MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-07 04:33:00+00:00
Sorry again I was more interested in the ongoing vanilla automation research angle-- where the value of current research strat not established. that's why it's the last point, though contrasted by structure to the first (so the question is "better" IP infra all you need to shift the status quo, how interaction between value and values can guide design/deployment of research infra)

All examples are not hypothetical, there are indeed vanilla farmers who have demo'd enough value to buy (unregulated) shotguns+ammo, but not to DIY that,or hire goons OR proper research managers :)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7994929

(Abstract just to demo some basic convo "value", note that it's undergrad project and already paywalled :)

Trying to establish we agree on the basics, then move on to questions we're both interested in.

Edit: related thread that I hamfistedly tried to participate in, I'm guessing I'm more inclined to think this guy is providing some value, even if you discount he earned 10+ karma from this very comment -- which means the top one, less insightful imho, has like nX ??!!:)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127646
by temp8830 | 2025-12-07 04:33:44+00:00
Also, back in 2025 people's mental models were so primitive that they could only consider one parameter at a time. And the reward function was wired into their survival instincts, imagine that! This caused them to see a person whose mental model held a different parameter value as a threat to their survival. These primitive serial thinkers used something called "wars" to update model weights, where they physically eliminated compute elements! Truly a barbaric age.
by nl | 2025-12-07 04:34:47+00:00
> In my opinion, being able to write the code to do the thing is effectively the same exact thing as doing the thing

That's great, but it's demonstrably false.

I can write code that calculates the average letter frequency across any Wikipedia article. I can't do that in my head without tools because of the rule of seven[1].

Tool use is absolutely an intelligence amplifier but it isn't the same thing.

> Because again, the actual “model” is just a text autocomplete engine and it generates from left to right.

This is technically true, but somewhat misleading. Humans speak "left to right" too. Specifically, LLMs do have some spatial reasoning ability (which is what you'd expect with RL training: otherwise they'd just predict the most popular token): https://snorkel.ai/blog/introducing-snorkelspatial/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
by Swizec | 2025-12-07 04:35:50+00:00
Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They’re great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how exercise became a thing that people do.

However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for women. Here’s a pubmed paper:

> Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise and competition could cause women to become masculine, threaten their ability to bear children, and create other reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-twentieth century.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/
by array_key_first | 2025-12-07 04:36:44+00:00
> It's also no different to endless prank calls via phone, not a new thing.

Of course it's different. If I do 5 prank calls, that takes, say, 15 minutes.

In 15 minutes how many hoaxes can I generate with AI? Hundreds, maybe thousands?

This is like saying nukes are basically swords because they both kill people. We've always been able to kill people, who cares about nuclear weapons?
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-12-07 04:37:06+00:00
An aspect of this that always strikes me is 1940's or 1950's actors. They lived through the depression, where protein was a rarer commodity. Childhood diseases that we now have forgotten. Their frames are small, but their heads are normal sized.

Then, suddenly, a decade later, the men who are actors are all strapping young guys, fit and healthy.

It reminds of me of WWII era japanese, who, a decade or three earlier, had also been protein-starved. Their height and frames reflected this.

All this to say that while we see the downsides, the green revolution also had its health upsides, I guess.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-07 04:38:01+00:00
You don't need AI to make these hoaxes, pranks have been around forever etc etc.... but as with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. In this case the low barrier to creating the fake media coupled with the pervasiveness of social media networks and their reach (also networks that aren't new), affording the rapid deployment and significant impact by bad actors.

The problem is the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-12-07 04:38:14+00:00
> When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast.

But I mean, you can get by without memorizing stuff sure, but memorizing stuff does work out your brain and does help out in the long run? Isn't it possible we've reached the cliff of "helpful" tools to the point we are atrophying enough to be worse at our jobs?

Like, reading is surely better for the brain than watching TV. But constant cable TV wasn't enough to ruin our brains. What if we've got to the point it finally is enough?
by jordan_blakey | 2025-12-07 04:39:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this extension because I found myself reflexively opening Reddit or Twitter while waiting for builds to compile. The existing redirectors I tried were either closed-source, requested weird permissions, or felt too clunky.

URL Redirector is a simple, privacy-first alternative:

-- Zero Latency: Built on the declarativeNetRequest API.

-- Privacy: No analytics, no tracking, MIT licensed.

-- Gamified: It tracks how many times you've "restored reality" (deflected a distraction).

-- Local: Import/Export rules to JSON (no sync servers).

It lets you map things like reddit.com -> localhost:3000 or docs.google.com.

The code is on GitHub, or you can grab it on the Chrome Web Store here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-redirector/jhko...

Feedback on the code or the UX is welcome!
by jrm4 | 2025-12-07 04:39:27+00:00
Here's why this is silly:

Most UI's are fundamentally dumbed down, they're only good for repetitive tasks.

If you're doing any task that is non-repetitive enough such that the UI needs to change, what you really need or would like is an "assistant" who you can talk through, get feedback, and do the thing. Up until very recently, that assistant probably had to be human, but probably obviously, people are now working quite a bit on the virtual one.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-07 04:39:38+00:00
Like most things in life, it all averages out.

'There's these three statisticians gone duck hunting,' he said. He paused. 'They're like statisticians by trade.’

'I'm with you so far.’

'And they gone off hunting duck, and they're hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double-aughts, so on. And they're quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always quack into.’

'Duck-calls,' I said.

'There you go.' Stice tried to nod against the window. 'Well and here comes this one duck come flying on by overhead.’

'Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’

'Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they're getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers and goo,' Stice said. 'And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass kersplat in the muck, and but he's missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and fires then, and back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies gota fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from firing, and they see his shot goes just high.’

'Misses the duck as well.’

'Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping and jumping up and down to beat the band, hollering "We got him, boys, we done got him!"‘

Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn't even pretending to laugh. Stice didn't seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.
by postalcoder | 2025-12-07 04:41:35+00:00
Haleakalā is like this as well. Don't just drive up the crater - hike through the thing. It's a ~12 mile hike. It's a remarkable experience because the landscape changes so frequently and dramatically from desert to tropical forest.

The only comp to this is like the transition in Max Max from the desert to the oasis.

Tourists that drive to the crater, take pictures, and drive down have no idea what they're missing.
by milesvp | 2025-12-07 04:43:11+00:00
So usually you would DNP the parts and they wouldn’t populate at the factory. But sometimes you have a bunch of boards already made that for some reason you can’t use for another SKU, and so you put them in another housing, and change the board for the next rev.

Mind you, I’m not saying a mic in a KVM isn’t sus, just that it’s a little obvious, and certainly not stuxnet level espionage.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-07 04:43:12+00:00
Yes, I can imagine.

It is all I can do, to consider the alternatives but rather make my own mind up about what should happen.

If I, ever, were to see humanity under my thumb from so far away, I would delight in knowing I was far enough away to see just how fragile it is, and always will be.

We humans are a special lot. Thumb sized.
Ask HN: Why does every B2B SaaS have to look like Linear/Stripe?
by PaulShin | 2025-12-07 04:43:22+00:00
I'm a founder (and ex-architect) building a logistics OS. Recently, I received feedback that my site looks "cheap and ugly" because I used Serif fonts and an engraving style aesthetic instead of the standard Sans-Serif "Clean Tech" look.

My intent was to evoke the "Age of Exploration" vibe, since the AI era feels like charting unknown territories. But users seem conditioned to trust only "Standard Blue SaaS UI."

My question to HN: Does a B2B tool have to follow the "Standard Modern UI" to be taken seriously? Or is there room for distinctive, maybe even polarizing, aesthetics in enterprise software?

I'm debating whether to cave in and redesign to "boring but safe" or double down on our soul. Would love to hear your thoughts on "Brand Distinctiveness vs. UI Familiarity."
by jonstewart | 2025-12-07 04:44:20+00:00
My great-grandfather was born in a dugout (i.e., sod) house on the Kansas prairie in 1880. His father died when he was 9. When he went to teacher’s college, someone gave him an orange and he ate the rind, as he didn’t know you were supposed to peel it; he still thought it was delicious. He married late at 35, and his wife died after a year. He married again and their first daughter died as a toddler. He was 49 when the Great Depression began. He became a Republican because FDR repealed Prohibition.

I’m not wealthy, not by HN standards, but my kids are healthy and lack for nothing. I doordash them takeout sushi when I don’t feel like cooking them dinner. I’ve been to several of the world’s great museums, gone to great plays and concerts, and love a round of Epoisses with a plump Meursault.

Things that last have always been expensive, out of reach for many. And every time I think nostalgically about life on the prairie in a dugout, I think about winter, it being -10 outside and windy, and 45 degrees inside and damp and smoky.
by Spooky23 | 2025-12-07 04:45:20+00:00
Everyone is the star of their personal movie. They shine it up on their own.

A good friend of mine had an awakening when he realized that his civil war ancestor suffered and sacrificed so that rich men could own other humans, and use those people to suppress his wages.

Reality is people are people and those before us had the same struggles we have about different things. We’re no smarter, but have access to the worlds information.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-07 04:46:12+00:00
> whereas BFL (makers of Flux 2) dedicated like a fith of their press release talking about how "safe" (read: censored and lobotomized) their model is.

Agreed, but let’s not confuse what it is. Talking about safety is just “WE WONT EMBARRASS YOU IF YOU INVEST IN US”.
by AlexCoventry | 2025-12-07 04:46:30+00:00
Maybe it's not as necessary with a codebase as well-organized as Oxide's, but I found gemini 3 useful for a refactor of some completely test-free ML research code, recently. I got it to generate a test case which would exercise all the code subject to refactoring, got it to do the refactoring and verify that it leads to exactly the same state, then finally got it to randomize the test inputs and keep repeating the comparison.
by mcqueenjordan | 2025-12-07 04:46:35+00:00
I guess to follow up slightly more:

- I think the "if you use another model" rebuttal is becoming like the No True Scotsman of the LLM world. We can get concrete and discuss a specific model if need be.

- If the use case is "generate this function body for me", I agree that that's a pretty good use case. I've specifically seen problematic behavior for the other ways I'm seeing it OFTEN used, which is "write this feature for me", or trying to one shot too much functionality, where the LLM gets to touch data structures, abstractions, interface boundaries, etc.

- To analogize it to writing: They shouldn't/cannot write the whole book, they shouldn't/cannot write the table of contents, they cannot write a chapter, IMO even a paragraph is too much -- but if you write the first sentence and the last sentence of a paragraph, I think the interpolation can be a pretty reasonable starting point. Bringing it back to code for me means: function bodies are OK. Everything else gets questionable fast IME.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-12-07 04:48:26+00:00
"A woman's work is never done."

In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.

Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).

Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.

We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.

There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.
by 6gvONxR4sf7o | 2025-12-07 04:48:58+00:00
I have a potentially more optimistic (and simultaneously more pessimistic!) view to offer.

Some differing interpretations of the law distinguish between the lawmakers' intention vs the literal meaning (and keep in mind that language itself changes a lot in just a few centuries. The hard problem is that, in PL terms, the law is written in syntax without agreed upon semantics. So a decent step could be just using some agreed upon semantics, like we do in code! Then at least "interpreting" it would be unambiguous.

Maybe a decent analogy would be gcc vs clang might produce different programs for certain undefined behavior, and different combinations of pieces might lead to different behavior too (like race conditions), and somebody (the plaintiff/user) is asking you (the judge/compiler) to decide what's going to happen in this next loop/program/whatever.

Or maybe a decent analogy would be getting a ticket that the API is erroring in some rare user's case and having to look into the code and stacktrace to realize it's some weird unanticipated interaction between two different pieces of legacy code (150 year old law) that now interact due to a recent merge (a new law from last year), and now it's crashing, so we have to figure out how to interpret/compile/resolve this user's case.

If law was usable like code, we'd never have any of those issues, just like we never have those issues with actual literal programs. And when we do, it's just because we're using the wrong language/aren't encoding enough things in the types and semantics/shouldn't have used this niche compiler so now let's get a new interpretation from another Supreme Compiler/etc. Life would be easier \s

So it's maybe more optimistic than you, in that the run/read time power (judicial) doesn't get diminished, but more pessimistic in that I believe it because I believe that changing the language from english law jargon to some formal language doesn't actually eliminate the issues it might be intended to eliminate.
by jippo | 2025-12-07 04:49:15+00:00
Location: Bangkok, Thailand

Remote: Yes (also Hybrid / On-Site)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies:

Languages: F#, Haskell, C/C++, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, HTML/CSS Frameworks/Libraries: .NET, Safe-Stack, Akka, jQuery, Tailwind Database: PostgreSQL, SQLServer DevOps: Docker Other: Kafka, kSQL

Résumé/CV: https://twuttiwat.com/cv.pdf

GitHub: https://github.com/twuttiwat

Email: twuttiwat@gmail.com

Hi there. My name is Teerawat. I am a senior software engineer working remotely for 20+ years. I enjoy working on functional programming (F#) especially in domain modeling for business application. I did working exclusively in F# for the past 7 years and I think that FP is the blade that can tame the dragon (i.e. the complexities of codebase). I did work on haskell as well (i.e. to audit cardono blockchain).
by jmward01 | 2025-12-07 04:49:40+00:00
I tell people we have inverted control with the latest agent concepts. Instead of deterministic code treating LLMs as functions, we have LLMs determining the flow of the app and the interaction with the user. It is much more organic when it is done right and you can gain access to features you never coded. We have been implementing UI tools/widgets to allow a much more interactive experience and it is amazing to play with that idea. This will obviously be part of the standard toolkit of agentic software a year or two from now. The agent stack is just now forming and UI is a core piece of it.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-07 04:49:52+00:00
Given what that ad said, I can hardly blame her. That must have been horrifying.

Imagine if advertisers were directly responsible for cleaning up after themselves. For newspapers, they'd need to recycle the equivelent amount of paper their ads take up in all papers distributed. For ads on digital devices, an amount of processing power equivalent to the amount used to display them all would be user for a good cause (say folding). Or even just the same amount of electrical power used could be donated to a good cause. And for incidents like this, the company would be directly liable and bound to clean up.

Or we could just ban them and also get rid of the long list of other downsides with ads.
by akerl_ | 2025-12-07 04:49:57+00:00
I think the boring answer is that the people who are looking to procure B2B SaaS solutions aren't looking for artistic sites that "evoke" a feeling. They're looking for a product that meets their needs, and one of those needs is "when I tell my superiors / peers / users about this product, and they Google it, it looks crisp and professional, like giving this SaaS a big stack of money will be worth it."
by colechristensen | 2025-12-07 04:52:25+00:00
>But the end state in my mind is telling an AI "build me XYZ", having it ask all the important questions over the course of a 30-minute chat while making reasonable decisions on all lower-level issues, then waking up the next morning to a live cloud-hosted test environment at a subdomain of the domain it said it would buy along with test builds of native apps for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, all with near-100% automated test coverage and passing tests. Coding agents feel like magic, but we're clearly not there yet.

I'm pretty sure we're there. I'm not sure how interested I am in completely closing that loop and completely removing the human from the loop. But I'm also pretty confident that I could do it with nothing but existing models and software built around them.
by roenxi | 2025-12-07 04:53:34+00:00
Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes those long-form articles that go on for days and could use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly the best the community has come up with because it takes a lot of words to tackle economics.

That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just echoing all that, so if you want the details you can spend a few hours reading what he wrote.
by compounding_it | 2025-12-07 04:54:10+00:00
Graduated 5 years ago. One of the best decisions in life. Coursework is challenging and more than 2 classes would definitely feel like a very full time degree (1 per semester is the best pace imo for work life study balance). Although you would need special permission to take a third class (from what I remember).

My resume is also looked at differently after mentioning Georgia Tech. It really helped gain a lot of confidence. Fundamentally changed things as my undergraduate in India was not a good experience for me.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-07 04:54:32+00:00
Comparing text against averages and labeling it as right or left is one of the highest things on the list of things I would trust AI to do. Ground News is a really weird catalyst for this article. If Ground News is problematic, it's in overly simplistic black and white labels to put highly nuanced matters into neat boxes, not the fact that they used a computer to do it.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-07 04:55:29+00:00
Clothes lasted longer, yes. The fabric was almost always thicker and less finely woven due to the limitations of historical textile manufacturing. The garments themselves were properly stitched instead of overlocked, with patterns sensibly designed for the usage and size of the garments. People also repaired their clothes and would keep them long past the point most modern consumers would buy new.

Plus, clothes were a considerable portion of the household budget. People couldn't afford them if they didn't last.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-07 04:56:05+00:00
You must have missed my comment about opposing the war. But this kind of bad faith accusation is really disappointing to see on HN. The caliber of discourse here is usually much higher - people engaging with the actual merits of the points being raised, not reverting to attacking strawmen that only exist in their head as if this was Facebook.

Ordinary Russian and Ukranian people are both victims of this war. It is being waged for reasons neither of them chose, that neither of them asked for, that neither of them wanted. Civilians are being killed on both sides, and the people most vested in the continuation of the conflict are those that reap all of the profits from the war while paying none of the human costs. This is a classic principal-agent problem.

If you can't see the inhumanity in the structural forces at play and want to play a game of "attack the strawman" to score meaningless internet points while millions die needlessly over a pointless war, I can't force you to stop, but I'd at least hope you can grow up and take the tragedy and human suffering seriously enough at some point to care more about that than you do about your HN rep.