MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgwalter | 2025-12-07 18:42:02+00:00
It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now.

"AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies.

This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot air and incorrect algorithms.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-07 18:42:54+00:00
It is true. There are 100's (probably 1000's) of confirmed news stories by now. Just like people get into car accidents is real, even if you personally haven't been in a car accident yet. And people dying is real, even if you are still alive.

You are a sample of '1' and you don't get to invalidate other people's experiences based on your own. The only reason you do not notice, given that it is true is because you would either rather have it not be true or because you are actively working not to notice.
by shash | 2025-12-07 18:43:53+00:00
They already do offer that - it’s called a multi-project wafer or MPW. But it’s prohibitively expensive on a per-chip basis. It’s mostly used for prototyping or concept proving and not for commercial use.

One problem is, you need to create a photolithography mask set for any volume size of fabrication and those aren’t cheap. But that’s far from the _only_ problem with small volume.
by tpmoney | 2025-12-07 18:44:04+00:00
It feels like the question that gets raised by this is why was there such a blind spot here? Apple's UI/UX decisions aren't for everyone to be sure, but they were a core differentiator for Apple. So if so many people inside saw Dye as a problem, and given the ever increasing dissatisfaction with the UX from customers, why was there a blink spot? Was it too much focus on the hardware side? Was it a change in overall care for UX beyond just Dye? Is it a company stretched too thin between all the various projects?
by nathan_compton | 2025-12-07 18:44:07+00:00
Big lisp guy here. Have written tens of thousands of lines of scheme, at least, and common lisp.

But I don't get this "Lisp is so much better than everything else," thing. It feels very jejune to me.

Most lisp programmers barely use macros and most programming languages these days have most of the features of Lisp that originally made it useful (automatic memory management, repls, dynamic typing*, and even meta-programming if you really want it).

I do think that most common languages are mediocre but mediocrity is just how humans are.

--

If I had one thing I want fixed about Scheme it would be the dynamic typing, especially since many Schemes compile aggressively. Finding bugs is much harder when your apparently dynamic language has compiled out everything useful for understanding an error condition. Most of those mistakes could be caught at compile time.
by frje1400 | 2025-12-07 18:44:16+00:00
> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?

Because in 5-10 years you'll have a Java project that people can still maintain as if it's any other Java project. If you pick Kotlin, that might at that point no longer be a popular language in whatever niche you are in. What used to be the cool Kotlin project is now seen as a burden. See: Groovy, Clojure, Scala. Of course, I recognize that not all projects work on these kinds of timelines, but many do, including most things that I work on.
by grouchy | 2025-12-07 18:44:39+00:00
I think the problem is having to "learn" software in the first place. You don't have to "learn" how to work with a good accountant or lawyer. They make it easy by exposing what they can offer precisely when you need it.

That's how I think software will work in the future. I'm not suggesting that the UI should be completely different on every render. Some predictability is essential. That's one reason I don't think codegen on every render is worthwhile. I'm simply suggesting that software should look different from user to user based on their individual needs.
by Eisenstein | 2025-12-07 18:45:08+00:00
Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone.

Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money.

I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?
by sa46 | 2025-12-07 18:45:15+00:00
Advisory locks aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. They can only be unlocked by the Postgres connection that acquired the lock. That means you need to track the connection, typically by dedicating a connection to the job that needs locking.

Here’s a good issue describing the tradeoffs between a lock table and advisory locks.

https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job/discussions/831
by jama211 | 2025-12-07 18:45:21+00:00
I’m rightfully dubious of studies like this. Too many variables. They stated what they controlled for, but it wasn’t all that much, and doesn’t have any clue at all mechanism. For all we know it could be that people who drink coffee are less stressed and it’s stress that ages you. Or people who drink coffee work outside less. Or own more frogs. I dunno.

Just annoyed that studies like this get so much attention compared to studies that provide more value.
by _blk | 2025-12-07 18:45:30+00:00
Thanks for sharing that. Interesting how there was a solution to a problem that didn't really exist yet.. I mean, I'm sure it was there for a reason, but I assume it was more things like wrongful attribution, missing commas etc. rather than outright invented quotes to fit a narrative or do you have more background on that?

...at least the mandatory automated checking processes are probably not far off at least for the more reputable journals, but it still makes you wonder how much you can trust the last two years of LLM-enhanced science that is now being quoted in current publications and if those hallucinations can be "reverted" after having been re-quoted. A bit like Wikipedia can be abused to establish facts.
by belorn | 2025-12-07 18:45:59+00:00
The saying/claims in the last 20 years or so is that London has the highest ratio of cameras to people in the world, through looking at what seems more correct statistics it is only the 12th most dense camera city in the world. how well that translate to the rest of the country is much less talked about.

Here in Sweden, people walking on the rails without permission is a fairly common problem, which cause almost 4k hours of accumulated delays per year. For people who often travel by train, the announcement of reduced speed because of the system has detected people on the tracks are one of the more common ones, only second to the catch-all announcement of "signal error", which simply mean the computer says stop for a reason that the driver don't know or don't want to say.

When it comes to suicide prevention on bridges, it is not just the big bridges. Suicide by train is a fairly talked methods in the news as a work hazard for train drivers, and the protection here is for small bridges that goes above the track. Similar issues exist with bridges over roads and highways. Those methods are to my read of the statistics more common than the movie version of a person jumping from a suspension bridge.
by toast0 | 2025-12-07 18:46:11+00:00
> Even after searching for ~15 minutes, I could find no information about how to become such a compatible provider.

I think that info is here:

https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...

Search terms: whatsapp dma program

Disclosure: I worked for WhatsApp until 2019, which included detecting 3rd party applications and blocking them when they didn't follow (unpublished) specifications.
by catlover76 | 2025-12-07 18:46:32+00:00
The fuck? Who do you think built the houses?

> army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things.

In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted into war frequently?

> Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died".

Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours?
by thelastgallon | 2025-12-07 18:47:05+00:00
AI is the only 'technology' that nobody knows what it solves. If it is a fridge, people buy it. If its a dishwasher, people buy it. The use cases of these technologies are immediately understood. AI is pushed down hard by the 'leaders', C-suite is pushing everyone to use AI at most companies. Nobody knows what its supposed to help with but a great many people claim 'success' with AI. Every full text search that was perfectly working before got converted to AI search and is instantly 100x worse. Same with lots of customer facing FAQs, customer support, etc.

Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.
by sebastiennight | 2025-12-07 18:47:11+00:00
One incorrect way to think of it is "LLMs will sometimes hallucinate when asked to produce content, but will provide grounded insights when merely asked to review/rate existing content".

A more productive (and secure) way to think of it is that all LLMs are "evil genies" or extremely smart, adversarial agents. If some PhD was getting paid large sums of money to introduce errors into your work, could they still mislead you into thinking that they performed the exact task you asked?

Your prompt is

‘you are an extremely rigorous reviewer searching for fake citations in a possibly compromised text’

- It is easy for the (compromised) reviewer to surface false positives: nitpick citations that are in fact correct, by surfacing irrelevant or made-up segments of the original research, hence making you think that the citation is incorrect.

- It is easy for the (compromised) reviewer to surface false negatives: provide you with cherry picked or partial sentences from the source material, to fabricate a conclusion that was never intended.

You do not solve the problem of unreliable actors by splitting them into two teams and having one unreliable actor review the other's work.

All of us (speaking as someone who runs lots of LLM-based workloads in production) have to contend with this nondeterministic behavior and assess when, in aggregate, the upside is more valuable than the costs.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-07 18:47:23+00:00
I think it's reasonable to expect that the staff involved in an emergency callout of this sort will be entitled to Time Off In Lieu, and that that TOIL will cause knock-on effects to staff rostering.

Delaying the inspection until working hours would have caused much greater disruption. Having a track inspection team on hand 24x7 to cover all potential routes would incur much higher staffing costs.

An on-call system backed by TOIL and accepting the risk of dealing with occasional re-rostering seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
by mooreds | 2025-12-07 18:48:11+00:00
Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees.

Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.

What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).

From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.

There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-07 18:48:33+00:00
What are you trying to say? It is defined that way. And the example I provided above makes that completely explicit.

But here, from the official documentation:

> if the expression is false (which may be the first time it is tested) the suite of the else clause, if present, is executed and the loop terminates.

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#the-...
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-07 18:48:36+00:00
I know my mom ran away to SF as a teen in the 60s, but she will not say why or share the story. I’ve always been curious about it because she’s a very straight laced person, and I just cannot imagine her doing anything like that.

I feel like there is a secret there that she is afraid or ashamed of, but if she would tell me I could understand her better.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-07 18:48:38+00:00
The thing is that the usual comparisons I'm thinking of generally focused on how much the languages in question rely on GC for practical use. C++11 didn't really move the needle much, if at all, in that respect compared to the typical languages on the other side of said comparisons.

Perhaps I happen to have been around different discussions than you?
by Amezarak | 2025-12-07 18:48:57+00:00
> Where did you get this figure?

https://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Registered_Nurse_(R...

I am happy to accept your figure of "slightly more than half" for the sake of this discussion.

> Mind you, half of socialized costs, like health insurance is payed by the employer, so you need to adjust figures accordingly.

Nurses in the US also have half (or more) of costs like health insurance paid for by their employer - in that particular case, almost always much more than half. Half of Social Security retirement tax is paid for by the employer, but additional retirement payments beyond Social Security are usually much less than half. We can probably safely call this a wash.

> It's of course a totally ridiculous comparison without adjusting for living costs, etc..

Germany has overall notoriously high living costs. For instance, the electric rate my German friend is paying in east Germany is 4x(!!!![1]) my rate in the US, and she and her husband pay much more for a small apartment than I do a large house. On top of this, German housing often comes ludicrously unfurnished - most Americans would be surprised to learn that renters are often expected to provide their own kitchen. Germany certainly does not win out on housing costs.

Nurses are underpaid. Pay nurses more.

[1] I used to be baffled as to why Germans typically have no AC, only small appliances, often no clothesdryer, etc. Then after learning this I realized that for an average person, running American-style appliances would be totally unaffordable. Even lower class Americans will happily blow hundreds of dollars keeping their house at 60F in 95F degree heat while cooking in their electric oven and running their electric clothesdryer. While this results in "high" bills around $400 here, that'd be $1600 in Germany. You couldn't live like an American there. Even my personal "high" bills which sometimes approach $200 would cause me to cut back severely - $800 would be way too much.
by chihuahua | 2025-12-07 18:49:02+00:00
It would also be a lot more persuasive if the article provided even a single example of how Lisp enables superior solutions.

Instead, it's just an ad-hominem attack based on the idea that non-Lisp programmers are too limited in their thinking to appreciate Lisp.

Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.

In the absence of that, the entire article can be refuted by quoting The Big Lebowski: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
by franga2000 | 2025-12-07 18:49:14+00:00
Why is this article trending again?? The NanoKVM is showcase product for the LicheeRV Nano. A built-in microphone is an advertised feature of that board.

I like Matej's work, especially his GSM stuff, but this article is so overblown. A third are known issues and another third are non-issues. The last third was good security work and I genuinely appreciate he did it. Beat me to it by a feew weeks, since my order was stuck in customs while I tried to explain to them what a KVM was...
by zkmon | 2025-12-07 18:50:03+00:00
These analogies are like fitting a curve to align with the data. Let the new data come in next year, the curve changes to fit that data as well. Any data can be curve-fitted and be seen as following some pattern.

It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look at the what's going on across the globe.

The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction between various forces.

For example, social and political norms may turn against all that is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving plastic food.
by rented_mule | 2025-12-07 18:51:38+00:00
> The idea of a linear hierarchy in languages is the true flatlander mindset.

100% this. I think you can replace "languages" in that sentence with many things (employee levels is another big one that is relevant to this forum - employee value comes in many, many shapes). Reducing complicated things to one dimension can be a useful shortcut in a pinch, but it's rarely the best way to make complicated choices among things.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-07 18:53:28+00:00
> IMHO, "tech optimism" reached its peak in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon.

Not everyone was so optimistic. You just didn’t hear about it on mainstream media

https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?si=GgGmX9Z7vubN3_8x
by sebastiennight | 2025-12-07 18:53:30+00:00
Note: the more accurate mental model is that you've got "good genies" most of the time, but from times to time at random unpredictable times your agent is swapped out with a bad genie.

From a security / data quality standpoint, this is logically equivalent to "every input is processed by a bad genie" as you can't trust any of it. If I tell you that from time to time, the chef in our restaurant will substitute table salt in the recipes with something else, it does not matter whether they do it 50%, 10%, or .1% of the time.

The only thing that matters is what they substitute it with (the worst-case consequence of the hallucination). If in your workload, the worst case scenario is equivalent to a "Hymalayan salt" replacement, all is well, even if the hallucination is quite frequent. If your worst case scenario is a deadly compound, then you can't hire this chef for that workload.
by titanomachy | 2025-12-07 18:53:31+00:00
I have this debate with people about news and podcasts sometimes (news was one of the examples in TFA). People say they are doing it to remain informed, and it’s a high-value activity, but I argue it’s mostly entertainment since it rarely affects any decision-making.

This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment.

(To be clear, I have nothing against entertainment.)
by hbarka | 2025-12-07 18:53:50+00:00
I just want to add that the website linked in this post is a prime example of a hot mess of ads. This model of over-the-top syndicated crap interleaved in the bottom is also ever present in larger news media websites and is a vestige of the early internet method of stuffing clickbaity tabloid ad blocks. If some ad executive thinks it’s the best for engagement they’re not measuring disengagement.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 18:53:58+00:00
So you have an OS of which you have the source, which is binary reproducible and you can compile yourself if you want to. You want to make that more trustworthy by injecting a random blob, you can not inspect and which updates itself over the network controlled by a third party. I do not understand your threat model.

If you think your OS doesn't give you the correct answer to a read, than you need to run a second OS side-by-side and compare. If you think your OS is touching data you haven't told it to, you need to have a layer running below so you can check, i.e. virtualization, BIOS or hardware. If you think your OS is making network calls you haven't told it to, then you need to connect it via an intermediate host, that acts as a firewall.

I don't see what injecting a random blob into the OS gives you other than box ticking. Now you need to trust the OS and that other thing.

When your attacker gains control of your OS (so actually below root), than you are screwed anyways. Only having some layer independently will help you in that case. Having more code in your OS, won't help you at all, it will just add more attack surface.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-07 18:54:29+00:00
I'm not saying they will cease to exist. I'm saying that the Internet bubble of 2000 had valid tech whose growth was (deliberately) overestimated.

They can write it off and move on to other things. But that is not what the new wildfire talking point says. The wildfire framing says that the underlying tech is as valuable as the tech of 2000 was.
Ask HN: AI tools to enhance old SATB choir recordings?
by fdeage | 2025-12-07 18:54:41+00:00
I have some old recordings of a SATB choir (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass), but the audio quality is quite poor. I also have the exact musical scores for each song.

I'm looking for AI tools/services that could improve the clarity and separation of each vocal part (and maybe also reduce noise and artifacts). If it can leverage the scores to guide the enhancement, the better.

Has anyone tried something similar or can recommend modern approaches or models for this?
by grouchy | 2025-12-07 18:56:45+00:00
I totally agree with this, and I'd go even further.

When I'm having trouble with software, I often turn to Google to figure out how to use it. I'm then directed to a YouTube video, help article, or blog post with instructions.

My take is that people are already accustomed to this question-and-answer model. They're just not used to finding it within the application itself.
by steelblueskies | 2025-12-07 18:57:17+00:00
Reductionist, but it's a backup problem.

Data matters? Have multiple copies, not all in the same place.

This is really no different, yet we don't have those redundancies in play.

Host, and paths.

Every other take is ultimately just shuffling justification around the least bad for everyone lack of backups for cost saving.
by pesfandiar | 2025-12-07 18:57:30+00:00
The signs of techno-feudalism have always been around in fragments (platform/cloud landlords, rent-seeking, gig work, ...), but the promise of hitting gold, the idea of democratized innovation, and the reliance on mass tech labour fueled the techno-optimism. Now, the heavily power-centralizing nature of AI and the shrinking reliance on tech labour have diminished the optimism.
by grouchy | 2025-12-07 18:57:51+00:00
Yeah, exactly. This is the progressive disclosure.

AI can give you a smart starting point (like a pre-filled formula) instead of making you start from scratch, and then you dig deeper only if you need to. That's what I mean by personalized software.

You get something that actually works right away, and you can tweak it from there. No need to watch YouTube tutorials or read docs just to figure out where to start.