MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bccdee | 2025-12-09 04:41:37+00:00
I don't know if that example is real, but if it is, that's exactly the reason I find AI tools irritating. You do not need six different ways to handle the connection being down, and if you do, you should really factor that out into a connection management layer.

One of my big issues with LLM coding assistants is that they make it easy to write lots & lots of code. Meanwhile, code is a liability, and you should want less of it.
by themafia | 2025-12-09 04:41:49+00:00
> failure of business model and logistics

Just the model. They optimized for tax outcomes. They obviously wanted in on the "Amazon race to the bottom" game.

https://www.leesburg-news.com/2025/11/30/kroger-took-incenti...

> the real issue was delivery distances and times.

Which they could care less about. Where else are you going to go?
by florilegiumson | 2025-12-09 04:43:19+00:00
If AI is really likely to cause a mass extinction event, then non-proliferation becomes critical as it was in the case with nuclear weapons. Otherwise, what does it really mean for AI to "replace people" outside of people needing to retool or socially awkward people having to learn to talk to people better? AI surely will change a lot, but I don't understand the steps needed to get to the highly existential threat that has become a cliché in every "Learn CLAUDE/MCP" ad I see. A period of serious unemployment, sure, but this article is talking about population collapse, as if we are all only being kept alive and fed to increase shareholder value for people several orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, and with more opposable thumbs. Do people think 1.2B people are going to die because of AI? What is the economy but people?
by nowittyusername | 2025-12-09 04:44:05+00:00
My man did you even check my video, did you even try the app. This is not "bug related" nowhere did i say it was a bug. Batch processing is a FEATURE that is intentionally turned on in the inference engine for large scale providers. That does not mean it has to be on. If they turn off batch processing al llm api calls will be 100% deterministic but it will cost them more money to provide the services as now you are stuck with providing 1 api call per GPU. "if I hit the black box twice, I get two different replies" what you are saying here is 100% verifiably wrong. Just because someone chose to turn on a feature in the inference engine to save money does not mean llms are anon deterministic. LLM's are stateless. their weights are froze, you never "run" an LLM, you can only sample it. just like a hologram. and depending on the inference sampling settings you use is what determines the outcome.....
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 04:45:26+00:00
Well for me, all of my actual implementation work has been green field from “git init” and mostly coding around the AWS SDK in the target language and infrastructure as code since AI coding has gotten decent.

I haven’t had to write a line of code in a year. First ChatGPT and more recently Claude Code.

I don’t do “agentic coding”. I keep my hands on the steering wheel and build my abstractions and modules up step by step. I make sure every line of code looks like something I would write.

I’m a staff consultant (cloud + app dev) and always lead projects, discovery and design and depending on the size of the project, do all of the actual hands on work myself.

I would have had to staff at least one maybe two less senior consultants to do the actual hands on work before. It’s actually easier for me to do the work then having to have really detailed requirements and coordinating work (the whole “Mythical Man Month” thing).

FWIW: before the pearl clutching starts, I started coding in assembly in 1986 on an Apple //e and have been delivering production level code since 1996.
by visarga | 2025-12-09 04:45:39+00:00
> It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.

You can definitely use AI and automation to help yourself and your family/community rather than the oligarchs. You set the prompts. If AI is smart enough to do your old job, it is also smart enough to support you be independent.
by lone-cloud | 2025-12-09 04:47:11+00:00
When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS.

"The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor, but he didn't transition to become Sophie Wilson until 9 years after the first release of ARM1 according to Wikipedia.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-12-09 04:47:21+00:00
Yep. Instacart. I work from home and sometimes I don't want to go to the store (or it would be difficult because I'm on Zoom/Teams a lot), but I need vegetables, meat, milk, etc. for cooking.

With Instacart & Costco memberships and also ordering from the local discount grocers, I can get food delivered for less than it costs to actually go to the mainstream grocery stores like Von's, and I don't get bruised eggplants or cilantro that's already going bad. The drivers/shoppers are generally quite good at picking out items that can lead to higher tips (that or they're just in it for the love of good produce, but either way you can often tell they're not randomly loading the bags).
by Duanemclemore | 2025-12-09 04:47:39+00:00
It was! I even remember it was Terrapin LOGO - which amazingly seems to still be around. [0]

None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.

When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.

[0] https://www.terrapinlogo.com/
by AngryData | 2025-12-09 04:47:42+00:00
Except we aren't blameless either for the state North Korea ended up in. We leveled nearly every building in the country, we even targeted rural thatch huts with bombing runs. We dropped so many bombs on North Korea that the bombers started dropping bombs on thrice bombed rubble and open land because they couldn't find any targets left to attack. Why should we be surprised that a strong arm authoritarian leadership rose up among the chaos and put every effort towards military power and obtaining nuclear weapons at the expense of everything else?

I can't even say that they made the wrong decision either, North Korea still exists as an independent nation which is amazing in itself.
by levocardia | 2025-12-09 04:47:54+00:00
This general idea shows up all over the place though. If you do 3D scans on thousands of mammal skulls, you'll find that a few PCs account for the vast majority of the variance. If you do frequency domain analysis of various physiological signals...same thing. Ditto for many, many other natural phenomena in the world. Interesting (maybe not surprising?) to see it in artificial phenomena as well
by osn9363739 | 2025-12-09 04:48:45+00:00
What % of HN is bots/AI do we think? This is the only site I use that has any social part to it, and I'm beginning to think that many of the comments aren't real. I don't know if it's in my head - but it all feels off to me. Either that or it's just a different crowd from years ago.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-09 04:48:54+00:00
I've worked in similar scenarios and advocated for the Safari subscription. The most obvious problem with the physical book solution is that not everyone can read the same book at the same time. In my experience it's very common that, because some topic is particularly relevant for the team, many people will want to read the same book. At the same time, you do not want 30 copies of a book that was read by everyone 3 years ago sitting on the shelf.

And, as far as expenses go for a research institute, $4k/mo is very inexpensive.
by vel0city | 2025-12-09 04:49:41+00:00
I had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data.

I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally.

I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.
by justinram11 | 2025-12-09 04:49:52+00:00
This was around 2020-2022 during COVID, but the whole process from start to finish from Taiwan took a little over two years for us (we had issues with the financial supporting documents that took 3 months round trip twice to get resolved -- so potentially would have been closer to 18 months had we done everything correctly).

Extremely frustrating process to say the least (my Taiwan resident card was sorted in less than a month).
by bruce511 | 2025-12-09 04:49:52+00:00
Your analogy is apt, but can be extended a bit further to show why MS is so successful.

Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered.

Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland.

You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price.

Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.)

I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days.

The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way.

And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
by casparvitch | 2025-12-09 04:50:04+00:00
Statistical algorithms always make more concrete assumptions of the signal. DFT / Fourier transforms are great as they are a direct mathematical operation, that maps neatly to (basic) equations. There's a lot you can do, and easily grok, with FTs. Once you get statistical, a lot of things are harder :)

If you want pure performance, and understand the underlying statistical processes, then sure I totally agree with you.
by dmayle | 2025-12-09 04:50:49+00:00
I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).

We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:

1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.

I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.

If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)
by aerostable_slug | 2025-12-09 04:51:12+00:00
They could if there are human pickers.

In any event, delivery doesn't always mean the worst of the produce aisle, and while I noted that the incentive of tips might not transfer to robots, keeping repeat customers might be enough incentive for a way to be found to not make robots and grocery synonymous with only frozen food. That might mean human pickers; better automation on the food selection system; pre-inspected, washed and packaged fruits & veggies; etc.
by concinds | 2025-12-09 04:51:30+00:00
> It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so?

This is a pet peeve of mine and it feels like some cargo cult within the UI design "field". There's nothing wrong with the floppy icon. It's perfectly fine. Even if someone doesn't get it, the consistency of its use across apps is enough for its meaning to be clear, which is what really matters.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-09 04:52:26+00:00
A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important.

It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation increased, society seems to have trended in the exact opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most, younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves.

In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to predict what follows.

[1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...
by AngryData | 2025-12-09 04:53:15+00:00
Or how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".
by sebular | 2025-12-09 04:53:49+00:00
Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again.

And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very definition of fault tolerance.

What else could you possibly want?
by re | 2025-12-09 04:53:54+00:00
> HTML4 was the "sloppy" answer to XHTML

I think you mean HTML5, which exhaustively specified how to do parsing in a fault-tolerant, normalizing way. HTML 4 (and 4.01) predated XHTML 1.0, and HTML 4.01 attempted to take things in a stricter direction, introducing a "Strict" DTD that did things like drop the <font> tag, in pursuit of separating structure and presentation.
by refactor_master | 2025-12-09 04:54:51+00:00
> We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years

Still haven’t gotten rid of work for work’s sake being a virtue, which explains everything else. Welfare? You don’t “deserve” it. Until we solve this problem, we’re not or less heading straight for feudalism.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-12-09 04:54:54+00:00
The December updates for Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are available to manually download on Google's website [0], so the updates do exist, although Google might not be rolling them out to the general public quite yet. But the December update for Pixel 7a are completely missing from that website, and trying to update from the Settings app also shows no updates available.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/android/ota
by joquarky | 2025-12-09 04:55:36+00:00
I got crazy obsessed with EvoLisa¹ back in the day and although there is nothing in common between that algorithm and those that make up training an LLM, I can't help but feel like they are similar.

¹ https://www.rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-e...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-09 04:56:00+00:00
I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once."

I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized.

Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".
by jaredhallen | 2025-12-09 04:57:58+00:00
I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated, otherwise maybe you ripped a CD. But still it represented a great state of solid technology (they just played for you without any fuss) and reasonable ownership. Then along came streaming. It does, of course, have its advantages, but they come with many significant drawbacks.
by DesiLurker | 2025-12-09 04:58:16+00:00
to me bigger problem emerges if you assume all those companies in the 'circular financing infographic' as one conglomerate. then essentially all you are left with is real demand for AI & I just dont really see much of it besides Hype and FOMO. that falls away the moment CFOs get 'permission' to ignore the AI growth story. besides that I only see coding bot and openAI's consumer subscription business. I dont see that becoming $1T business anytime soon. so what gives? I think Burry is right but I am not sure of timing because they just need one funder to extend and pretend for a few more quarters & DJT can do it under guise of datacenter jobs etc.

Circular thing is bad too but from a different angle, Imagine if the whole TPU vs GPU thing erodes Nvidia's moat and its profit margins compress. if that happens how long it can keep feeding the same unproductive 'pets.AI' type startups? one break in the narrative and tragedy of commons strikes. will it happen soon? anybody's guess but given Trump is at helm and there is going to be new Fed chief, I doubt it would be anywhere near soon. Definitely not before mid-terms are locked in.
by akshayshah | 2025-12-09 04:58:49+00:00
No. Redpanda has made a lot of noise about this over the years [0], and Confluent's Jack Vanlightly has responded in a fair bit of detail [1].

[0]: https://www.redpanda.com/blog/why-fsync-is-needed-for-data-s...

[1]: https://jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2023/4/24/why-apache-kafka-...
by marcus_holmes | 2025-12-09 04:58:49+00:00
> Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.

I don't disagree, though I'd put it more as "machines cannot take responsibility for decisions, so machines must not have authority to make decisions".

But we've all been in meetings where there are too many people in the room, and only one person's opinion really counts. Replacing those other people with an LLM capable of acting on the decision would be a net positive for everyone involved.
by fma | 2025-12-09 04:59:51+00:00
Or their online groceries didnt succeed because people can p4ice shop. I am of the belief Kroger does well because they obfuscate their prices and their tags which make it seems like they are sales truely are not.

Unlike Publix if I see a discount I know it is a discount. Every other item in Kroger has a yellow tag and a red price to make you think you are getting a deal when in fact the red number is higher than regular price at normal stores.
by petersellers | 2025-12-09 05:00:41+00:00
> Suggesting that personal fulfillment should not be controlled by a corporation is not elitist — it is philosophy.

So now if I choose to play a video game, that means my personal fulfillment is being controlled by a corporation? You seem to be conflating one's agency to choose versus a corporation having utter control over one's choices. Again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but you mentioned being addicted to video games and I think that is affecting your objectivity. As someone who plays video games only a few hours a week, your claim sounds ridiculous.

> I typed out my ideas as they came to me, so I may have missed the mark. The core idea I want to portray is that you can choose not to play the game of for profit corporations. You can walk away.

Sure, no argument there - but that's not what you said originally.

Choosing to play a video game made by a corporation doesn't mean the corporation is controlling one's fulfillment, nor does it mean one is not getting fulfillment or satifsfaction from it (your words).
by iamthemonster | 2025-12-09 05:01:07+00:00
I was interested to hear Trump mention Australia's retirement system the other day (amongst the endless stream of what he normally talks about, it really stood out).

In Australia you have a universal Age Pension which is a backstop against extreme hardship set at the equivalent of US$20.5k, but your rate of Age Pension reduces linearly with income levels between US$9k and US$44k.

Similarly, the rate of Age Pension reduces linearly with asset levels between US$213k and US$474k, but you don't count your own home in that.

The private retirement savings system is similar to the 401(k) and Roth 401(k) except the employer doesn't typically do a match, they are just legally obligated to pay 12% of your salary. You can then contribute an extra US$20k as an income tax reduction or pretty much however much you want after-tax.

Inside the superannuation system, the gains are only taxed at 15%.

In general, it's a pretty perfect system that just leans a little too far towards being a rich person's wealth preservation tool, but overall it enables self-sufficiency while also preventing real poverty in old age.