, but it triggers stuff.

Don't want to introduce complex code to only copy the parts that are actually reachable would be silly and introduce bugs.

But keep in mind valgrind is super buggy and we spend quite a bunch of time working around valgrind false positives (outside of amd64)
by larusso | 2025-11-02 09:08:18+00:00
I generally like to use it. But I one project in the org which simply can’t work because the internal built system expects a normal .git directory at the root. Means I have to rewrite some of the build code that isn’t aware of this git feature. And yes we use a library to read from git but not the git cli or a more recent compatible one that understands that the current work tree is not the main one.
by js8 | 2025-11-02 09:09:34+00:00
You don't need postscarcity to do that. I was born in communist Czechoslovakia (my father was an academic). Government allocated jobs for academics and researchers, and they pretty much had tenure. So you could coast by being unproductive, or get by using your connections to the party members (the real currency in CSSR).

After 1989, most academics complained the system is not merit-based and practical (applied) enough. So we changed it to grants and publications metrics (modeled after the West). For a while, it worked.. until people found too much overbearing bureaucracy and some learned how to game the system again.

I would say, both systems have failure modes of a similar magnitude, although the first one is probably less hoops and less stress on each individual. (During communism, academia - if you could get there, especially technical sciences - was an oasis of freedom.)
by cess11 | 2025-11-02 09:10:10+00:00
And those that supposedly oppose it just happen to fail to act in line with that position.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/mp-och-v-rostade-fel-om-k...

https://emanuelkarlsten.se/vansterpartiet-om-varfor-de-stott...

Or they opposed it before the EU elections and then switched immediately afterwards.
by alentred | 2025-11-02 09:10:35+00:00
Just recently I wanted to show my kids the 5.25" floppy disk - I had a small stack somewhere, but could not find it. I have finally found an 3½" floppy and have shown it to my kids (14 y.o. max). Evidently they never used such a thing, but I was genuinely surprised they didn't even know what it was. After a considerable amount of time one of my daughters hesitated but said something like: "Wasn't it like old USB stick thingy?". Given they have no USB stick either that's not bad, I guess. Then I proceeded to explain that a floppy disk is pictured on Save buttons - you just had to see their faces, it was a moment of the big revelation.
by dminik | 2025-11-02 09:11:19+00:00
There's no indication that an AGI mind will adopt human-like values. Nor that the smarter something gets, the more benevolent it is. The smartest humans built the atom bomb.

Not that human values are perfectly benevolent. We slaughter billions of animals per day.

If you take a look at the characteristics of LLMs today, I don't think we want to continue further. We're still unable to ensure the goals we want the system to have are there. Hallucinations are a perfect example. We want these systems to relay truthful information, but we've actually trained them to relay information that looks correct at first glance.

Thinking we won't make this mistake with AGI is ignorance.