MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-11-11 12:27:03+00:00
I agree. The way I put it is that for profit corporations are not political activist organizations and you should not expect them to be any more than you’d expect the school board to put out a fire. It’s the wrong kind and shape of social organization for that.

That’s not to say they’re bad. They do an important thing. But they have a limited sphere. You wouldn’t expect the police to make a laptop or a church to direct air traffic either.
by jorvi | 2025-11-11 12:27:36+00:00
> They have by far the strongest brand

They don't really, because of Gemini and Grok.

If it was OpenAI vs Claude then yeah, ChatGPT is known whereas Claude you have to be an enthusiast to know.

But everyone using Google runs into Gemini and everyone using X runs into Grok, and people talk. Now even the laypeople know there is more than one AI, and they're from big brands that they trust. Which means that people will window shop for the AI with the best performance per cost. Bye bye brand power.
by mzajc | 2025-11-11 12:28:13+00:00
> (Wikipedia has the additional problem that, by default, the version cited is the ever-changing "latest" version, not a fixed and identified version.)

Only citing means copying the URL directly. If you use Wikipedia's "Cite this page" or an external reference management tool (e.g. Zotero), the current page ID will be appended to the URL.
by anechouapechou | 2025-11-11 12:28:57+00:00
I believe that last-mile edits do not significantly improve the quality of (most) creative work. To produce high-quality work, one must have already "cached" their "motor heuristics," which, in simpler terms, means having dedicated thousands of hours to deep and deliberate practice in their field.

The definition of 'last-mile edits' is very subjective, though. If you're dealing with open systems, it's almost unthinkable to design something and not need to iterate on it until the desired outcome is achieved. In other domains, for example, playing an instrument, your skills need to have been honed previously: there's nothing that will make you sound better (without resorting to editing it electronically).
by ethin | 2025-11-11 12:29:03+00:00
IMO PDFs should just be gone. Nobody should use them. They are a solution in search of a problem. The most common argument I hear is "well we need document fidelity!" But IMO this completely ignores the fact that this just isn't needed when we have digital signatures and a PKI and certificates and all that to prove that a document hasn't been tampered with. Making sure a document appears the same on any kind of device/OS or whatever would be a great idea in theory if the way it was done was actually thought through, but it wasn't and now the PDF format is even worse than HTML is (and that's really saying something). Every single time I have had to interact with a PDF it has always been a total disaster. Don't even get me started on the clusterfuck that is PDF forms.
by jstummbillig | 2025-11-11 12:29:18+00:00
I made a living from GEMA payments some while back, but dear lord, so much of how the institution does what it does feels so bad and zero-sum. Might just be that the world would be better off without it. It does something important for right holders for sure, but (and I understand, I am heavily back-seating here without offering a solution) there must be better ways to go about it.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-11 12:29:27+00:00
The question, as always, is: can we get any useful insights from all of that?

Trying to copy biological systems 1:1 rarely works, and copying biological systems doesn't seem to be required either. CNNs are somewhat brain-inspired, but only somewhat, and LLMs have very little architectural similarity to human brain - other than being an artificial neural network.

This functional similarity of LLMs to the human brain doesn't come from reverse engineered details of how the human brain works - it comes from the training process.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-11-11 12:30:40+00:00
Of course the models are not human, but if you consider this situation as if they are persons, then the question becomes: May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked, and the court's ruling basically says no, this may not happen, which makes little sense.

I guess the main difference between the situation with language models and humans is one of scale.

I think the question should be viewed like this, if I as a corporation do the same thing but just with humans, would it be legal or not. Given a hypothetical of hiring a bunch of people, having them read a bunch of lyrics, and then having them answer questions about lyrics. If no law prohibits the hypothetical with people, then I don't see why it should be prohibited with language models, and if it is prohibited with people, then there should be no specific AI ruling needed.

All this being said, Europe is rapidly becoming even more irrelevant than it was, living of the largess of the US and China, it's like some uncontacted tribe ruling that satellites can't take areal photos of them. It's all good and well, just irrelevant. I guess Germany can always go the route of North Korea if they want.
by contravariant | 2025-11-11 12:30:43+00:00
Just map quality q to e^q or something and it will be sublinear again.

Or more directly, if your argument for why effort scales linearly with perceived quality doesn't discuss how we perceive quality then something is wrong.

A more direct argument would be that it takes roughly an equal amount of effort to halve the distance from a rough work to its ideal. Going from 90% to 99% takes the same as going from 99% to 99.9% but the latter only covers a tenth of the distance. If our perception is more sensitive to the _absolute_ size of the error you get an exponential effort to improve something.
by winterlights | 2025-11-11 12:30:43+00:00
Efficiently implementing a doubly linked list in C or C++ is easy. In Rust, less so.[0]

And the prevalence and difficulty of unsafe means both that Rust is not memory safe [1], and that Rust sometimes is less memory safe than C or C++.

[0]: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

[1]: For an example of memory unsafety in Rust: https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...
by fancyfredbot | 2025-11-11 12:30:56+00:00
Fun thought experiment: If a company had a product with infinite value it would be irrational to allocate capital to shares since you could own the product instead. So the share price might even go down (it's hard to know what role money will play in a post-agi society).

A smaller scale version of this might be happening here. Or it could be a bubble. Either way it's interesting!
by AbrahamParangi | 2025-11-11 12:31:00+00:00
This is comical because we used to have something called the turing test which we considered our test of human-level intelligence. We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.

There are some interesting ways in which AI remains inferior to human intelligence but it is also obviously already superior in many ways already.

It remains remarkable to me how common denial is when it comes to what AI can or cannot actually do.
by harry8 | 2025-11-11 12:31:04+00:00
Off the top of my head, a couple of examples.

The "white knight" purchase of Salomon Bros stake to "save" them from a hostile takeover was a redistribution of wealth from the existing shareholders who would have accepted the deal to him & his fund. Is that evil? No, I don't think so. Is it perfect ethics, that's a personal ethical call. Colluding with management to redistribute wealth from the shareholders professional managers are meant to serve to yourself? Certainly profitable. Salomon managers kept their jobs and bonuses too. Buffet spoke about how impressed with their ethics he was and that being his motivation. Ok.

The purchase of the Goldman's stake during the GFC at what was it a 20% discount to market? Evil? Again no. Did he insist instead of just taking a huge windfall, on underwriting an offer at that price and throwing it open to small investors so anyone who would back the bank in the crisis collects 20% on top of buying on market? That would be hugely admirable, democratic and patriotic but less profitable.

Going to the start, moving Berkshire's pension fund from debt to equity. Did he get the approval of all the pension plan's beneficiaries for that change in risk? He was right, fine, sure. Was that his risk to take on their behalf? Worked out great. Do you want your pension fund manager going against the accepted wisdom on risk? Well you do if it works, but you can't take on the risk in hindsight. There are no shortage of managers who /know/ they're right and the market is wrong, like he did then. Do you want them to act on that with your assets without your full and informed consent? You (and I) do if it's Warren Buffet but he was not Warren Buffet yet.

On the standards of investment managers he is pretty good, as I said. Is he this perfect paragon of ethics. Well his fans seem to think so (and loudly) and they are allowed to. As am I to differ with that assessment. This is worlds away from declaring that Buffet is in league with both Darth Vader and Sauron to torture innocent babies to an early death and a fate of never having heard of Benjamin Graham. I would say he is far more on the right side of things than wrong and has been largely a force for good in the investment industry. "Which of his perfections impresses you the most?" Give me a break. Critical faculties are worth keeping.
by mcv | 2025-11-11 12:31:14+00:00
Is a corporation really a group of people? Of course people are involved with the corporation, but the corporation doesn't represent its employees, shareholders, management or customers. It's a separate legal entity with complex relationships with its employees, management, shareholders and customers, but with its own rights and responsibilities.

There are organisation forms that are a lot closer to being just a group of people working together, like co-ops and firms maybe. I'm not entirely up to date on all options in English-speaking countries (which will vary of course, but the Dutch Maatschap is probably as close as you can get to a company that's just a group of people.
by JCM9 | 2025-11-11 12:31:27+00:00
With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.

With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate long term tragedy of the present AI hype cycle. Expect “made by a human” to soon be a tag associated with premium brands and customer experiences.
by LightBug1 | 2025-11-11 12:31:51+00:00
It's funny you mention those. I don't use any of them!

Listen, it's pretty simple. Where I have a real choice, I will attempt to make the best choice available. That's what money is. The very voting mechanism that drives capitalism. A bit more conceptually solid than Mr Smith's invisible hand.

And, by the way. With Mr Musk, I definitely have a choice.
by jorangreef | 2025-11-11 12:32:19+00:00
> We didn't observe any automatic batching when testing Tigerbeetle with their Go client.

This is not accurate. All TigerBeetle's clients also auto batch under the hood, which you can verify from the docs [0] and the source [1], provided your application has at least some concurrency.

> I think we initiated a new Go client for every new transaction when benchmarking

The docs are careful to warn that you shouldn't be throwing away your client like this after each request:

The TigerBeetle client should be shared across threads (or tasks, depending on your paradigm), since it automatically groups together batches of small sizes into one request. Since TigerBeetle clients can have at most one in-flight request, the client accumulates smaller batches together while waiting for a reply to the last request.

Again, I would double check that your architecture is not accidentally serializing everything. You should be running multiple gateways and they should each be able to handle concurrent user requests. The gold standard to aim for here is a stateless layer of API servers around TigerBeetle, and then you should be able to push pretty good load.

[0] https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/coding/requests/#automatic-batc...

[1] The core batching logic powering all language clients: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/cli...
by TheStagHeart | 2025-11-11 12:32:21+00:00
I'm building a node based image editing / graphic design tool called Sevro

The hope is that I can bring more procedural workflows to graphic design so you can make generative branding systems and parametric identities

(or just make sick posters)

you can try it in the browser, no login no tracking https://sevro-app.netlify.app/
by chmod775 | 2025-11-11 12:33:29+00:00
Why are you fixing their code? You're just doing the same thing as the LLM you're complaining about.

Also, as someone who attended university in Germany, the mental image of a professor helping undergrads with homework already seems strange if not funny to me. That is... at least I hope they're undergrads, because if people managed to get any sort of CS degree while having to rely on a LLM to code I might be sick.
by marrs | 2025-11-11 12:34:20+00:00
> DHH also does this, of course, as he paints a false narrative in his blog text that brown people are dangerous.

I've never seen him even imply this; and I'm afraid I simply presume accusations of racism on the internet to be false and malicious unless they come with hard evidence.

> Identifying with your tribe is a completely different idea. Your tribe (or nation) is not defined by ethnicity, but by culture.

Fine, I can go with that. Does that mean that people from other cultures are not of this nation?

> no such group as the English existed before the Anglo-Saxons arrived.

Who built Stonehenge? If you're just being pedantic (and your next reply is likely to be something like "the word English is derived from Angle"), then let's instead refer to them as the peoples who already inhabited the British Isles.

> You've outdone you previous self-contradiction speedrun, now the contradiction is in the same sentence.

I honestly don't know what this sentence means.
by styanax | 2025-11-11 12:34:22+00:00
Thanks to multiple mentions of Mullvad in this overall post comments, I decided to replace dnsmasq with unbound and convert the laptop to DoT. Here's the specific Mullvad snippet if anyone needs:

# Mullvad Unfiltered forward-addr: 2a07:e340::2@853#dns.mullvad.net forward-addr: 194.242.2.2@853#dns.mullvad.net # Mullvad Adblock # forward-addr: 2a07:e340::3@853#adblock.dns.mullvad.net # forward-addr: 194.242.2.3@853#adblock.dns.mullvad.net

As mentioned in the default unbound config, the "#" is not a comment when used in the value, it's used for TLS checks. I followed this simple blog post from years ago: https://www.jwillikers.com/dns-over-tls-with-unbound
by vasco | 2025-11-11 12:36:05+00:00
> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.

My Turing test has been the same since about when I learned it existed. I told myself I'd always use the same one.

What I do is after saying Hi, I will repeat the same sentence forever.

A human still reacts very differently than any machine to this test. Current AIs could be adversarially prompted to bypass this maybe, but so far it's still obvious its a machine replying.
by mariopt | 2025-11-11 12:36:20+00:00
It would be interesting if Supabase allows me to use that runtime without forcing me to use supabase, being a separated product on its own.

Several years ago, I used MeteorJs, it uses mongo and it is somehow comparable to Supabase. The main issue that burned me and several projects was that It was hard/even impossible to bring different libraries, it was a full stack solution that did not evolved well, it was great for prototyping until it became unsustainable and even hard to on board new devs due to “separating of concerns” mostly due to the big learning curve of one big framework.

Having learn for this, I only build apps where I can bring whatever library I want. I need tool/library/frameworks to as agnostic as possible.

The thing I love about CloudFlare workers is that you are not force to use any other CF service, I have full control of the code, I combine it with HonoJs and I can deploy it as a server or serverless.

About the runtimes: Having to choose between node, demo and bun is something that I do not want to do, I’m sticking with node and hopefully the runtimes would be compatible with standard JavaScript.
by jabbywocker | 2025-11-11 12:36:41+00:00
No I understand clearly, it’s a weasel word and I dislike it. You use it to mask a personal attack (calling him an “ass”), shun behavior, and avoid the actual conflict of directly addressing what was said. Its annoying passive aggressive bullshit verbiage.

Calling out “gatekeeping” is virtue signaling at its very core.
by jorangreef | 2025-11-11 12:36:43+00:00
> you risk getting bottlenecked by all the attributes you'll need to wrap around the transaction in PostgreSQL to make it work in a real application.

The performance killer is contention, not writing any associated KV data—KV stores scale well!

But you do need to preserve a clean separation of concerns in your architecture. Strings in your general-purpose DBMS as "system of reference" (control plane). Integers in your transaction processing DBMS as "system of record" (data plane).

Dominik Tornow wrote a great blog post on how to get this right (and let us know if our team can accelerate you on this!):

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-11-06-the-write-last-read-...
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-11-11 12:36:44+00:00
> They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.

This is Softbank though, they're not really noted for great investment decisions (apart from Alibaba really early on).

Like, my prior is that when Softbank invest in something, the growth is done (but then I am, very much, a cynic).
by davrosthedalek | 2025-11-11 12:37:09+00:00
I think it's a trick. It seems to be the article is just a series of ad-hoc assumptions and hypotheses without any support. The language aims to hide this, and makes you think about the language instead of its contents. Which is logically unsound: In a sharp peak, micro optimizations would give you a clearer signal where the optimum lies since the gradient is steeper.
by Chabsff | 2025-11-11 12:37:11+00:00
> Have you read the literature? Do you have a background in machine learning or statistics?

Very much so. Decades.

> Being trained by predicting one token at a time is also not a criticism??! It is just a factually correct description...

Of course that's the case. The objection I've had from the very first post in this thread is that using this trivially obvious fact as evidence that LLMs are boring/uninteresting/not AI/whatever is missing the forest for the trees.

"We understand [the I/Os and components of] LLMs, and what they are is nothing special" is the topic at hand. This is reductionist naivete. There is a gulf of complexity, in the formal mathematical sense and reductionism's arch-enemy, that is being handwaved away.

People responding to that with "but they ARE predicting one token at a time" are either falling into the very mistake I'm talking about, or are talking about something else entirety.
by rmoriz | 2025-11-11 12:37:19+00:00
The dilemma of leaders way behind is to find the right attack vector. Of course, you won't be able to become competitive by just "put more effort" into the existing stuff and hence everyone is eager to hope for a "Wunderwaffe" like flying taxis, quantum computing, blockchain, AI moonshots or whatever. In the end they all fail because the existing issues and problems won't be fixed, leading to the next failure. This happens over and over again, but voters still believe the promises of politicians.

Worse, there is a whole European industry sector hunting for subsidies doing build-to-fail projects, for example "google competitor", "European cloud" etc.
by shadyKeystrokes | 2025-11-11 12:37:22+00:00
Now, without the fimförderung all those grim dark arthouse movies where people yell "Scheisse!" in Berlin stairwells would never be made. And all that public gremium pleasing shovelware, looking extracute and boring clogging up the appstores with zero sales, what would we do without that. Take anything popular streamingwise and ask yourself would it get through and by. And if it was stopped by what and who.. fire that, to fix germanys media sector.
by kevinreisenbuk | 2025-11-11 12:38:15+00:00
Biggest challenges in search relevance are: - collecting and maintaining a large, clean, diverse product catalog (up to hundreds of millions of products) - actually understanding what users mean (not just what they type) - giving them ways to refine vague searches.

Skip any of these and even the fanciest ranking algorithms feel useless. Helping users bridge that gap is where relevance actually clicks.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-11 12:38:41+00:00
One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.

The other’s fake noise.

One’s a real photo from 1890. The other’s an old-timey instagram filter.

It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would not want a scanned version of those to have the “noise” removed for compression’s sake. If that had been done, I’d have limited interest in adding fake noise back to them. By far my favorite version to have would be the originals, without the “noise” smoothed out at all.

Lots of folks have similar feelings about film. Faked grain isn’t what they’re after, at all. It’s practically unrelated to what they’re looking for.
by lizknope | 2025-11-11 12:38:58+00:00
I had a bunch of these VT100 animation files and found those and more on this site. Things like Star Trek and fireworks. I first saw them in 1991 but modern terminals play them too quickly and instead of going on for 15 seconds it instantly finishes and you just see the final scene.

Is there any way to slow things down in a terminal?

http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/

EDIT:

I just found this command from here and it's awesome to see these after 30 years!

https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/cbp3eo/playing...

cat "/path/to/file.vt" | pv -q -L 2000
by TylerLives | 2025-11-11 12:38:58+00:00
We're getting off topic, but there is another form of government:

"A peculiar disadvantage attaching to republics...is that in this form of government it must be more difficult for men of ability to attain high position and exercise direct political influence than in the case of monarchies. For always...there is a conspiracy...against such men on the part of all the stupid, the weak, and the commonplace; they look upon such men as their natural enemies, and they are firmly held together by a common fear of them. There is always a numerous host of the stupid and the weak, and in a republican constitution it is easy for them to suppress and exclude the men of ability, so that they may not be flanked by them. They are fifty to one; and here all have equal rights at start.

In a monarchy, on the other hand...talent and intelligence receive a natural advocacy and support from above. In the first place, the position of the monarch himself is much too high and too firm for him to stand in fear of any sort of competition. In the next place, he serves the State more by his will than by his intelligence; for no intelligence could ever be equal to all the demands that would in his case be made upon it. He is therefore compelled to be always availing himself of other men's intelligence."

Arthur Schopenhauer