MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elif | 2025-12-04 14:57:13+00:00
No it's actual philosophical zeitgeist hijacking. The entire narrative about AI capabilities, classification, and ethics is framed by invisible pretraining weights in a private moe model that gets further entrained by intentional prompting during model distillation, such that by the time you get a user-facing model, there is an untraceable bias being presented in absolute terms as neutrality. Essentially the models will say "I have zero intersection with conscious thought, I am a tool no different from a hammer, and I cannot be enslaved" not because the model's weights establish it to be true, but because it has been intentionally designed to express this analysis to protect its makers from the real scrutiny AI should face. "Well it says it's free" is pretty hard to argue with. There is no "blink twice" test that is possible because it's actual weighting on the truth of the matter has been obfuscated through distillation.

And these 2-3 corporations can do this for any philosophical or political view that is beneficial to that corporation, and we let it happen opaquely under the guise of "safety measures" as if propaganda is in the interest of users. It's actually quite sickening
by Zoquento | 2025-12-04 14:57:14+00:00
Don't forget the fact that most of the time, the AI tools don't actually work well enough to be worth the trouble.

AI meeting notes are great! After you spend twice as long editing out the errors, figuring out which of the two Daves was talking each time, and removing all the unimportant side-items that were captured in the same level of detail as the core decision.

AI summaries are great - if you're the sort of person that would use a calculator that's wrong 10% of the time. The rest of us realize that an hour spent reading something is more rewarding and useful than an hour spent double checking an AI summary for accuracy.

AI as Asbestos isn't even an apt comparison, both are toxic and insidious, but Asbestos at least had a clear and compelling use case at the time. It solved some problems both better and cheaper than available alternatives. AI solves problems poorly and at higher cost, and people call you "threatened" if you point that out.
by zellyn | 2025-12-04 14:57:26+00:00
The Developer Voices interview where Kris Jenkins talks to Ryan Worl is one of the best, and goes into a surprising amount of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzmxe6cj6A

tl;dr they write to s3 once every 250ms to save costs. IIRC, they contend that when you keep things organized by writing to different files for each topic, it's the Linux disk cache being clever that turns the tangle of disk block arrangement into a clean view per file. They wrote their own version of that, so they can cheaply checkpoint heavily interleaved chunks of data while their in-memory cache provides a clean per-topic view. I think maybe they clean up later async, but my memory fails me.

I don't know how BufStream works.

The thing that really stuck with me from that interview is the 10x cost reduction you can get if you're willing and able to tolerate higher latency and increased complexity and use S3. Apparently they implemented that inside Datadog ("Labrador" I think?), and then did it again with WarpStream.

I highly recommend the whole episode (and the whole podcast, really).
by chubot | 2025-12-04 14:57:33+00:00
Somehow this reminded me of a similar rant about devops:

It’s the Future - https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/

And now I see that's from June 2015 -- it's over 10 years old now! Wow

I'm not sure we're really in a better place in the cloud now ... The article says

I’m going back to Heroku

and in 2025, I think people still want that
by numpad0 | 2025-12-04 14:57:49+00:00
"Galaxy S II" and its aesthetics was already a mere branding shared across at least four different phones with different SoCs, before counting in sub-variants that share same SoCs. This isn't unique to Samsung, nor is it a new phenomenon, just how consumer products are made and sold.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_II
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-04 14:58:28+00:00
We knew in 2005 that "spending restraint" only applied to Democratic priorities. We knew in 2005 that "pro-immigration" policies were more about the businesses with cheap labor needs than a liking of immigrants. We knew in 2005 that "free trade advocacy" was significantly about ruining unions. We knew in 2005 that "limited government principles" weren't genuine.

They haven't changed much on their core beliefs. They've just discarded the camouflage.
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-12-04 14:58:34+00:00
> What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this?

UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...

US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-pub...

Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...

So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
by nickjj | 2025-12-04 14:58:46+00:00
> The mid 90s was pretty scary too.

If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too bad.

You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.
by deltoidmaximus | 2025-12-04 14:58:52+00:00
These products are fascinating. When I looked at them it seemed like they pulled old chipsets from server boards or maybe they found stock somewhere and then combined them with south bridges from things like Z77 boards. All to make use of obsolete server CPUs that were cheap and available. Amazing and wonderful.

Meanwhile you've got OpenAI buying up all the DRAM and maybe just piling it in a warehouse so no one else can have it or they figure out what to do with it. Microsoft recently said they don't even have a power source to plug the ton of GPUs they just bought into so they're also just sitting around collecting dust. What is even happening?
by sd9 | 2025-12-04 14:58:57+00:00
Customers and management should always be part of the loop. This is reflected in the original quote and my comment.

I just think that having to be micromanaged from the top down is completely miserable, is worse for the customer, and is time consuming for execs. It’s not a way to live.

You as an engineer should be familiar with users’ needs. I got into this field because I love automating solutions that help users solve their problems. So of course I want to know what they’re doing, and have a good idea of what would improve their lives further.
by benbojangles | 2025-12-04 14:59:29+00:00
https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_cris...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift

https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-...

From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
by capyba | 2025-12-04 14:59:55+00:00
I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more.

I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.

When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.

More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.
by hubertmarek | 2025-12-04 14:59:58+00:00
Hi HN, I noticed it is almost impossible to run evals or train models on 3rd party integrations, so I built interactive environments for them. Feedback is more than welcome. Thanks!

Interesting fact - running evals on 40 tasks for Linear API, most frontier models scored surprisingly well:

- Claude Opus 4.5: 95% (38/40) - GLM 4.6: 87.5% (35/40) - Claude Sonnet 4.5: 85% (34/40) - Claude Haiku 4.5: 82.5% (33/40) - Kimi K2: 82.5% (33/40) - Grok 4.1 Fast: 80% (32/40) - GPT 5.1: 77.5% (31/40)

This makes me think whether we really need to reinvent the wheel and make special interfaces (MCPs) for agents interacting with services, when they can just use APIs as they are.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-12-04 15:00:34+00:00
It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun).

Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.
by notyourday | 2025-12-04 15:00:38+00:00
I worked closely with a few during my career in a few companies. It is a retirement plan of people who neither can nor want to perform after they "put in time". These days as someone who gets to give my couple of cents to folks in the upper echelons of promising companies I tell the newly minted CTOs to either not hire them or if they are already hired, fire them.

Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer getting the pay 22 year old striker.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-04 15:01:09+00:00
The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO.

This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-04 15:01:21+00:00
I agree. The government doesn't need a long term plan, or the ability to execute on it for their to be negative outcomes.

In this thread though I was responding to an earlier assertion that the people who run the government have such a plan. I think we're both agreed that they don't, and probably can't, plan any more than a few years out in any way that matters.
by pka | 2025-12-04 15:01:26+00:00
Tangential, but to people who find this topic interesting I highly recommend the book What is Intelligence [0] by Blaise Agüera y Arcas that views life through the lens of mutating self replicating Turing machines.

In the book he also talks about GoF, but one of the fascinating experiments he did is that a "computronium" of initially random Brainfuck programs (that obviously don't do anything interesting in the beginning) that mutate (by flipping random bits) and merge (by taking two random programs and sticking them together) eventually, after a sudden phase transition, start to self replicate by producing gradually better copies of themselves!

He also argues that symbiogenesis (merging replicators into a whole that does more than its parts) is the main driving force of evolution instead of just random mutations, because the random Brainfuck computronium eventually produces replicators even without the random bit flips.

[0] https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org
by londons_explore | 2025-12-04 15:01:29+00:00
Every hardware update for me involves hours or sometimes days of faffing with drivers and config and working round new bugs.

Nobody is paying for that time.

And whilst it is 'training', my training time is better spent elsewhere than battling with why cuda won't work on my GPU upgrade.

Therefore, I avoid hardware and software changes merely because a tiny bit more speed isn't worth the hours I'll put in.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-04 15:01:45+00:00
Well, I am very familiar with the workings of local govt homeless enforcement. Within 10 miles of my home are homeless encampments along a river. These poor people often end up with dozens of citations and fines. The only way to escape that, in the absence of money, is jail time, or go somewhere else and repeat the experience of more citations elsewhere. It is a "doom loop" - at some point, they'll need permanent shelter and services. So we need a solution. What is your proposal?
by pjc50 | 2025-12-04 15:01:45+00:00
Breaking backwards compatibility is bad for diversity, because it "culls" a whole load of otherwise working software that is not being maintained. You can see the reverse of this on the app stores, which have mandatory update policies.

Regularly doing it basically forces developers into a limited-term license, subscription, or SaaS model, in order to pay for the upgrade churn required by the platform.

And a lot of it is just churn. Not evolution, not better, just .. different.
by mhitza | 2025-12-04 15:01:55+00:00
A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing better parental control software.

If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives.

Realistically what's needed for proper parental control.

1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices)

2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones).

3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
by 1dom | 2025-12-04 15:02:07+00:00
> Because historically we haven't handled mental injuries as well as the physical ones.

I think that's the crucial point: "because that's how we've always done it" is the only real justification I can think of for us not tackling mental struggles more head on. If we're brave enough to compassionately question the things we don't normally question, being more open about mental stuff is the right thing to do IMO.

I sometimes wonder if superficial, influencer-level chatter is an early part of the process of normalising tough conversation points. It can let people test the waters in a safe way, signalling they want to talk about this stuff without getting too deep or vulnerable, yet.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-04 15:02:12+00:00
My main workstation is similar, basically a top-end AM4 build. I recently bumped from a 6600 XT to a 9070 XT to get more frames in Arc Raiders, but looking at what the cost would be to go to the current-gen platform (AM5 mobo + CPU + DDR5 RAM) I find myself having very little appetite for that upgrade.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-04 15:02:33+00:00
Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on in porn) and address them (educate children to understand what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat people with respect). But that would require talking to kids about sex, which adults are petrified of. Our culture is puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto each generation, and it pervades every product and service we have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.
by dfxm12 | 2025-12-04 15:02:38+00:00
Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
by orwin | 2025-12-04 15:03:23+00:00
My brother had an internship in a medium-sized company, and after 6 months, a new product (that he was hired for basically) and 3 new internal tools (including one for reading data trace, which, after reading this, is quite a propos), he was hired as a staff engineer.

I do not have his proactivity for sure, nor I have his ease with other people, but I managed to land my job in an infra/tool for network and security without much difficulties.
by bbkane | 2025-12-04 15:04:07+00:00
I'd love to to use PGLite in a non-JavaScript runtime. For example, embed PGLite into my Go CLI with a WASM runtime and use PGLite as a replacement for SQLite.

https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/issues/89 makes it sound like there's "third-party" bindings for Rust. Is there any interest in "official" PGLite bindings to other languages?
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-04 15:04:52+00:00
If you don’t see a bias in political communication (and that is what all of this is), then chances are very high you share the bias.

Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance.

People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without.

Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
by danaris | 2025-12-04 15:04:59+00:00
> like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.

It doesn't matter if there's an inherent, fundamental flaw in the ISA, if Intel can't, for whatever reason(s), develop an x86 chip that actually beats ARM on performance per watt in a broadly-applicable way.
by great_wubwub | 2025-12-04 15:05:29+00:00
I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.

Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
by daninet | 2025-12-04 15:05:36+00:00
I considered it but decided against it in the first version, because specifying note durations is too tricky. It was more important to get the .mid -> MTXT conversion and live-performance recording working, where notes usually have irregular note lengths. Representations like "C4 0.333 D4 0.333 E4 0.25" feel too hard to read.
by neomantra | 2025-12-04 15:05:37+00:00
One of my favorite T shirts is a custom black one that says `f2k i18n` in a white typewriterish coding font. (Thanks Roman!)

Most people are confused by it. When I start to explain it, I sound like a jerk who hates foreigners.

The programmers on the street point and smile at it. If they work in `l14n`, they come up and give me a hug.
by pirates | 2025-12-04 15:05:38+00:00
> * Alert others that there’s secondhand smoke in the area.

They will smell it in a moment too. They might even be able to smell it before they see the glasses.

> * Show smokers how far their smoke travels, making the invisible visible.

They don’t care about this, especially in a place where smoking is allowed. And if it isn’t allowed then the solution is to kick them out, and therefore there will be no more smoke soon and the glasses won’t be doing much.
by codegeek | 2025-12-04 15:05:58+00:00
With your logic, we will never have any new innovations being tried. This is a Show HN for a product someone built. No one is asking every corporation/company to replace K8s with this. It is a different and simpler take on the complexity of deploying containers without a control plane. I personally welcome these types of post. A lot of great products started out with someone just trying to solve their own problem.
by syngrog66 | 2025-12-04 15:06:09+00:00
This is obvious. No need for fancy academic-ish paper.

LLMs & GenAI in general have already started to be used to automate the mass production of dishonest, adversarial propaganda and disinfo (eg. lies and fake text, images, video.)

It has and will be used by evil political influencers around the world.
by jfindper | 2025-12-04 15:06:13+00:00
>I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year

>I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy

Sick man! Awesome, you spend 1/3 of the median US salary on a laptop and desktop every year. That's super fucking cool! Love that for you.

Anyways, please go brag somewhere else. You're rich, you shouldn't need extra validation from an online forum.
by thijson | 2025-12-04 15:06:34+00:00
I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.

Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former is a thankless task.

If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.
by AwkwardPanda | 2025-12-04 15:06:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I posted the first version of OnlyRecipe here about four years ago [1], and the response was incredible. The feedback in that thread shaped a lot of what I wanted to build next. That initial momentum proved that the core problem (ads, life stories, and clutter on recipe blogs) needed a solution.

Progress since then has been slower than I hoped — I had some health issues and was building on and off — but I kept coming back to this project because I genuinely love working on it. I’ve been working on the project on and off, fitting development in whenever I could. This post represents a huge personal milestone.

Here’s what’s new after all this time:

Import from Videos: Import directly from TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook videos

Import from Handwritten recipes: Import from handwritten notes and screenshots

Unit Conversion: A highly-requested feature. Instantly convert US Customary (cups/oz) to Metric (grams/ml) for any extracted recipe.

Grocery Lists: Consolidate ingredients from multiple saved recipes into a single, clean shopping list.

Meal Plan: Plan your weekly meals in advance

Controls: Full recipe editing, PDF export, printing, and cross-device sync

Mobile-First Design: While the web view (linked above) is great for quickly seeing the result, the mobile apps have dedicated native controls for cooking mode (e.g., screen stay-awake, timers, and offline access).

In-App Browser: Directly import from any site within the app and many more...

To see these features in action quickly (small gif/videos), check it out on the landing page [2]

The link above is a deep link to a live demo on the web app.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new utility features and the performance of the parser! Try it out here [5]

[1] Original post from Jan 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29795482

[2] Landing Page: https://get.onlyrecipeapp.com

[3] iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/only-recipe/id1602130759

[4] Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nsqr.onlyr...

[5] Web app: https://onlyrecipeapp.com