MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altmanaltman | 2025-12-03 07:00:32+00:00
> As discussed previously, OpenAI lost $5 billion and Anthropic $5.3 billion in 2024, with OpenAI expecting to lose upwards of $8 billion and Anthropic — somehow — only losing $3 billion in 2025. I have severe doubts that these numbers are realistic, with OpenAI burning at least $3 billion in cash on salaries this year alone, and Anthropic somehow burning two billion dollars less on revenue that has, if you believe its leaks, increased 500% since the beginning of the year.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on...
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-03 07:00:35+00:00
We already had 'low effort' mail queues (for things like password reset emails: these are retried 1/2/4/8 minutes apart and don't generate bounces, other than an API flag and a metrics record), to which we added 'least effort' for DMARC reports. Retry once, then forget about the entire thing other than incrementing a counter for the destination domain.
by gloosx | 2025-12-03 07:00:36+00:00
Try to ask it to write some GLSL shaders. Just describe what you want to see and then try to run the shaders it outputs. It can output a UV-map or the simple gradient right, but when it comes to shaders a bit more complex it most of the time will not compile or run properly, sometimes mix GLSL versions, sometimes just straight make up things which don't work or output what you want.
by XorNot | 2025-12-03 07:01:15+00:00
Maybe but there's no reason to think that's the case here rather then the models just acting out typical corpus storylines: the Internet is full of stories with this structure.

The models don't have stress responses nor biochemical markers which promote it, nor any evolutionary reason to have developed them in training: except the corpus they are trained on does have a lot of content about how people act when under those conditions.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-03 07:01:17+00:00
Indeed, I was part of this generation, the first real computer I got, by opposition to build your own kits from electronic stores, was the Timex 2068 from that same factory.

Only recently I got to understand Timex spotlight in USA was long gone, while in the Iberian Penisula it was still all over the place, alongside ZX Spectrums and some MSX models.

I never knew anyone with a C64 back then.

Then the next computing wave was mostly Amiga, there were some people with Sam Coupe, until Windows 3.1 came to be, which is when I left my dear Timex 2068 into PC land, buying on credit, hardly anyone could afford paying on the spot.
by Someone | 2025-12-03 07:01:28+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess:

“Advanced chess is a form of chess in which each human player uses a computer chess engine to explore the possible results of candidate moves. With this computer assistance, the human player controls and decides the game.

Also called cyborg chess or centaur chess, advanced chess was introduced for the first time by grandmaster Garry Kasparov, with the aim of bringing together human and computer skills to achieve the following results:

- increasing the level of play to heights never before seen in chess;

- producing blunder-free games with the qualities and the beauty of both perfect tactical play and highly meaningful strategic plans;

- offering the public an overview of the mental processes of strong human chess players and powerful chess computers, and the combination of their forces.”
by hxtk | 2025-12-03 07:01:44+00:00
The problem with function coloring is that it makes libraries difficult to implement in a way that's compatible with both sync and async code.

In Python, I needed to write both sync and async API clients for some HTTP thing where the logical operations were composed of several sequential HTTP requests, and doing so meant that I needed to implement the core business logic as a Generator that yields requests and accepts responses before ultimately returning the final result, and then wrote sync and async drivers that each ran the generator in a loop, pulling requests off, transacting them with their HTTP implementation, and feeding the responses back to the generator.

This sans-IO approach, where the library separates business logic from IO and then either provides or asks the caller to implement their own simple event loop for performing IO in their chosen method and feeding it to the business logic state machine, has started to appear as a solution to function coloring in Rust, but it's somewhat of an obtuse way to support multiple IO concurrency strategies.

On the other hand, I do find it an extremely useful pattern for testability, because it results in very fuzz-friendly business logic implementation, isolated side-effect code, and a very simple core IO loop without much room in it for bugs, so despite being somewhat of a pain to write I still find it desirable at times even when I only need to support one of the two function colors.
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-03 07:02:12+00:00
Hmm, I would characterize FAANG employment differently.

The overwhelming commonality is class. They get people from sophisticated backgrounds who have aspirations and status.

And I think that has value in that employees act in generally trustworthy, and orderly manner, and cultivate tastes and interests that appeal to other people with money.

The exceptional programmer genius with mild Asperger’s from unknown background also exist. It’s just really rare and they kind of don’t fit in.

There just isn’t a pipeline for finding and recruiting those types, and there is for upper middle class kids.
by hintymad | 2025-12-03 07:02:25+00:00
> That’s not to say that there aren’t people within those companies who care about employee development, but the system isn’t set up for that to be the companies’ top priority.

There has been a cultural shift too. I don't know when it got started, but at least employees in the tech companies started to get more and more obsessed with promotions. The so-called career development is nothing but a coded phrase for getting promoted. Managers use promotion as a tool to retain talent and to expand their territories. Companies adopted to this culture too. As a result, people development increasingly became a lip service.
by js8 | 2025-12-03 07:03:32+00:00
CMIIW currently AI models operate in two distinct modes:

1. Open mode during learning, where they take everything that comes from the data as 100% truth. The model freely adapts and generalizes with no constraints on consistency.

2. Closed mode during inference, where they take everything that comes from the model as 100% truth. The model doesn't adapt and behaves consistently even if in contradiction with the new information.

I suspect we need to run the model in the mix of the two modes, and possibly some kind of "meta attention" (epistemological) on which parts of the input the model should be "open" (learn from it) and which parts of the input should be "closed" (stick to it).
by sneak | 2025-12-03 07:03:44+00:00
This argument depends on the idea that someone’s creative work output being used for AI training somehow deprives them of benefit from that creative work output - the basic idea behind “copyright infringement is stealing”. This is not to agree that AI training is copyright infringement, just that it depends on the same concept of intellectual property.

I don’t subscribe to this basic idea. Copyrights are a legal fiction designed to prop up an industry. Somehow from that we went to the idea that creative work output is property. It isn’t. It’s a service. This is why “works made for hire” is a thing.

This is the same reason that reasonable people don’t believe that fanfic authors should be jailed.
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-03 07:04:17+00:00
These are some really good points.

- WAL checkpointing is very important (litestream handles this well). As you said not checkpointing can cause massive query slow down.

- SQLITE_LOCK and SQLITE_BUSY can be avoided by ensuring your application only has a single write connection ideally behind an MPSC queue. After WAL this is probably one of the biggest SQLite quality of life improvements.

- 100% avoid cloud drives in this context you ideally want attached NVME.

- Postgres is great and there's nothing wrong with using it!
by palmotea | 2025-12-03 07:04:57+00:00
> An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand.

1) I think it's the destruction of our value, as workers. Without an unthinkable change in society, we'll be discarded.

2) I think it will also destroy the unrealized value of not-yet-created work, first by overwhelming everything with a firehouse mediocre slop, then by disincentivizing the development of human talent and skill (because it will be an easy button that removes the incentives to do that). AI will exceed humans primarily by making humans dumber, not by exceeding humans' present-day capabilities. Eventually creative output will settle at some crappy, derivative level without any peaks that rise above that.
by defrost | 2025-12-03 07:05:17+00:00
They have their issues ...

Bindoon: * https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/brother-kea...

Castledare: * https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39131761

Clontarf: * https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/entity/clontarf/

St Augustine’s / Marcellin College : * https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/father-terr...

Not just Catholic schools, of course - but they certainly swept the boards and came first by a good margin: https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/case-studies

They were very good at keeping it under wraps for decades though.
by lucaherrorpress | 2025-12-03 07:06:27+00:00
You're right - I used Claude heavily as an editor and co-writer in my 'Industrial AI Publishing' model. I generated drafts with GPT, then refined everything with Claude for tone and coherence. I was transparent about this process because I thought 'AI-assisted satire about AI' was meta-interesting. But maybe that's exactly why it doesn't sell: people smell the AI sycophancy you mentioned. The brutal question: can AI-assisted satire ever feel genuinely sharp, or does the tool's politeness always dull the blade? I'm starting to suspect the latter.
by weaksauce | 2025-12-03 07:06:59+00:00
> Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine.

i don't think you have a good grasp of why that it was ok for outdoor protests to happen but people should not go out into crowded buildings. the chance of you getting sick from a protest is much less than the chance of you getting sick from going to an indoor gathering at say a club. getting sick is not a binary on or off. it's exposure time and magnitude vs. your immune system's defenses.
by krackers | 2025-12-03 07:07:12+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23514072 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12354494 seem to contradict this and claim that modern intel processors don't use separate AGU for LEA...

Not too versed here, but given that ADD seems to have more execution ports to pick from (e.g. on Skylake), I'm not sure that's an argument in favor of lea. I'd guess that LEA not touching flags and consuming fewer uops (comparing a single simple LEA to 2 ADDs) might be better for out of order execution though (no dependencies, friendlier to reorder buffer)
by uecker | 2025-12-03 07:07:16+00:00
I am not sure. I saw quite a few of these bugs where programmers were told it is UB but it isn't.

For example, people showed me

extern void g(int x); int f(int a, int b) { g(b ? 42 : 43); return a / b; }

as an example on how compilers exploit "time-travelling" UB to optimize code, but it is just a compiler bug that got fixed once I reported it:

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Invalid-optimi...

Other compilers have similar issues.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-03 07:07:47+00:00
>offering to double the salary in case of success

have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill

>sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them

do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work?

>in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.

not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
by andersmurphy | 2025-12-03 07:07:54+00:00
You don't need to truncate the WAL, you can checkpoint PASSIVE and the WAL will be overwritten (so your queries won't slow). Generally if you're using litestream for backups it will do checkpointing for you. If you aren't depending on the after each batch (always be batching!) works well too.

I'd say the hardest part of using SQLite is its defaults are rough, and a lot of drivers don't handle batching for you.
by sneak | 2025-12-03 07:08:10+00:00
There is a very strong argument that if your work output can be discarded effectively in favor of a firehose of mediocre slop, then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life.

The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel this way.
by antonvs | 2025-12-03 07:09:25+00:00
The new title may still be misleading. Have you tested this on MS-DOS with 1993 hardware?

On Linux, `sndserver` is a separate process. On MS-DOS, it was not. On DOS, priority mixing would have to happen e.g. within Doom's tick processing or in the sound interrupt handler.

If you're just making these changes in Linux and assuming they could have worked in 1993, you're just cosplaying.
by erikerikson | 2025-12-03 07:09:30+00:00
Given the context, I'd say vulnerability is a bundle concept used on average to hold a set of mostly unconsciously contradictory demands by women asking to have their needs met but in my experience not able nor willing to keep their side of the bargain but merely reciting their cue. Still, I'm not responding again to write more myself...

What do you think of vulnerability or whatever the thing you think we are discussing means to you?
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-03 07:10:12+00:00
> Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too.

What you’re sensing is that things that were luxuries are now not. It’s not a big deal to pay $500 for the quartz countertops when your house is $800k.

What has gone up is the cost of essentials and the base level of goods to participate in society: housing, transportation, medicine, and education.

So yeah a TV you thought was untouchable is 3 days of minimum wage work. But it’s orthogonal to why people feel economically disposssed.
by curioussquirrel | 2025-12-03 07:10:21+00:00
This is probably not a core concern for most HN readers, but at work we do multilingual testing for synthetic text data generation and natural language processing. Emphasis on multilingual. Gemini has made some serious leaps from 1.5 to 2.5 and now 3.0, and is actually proficient in languages that other models can only dream of. On the other hand, GPT-5 has a really mixed performance in a lot of categories.
by palmotea | 2025-12-03 07:10:32+00:00
> There is a very strong argument that if your work output can be discarded effectively in favor of a firehose of mediocre slop...

> The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel this way.

Have you ever worked for an American company? They almost always choose slop over quality. Why should an executive hire employ a skilled American software engineer, when he can fire him and hire three offshore engineers who don't really know what they're doing for half the price? Things won't blow up immediately, there's a chance they'll just limp along in a degraded state, and by then executive will be off somewhere else with a bonus in his pocket.

Also, how many people are "truly creative" and how does that compare to the number of people who have to eat?

> then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life.

And what should they do then? Sit around jerking off under a bridge?

There's no "moral imperative" to cast people off into poverty. And that's what will happen: there will be no retraining, no effort to find roles for the displaced people. They'll just be discarded. That's a "terrible waste of a human life."
by another_twist | 2025-12-03 07:10:39+00:00
True no one involved in Scale AI right now is a kid. But, their expertise is in data labelling not cutting edge AI. Compare that to the Mistral team. They launched a new LLM within 6months of founding. They're also ex-Meta researchers. But they dont have the distribution coz europe. If we want to tout 13B acqusitions and 100m pay packages, Mistral is the perfect candidate. Its basically plug and play. Compare that to Scale and the shitshow that ensued. MSL lost talent and have to start from scratch given that their head knows nothing about LLMs.
by chroma205 | 2025-12-03 07:10:40+00:00
> I guess that's mostly true, but why does Jane Street get to have a moat in models but LLM companies can't?

Common misconception by people outside quant trading.

Modern “alpha” in trading does not come from better models but rather business connections with exchanges and regulators for preferential fees and/or revenue agreements.

If you are a “lead market maker” like Jane Street for ETFs, you can effectively skip the FIFO queue that retail traders and large passive index funds (VTI, VOO) must wait in.

Citadel has exclusive contracts to execute PFOF trades with e.g. Schwab. Even a simple exponential moving average model can be profitable with such a business arrangement.

OpenAI and Sam Altman tried to cut a deal (threaten?) with the US government, but looks like US government called Sam’s bluff.
by Sophira | 2025-12-03 07:11:04+00:00
At least in some circles, the real meaning of "end-to-end encryption" was being addressed. For example, in the field of credit card processing, here's an article from 2009 which talks about how people back then were misusing the term: https://web.archive.org/web/20090927092231/http://informatio...

Granted, it's a marketing piece trying to sell a product, but still.
by timcambrant | 2025-12-03 07:11:26+00:00
What is the use case for bundling next.js with the web game? Just the layout of the page surrounding the game canvas? It just seems unnecessary, that's all. Traditionally, software development in general and game development in particular has tried to avoid unnecessary overhead if it doesn't provide enough value to the finished product.

It's obvious why he didn't write the game in x86 assembly. It's also obvious why he didn't burn the game to CD-ROM and ship it to toy stores in big box format. Instead he developed it for the web, saving money and shortening the iteration time. The same question could be asked about next.js and especially about taking the time to develop Bun rather than just scrapping next.js for his game and going about his day. It's excellent for him that he did go this route of course, but in my opinion it was a strange path towards building this product.
by jameslk | 2025-12-03 07:11:39+00:00
> Most soldiers were just ordinary untrained men.

It’s unclear what era or region you’re talking about, but during the High Middle Ages in Europe before democracy existed, which is what I was referring to, training depended on social standing. For knights, this was a career. Regardless, training is not that important when the weapons themselves were inaccessible. Easy access to easy to use weapons helped change bargaining power for the masses

To be clear, this was not the only reason I claimed democracy spread. It’s partly why

But anyway, give a few companies all the “powerful AI” I guess, for “safety”
by barrell | 2025-12-03 07:12:12+00:00
But that is exactly the promise that the heads of the AI labs are making. Sam Altman is repeatedly saying he wants to be able to ask it "go discover a new branch of physics".

Perhaps it's not how you use LLMs, but it is the promise of AI.

For the record, I make a distinction between LLMs (a current tool that we have today) and AI (a promise of some mystical all-powerful science-fiction entity).

There is nothing intelligent about what we have today, artificial or otherwise.
by sneak | 2025-12-03 07:12:20+00:00
Everyone productive and working can afford a house with a yard now. You’ll be a few dozen miles from others.

If you want everyone to be able to afford a house with a yard within walking distance of downtown Palo Alto, there aren’t enough of them for everyone that wants to do that, and AI (and utopia) can’t change that. Proximity to others creates scarcity because of basic physical laws. This is why California is expensive.

This is something I always wondered about in Banks’ post-scarcity utopian Culture novels. How do they decide who gets to live next door to the coolest/best restaurant or bar or social gathering place? Does Hub (the AI that runs the habitat, and notionally is the city) simply decide and adjudicate like a dictator or king?
by mdhb | 2025-12-03 07:12:36+00:00
I genuinely don’t understand this sentiment at all. Typescript looks great when you put it next to JavaScript in most cases. And looks like shit when you put it next to any other modern language that emerged from a similar time frame (Kotlin, Dart, Swift etc..)

I really don’t see TypeScript destined for long term success with the rise of Wasm on the web. It is only where it is currently because it has operated at a huge advantage of being the only viable solution to a problem that every web developer has needed.

I say this as someone who writes a lot of typescript professionally and a lot of Dart for everything else I possibly can. The difference between the two is huge on almost every factor I can think of where Dart wins by a considerable margin. I’m thankful that Typescript existed at a time when it did but I don’t think it’s in anyway actually a good or sensible language (because it’s so closely to JavaScript) and I can’t wait to not have to use it in the future because better options exist and are becoming viable for more use cases.
by rustystump | 2025-12-03 07:13:30+00:00
Perhaps i am a bit odd but i dont understood this take. Why do you do what you do? Why do you create anything?

Since before ai all my tiny little works have been public domain and it tickles me pink when i see something of mine out in the wild.

Journey before destination.

With that said though, the people who press the button and fashion themselves creatives piss me off. Heck anyone who has more than a passing interest in gen ai art disappoints me. After all, what is interesting about printing the Mona Lisa compared to creating your own shitty version by hand?