MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pavel_lishin | 2025-11-14 15:13:41+00:00
> There's no way you could possibly know what this "one guy" wants.

What do you mean? He used to be a good friend. We've literally talked about this. He's talked about it with other people, including women, and the rest of the friend group has also discussed this. It was more than "a few words".

I mean, in one sense we can never truly know what's going on inside someone's head, but unless we just take the slide down to solipsism, that doesn't really get us anywhere.

> I don't understand why these debates keep coming up on the internet since even our great grandparents could have said every word I just did. Old news.

Our grandparents lived in vastly different times. Yes, the huge choice of dating partners in the modern world is a detriment, but it's better than living in a small town and knowing that you have two people you could potentially marry, or stay a bachelor (which isn't a choice often granted to women.) One grandparent in my family literally married a man to escape her abusive family; her love for him was strongly shaped by the fact that he was the only man in her life who didn't beat her, and offered to take her out of the situation by joining the military.
by danaris | 2025-11-14 15:14:06+00:00
But if I say "I object to AI because <list of harms> and its water use", why would you assume that I don't also object to alfalfa farming in Arizona?

Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza", would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur genocide?

This is nothing but whataboutism.

People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they understand all the other bad things happening in the world at the same time.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-14 15:14:41+00:00
People who appear angry when they're behind psedonyms on the internet and seemingly never go outside exists everywhere.

People who are afraid of nudity are a very small minority, and to again answer the question you should be asking yourself: you probably should talk with a psychiatrist or psychologist about that and your anger, because it seems to affect you in your daily life, since you're walking around being "disgusted" by very natural things.
by gumboshoes | 2025-11-14 15:14:42+00:00
After trying a dozen or more paid and open source, I keep going back to MacWhisper. The dictation feature is in advanced beta but works well. The only thing I want it doesn't have is to have different models chosen for different tasks at the same time: one model for each drop folder, a different one for dictation and then another general-purpose one for drag-and-drop. I have the memory for it and MacWhisper can flush a model after a certain amount of unuse time anyway.
by randallsquared | 2025-11-14 15:14:58+00:00
The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process.

So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-14 15:15:11+00:00
Careful! High Sierra is actually macOS 10.13.

By contrast, macOS 13 is Ventura, from 2022.

(I personally would accept someone referring to High Sierra as “OS X” because it’s still version 10 of the Macintosh OS, even if Apple dropped that branding a few years earlier.)
by chriswarbo | 2025-11-14 15:16:16+00:00
> I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it.

Ever since "AI" was named at Dartmouth, there have been very smart people thinking that their idea will be the thing which makes it work this time. Usually, those ideas work really well in-the-small (ELIZA, SHRDLU, Automated Mathematician, etc.), but don't scale to useful problem sizes.

So, unless you've built a full-scale implementation of your ideas, I wouldn't put too much faith in them if I were you.
by efsavage | 2025-11-14 15:16:34+00:00
The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is.

Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people than not will assume that using water means it's not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer, untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation. Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it seems then some education is in order.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-14 15:16:46+00:00
Yeah, in reality it seems that DeepMind are more the good guys, at least in comparison to the others.

You can argue about whether the pursuit of "AGI" (however you care to define it) is a positive for society, or even whether LLMs are, but the AI companies are all pursuing this, so that doesn't set them apart.

What makes DeepMind different is that they are at least also trying to use AI/ML for things like AlphaFold that are a positive, and Hassabis' appears genuinely passionate about the use of AI/ML to accelerate scientific research.

It seems that some of the other AI companies are now belatedly trying to at least appear to be interested in scientific research, but whether this is just PR posturing or something they will dedicate substantial resources to, and be successful at, remains to be seen. It's hard to see OpenAI, planning to release SexChatGPT, as being sincerely committed to anything other than making themselves a huge pile of money.
by cestith | 2025-11-14 15:16:56+00:00
I’m no ML engineer and far from an LLM expert. Just reading the article though it seemed to me that leveraging an SQL database here was a bigger issue than using traditional ML on the data, rather than the LLM being a win specifically. Just finding anything that was better suited than string matching on a RDBMS to the type of inputs seems like the natural conclusion when the complaint in the article itself was literally about SQL.
by riskable | 2025-11-14 15:17:01+00:00
> People don't want AI passively lurking in the background extracting behavioral data yet this is the model they are aiming for, or at least gravitating towards repeatedly.

Is there any evidence Mozilla has plans to do this? As far as I know, there's only two companies doing what you describe: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft being the most invasive (and evil) by a huge amount—because it's at the OS level.
by never_inline | 2025-11-14 15:17:25+00:00
It's fine man. If rich folks can build $1B business, I can surely build something worth $10M.

--

That was a bit of tongue in cheek reaction but I think we all know this already.

What helps is to know that initial advantages compound A LOT : http://web.archive.org/web/20181224131908/https://ofdollarsa...
by oshams | 2025-11-14 15:18:34+00:00
Hello HN,

We previously launched Auto Wiki (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915999) in Jan 2024 and broke the ground for AI generated wikis that explain your code. Now this product has been rebuilt by the same team, as well as others and launched as a part of Google. Hope you enjoy.

Although, I've recently moved on to working on Gemini and AI research, I'm still involved as an advisor and founder emeritus of sorts. This team moves extremely fast and while we don't have full availability yet, we're working hard on addressing some early feedback before we make it more widely available including for private repos. Personally, I think the NotebookLM integration is a nice touch and distinguishing factor that we could only do as Google.

I hope you enjoy.

Thank You, Omar (Formerly Founder/CEO MutableAI)
by jelder | 2025-11-14 15:19:25+00:00
Underrated point.

Looking for performance issues on a machine with different baseline IO and CPU load, buffer state, query plans, cardinality, etc. is just theater and will lead to a false sense of security. RegreSQL is approaching a stateful problem as if it were stateless and deterministic. A linter like https://squawkhq.com is a good partial solution but only addresses DDL problems.

RegreSQL would be better served by focusing only on the aspects of correctness that tools like SQLx and sqlc fundamentally cannot address. This is a real need that too few tools try to address.
by rmoriz | 2025-11-14 15:19:28+00:00
Exactly, this is junior mistake I made too many times. There is a wisdom: Never tell anyone, when you’ve won the lottery.

In technical terms you need to plan ahead. The legacy mistakes are caused by actions in the past and will likely be made again, when you can’t change the strategy or approach to problems. You won‘t get budget for this AFTER you successfully made a change. „It‘s all solved now, we are good“. No.
by api | 2025-11-14 15:19:37+00:00
> Millions of people are storing their data on self hosted or 3rd party run managed OSS services on multiple platforms.

That's open source being used by developers to provide a closed service to users. Users experience it as an opaque closed service.

SaaS backed by open source is actually the most closed model of software, more closed than closed-source software run locally.
by pimeys | 2025-11-14 15:19:50+00:00
Yep. Same for the other direction: there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and praising AI on Twitter.

Then there's us who are mildly disappointed on the agents and how they don't live their promise, and the tech CEOs destroying the economy and our savings. Still using the agents for things that work better, but being burned out for spending days of our time fixing the issues the they created to our code.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-11-14 15:20:04+00:00
There were a lot of signs in America at one point in time that said "No Coloreds", "Colored Section", and similar phrases to indicate the spaces that white people had decided non-white people could or could not go.

At the same time, there were not a lot of signs saying "No Persons of Color" or "Persons of Color Section".

Likewise, my grandfather who died 35 years ago was very fond of saying "the coloreds". His use of the term did not indicate respect for non-white people.

Historical usage matters. They are not equivalent terms.
by nijave | 2025-11-14 15:20:10+00:00
>Does anyone want AI in anything?

Well, yes. It's extremely useful. However, the hype bubble means it's getting added everywhere even when there's not a clear and vetted use case.

It works really well for navigating docs as a super-charged search--much better at mapping vague concepts and words back to the official terminology in the docs. For instance, library Z might have "widgets" and "cogs" as constructs, but I'm used to library A which has similar constructs "gadgets" and "gears". I can explain the library A concepts and LLMs will do a pretty good job of mapping that back to the library Z concepts--much better than traditional search engines can do.
by railka | 2025-11-14 15:20:19+00:00
I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome.

Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better if they allowed the integration of local models or aggregators, such as Openrouter, Huggingface...)

Meanwhile, developers continue to ignore Firefox, testing only Chromium browsers. Large companies are also choosing the Chromium engine for their browsers.

Perhaps if they implement this functionality conveniently, more average users will use Firefox.
by jasonlotito | 2025-11-14 15:20:53+00:00
It's a good question. I'm not the OP, but I'd like to add something to this discussion.

How do I know what I'd be reading is correct?

To your question: for the most part, I've found summaries to be mostly correct enough. The summaries are useful for deciding if I want to dig into this further (which means actually reading the full article). Is there danger in that method? Sure. But no more danger than the original article. And FAR less danger than just assuming I know what the article says from a headline.

So, how do you know its summaries are correct? They are correct enough for the purpose they serve.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-14 15:21:06+00:00
I want AI in lots of stuff, but not like how it is now. I was working on a Google Doc last night and I was curious about whether or not Google Docs had the ability to transclude a live preview of another document as an object that can be inserted in the current document. So I popped open the AI sidebar and asked. I got three hallucinated answers telling me to do things that did not exist in the UI before I finally convinced it that it didn't know what it was talking about and that I should just use bookmarks.

That could have been an amazing experience where the AI told me exactly how to use the product. That's what I want. It's not what I got.
by cornholio | 2025-11-14 15:21:25+00:00
> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda

All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives.

The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment.
by KraftyOne | 2025-11-14 15:21:43+00:00
Thanks for the great questions!

1. Yes, currently versioning is either automatically derived from a bytecode hash or manually set. The intended upgrade mechanism is blue-green deployments where old workflows drain on old code versions while new workflows start on new code versions (you can also manually fork workflows to new code versions if they're compatible). Docs: https://docs.dbos.dev/java/tutorials/workflow-tutorial#workf...

That said, we're working on improvements here--we want it to be easier to upgrade your workflows without blue-green deployments to simplify operating really long-running (weeks-months) workflows.

2. Could I ask what the intended use case is? DBOS workflow creation is idempotent and workflows always recover from the last completed step, so a workflow that goes "database transaction" -> "enqueue child workflow" offers the same atomicity guarantees as a workflow that does "enqueue child workflow as part of database transaction", but the former is (as you say) much simpler to implement.
by jimnotgym | 2025-11-14 15:22:14+00:00
If you were "profitable but no cash flow" then you must have non-cash additions to your profit, not deductions.

A classic example of 'profit but no cashflow' might be where you made a profit but spent a lot of money on stock that you haven't sold yet. Or you made a lot of sales that you are yet to be paid for.

In the PE world it is just as likely that you made a profit before interest and tax, but you paid it all in interest. You would then have an operating profit but no cashflow due to a cash item. It could still make it a good business to own, if you didn't need the debt, or wanted to have the interest paid to you.

Maybe you made a profit but paid it all in dividends to a holding company. Then you have a profit but no cash flow due to cash items that don't affect the p&l.
by vunderba | 2025-11-14 15:22:38+00:00
Thanks, that makes sense. I'll have to give the "red bounding box overlay" a shot when there are a great deal of similar objects in the existing image.

I also have a custom pipeline/software that takes in a given prompt, rewrites it using an LLM into multiple variations, sends it to multiple GenAI models, and then uses a VLM to evaluate them for accuracy. It runs in an automated REPL style, so I can be relatively hands-off, though I do have a "max loop limiter" since I'd rather not spend the equivalent of a small country's GDP.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-14 15:22:45+00:00
.... Oh, wow, I assumed you were _joking_, but:

> At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots.
by simonw | 2025-11-14 15:23:22+00:00
Also from that article:

> U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).

Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture.

USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year.

163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage point.

It's very easy to present water numbers in a way that looks bad until you start comparing them thoughtfully.

I think comparing data center water usage to domestic water usage by people living in towns is actually quite misleading. UPDATE: I may be wrong about this, see following comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945
by txrx0000 | 2025-11-14 15:23:23+00:00
A device-side IP filter locked behind a password that parents can configure in the device's settings would be much more effective and easier to implement than censoring the Internet. This should be the default solution, yet it's never brought up for whatever reason.

Not to mention these online content censorship laws for kids are wrong in principle because parents are supposed to be in control of how they raise each of their own kids, not the government or other people.

And these laws make authoritarian surveillance and control much easier. It's hard to not see this as the main objective at this point. And even if it isn't, this level of stupidity is harmful.
by vidarh | 2025-11-14 15:23:23+00:00
Determining whether something is worth reading doesn't require a good summary, just one that contains enough relevant snippets to give a decent indication.

The opportunity cost of "missing out" on reading a page you're unsure enough about to want a summary of is not likely to be high, and similarly it doesn't matter much if you end up reading a few paragraphs before you realise you were misled.

There are very few tasks where we absolutely must have accurate information all the time.
by strictnein | 2025-11-14 15:23:41+00:00
I mean, who were they listening to when they acquired Pocket and integrated it into Firefox? Or decided to build their own video chat service? Or an encrypted file sharing service? Or Persona, Firefox OS, Firefox Hello, etc etc. These weren't just bad decisions in retrospect, these were clearly bad decisions at the time.

https://killedbymozilla.com/
by moontear | 2025-11-14 15:23:52+00:00
Now I get where you are coming from (also not a lawyer):

- You asking the painter to create a Mickey Mouse painting: not illegal. You still are asking for a derivative work without permission, but if used privately you're good (this is different per jurisdiction) - The artist creating the painting of a derivative work is acting illegally - they are selling you the picture and hence this is a commercial act and trademark infringement - Displaying the bought Mickey Mouse image publicly is likely infringement, but worse is if you would charge admission to show the picture, that would definitely be illegal - If you were to hide the image in your basement and look at it privately, it would most likely not be illegal (private use - but see first point since this is different per jurisdiction)

Comparing violations doesn't really make sense (the artist creating it vs. you displaying it) - the act of creating the image for money is illegal. If it were the artist creating the image for him/herself - that would be fine.

Now getting back to the LLM and your question which also the court answered (jurisdiction: Germany). The courts opinion is that the AI recreating these lyrics by itself is illegal (think about the artist creating the image for you for money).

Personally I would think the key part and similarity is the payment. You pay for using OpenAI. You pay for it creating those lyrics/texts. In my head I can create a similar reasoning to your Mickey Mouse example. If we'd take open source LLMs and THEY would create perfect lyrics, I think the court would have a much harder case to make. Who would you be suing and for what kind of money? It would all be open source and nobody is paying anyone anything to recreate the lyrics. It would be and is very hard to prove that the LLMs were trained on copyrighted material - in the lyrics example, they may have ingested illegal lyrics-sharing sites, but they may also just have ingested Twitter or Reddit where people talk about the lyrics - how could any LLM know that these contents were illegal or not to be ingested.
by ForOldHack | 2025-11-14 15:23:57+00:00
Stone thrown for a hit. Apps want to use locations and the microphone, but not to help you, but to sell you stuff. I have 14 sensors on my phone, mostly for positioning, and the software still cannot reformat text for zooming without a left to right cornrow panning. You get the absolute absurdity of it.

AOL had great marketing, just not pointed at consumers, it pointed it at ad providers. The free disk thing ...
by rekabis | 2025-11-14 15:24:24+00:00
> If only as a PR move, the insurance industry could easily build some examples of such construction, push for building codes friendly to them, and offer far-cheaper hail damage insurance for them.

That wouldn’t lower costs for consumers, that would only allow the insurance companies to have lower costs for themselves.

Remember: prices for consumers only ever go up. Even if costs to the company go down, that is an opportunity to see higher profits. It’s why the cost of groceries continued to go up even as cashiers were replaced by self-checkouts.

Under capitalism, businesses have only one responsibility, and that’s to their already fantastically wealthy shareholders. Anything that increases shareholder value is good. Anything which doesn’t is bad. And so the average Joe is squeezed from both ends in order to extract every last possible penny.

It doesn’t have to be like that, but our civilization has been brainwashed into thinking that an exceptionally tiny group of obscenely wealthy people parasitizing off of the bulk of humanity for every last shred of wealth they have is somehow the only possible economic system.