MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 13:59:10+00:00
> I think they are much smarter than that. Or will be soon.

It's not a matter of how smart they are (or appear), or how much smarter they may become - this is just the fundamental nature of Transformer-based LLMs and how they are trained.

The sycophantic personality is mostly unrelated to this. Maybe it's part human preference (conferred via RLHF training), but the "You're asbolutely right! (I was wrong)" is clearly deliberately trained, presumably as someone's idea of the best way to put lipstick on the pig.

You could imagine an expert system, CYC perhaps, that does deal in facts (not words) with a natural language interface, but still had a sycophantic personality just because someone thought it was a good idea.
by thadt | 2025-12-08 13:59:53+00:00
When I see juries in American courts, for example when I've served on one, it seemed like a group of people who take their job quite seriously. You are correct in that what a jury gets is a very curated set of information. The intention being to keep the jury focused on the details of a very specific situation with evidence that is processed in such a way as to be as "reliable" as possible.

It is by no means an accurate or incorruptible system. When we design and prove out a better, more robust alternative, I'll be eager to learn about it.
by OddMerlin | 2025-12-08 14:00:46+00:00
I recently purchased an iPad Air and am blown away at how bad the UX is. Notes is incredibly buggy, the iOS is not optimized for the pencil pro (seems like it delivers very little value outside of visual arts programs), the Siri +gpt experience is laughable, and I can go on…

I’m a long time Apple user and I’m concerned with the state of things.

Im considering returning this piece of junk.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-08 14:01:09+00:00
(1) Multi-modal is where a lot of these things go to die. You will hear people talk about the occasional striking success but so often I show Copilot an easily identifiable flower image and it gets it wrong even though Google Lens will get it right

(2) The kind of dialog he's having with Claude is a kind of communication pattern I've found never works with LLMs. Sure there is the kind of conversation that goes

Do X ... that's pretty good except for Y Great!

but if it is

Do X

and it comes back with something entirely wrong I'd assume the state of the thing is corrupted and it is never coming back and no matter how you interrogate it, encourage it, advise it, threaten it, whatever, you will go in circles.
by music4airports | 2025-12-08 14:01:19+00:00
>They're very proud of its spatial awareness and vision abilities.

Suuuuuuuuure they are.

I haven't found a single multimodal model, vision LLM, or any model at all that can segment and extract music charts/infographics.

Can Gemini 3 Pro, in one shot, turn charts like these into lists of "artist - album" without choking on the visuals?

https://reddit.com/r/citypop/comments/10fu1t5/city_pop_album...

https://reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/173o33z/the_new_ind...
by beepbooptheory | 2025-12-08 14:01:52+00:00
What is the import of this to you here? Whether you have free will or you feel like you do, kinda same difference for this particular point right? It doesn't make me more human actually having free will, it is sufficient to simply walk around as if I do.

But beyond that, what do you want to say here? What is lost, what is gained? Are you wanting to say this makes us more like an LLM? How so?
by Traster | 2025-12-08 14:02:17+00:00
There's a few things. Let's start with the core of what they say is their value. They have forward deployed engineers - this a totally new, previously unknown innovation - who go to a company, understand their needs and build data processing tools to give them insights. Then, they generalize these tools so that they can essentially sell them as SAAS software, giving them SAAS-type economics.

What other people say is their secret sauce, is they do consulting work for the government (a forward deployed engineer is just a consultant) and they make incredible margins because their senior management and early investors have connections to the government which gets them exclusive access to incredibly juicy contracts. As these contracts paid off they leant heavily into the social media meme stock trend so their CEO spends time talking like a psychopath and doing various non-economic things like spending huge amounts of money running adverts about how they're going to use AI to unleash Americas workers (America's workers aren't able to buy Palantir software or services, but they can buy it's stock).
by netsharc | 2025-12-08 14:02:31+00:00
What calendar system have you been using for 30 years, that's survived that long?

I think I sent one of those "mails to the future" in the 90's, asking 2002 me how I am. I don't think it ever arrived, or the free email domain I was using ceased operating.

Sheesh, anyone old enough to remember the services offering a free email address with a choice of maybe 50 domains in a dropdown?
by entuno | 2025-12-08 14:02:37+00:00
The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that.

If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store.

But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.
by level09 | 2025-12-08 14:03:05+00:00
Python is having a moment right now, between the AI ecosystem, Astral tooling and a huge talent pool. I think calling it the worst choice is a stretch :)

The real question is not raw speed. It's how fast you ship, how many users you need before performance matters and whether you actually own your stack. Most modern solutions push you toward third party auth. This gives you full self hosted auth out of the box.

Scale problems are good problems to have.
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-12-08 14:05:36+00:00
Hi there, I am sorry you had this negative experience us with us. For very late invoices, we lock accounts and ask that users pay using a bank/wire transfer. https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/late-payments-faqs Was your account fairly new? We tend to be more careful with newer accounts because of fraud and abuse. If an invoice is very late, we do not re-open the account until the invoice is paid. (Again, because of fraud and abuse). But our support teams would very likely have asked you to pay using a bank/wire transfer. It's not that we don't want people to pay their invoices. We just want them to use a more reliable form of payment once that happens. If you still have access to your old invoice (perhaps you still have your email with it), you can still pay it. Your customer number will be on your invoice and you can use that or the invoice number in the reason for the payment. Since it is far in the past, we could not re-activate your account. It might be possible, however, to create a new account. --Katie
by tatjam | 2025-12-08 14:05:51+00:00
I think the key is that the LLM is having no trouble mapping from one "embedding" of the language to another (the task they are best performers at!), and that appears extremely intelligent to us humans, but certainly is not all there's to intelligence.

But just take a look at how LLMs struggle to handle dynamical, complex systems such as the "vending machine" paper published some time ago. Those kind of tasks, which we humans tend to think of as "less intelligent" than say, converting human language to a C++ implementation, seem to have some kind of higher (or at least, different) complexity than the embedding mapping done by LLMs. Maybe that's what we typically refer to as creativity? And if so, modern LLMs certainly struggle with that!

Quite sci-fi that we have created a "mind" so alien we struggle to even agree on the word to define what it's doing :)
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-08 14:06:00+00:00
Xbox spent $75 billion buying activision-blizzard, an acquisition which is very far away from making its money back, so price hikes were inevitable to cover the massive money hole that left.

Of course this price hike is inevitably dragging Xbox brand into the hole long term, but those in charge of the price hikes probably expect not to be around when that happens,.
by someguy101010 | 2025-12-08 14:06:05+00:00
wrote about this a bit too in https://www.robw.fyi/2025/10/24/simple-control-flow-for-auto...

ran into this when writing agents to fix unit tests. often times they would just give up early so i started writing the verifiers directly into the agent's control flow and this produced much more reliable results. i believe claude code has hooks that do something similar as well.
by morkalork | 2025-12-08 14:06:23+00:00
This drives me nuts when trying to bounce an architecture or coding solution idea off an LLM. A human would answer with something like "what if you split up the responsibility and had X service or Y whatever". No matter how many times you tell the LLM not to return code, it returns code. Like it can't think or reason about something without writing it out first.
by MisterTea | 2025-12-08 14:06:43+00:00
The shameful part is human beings have the ability to drive very well if they choose to do so. However reckless speeding, tailgating, driving intoxicated, and other forms of reckless driving is a constant on the roads. Cops seem to do little to stop it. Instead we must capitulate driving to a machine because people cant be trusted to be courteous to each other.
The Pixel 9 Pro was designed for Google Fi, but the iPhone 16 Pro outperforms it
by pcvetkovski | 2025-12-08 14:07:19+00:00
When I signed up for Google Fi, Pixel was advertised as the "native" device for the network. It was designed to handle the MVNO's specific switching logic and carrier configurations better than any BYOD device.

However, six months into my contract, as the signal was dropping a few times a day, I got another line for testing on my iPhone. I’ve been gathering data on signal stability for Google Fi, and the results are counter-intuitive. The iPhone 16 Pro (Qualcomm X75) provides a significantly more stable experience on Fi than Google's own Pixel 9 Pro (Exynos 5400).

The gap is most noticeable in two specific areas where the Pixel "native" advantage should theoretically shine, but fails:

1. The "Zombie" Handoff (WiFi-to-Cellular). The Pixel 9 Pro aggressively power-gates the modem via "Adaptive Connectivity." When leaving WiFi, the Exynos modem frequently gets stuck in a deep sleep state, resulting in 5-15 seconds of signal loss before reconnecting. The iPhone X75 modem maintains a "warm" standby, handling the Fi network transition almost instantly.

2. 5G Sector Switching. One of Fi's selling points is intelligent network management. Yet, the Pixel struggles with inter-cell handovers (switching 5G towers while driving). It frequently drops the data session entirely or falls back to LTE/3G. The iPhone maintains the 5G data session seamlessly during the same handovers, likely due to superior Carrier Aggregation logic on the Qualcomm chip.

It’s ironic that to get the best performance out of Google’s network, you currently need Apple’s hardware. Is the Exynos modem simply incapable of the rapid switching Fi requires, or is the Android RIL (Radio Interface Layer) optimized too heavily for battery over connectivity?
by wongarsu | 2025-12-08 14:07:26+00:00
Considering the last price increase was almost 4 years before this one goes into effect, most of those are pretty modest 1-4%/year increases. In line with inflation. The notable outliers are F1 and F3 which got a lot more expensive

Apparently F1 and F3 are "Office 365 for Frontline Workers". F3 is kind of like Office 365 Basic, F1 is stripped down to mostly read-only access plus Microsoft Teams
by wafflemaker | 2025-12-08 14:07:34+00:00
From FAQ:

>AdNauseam 'clicks' Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions this is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a 'click' on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam's clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.

https://github.com/dhowe/adnauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnause...
by eddyg | 2025-12-08 14:07:39+00:00
I’ve been using git-crypt⁽¹⁾ which is transparent (you put the patterns you want to encrypt in .gitattributes) and lets you use GPG keys or symmetric keys. And it's been around for quite a while.

⁽¹⁾https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt
by adabyron | 2025-12-08 14:07:55+00:00
In the US, property tax typically works that way for many people. You get something in the mail that says this is what your tax will be. If you happen to have a loan for your house, the bank in charge of your loan handles it.

The only opposing political argument I've heard is that if income taxes were this simple, many people would be overpaying. I think that argument has many obvious flaws. Unfortunately few US citizens demand anything of their politicians on this topic or other topics that would dramatically improve their lives. Instead they care more about vanity topics that don't even effect them.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-12-08 14:08:13+00:00
For an individual, probably not. I've been an OpenOffice and LibreOffice use for my personal use and contracting business since 2004. I've had no need for "real" Microsoft Office in that time. I also don't deal in macro-encrusted documents or with more esoteric features.

For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.
by nickthegreek | 2025-12-08 14:08:27+00:00
It has 12 upvotes prior to your comment. Assume 12 people out there have different motivations and desires to share and discuss things that you might not find particular interesting. When you see something that is not interesting, feel free to click that flag button (not ideal) or keep walkin past.

These colors choices have a habit of seeping into different industries and affecting our culture. There are valid reasons that might want to share their opinions on these things here on HN.
by mschaef | 2025-12-08 14:08:37+00:00
> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.

Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than the fact it has online help files. The help facilities can query the Lisp runtime for things like functions and keybindings. These update dynamically as the system is reconfigured. The result is something that isn't quite as cleanly presented as an online help document, but has the benefit of being deeply integrated into how the system is actually configured to behave at the moment. Very cool, and very much dependent on the open source nature of emacs.
by DivingForGold | 2025-12-08 14:08:59+00:00
The EU loves our American weapons that comprise >90% of the weapons furnished to Ukraine. The EU thinks they can have it both ways: Let's "tax" and fine the Americans, all the while we "hustle" them for their weapons to fight the Ukraine-Russia war. If that's going to be their tact - - - heck, let them fight Russia all by themselves till them back to the US come screaming for help. How soon they forgot WW II and how they would all be living under Hitler if it had not been for the mighty US getting involved. How soon they forget the cold war where the Russians invaded and took many European nations into so called communism.
by 7thpower | 2025-12-08 14:09:54+00:00
I have a family license and am more or less stuck with it, but for my business I will be moving things over to gsuite so I can be price gouged by them instead. It will cost more, but I’ll have Gemini, which is actually useful.

The last straw, aside from the price increases, was switching my office.com landing page to copilot. It feels like a new low, even for Microsoft.

You just lost $6/mo., Microsoft. I hope it was worth it.
by Agnes28 | 2025-12-08 14:10:20+00:00
Location: London, UK

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Cloud (AWS/ Azure), CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform/ Ansible), Python, Bash, JavaScript, Monitoring/ Observability, Machine Learning, AI (Still learning)

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-u4iraG7ydPIiE0BLSaDFCLg...

Email: ojuhagnes@gmail.com

GitHub: https://github.com/Agnes4Him

Portfolio: https://agnes4him.github.io/cloud-devops-portfolio/cloud.htm...

I'm Agnes Olorundare, a DevOps Engineer with a background in Software Development. I possess a strong growth mindset and am collaborative.
by jstrebel | 2025-12-08 14:10:26+00:00
I am certain that LLMs can help you with judgment calls as well. I spent the last month tinkering with spec-driven development of a new Web app and I must say, the LLM was very helpful in identifying design issues in my requirements document and actively suggested sensible improvements. I did not agree to all of them, but the conversation around high-level technical design decisions was very interesting and fruitful (e.g. cache use, architectural patterns, trade-offs between speed and higher level of abstraction).
by boh | 2025-12-08 14:11:56+00:00
If most companies had to for some reason revert to Windows XP and MS Office from 1998, they would barely be impacted. There is literally no benefit to this subscription model besides paying for what you already have and what you don't want. None of this stuff needs to be on the cloud even for bigger firms. For the I need/like X in Office 365, it's not worth it from a costs perspective.
by sgerenser | 2025-12-08 14:12:01+00:00
Family Dollar and Dollar General (the subjects of this piece) are not traditional “dollar stores” (and haven’t been in a long time) despite having Dollar in the name. They’re just discount stores, like a smaller Wal-Mart. Dollar Tree, on the other hand, had long been a traditional dollar store where most items are priced at a dollar. However after pandemic-induced inflation they have mostly changed to a $1.25-$1.50 price point and now have a number of items marked above that as well.
by amarcheschi | 2025-12-08 14:12:40+00:00
The italian middlemen is now wanted: https://www.lastampa.it/esteri/2025/12/08/news/appalti_nato_...

if article doesn't open: https://web.archive.org/web/20251208140746/https://www.ftm.e...

or gift link for 24hrs: https://www.ftm.eu/articles/israel-defence-elbit-systems-sus...
by gary_0 | 2025-12-08 14:12:58+00:00
They can set whatever price they want. Most customers have no choice but to pay; there is no competitor with anything approaching full compatibility or a similar feature set.

Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have maintained a business software monoculture for decades. Nobody has invested significant resources into competing products, just tiny companies and open source volunteers putting out niche alternatives. Microsoft could probably double their prices, and double the built-in advertising, and most customers would complain loudly and keep using them. Docx files, PSDs, PDF forms, etc with any complexity will only ever run properly in one corresponding proprietary application.
by nickthegreek | 2025-12-08 14:13:03+00:00
https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV should get you started. In HA, it will available in the Settings > Add-ons / Add-on store. If you don't have home assistant, you can always run it on an rpi or in docker on a system on your network.

https://medium.com/@lumenyx/isponsorblocktv-on-a-raspberry-p...
by npoc | 2025-12-08 14:13:05+00:00
Okay, so it's an attack vector but one that can be mitigated against by implementing redundancy.

I would argue that Lightning's biggest security issue is having to store your private keys on an Internet connected device. I don't know if further improvements can be made in this area, for example allowing for some kind of 2FA, like multi-sig on the base layer.
by sneak | 2025-12-08 14:14:06+00:00
Excel has no competition whatsoever in the local software space. Google Sheets is somewhat useful for 80% of users but for people who must be on-prem/local it’s Excel or nothing.

Someone really should Pixelmator Excel. That’s a viable startup, I think, though I have no idea what the GTM looks like. Some killer feature/perf that makes people install it alongside?
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-08 14:14:07+00:00
Agreed; I'm not clear at all how real the threat is.

The pathogenic bacteria can survive boiling: bad for us.

Infections seem rare: better.

Counterpoint anecdata: I had Giardia once, and that's a month I never want to repeat. Ever. (survives boiling; isn't super common)
by not_ai | 2025-12-08 14:14:08+00:00
I didn't have the words to articulate some of my frustrations, but I think you summed it up nicely.

For example, there's been many times when they take it too literally instead of looking at the totality of the context and what was written. I'm not an LLM, so I don't have perfect grasp on every vocab term for every domain and it feels especially pandering when they repeat back the wrong word but put it in quotes or bold instead of simply asking if I meant something else.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-08 14:14:17+00:00
Business basic goes from $6 to $7. Business premium is unchanged from $22 to $22.

Price increases are normal. (I’ve been on HN long enough to remember when “raise your prices” was treated as the best startup advice around in HN comments) These price increases aren’t excessive relative to inflation for other services in a business context. I don’t see this as a dangerous game.

> The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want

Most people who comment on HN, maybe. Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.

The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.
by Xmd5a | 2025-12-08 14:14:26+00:00
Word. This is a problem of lisps in general, they loose information as the same "thing" traverse the various meta-layers that constitute the system. A parsed expression is not tied to its string, and the expansion of the expression, provided it is a macro, is not tied to the original expression. In the same vein: you can't easily find the source code of a lambda that was compiled/interpreted.

Of course you can do all of this, but you need to build it yourself: see rewrite-clj. If you want to build a clojure debugger that is able to display or refer to code with the same indentation the programmer is dealing with in his text editor, you need to bridge the gap between clojure expressiosn and their string representation.

Anyway I concur that reversible macros would be great. Tag the output, have those tags propagate to the input by playing the macro backwards. Complex stuff really. That's a job for category theory I guess.

https://cybercat.institute/2024/09/12/bidirectional-programm...