MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2025-12-04 10:38:41+00:00
> I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread.

What I feel is people are denouncing the problems and describing them as not being worth the tradeoff, not necessarily saying it has zero use cases. On the other end of the spectrum we have claims such as:

> countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for.

Maybe those blow your mind, but not everyone’s mind is blown so easily.

For every one of your cases, I can give you a counter example where doing the same went horribly wrong. From cases being dismissed due to non-existent laws being quoted, to people being poisoned by following LLM instructions.

> I'm worried about some of the problems LLMs will create for humanity in the future but those are problems we can solve in the future too.

No, they are not! We can’t keep making climate change worse and fix it later. We can’t keep spreading misinformation at this rate and fix it later. We can’t keep increasing mass surveillance at this rate and fix it later. That “fix it later” attitude is frankly naive. You are falling for the narrative that got us into shit in the first place. Nothing will be “fixed later”, the powerful actors will just extract whatever they can and bolt.

> and as we add them in smart ways to systems that exist today, things will only get better.

No, they will not. Things are getting worse now, it’s absurd to think it’s inevitable they’ll get better.
by captn3m0 | 2025-12-04 10:38:47+00:00
> a single ID will limit babudom arbitrariness a bit

It does not in practice, because Aadhaar data is a unverified source of big messes. As several examples:

- UP Gov does not believe Aadhaar to be a proof of date of birth https://www.newsonair.gov.in/up-government-clarifies-that-aa...

- UIDAI has stated that it is not a proof of citizenship, DoB, or address: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/aadhaar-not...

- EPFO no longer accepts it https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/government-makes-citi...
by nottorp | 2025-12-04 10:39:08+00:00
> you fight game challenges

Like "kill 100.000 mobs" ?

With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)

And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.

But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.

I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
by akra | 2025-12-04 10:39:17+00:00
Sadly capitalism rewards scarcity at a macro level, which in some ways is the opposite of efficiency. It also grants "social status" to the scarce via more resources. As long as you aren't disrupted, and everyone in your industry does the same/colludes, restricting output and working less usually commands more money up to a certain point (prices are set more as a monopoly in these markets). Its just that scarcity was in the past correlated with difficulty which made it "somewhat fair" -> AI changes that.

Its why unions, associations, professional bodies, etc exist for example. This whole thread is an example -> the value gained from efficiency in SWE jobs doesn't seem to be accruing value to the people with SWE skills.
by LinXitoW | 2025-12-04 10:39:45+00:00
Most people do have an issue with it, because every game that's replaced loot boxes with discrete cosmetics purchases has to then massively increase the price of them. For 20 bucks in Overwatch 1, you got (afaik) 10 loot boxes which all had 4 random items. In Overwatch 2 20 bucks barely gets you single good skin.

It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my experience, having been part of communities of both types of games.
by JohnMakin | 2025-12-04 10:39:58+00:00
If you are a small operation and trying to self host k3s or k8s or any number of out of the box installations that are probably at least as complex as docker compose swarms, for any non trivial production case, presents similar problems in monitoring and availability as ones you’d get with off the shelf cloud provider managed services, except the managed solutions come without the pain in the ass. Except you don’t have a control plane.

I have managed custom server clusters in a self hosted situation. the problems are hard, but if you’re small, why would you reach for such a solution in the first place? you’d be better off paying for a managed service. What situation forces so many people to reach to self hosted kubernetes?
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-04 10:40:18+00:00
> Used to go there for parts needed on short notice

Which is why they shut down - the addressable market of people having an emergency need for an item from a limited selection of electronics isn't that big, and that's becoming the only market.

It's not your fault that you don't want to pay over the odds for everything when you're not in a rush, and it's not their fault they need to pay commercial rent, utilities, payroll, insurance and all the other overheads.

But the outcome is simply that staffed local physical shops have a lower efficiency ceiling in terms of getting items to customers.
by pbmonster | 2025-12-04 10:40:40+00:00
I think the F1 teams would all switch to racing versions of those transmissions the second they would be allowed to do so.

The efficiency gains wouldn't even be important in comparison (until you start bringing significantly less fuel than your opponents), but just the reduction in weight and size (important for aero considerations) would be worth it. Also, the power gains from always running the ICE (and its turbo) at the perfect sweet spot in the power curve would be a giant advantage in racing.
by throwaway290 | 2025-12-04 10:40:45+00:00
> Technically, the act of bypassing censorship by itself is still not even illegal

Seeking extremist materials is illegal as of September. If that is not "bypassing censorship" then what is?

By the way. Extremist materials is a big list of thousands of things that no one can always know. What it means for a normal person? If you use VPN you can be finding extremist materials, if you don't = then you don't (because they are all helpfully blocked)

After 3 months there is one guy with a case for looking up Azov for example https://meduza.io/amp/cards/mvd-vpervye-popytalos-oshtrafova...
by pjc50 | 2025-12-04 10:41:05+00:00
That's a fairly literal description of how privatization worked, yes. That's why British Steel is owned by Tata and the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW. British nuclear reactors are operated by Electricite de France, and some of the trains are run by Dutch and German operators.

It sounds bad, but you can also not-misleadingly say "we took industries that were costing the taxpayer money and sold them for hard currency and foreign investment". The problem is the ongoing subsidy.
by novella_rel | 2025-12-04 10:41:18+00:00
To me it has a couple advantages over the other options on the market.

1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.

2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.

3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.

The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.
LED Streetlights Are Disrupting Ecosystems – A Systems Failure
by emmasuntech | 2025-12-04 10:41:26+00:00
Cities worldwide have replaced orange high-pressure sodium (HPS) streetlights with white LEDs—promising energy savings. But this “upgrade” is worsening light pollution and harming ecosystems, because we optimized for lumens per watt, not system health.

The Sky Is Getting Brighter Despite lower power use, satellite data shows global skyglow is increasing by ~2% yearly (Science Advances, 2016). Why?

White LEDs (often 4000K–5000K) emit intense blue light, which scatters 3× more in the atmosphere than HPS’s amber glow. Poorly shielded fixtures leak upward—even “retrofit” kits in old housings often lack proper optics. Cheaper operating costs encourage over-lighting (Jevons paradox). Real Ecological Harm Peer-reviewed studies confirm:

Insects swarm blue-rich LEDs → local population collapse (Biol. Lett., 2018). Migratory birds collide with buildings due to disorientation from skyglow. Bats, frogs, and other nocturnal species show disrupted foraging and reproduction. The AMA even warned in 2016 that high-CCT streetlights suppress melatonin and increase glare—reducing nighttime safety.

A Better Path This isn’t anti-LED—it’s pro-systems thinking. Solutions exist:

Use ≤2700K LEDs (less blue, better visual comfort)

Mandate full-cutoff fixtures (zero uplight)

Dim lights after midnight via motion or scheduling

Cities like Tucson and Davis prove you can cut energy and protect the night.
by alexaab | 2025-12-04 10:42:07+00:00
Songscription | Founding Engineer | San Francisco, CA | In-Person/Remote

At Songscription, we are building state-of-the-art AI models to automate music transcription, with the vision of enabling any musician to learn any song, on any instrument, at any level.

Apply at https://songscription.ai/careers and/or feel free to shoot me an email at alex (at) songscription.ai
by smcl | 2025-12-04 10:42:19+00:00
I'm actually from Scotland and grew up in an area that laid claim to their invention - near Stonehaven - around the time they popped up.

They're basically a silly novelty equivalent to "deep fried butter" is in the USA but they definitely came from Scotland. I've never had one and know only a handful of people who did, I suspect they came about as a sort of pre-internet way to grab attention and go "viral"

They're not exactly a delicacy or something that we should be proud of, mind ...
by everdrive | 2025-12-04 10:42:21+00:00
It's important to remember that being a "free thinker" often just means "being weird." It's quite celebrated to "think for yourself" and people always connect this to specific political ideas, and suggest that free thinkers will have "better" political ideas by not going along with the crowd. On one hand, this is not necessarily true; the crowd could potentially have the better idea and the free thinker could have some crazy or bad idea.

But also, there is a heavy cost to being out of sync with people; how many people can you relate to? Do the people you talk to think you're weird? You don't do the same things, know the same things, talk about the same things, etc. You're the odd man out, and potentially for not much benefit. Being a "free thinker" doesn't necessarily guarantee much of anything. Your ideas are potentially original, but not necessarily better. One of my "free thinker" ideas is that bed frames and box springs are mostly superfluous and a mattress on the ground is more comfortable and cheaper. (getting up from a squat should not be difficult if you're even moderately healthy) Does this really buy me anything? No. I'm living to my preferences and in line with my ideas, but people just think it's weird, and would be really uncomfortable with it unless I'd already built up enough trust / goodwill to overcome this quirk.
by prmoustache | 2025-12-04 10:42:25+00:00
I think that is the main difference: choice

30 years ago you would buy what was available locally, possibly you could obtain from the shop owner that he orders a part from his distributor's catalog and that was it. And we weren't giving it much second thought.

Now when we know we can obtain any brand or any model online we are much more picky about our component choices. I know for me it is the same in other areas I am knowledgeable like bicycle parts. Regardless of the price more often than not the local bike shop doesn't have the exact tire model I want so if I am not in a hurry I order online. I wasn't unhappy buying whatever was available back in the days as it was just not a possibility and I had less knowledge about what was available, even when receiving magazines every month. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
by quitit | 2025-12-04 10:42:39+00:00
While AI is an example, it's an extreme one - the uniqueness here is that the AI companies have very large spend commitments that exceed expected cash generation, even under presumption of no faults and very strong revenue assumptions because infrastructure costs outpace revenue by a significant margin.(1)

This differs quite a bit from a typical venture-backed or boot-strapped entity, which has a realistic pathway to profitability.

https://www.analyticsinsight.net/news/hsbc-warns-openai-coul...
by gaigalas | 2025-12-04 10:42:47+00:00
What I mean is that talking about mass persuation was (and to a certain degree, it still is) crackpot talk.

I'm not talking about the persuations themselves, it's the general public perception of someone or some group that raises awareness about it.

This also excludes ludic talk about it (people who just generally enjoy post-apocalyptic aesthetics but doesn't actually consider it to be a thing that can happen).

5 years ago, if you brought up serious talk about mass systemic persuation, you were either a lunatic or a philosopher, or both.
by Amezarak | 2025-12-04 10:42:56+00:00
I think most people who really cared about it just think it's absurd that everyone has to accept planets being arbitrarily reclassified because a very small group of astronomers says so. Plenty of well-known astronomers thought so as well, and there are obvious problems with the "cleared orbit" clause, which is applied totally arbitrarily. The majority of the IAU did not even vote on the proposal, as it happened after most people had left the conference.

For example:

> Dr Alan Stern, who leads the US space agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto and did not vote in Prague, told BBC News: "It's an awful definition; it's sloppy science and it would never pass peer review - for two reasons." [...] Dr Stern pointed out that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have also not fully cleared their orbital zones. Earth orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids. Jupiter, meanwhile, is accompanied by 100,000 Trojan asteroids on its orbital path." [...] "I was not allowed to vote because I was not in a room in Prague on Thursday 24th. Of 10,000 astronomers, 4% were in that room - you can't even claim consensus." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5283956.stm

A better insight might be how easy it is to persuade millions of people with a small group of experts and a media campaign that a fact they'd known all their life is "false" and that anyone who disagrees is actually irrational - the Authorities have decided the issue! This is an extremely potent persuasion technique "the elites" use all the time.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-04 10:43:20+00:00
> I tested myself for ADHD by taking amphetamines. [...] Or I was whizzing my tits off and hallucinated the whole thing. Not sure yet.

You can't test yourself for ADHD by taking amphetamines because they have profound effects on everyone - there's a reason why stimulants are some of the most popular recreational drugs. They can make everyone feel smarter, more productive, like you're on top of the world, especially at recreational doses.

When it comes to therapeutic doses for treating ADHD, the effects of the medication should be very subtle, you shouldn't "feel it working" like you've just taken that pill from Limitless. It can produce some euphoria or other recreational effects initially but they're supposed to disappear within a couple of days or weeks, otherwise your dosage is considered to be too high.
by Macha | 2025-12-04 10:43:30+00:00
Standard Latin characters are half width. Ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ latin characters do exist, but that’s not the difference we’re seeing here, if anything that would make the Latin font in the English release “quarter width” except that’s not a real thing that exists. It’s just an ultra condensed font, and the fix is replacing the font files with more standard fonts, not some kind of special font to treat half width as full width.

Realistically it’s only katakana that you can make this mixup on. My desktop IME will let me type カタカナ or (reluctantly) ｶﾀｶﾅ, though it turns out iOS doesn’t have a way to type the half width kana, and IMEs have differing opinions on if they prefer full width digits, so you might see full width numbers like ５０００。
by eurleif | 2025-12-04 10:43:52+00:00
When I was visiting home last year, I noticed my mom would throw her dog's poop in random peoples' bushes after picking it up, instead of taking it with her in a bag. I told her she shouldn't do that, but she said she thought it was fine because people don't walk in bushes, and so they won't step in the poop. I did my best to explain to her that 1) kids play all kinds of places, including in bushes; 2) rain can spread it around into the rest of the person's yard; and 3) you need to respect other peoples' property even if you think it won't matter. She was unconvinced, but said she'd "think about my perspective" and "look it up" whether I was right.

A few days later, she told me: "I asked AI and you were right about the dog poop". Really bizarre to me. I gave her the reasoning for why it's a bad thing to do, but she wouldn't accept it until she heard it from this "moral authority".
by dominicrose | 2025-12-04 10:44:29+00:00
The current rate in France is more or less 3.2% for 25 years. It's better than the rates we see on this page but as someone who bought at a rate of 1% (1.75% real rate, something like that) I strongly advise people not to have a 33% debt ratio.

This is the max allowed by banks but it's a huge risk compared to renting which is basically risk-free. Buying something less expensive to have a smaller debt ratio may be better than renting.

ps: comparing rates alone isn't fair because Europe has a lot more taxes
by DVoidCreationz | 2025-12-04 10:44:29+00:00
We're at a convergence point: AI capability doubling every 6 months, climate tipping points approaching by 2030, and social trust collapsing globally. We have roughly 5-10 years to consciously navigate this transition. I'm an architect, system deconstructor, and former psychonaut. I spent over a decade introspecting and observing how human systems work—through personal experience, professional practice, and deep contemplation. Then, in the last 2 years, I went all in: full days, every day, compiling everything into a complete framework. The result is The Eternal Canvas: 85 interconnected documents containing:

The mechanism: All systems run on Protocol F (extractive/power-over) or Protocol G (generative/power-with). Everything downstream flows from this. The diagnosis: Three crises converging, why most people don't see it, and the narrow window we have. The solution: Practical frameworks from personal to planetary scale—how to shift organizations, communities, and systems from F to G. Real implementations: Complete designs for non-exploitative apps, games, and platforms (conservation gaming, truth-seeking tools, creator liberation systems).

This isn't philosophy. It's emergency systems engineering. A decade of lived experience distilled through 2 years of full-time, obsessive documentation. The vault is completely open source. 45-minute critical path for newcomers, 20+ hours of deep frameworks for builders. Explore the vault: https://publish.obsidian.md/thecanvas
by FahadHafeezOff | 2025-12-04 10:44:40+00:00
Khwand AI is a personalized learning coach that adapts to each student’s goals, syllabus, and learning style.

We completed our closed beta recently, and we’re officially launching on December 23rd. Early users have already tested the core features, and we’re now opening it to everyone.

Khwand AI creates a tailored learning profile using a quick onboarding flow or an uploaded syllabus. It then uses that profile to deliver personalized explanations, diagrams, flashcards, and study plans for university students and self-learners.

Key features:

Personalized AI chat built on a 55-question onboarding profile

Enhanced deep web search with clusters, reliability and bias scores on sources

Complexity level toggle, add/update/edit/delete/search memories

Learning progress tracking

Smart, learning-style-aware explanations

We’re excited to share this and would love feedback from the HN community. Happy to answer any questions.
by inkyoto | 2025-12-04 10:44:50+00:00
> So no, there are plenty of easy ways to fool the optimizer by obfuscation.

If you mean fooling the compiler by the source code obfuscation, it won't – by the time the first optimisation pass arrives, the source had already been transformed into an abstract syntax tree and the source code obfuscation becomes irrelevant.

Multiple optimiser passes do take place, but they are bounded in time – it is not an accepted expectation that the optimiser will spend a – theoretically – indefinite amount of time trying to arrive at the most perfect instruction sequence.

There was a GNU project a long time ago, «superoptimiser», which, given a sequence of instructions, would spend a very long time trying to optimise it into oblivion. The project was more of an academic exercise, and it has been long abandoned since.
by cpach | 2025-12-04 10:44:52+00:00
“is anyone really writing code from scratch”

Oh yeah, lots of people do. I have friends that hate AI and refuse to use it at all.

However, I guess it depends on what you mean with “from scratch”. In a corporate context, I would say most code-writing is fixing bugs or adding features to an existing project.

“Am I wasting time doing these exercises when they can easily be done with LLM within one or two shots?”

Depends on what your goal is. If you want to get better at programming, how would you get better if you don’t let your neurons form new pathways? However, perhaps you are more interested in the output and not in the process. But some day, you might need to debug your code, and then those pathways in your brain might come handy.
by adinagoerres | 2025-12-04 10:45:19+00:00
How well can agents work with APIs they’ve never seen before? We tested 41 APIs across 8 different LLMs to find out.

API execution is great for benchmarking, because it tests core qualities and limitations of LLMs:_the depth of the data they were trained on, their stateless architecture, context dependency, and reasoning.

Today we're releasing v2 of API-Bench:_a benchmark that tests how well LLMs can execute against APIs. Here are the results: https://superglue.ai/benchmark_v2

Tl;dr:_LLMs fail at integrations because they lack ground truth, lack state, lack debugging ability, and lack access to real system context - everything API integrations fundamentally require.

Here’s what we found:

1. LLMs are only as good as the data they’re trained on:_when docs change, APIs evolve, or systems are niche/long-tail, they use outdated patterns, guess missing pieces and hallucinate endpoints and parameters.

2. LLMs are stateless, but integrations are stateful:_auth handshakes, pagination, retries, multi-step flows all need memory but LLMs can’t persist intermediate values or reason across steps.

3. LLMs produce code that “looks right” but fails at runtime: LLMs cannot isolate the failing step and understand real error messages, so they can’t change what’s broken or retry with new hypotheses.

4. LLMs can’t reliably interpret imperfect API design:_humans can infer the intended function, LLMs will hallucinate what looks reasonable.

We open sourced the benchmark so you can test your own APIs or contribute new ones: https://github.com/superglue-ai/superglue/tree/main/eval/llm...

Curious to hear your experience, and of course always happy to share more learnings.