MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-12-18 01:40:51+00:00
> It’s all fun and games until it’s taking your stuff to give to a bunch of currently homeless folks.

Expropriation mostly means taking from corporations and giving to everyone, and maybe you're in a more developed nation but in the USA that would just mean giving it to nearly the majority of the people there. E.g. clearing out grocery stores and giving people food, and moving people from slums into empty luxury condos. Plenty of housing to fit the homeless as well, but they're a small slice.

If the PRC isn't capitalist, neither is the USA. Market dynamics drive everything in the USA, they have a concept of private property (no 99 year rule has triggered), and the means of production are owned by a capital class that uses it to exploit labor for further profit. Just because they have strong regulations and the government injects money all over the place doesn't mean it's not capitalist. It's just like a supercharged version of some highly socialized version of a European nation, plus an oversized secret police operation, but that's more on the political side than the economic one.

> It would require ignoring human nature. After all, why would the folks whose property gets expropriated go along with this?

Mostly corporations, so, capitalism over, so, nothing lol. If you mean their billionaire owners, I guess they would probably be keeping their heads down in this kind of situation. The idea is the improvement of quality of life for all people, even the billionaire class could hardly complain at a massive reduction in poverty and thus crime.

They've been stealing for the majority of people for so long I think it's only fair to expropriate it back.

But ok, how do you shift the entire world off fossil fuels without dismantling capitalism? What profit motive would drive someone to choose a more expensive energy solution that requires reconfiguring equipment?
by BeauGiles | 2025-12-18 01:41:01+00:00
In Australia, we often have bonus offers on Apple Gift Cards, from the merchant/retailer.

This could include a "real" cash discount of ~8-10% (eg, buy a $100 card for $92), or loyalty points.

Our supermarkets often have a "20x" bonus points promotion, which is effectively 10% off a future shop - eg, buy a $100 Apple gift card, get $10 off a future shop in loyalty points. Buy $1000, get $100 off, etc.

Or, if you're a frequent flyer, earn Qantas points - buy a $2000 gift card, get 20,000 in QFF points - that on its own is some one way/return domestic flights, or halfway to Honolulu (one way), if you were going to spend $2000 on a new iPhone, Mac, iCloud etc anyway.

https://gcdb.com.au/gc/apple/ has been documenting all the recent offers for Australia.
by thecolorblue | 2025-12-18 01:41:38+00:00
I have been working on my own language arts app for k-12 (https://snowdayacademy.com). In my experience, if it's not fun or rewarding, nobody is going to use it. Most of my users are parents that want their kid to get better grades, or the students want a better studying experience. So, for me its a combination of interesting content, UX, and better feedback than doing a worksheet.

I have been testing it with my two daughters and they make it very clear when its to painful to be useful.

The other thing that worked for me was talking to experts, in my case reading specialists.
by nerdponx | 2025-12-18 01:42:00+00:00
Remember when the whole reason people liked Firefox is that it was super customizable? There was a time when it was THE power user browser. Things only went sideways after Chrome came out.

Firefox literally was a mainstream browser at one point. Internet Explorer sucked. Safari didn't suck but it was nobody's favorite either except some really hard-core Apple fans.

Yes, Chrome was revolutionary when it came out. And yes, Firefox seemed to struggle with legacy architectural decisions that limited their ability to catch up. But Firefox was still differentiated and had a loyal fan base. Loyal fan base is exactly what can keep a project or product alive through a downturn. All they had to do was focus on the browser. They did some great things along the way like popularizing DoH. But it's 2025 and there's still no UI for switching profiles that any normal person might be able or want to use. Can you really blame people for giving up?
by eek2121 | 2025-12-18 01:42:14+00:00
I know hearing this gets old, however, please review sources outside of LLMs for accuracy. LLMs take a whole bunch off stuff from all over the internet and distill it down to something you can consume. Those sources include everything from reddit to a certain de-wormer that folks still think treats COVID (side note: I've a few long COVID victims in a support group I am in, and they are not happy about the disinfo that was spread, at any rate)...LLMs/"AI" does not and cannot innovate, it can only take all existing information it knows, mash it all together, and present you with a result according to what the model is trained on.

I'm not against AI summaries being on HN, however, users should verify and cite sources so others can verify.

However, I'm just a normal nerd that wants to fact check stuff. Perhaps I'm wrong in wanting to do this. We'll see.
by nl | 2025-12-18 01:42:43+00:00
> GPUs are necessarily higher latency than TPUs for equivalent compute on equivalent data.

Where are you getting that? All the citations I've seen say the opposite, eg:

> Inference Workloads: NVIDIA GPUs typically offer lower latency for real-time inference tasks, particularly when leveraging features like NVIDIA's TensorRT for optimized model deployment. TPUs may introduce higher latency in dynamic or low-batch-size inference due to their batch-oriented design.

https://massedcompute.com/faq-answers/

> The only non-TPU fast models I'm aware of are things running on Cerebras can be much faster because of their CPUs, and Grok has a super fast mode, but they have a cheat code of ignoring guardrails and making up their own world knowledge.

Both Cerebras and Grok have custom AI-processing hardware (not CPUs).

The knowledge grounding thing seems unrelated to the hardware, unless you mean something I'm missing.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-12-18 01:42:48+00:00
Functions return a value, subroutines do not. So functions can, at the whim of the compiler, cause an extra copy.

Style wise, many prefer to reserve functions for things that resemble mathematical functions (i.e. only intent(in) and pure). In some sense a little bit similar to how people tend to use lambdas in python.
by Maxatar | 2025-12-18 01:43:38+00:00
So I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd fire someone for copying and pasting code, but it's definitely part of my company's culture that copying and pasting code off of a website, and especially executing it, is something heavily discouraged to the point that it doesn't really happen at my job.

I'm perfectly happy to use Stack Overflow and other resources/tutorials, blog posts etc... to find solutions to problems, but just instinctively I would never think to copy and paste a solution from these sites and incorporate it into my codebase and I sure as heck wouldn't think to execute code from some untrusted site I happened to come across.

But this may also be a consequence of the domain I work in where we take security very seriously.
by newZWhoDis | 2025-12-18 01:44:36+00:00
I'll post some inside baseball:

Almost everyone in ecom is running every ad network integration they can, no matter the source of traffic.

So if you click a Facebook ad, load a website, enter your information/checkout ALL of your information goes to every other network they integrate with.

You might never use TikTok, you might have every Facebook domain blacklisted, but when you clicked on a Google search "result" (ad) and checked out everything about your order was sent to meta/tiktok/applovin/400 other "networks" via S2S APIs.

Until this is made illegal, the incentive structure will ALWAYS push marketing departments to do this.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-18 01:45:53+00:00
AI bots post enough content fast enough that the general public learns about the "dead internet" theory.

The Supreme Court rules against Trump in several important cases (tariffs and birthright citizenship, and a couple of others).

Trump threatens to arrest at least one big tech executive.

LLMs continue to improve, but the rate becomes slow enough that most people realize that AGI is not just around the corner.
by gchamonlive | 2025-12-18 01:46:18+00:00
> But a specialist will be applying intelligence to the data. An LLM is just generating random text strings that sound good.

I'd only make such a claim if I could demonstrate that human text is a result of intelligence and LLMs not, because really, what's the actual difference? How isn't LLM "intelligent" when it can clearly help me make sense of information? Note that this isn't to say that it's conscious or not. But it's definitely intelligent. The text output is not only coherent, it's right often enough to be useful.

Curiously, I'm human, and I'm wrong a lot, but I'm right often enough to be a developer.
by karakoram | 2025-12-18 01:47:57+00:00
Yeah Austin is the first city that comes to mind. Everyone that was screaming "California is dead" in 2020-22 mostly moved to Austin.

Ironically, many have moved back to Cal/SF for the AI boom.

Your last point is really valid. I think these "remote boom cities" were only "Covid Boom cities" and that kind of grow is just not sustainable for these cities anymore.
by decotz | 2025-12-18 01:48:14+00:00
yeah. cringe. I debate with myself is this Aghata can truly be trusted to be > I need to find the secret traveling farther than it should, the data leaking where it shouldn’t, the assumption I made that an attacker won’t make. I need to be paranoid on behalf of the users whose data and trust I’m protecting.

at the end of the day its still an llm. but hey, I want to call Claude _Claudius_ all the time but I don't cause it'll shut me down real quick
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-18 01:48:28+00:00
> I thought it was mainly being expelled after the creation of Israel.

Fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe was one of the main reason for immigration to Palestine prior to Israeli independence and a big reason Zionism as a movement started in the first place. The immigration quotas on Jews by countries like the US(which was the preferred destination for those fleeing pogroms) was another factor that encouraged Zionism as well. The immigration by Jews from middle eastern countries was largely after the Israeli independence.

> Sometimes with encouragement of Israel.

There were push and pull factors, but push factors like the extreme anti-semitism throughout the middle east and north Africa subsequent to Israeli independence made it effectively inevitable that Jews would have to either move to Israel or leave the middle east/north Africa entirely.

> Israel rather than being the victim of racism is a major perpetrator of it.

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel is itself a form of anti-semitism that's widespread throughout the world and especially the middle east.

> In fact, the Israel project foments anti Semitism around the world.

It's entirely reasonable that Jewish refugees would want a right to self determination after what happened to them in the pogroms and Holocaust.

> This is especially sad for those non-Zionist Jews who want to live their lives in peace free of discrimination.

Zionism is really only a thing because of anti-semitism. Jews have not had a good history living as minorities in much of the world.
by lelandfe | 2025-12-18 01:49:13+00:00
> get desktop audio for screen recording with QuickTime

A famously missing macOS feature. Loopback is yonder: https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/

> the shortcut to stop screen recording on QuickTime sucks, it’s like CMD+CTRL+ESC

I just stop it from the menu bar, then on the resultant video press Cmd-T (trim) to lop off that footage.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-12-18 01:49:23+00:00
Hardly taking this personally. Just calling out how I see it going most likely. Also... Nvidia has done quite a bit unethically. Namely violating anti-monopoly laws (though with our current US administration - they may as well be not worth the paper they are printed on), screwing with product reviewers, pulling a 90s-era Microsoft to obliterate their competition at all costs, and screwing over their board partners, like EVGA. GamersNexus on Youtube has covered plenty of this.

That said, although AI has some uniquely good applications, this AI mania is feeding into some ridiculous corporate feedback loop that is having a negative impact on the consumer.

Having to pay several thousands of dollars for a top tier consumer GeForce when it was possible to do the same with only a few hundred dollars less than a decade ago is telling me the customer is being taken for a ride. It stinks.
by rudnevr | 2025-12-18 01:49:39+00:00
I don't know, I've always thought that junior problem was mostly non-technical, kids issues: overconfidence, love for shortcuts, sense of entitlement, arrogance, lack of communication and respect of colleagues, including fellow juniors and seniors, aversion to holy wars, lack of compromise and team discipline, disrespect to existing solutions, laziness in following-up post-delivery, negligent edge case checking, being opinionated about tooling, languages and whatnot. Very little of this can be fixed with AI, and many things can be easily amplified. I mean, one junior with AI vs one senior with AI might yield comparable results, but seven juniors with AI vs seven seniors with AI should fail pretty fast.
by Morromist | 2025-12-18 01:51:49+00:00
Thanks for publishing this. People will complain about your metrics, but I would say its just useful to have metrics of any kind at this point. People talk a lot about AI coding today without having any data, just thousands of anecdotes. This is like a glass of pure water in a desert.

I'm a bit of an AI coding skeptic btw, but I'm open to being convinced as the technology matures.

I actually think LOC is a useful metric. It may or may not be a positive thing to have more LOC, but its data, and that's great.

I would be interested in seeing how AI has changed coding trends. Are some languages not being used as much because they work poorly with AI? How much is the average script length changing over time? Stuff like that. Also how often is code being deleted and rewritten - that might not be easy to figure out, but it would be interesting.
by j45 | 2025-12-18 01:51:53+00:00
Been running production servers for a long time.

DNS is no issue. External DNS can be handled by Cloudflare and their waf. Their DNS service can can obsfucate your public IP, or ideally not need to use it at all with a Cloudflare tunnel installed directly on the server. This is free.

Backend access trivial with Tailscale, etc.

Public IP doesn't always need to be used. You can just leave it an internal IP if you really want.
by ksec | 2025-12-18 01:52:06+00:00
> But you never hear about the probably endless companies and organizations that employ worthless checklists that do nothing but waste people's time.

Most if not all the bad checklist I have encountered are all for the same reason, they were not tested or poorly written, and most of the time both.

Not tested in terms the checklist was written by somebody who doesn't actually know how to do the whole project. Unlike Professionals like Doctor ands Pilot where they are well trained and the check list are well understood to be a reminder. The rational behind it were taught and even if not professionals will question if something they dont understands while most other in there field could immediately give a detail answer.

Another example would be HR writing an on-boarding checklist. 99% of the time I have seen those check list are intended to make HR's life easier. Not the candidate or applicants.

Checklist is also a clear and distilled form of writing. And as the saying goes I dont have time to write you a short letter, but I have time for a long one. Writing short points with clarity takes a long time. And not a skill set everyone process. Nor do they have the time to do it when it is not part of their job or KPI.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-18 01:52:19+00:00
As a rule of thumb, it’s best to assume that all studies like this are in mice or rats unless the headline specifically says “in human trials”.

Murine studies are a dime a dozen and therefore it’s the default assumption when reading research papers. When human trials commence the fact that it’s in humans is a big part of the research and therefore paper titles.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-12-18 01:52:25+00:00
If OpenAI has their IPO, this is likely going to result in retail getting fleeced, given how their return on their investments to date has been absolutely pitiful. They are seeing revenues of around $13 billion for 2025, with an alleged over $100 billion or more by 2030, but the investments they are making are orders of magnitude greater. Who is ultimately going to pay for this?

Surely OpenAI has customers buying their pro packages for ChatGPT, but that can't really be it. And businesses are starting to realize that AI can't replace the workforce that easily either.
by impendia | 2025-12-18 01:52:45+00:00
If I needed something verifiable, or wanted to learn the material in any depth, I would certainly not rely on an AI summary. However, the summary contained links to source material by known experts, and I would cheerfully rely on those.

The same is true if I imagined there would be misleading bullshit out there. In this case, it's hard to imagine that any nonexpert would bother writing about the topic. ("Universal torsor method" in case you're curious.)

I skimmed the AI summary in ten seconds, gained a rough idea of what the speaker was referring to, and then went back to following the lecture.
by gerdesj | 2025-12-18 01:53:07+00:00
Why not have a crack with a local LLM or two? You work in an industry with a lot of money involved.

Recently Apple have released beasties with up to 512GB of RAM. Apples have unified RAM (both for general use and GPU) so that 512GB looks a bit handy, and they have quite a lot of CPU cores too. They are of the order of £10,000. You should be able to run some pretty large models on that.

I've just blown a fair bit of money on network infra (yum: more switches that boot Linux for the control plane and shuffle packets at incredible speeds) at work so will need to wait a bit or perhaps persuade wifie that we really do need a really expensive Apple box at home.

The snag I have is getting over my mild distaste for Apple! I'm sure I'll manage it.
by gbear605 | 2025-12-18 01:54:01+00:00
Given that Americans with and without college degrees are split pretty much 50/50, then we’d expect there to be an equal increase in non-college degrees holder mortality rates if this was caused by changing who got degrees.

I suppose it’s possible that the gender ratio change is the cause of half of the mortality decrease, and the other half is a broad decrease in mortality rates. That would cause it to cancel out in non-college degrees holder mortality holders and double in college degree holders.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-18 01:54:35+00:00
> "When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.'" ... "If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand?"

There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes to HN to create buzz, drive site traffic, do SEO, or market something, whether it be a product or themselves, can expect an extremely frosty reception, particularly since the rate of spam submissions is high lately. And we are certainly not here to be a gauge of interest to any investors.

The one semi-exception is Show HN, which is intended to showcase something interesting that users can play with. There are separate specific guidelines for Show HN submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and tips from the site moderators (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638). Do note that among the tips is the following "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great." If you have questions about the guidelines or tips, the site moderators can be reached through the email on the contact page linked at the bottom of the page.
by j45 | 2025-12-18 01:54:36+00:00
Yes, of course.

Free way - sign up for a cloudflare account. Use the DNS on cloudflare, they wil put their public ip in front of your www.

Level 2 is install the cloudflare tunnel software on your server and you never need to use the public IP.

Backend access securely? Install Tailscale or headscale.

This should cover most web hosting scenarios. If there's additional ports or services, tools like nginx proxy manager (web based) or others can help. Some people put them on a dedicated VPS as a jump machine.

This way using the Public IP can almost be optional and locked down if needed. This is all before running a firewall on it.
by agentultra | 2025-12-18 01:55:24+00:00
When it comes to programming I find speed is of dubious value.

It comes when you already know what you’re doing. Which, if you’re an engineer, you should know what you’re doing according to Hamming.

But then you may not be tackling innovative or interesting problems. Much of software development is research: understanding customers, patterns, systems and so on. You do not know what you are doing, it’s more akin to science.

Then in order to go fast you must sacrifice something. Most people lose the ability to spot details or consider edge cases. They make fast and loose assumptions. And these trade offs blow up much later when the system experiences pressure.

It’s good to iterate and throw out bad ideas quickly for sure. You just have to know what area you’re in. Are you at the stage where you’re an engineer or are you doing more science related work?
by Nifty3929 | 2025-12-18 01:56:09+00:00
It's exactly these kind of issues with statistics that cause us all kinds of problems. I'm glad you pointed this one out.

It reminds me of a YT video I was watching with similar issues about cancer mortality rates. We've been doing all these treatments, and cancer survival rates have been going up. So everybody cheers about how good the treatments are. But when you control for the fact that earlier detection puts more people into the 'cancer' category earlier, causing 'cancer' people to live statistically longer from diagnosis, then the benefits of the treatments mostly go away (for many but not all types of cancer).

And these kinds of misleading issues are all throughout statistics. See Simpson's paradox, etc.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-18 01:56:20+00:00
Prevalence of the disease - if it only impacts 1/100 million, going to be hard to ever find sufficient patient population to test and recoup your investment.

Existing quality of treatments - if there are already efficacious drugs on the market - how sure are you that this new therapy will be best in class? Only being as good as the status quo is not an ideal competitive position. Conversely, if there is an unmet need because a disease is so lethal/debilitating, regulatory agencies can give latitude in approvals.

Likelihood patient compliance - if it is the most effective drug in the world, but requires intravenous infusion six times a day - nobody is going to adhere to that. GLP drugs are effective, but there is a needle-phobia that is preventing patients getting on board with the idea. Which is why there is an arms race for the first company to develop an oral version.

Toxicity - all chemicals are poisonous. Yet some have a lower therapeutic window than others. If you drug does what it should, but if you take 2x as much and it gives you a heart arrhythmia that is going to be a tough approval for anything but the most deadly conditions.