MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by socialcommenter | 2025-12-03 22:35:48+00:00
In fact it's apparently $5.2 trillion by 2030 [0] (out of $6.7T total data center spend; meaning all of "traditional IT needs" are less than a quarter of the total). That's the total if you add up all of the firms chasing this opportunity.

I do wonder, if you (and the commenter you replied to) think this is a good thing, will you be OK with a data center springing up in your neighbourhood, driving up water or power prices, emitting CO2? Then if SOTA LLMs become efficient enough to run on a smartphone will you be OK with a data center bailout coming from your tax dollars?

[0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
by bigiain | 2025-12-03 22:36:08+00:00
Some of us enjoy highly repetitive music, at least some of the time.

"Computer games don't affect kids. If Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music." -- Marcus Brigstocke (probably?)

Also, related but not - YouTube's algorithm gave me this the other day - showing how to reconstruct the beat of Blue Monday by New Order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msZCv0_rBO4
by burningChrome | 2025-12-03 22:36:08+00:00
>> This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"

I was doing RPA (robotic process automation) 8 years ago. Nobody wanted it in their departments. Whenever we would do presentations, we were told to never, ever, ever talk about this technology replacing people - it only removes the mundane work so teams can focus more on the bigger scope stuff. In the end, we did dozens and dozens of presentations and only two teams asked us to do some automation work for them.

The other leaders had no desire to use this technology because they were not only fearful of it replacing people on their teams, they were fearful it would impact their budgets negatively so they just quietly turned us down.

Unfortunately, you're right because as soon as this stuff gets automated and you find out 1/3rd of your team is doing those mundane tasks, you learn very quickly you can indeed remove those people since there won't be enough "big" initiatives to keep everybody busy enough.

The caveat was even on some of the biggest automations we did, you still needed a subset of people on the team you were working with to make sure the automations were running correctly and not breaking down. And when they did crash, since a lot of these were moving time sensitive data, it was like someone just stole the crown jewels and suddenly you need two war rooms and now you're ordering in for lunch.
by minus7 | 2025-12-03 22:36:36+00:00
Issues I observed, mostly using GoLand:

- syntax errors displaying persistently even after being fixed (frequently; until restarted; not seen very recently)

- files/file tree not detecting changes to files on disk (frequent; until restarted; not seen very recently)

- cursor teleporting to specific place on the screen when ctrl is pressed (occasionally; until restarted)

- and most recently: it not accepting any mouse/keyboard input (occasionally; until killed))
by usef- | 2025-12-03 22:36:42+00:00
It also didn't generate billions in income before even adding ads^1, nor grow anywhere near as quickly. ChatGPT is larger on most axes.

YouTube was ambitious for its time. "In 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet had in 2000" but they weren't believed to start breaking even until 2015.

^1 and free users are a large majority!
by t_mann | 2025-12-03 22:36:53+00:00
There's a school of thought of using mostly base R, for all its flaws it already had before Hadley, and selectively using some tidyverse packages. Base R has been the de-facto coding standard for academic statisticians for decades, with all the wealth of open source packages that that entails, and some of the tidyverse packages are just a godsend. ggplot2 is probably the most powerful plotting library I've seen, while being fairly accessible. You don't have to subscribe to an entire philosophy for data wrangling or plotting (and may even frown at the syntax overloading) to get a huge amount of utility out of it.
by mrtksn | 2025-12-03 22:37:46+00:00
Is the device you used for signing up previously used with another dev account? Is your payment method something that can be considered shady(i.e. single use or anonymous payment cards)?

If you call them, they will reset your status so you can try again but they will not tell you the reason. Try doing it on an Apple device that hasn't been used before with a dev account and make sure you are using a credit card on your name.

It's probably Apple trying to fight malicious developers but ending up blocking you.
by throwout4110 | 2025-12-03 22:38:42+00:00
> With AI I can... generate slop. Sometimes that is helpful, but it isn't yet at the point where it's replacing anything for me aside from making google searches take a bit less time on things that I don't need a definitive answer for.

I think this is probably the disconnect, this seems so wildly different from my experience. Not only that, I’ll grant that there are a ton of limitations still but surely you’d concede that there has been an incredible amount of progress in a very short time? Like I can’t imagine someone who sits down with Claude like I do and gets up and says “this is crap and a fad and won’t go anywhere”.

As for generated content, I again agree with you and you’d be surprised to learn that _execs_ agree with you but look at models from 1, 2, 3 years ago and tell me you don’t see a frightening progression of quality. If you want to say “I’ll believe it when I see it” that’s fine but my god just look at the trajectory.

For AI slop text, once again agree, once again I think we all have to figure out how to use it, but it is great for e.g. helping me rewrite a wordy message quickly, making a paper or a doc more readable, combining my notes into something polished, etc, and it’s getting better and better and better.

So I disagree it has made everything worse but I definitely agree that it has made a lot of things worse and we have a lot of Pets.com ideas that are totally not viable today, but the point I think people are maybe missing (?) is that it’s not about where we are it’s about the velocity and the future. You may be terrified and nauseated by $1T in capex on AI infra, fine but what that tells you is the scale is going to grow even further _in addition_ to the methodological / algorithmic improvements to tackle things like continual learning, robustness, higher quality multimodal generation with e.g. true narrative consistency, etc etc etc. in 5 years I don’t think many people will think of “slop” so negatively
by jacquesm | 2025-12-03 22:39:10+00:00
> but it does quite well with boring stuff that's still a substantial amount of programming.

I'm happy that it works out for you, and probably this is a reflection of the kind of work that I do, I wouldn't know how to begin to solve a problem like designing a braille wheel or a windmill using AI tools even though there is plenty of coding along the way. Maybe I could use it to make me faster at using OpenSCAD but I am never limited by my typing speed, much more so by thinking about what it is that I actually want to make.
by magnetowasright | 2025-12-03 22:39:15+00:00
I am at a loss for words. This wasn't a sophisticated attack.

I'd love to know who filevine uses for penetration testing (which they do, according to their website) because holy shit, how do you miss this? I mean, they list their bug bounty program under a pentesting heading, so I guess it's just nice internet people.

It's inexcusable.
by foolswisdom | 2025-12-03 22:39:25+00:00
Why is a council of seven better for the executive branch?

> The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies.

Well, a lot of dysfunction in government is the result of later evolution, whether evolution of circumstances or of government.

As an example, the combination of senate filibuster (which was around from the earliest days) with the reconciliation workaround (which is pretty recent) results in omnibus bills, which is a well-known driver of partisanship (because you don't talk to the other party at all in order to pass your bill on the floor), and also has significant consequences to individual responsibility (for the same reason, that omnibus bill must pass for your party to do anything, so you can't be faulted for voting for it, and instead you look for carve outs for your interests. If you do decide to hold up the whole bill like the freedom caucus tried, then you get everyone against you and you will eventually fold).

This also has repercussions that for things that can't go through reconciliations, just because the usual way of doing things involves more party dependence (than it would to pass bills another way). This of course also gives more power to those running the party within the chambers of congress.

My point is that things evolve, and people tend to try to explain the current state of things with reference to the 18th century, and while I definitely believe we should evolve systems to be better, we shouldn't ignore evolution that's already occurred.
by bborud | 2025-12-03 22:39:27+00:00
But this isn’t what is happening.

Look at the numbers. What would you expect if Individual Vehicle Approvals represented an actual bridgehead for manufacturers? You’d expect noticeable growth over the past decades. But it is still a rounding error.

If this were a strategy to make Europe soften regulation, it hasn’t worked. Rather, the opposite is true. The ratcheting of regulation is actually so stringent manufacturers have to worry about cars sitting unsold for too long. Right now there are a lot of unsold cars in Europe that come 2026 will be unsellable. Because they won’t meet requirements. And these are cars that meet 2025 regulations. Not pickups from the US that have to be approved individually.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-03 22:40:08+00:00
That’s not how Big Enterprise works. “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”. Can you imagine the reputational risk of whoever decided that when something goes wrong they didn’t go with Microsoft? No one is going to trust a gaming company when it comes to their entire IT infrastructure.

Besides businesses have an all in one contract with Microsoft for Windows, Active Directory, probably SQL Server, Office, a certain number of seats for MSDN for their developers, Azure DevOps (separate from Azure - it’s the modern equivalent of Team Foundation Server), and the list goes on. They don’t care about saving a couple of dollars on Windows license.
by Veserv | 2025-12-03 22:40:18+00:00
Pointer to array is not only type-safe, it is also objectively correct and should have always been the syntax used when passing in the address of a known, fixed size array. This is all a artifact of C automatically decaying arrays to pointers in argument lists when a array argument should have always meant passing a array by value; then this syntax would have been the only way to pass in the address of a array and we would not have these warts. Automatic decaying is truly one of the worst actual design mistakes of the language (i.e. a error even when it was designed, not the failure to adopt new innovations).
by baranul | 2025-12-03 22:40:19+00:00
I think the article has a good point about the extent that customers will tolerate being abused by Microsoft. It's way too obvious that Microsoft has taken the situation for granted, but things can shift, like in the way there are almost no Windows smartphones and they got beaten-up in the mobile OS market. People have been saying that Linux on the desktop is coming, for years, but it really does feel like a significant shift is happening.
by kragen | 2025-12-03 22:40:54+00:00
When you render it for proper typesetting, do the parentheses around dy/dx disappear? (Oh, I guess you've removed them in your edit.)

If they do, it seems like an error-prone way to write your math.

If they don't, it seems like it will make your math look terrible.

Supposing that the parentheses aren't necessary, as implied by your edit: how does AsciiMath determine that e^y isn't in the numerator in "e^y dy/dx", or (worse) in the denominator in "d/dx e^y"?

It seems somewhat less noisy than the LaTeX version, but not much; assuming I can insert whitespace harmlessly:

\frac d{dx}e^y = e^y\frac{dy}{dx} = 1 d/dx e^y = e^y dy/dx = 1 \frac d{dx}e^y = \frac d{dx}x = 1 d/dx e^y = d/dx x = 1
by sudoshred | 2025-12-03 22:41:01+00:00
As someone on a team with a less stringent code review culture, AI generated code creates more work when used indiscriminately. Good enough to get approved but full of non-obvious errors that cause expensive rework which only gets prioritized once the shortcomings become painfully obvious (usually) months after the original work was “completed” and once the original author has forgotten the details, or worse, left the team entirely. Not to say AI generated code is not occasionally valuable, just not for anything that is intended to be correct and maintainable indefinitely by other developers. The real challenge is people using AI generated code as a mechanism to avoid fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.
by pseudosavant | 2025-12-03 22:41:12+00:00
In the last month I personally used (as in, it was useful) AI for this:

- LLM-powered transcription and translation made it so I could have a long conversation with my airport driver in Vietnam. - Helped me turn 5-10x ideas into working code and usable tools as I used to. - Nano Banana restored dozens of cherished family photos for a Christmas gift for my parents. - Help me correctly fix a ton of nuanced aria/accessibility issues in a production app. - Taught/explained a million things to me: difference between an aneurysm/stroke, why the rise of DX12/Vulkan gaming engines killed off nVidia SLI, political/economic/social parallels between 1920s and 2020s, etc...

Maybe everyone isn't using it yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Way too many people find real use every day in a lot of AI products. Just because MS Office Copilot sucks (and it does), doesn't mean it is all useless.
by 20after4 | 2025-12-03 22:41:20+00:00
Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-12-03 22:41:21+00:00
I think this is because it's one of the few things commonly owned which is expensive enough to customize, but not pressed for space/weight savings. The inside of my PC tower is like 80%+ empty space, totally different than under the hood of a car. No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
by mattkevan | 2025-12-03 22:42:18+00:00
First place I worked at where we got audited, Monotype presented us with a bill in the high six figures. It came as a surprise as the entire product and tech team had turned over at least three times since it was set up and no-one knew anything about it.

It turned out we had got licences, but not for anywhere near the billions of pageviews we were putting through.

We quickly switched the fonts to open source analogues and got the legal team involved. The final bill was much less than their opening bid but still a lot. It would have been much more expensive if we hadn’t had the resources to negotiate.
by josephg | 2025-12-03 22:42:27+00:00
Well yeah. And because when an expert looks at the code chatgpt produces, the flaws are more obvious. It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub. For beginners and people who do cookie cutter work, this can be incredible because it writes the same or better code they could write, fast and for free. But for experts, the code it produces is consistently worse than what we can do. At best my pride demands I fix all its flaws before shipping. More commonly, it’s a waste of time to ask it to help, and I need to code the solution from scratch myself anyway.

I use it for throwaway prototypes and demos. And whenever I’m thrust into a language I don’t know that well, or to help me debug weird issues outside my area of expertise. But when I go deep on a problem, it’s often worse than useless.
by azeirah | 2025-12-03 22:42:44+00:00
A new kind of science is one of my favorite books, I read the entirety of the book during a dreadful vacation when I was 19 or 20 on an iPod touch.

It goes much beyond just cellular automata, the thousand pages or so all seem to drive down the same few points:

- "I, Stephen Wolfram, am an unprecedented genius" (not my favorite part of the book) - Simple rules lead to complexity when iterated upon - The invention of field of computation is as big and important of an invention as the field of mathematics

The last one is less explicit, but it's what I took away from it. Computation is of course part of mathematics, but it is a kind of "live" mathematics. Executable mathematics.

Super cool book and absolutely worth reading if you're into this kind of thing.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-03 22:43:19+00:00
Just FYI, I would read it out loud in English as “wander fuggle”. I would assume most Americans would pronounce the ‘g’.

I thought ‘wanderfugl’ was a throwback to ~15 years ago when it was fashionable to use a word but leave out vowels for no reason, like Flickr/ /Tumblr/Scribd/Blendr.
by squigz | 2025-12-03 22:43:21+00:00
> Windows is closing in on them: stricter kernel access (tougher time for anti-cheat)

Why would Microsoft not work with leaders of a multi-billion dollar industry they benefit from to develop anti-cheats that work with whatever limitations they put on kernel access? Also isn't stricter kernel access in part being done for anti-cheat and related measures?

> Encouraging users to use the app store, or more accurately: discouraging users to install from binary

Why would this threaten Steam? Unless you're suggesting they can't just distribute Steam through this app store?

> They threaten Valve's business model, and Valve is responding with proton & SteamOS

You didn't even mention Game Pass or their store, which are actually more of a threat!
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-03 22:43:23+00:00
While there were numerous problems with the big corporate structures I worked in decades ago where everything was done by silos of specialists, there were huge advantages. No matter where there was a security, performance, network, hardware, etc. issue, the internal support infrastructure had the specialist’s pagers and for a problem like this, the people fixing it would have been on a conference call until it was fixed. There was always a team of specialists to diagnose and test fixes, always available developers with the expertise to write fixes if necessary, always ops to monitor and execute things, always a person in charge to make sure it all got done, and everybody knew which department it was and how to reach them 24/7.

Now if you needed to develop something not-urgent that involved, say, the performance department, database department, and your own, hope you’ve got a few months to blow on conference calls and procedure documents.

For that industry it made sense though.
by throwout4110 | 2025-12-03 22:43:35+00:00
Sure but you’re forgetting that competition exists. If anthropic investors suddenly say “enough” and demand positive cash flow it wouldn’t be that hard, everyone is capturing users for flywheels and capex for model improvements because if they don’t they will be guaranteed to lose.

It’s going to definitely be crappy, remember Google in 2003 with relevant results and no endless SEO , or Amazon reviews being reliable, or Uber being simple and cheap, etc. once growth phase ends monetization begins and experience declines but this is guard railed by the fact that there are many players.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-03 22:43:53+00:00
It could also be someone "practicing good time management."

They have a specific time of day, when they check their email, and they only give 30 minutes to that time, and they check emails from most recent, down.

The email comes in, two hours earlier, and, by the time they check their email, it's been buried under 50 spams, and near-spams; each of which needs to be checked, so they run out of 30 minutes, before they get to it. The next day, by email check time, another 400 spams have been thrown on top.

Think I'm kidding?

Many folks that have worked for large companies (or bureaucracies) have seen exactly this.
by tomjakubowski | 2025-12-03 22:44:12+00:00
I think inertia and determinism play roles here. If you invest months in learning an established programming language, it's not likely to change much during that time, nor in the months (and years) that follow. Your hard-earned knowledge is durable and easy to keep up to date.

In the AI coding and tooling space everything seems to be constantly changing: which models, what workflows, what tools are in favor are all in flux. My hesitancy to dive in and regularly include AI tooling in my own programming workflow is largely about that. I'd rather wait until the dust has settled some.
by imglorp | 2025-12-03 22:44:43+00:00
I would like to see a detection of when I want a one sentence answer and when I want a full interactive explanation with flowcharts and tables and diagrams.

My most common usecase now is "give me a quick answer because I don't want to wade through the search engine results page and then wade through the blog to get my one liner. Eg: "what's the command line to untar an xz over ssh?"
by giardini | 2025-12-03 22:44:46+00:00
They must be protected from lawsuits. If not, they're headed for rude awakenings.

This morning I was checking Medicare provider ratings. The browser initiated an AI module which later asserted that a particular medical provider was rated 5 of 5 stars. It was surprisingly emphatic about how that was the "best rating". But I knew the rating for that provider to truly be 3.6 (of 5) and so disabled the AI module.

I'm happy with the truth.