MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jh00ker | 2025-12-08 05:19:58+00:00
It's kind of like at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when some in the US were saying that the US government should just forgive mortgage payments so the landlords could forgive everyone's rent. Instead the US government gave businesses loans so they could pay their employees (even though they weren't able to work) so those employees could then pay their rent and buy food, etc. It was (perceived to be) better to inject the money into the system to keep the current system running, rather than turn off / forgive the major parts of the system.
by mmsimanga | 2025-12-08 05:20:21+00:00
IMHO, speaking from a data engineer perspective. Excel is used excessively by industry specialists who aren't in IT or but IT people who are being constrained by environment. As in they don't have a better tool to work in. It is a great tool to quickly mock up a report.

Why am I am not good at excel, it is because I am the person who tends to fetch the data from the different systems and consolidates it for the analysts to analyse and some do use Excel to analyse the data.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-08 05:20:32+00:00
> Gemini on android just works.

Unless you want to turn it off, which I haven't been able to figure out how to do. Every now and then my phone will randomly prompt me to "ask Gemini", which is really annoying. When I want to use the LLM, I will go to it, stop shoving it in my face over and over.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-08 05:20:32+00:00
You replied to me in like 10 different places, nearly all of which are in responses to posts that weren't directed at you, so I'm trying not to fragment this discussion too much.

I will ask this here: If you are shipping code to production on a weekly basis, is that not a schedule, also known as a deadline for delivery?

If you expect to ship code to production every week, how do you know whether there will be something to ship without doing any estimation of the effort and time required?
by somenameforme | 2025-12-08 05:20:33+00:00
The thing is, the shift happened relatively recently. This [1] is an extremely interesting little report from UCLA where they poll the incoming class on a wide array of things. And there have been some massive shifts as recently as 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 of 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.

So we went from a society where the most important value for people was developing a life philosophy to one where the most important value is becoming wealthy. It's fairly easy to see how that leads directly to the situation we see now a days. In a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, what else can we expect other than endless greed?

---

In the time of The Jungle, that book resulted in dramatic change that eventually led to the creation of the FDA. In modern times you have that same FDA approving everything from pink slime [2] to Alzheimer's drugs that they know don't work. [3] I think the fact that society has changed is an inescapable conclusion

[1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad...
by duskwuff | 2025-12-08 05:21:04+00:00
Small piezo beepers typically don't draw much current. The article doesn't say what part they're using, but a datasheet for a typical piezo beeper [1] says it draws 12 mA at 12V - and much less at 3.3V, which is what this device is operating at. So it's probably going to be fine, especially since it's only running the buzzer for <50 ms at a time.

[1]: https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/3/6118/1/cpe_350a.pdf
by pests | 2025-12-08 05:22:01+00:00
While I generally agree with you, this "LLM is a human" comparisons really are tiresome I feel. It hasn't been proven and I don't know how many other legal issued could have solved if adding "like a human" made it okay. Google v Oracle? "oh, you've never learned an API??!?" or take the original Google Books controversy - "its reading books and memorizing them, like humans can". I do agree its different but I don't like this line of argument at all.
by holtkam2 | 2025-12-08 05:22:11+00:00
Maybe the way we get our bosses to stop shoving AI down our throats is to build an AI system that is expressly designed to do the job of a Sr. Exec at a tech company. There's nothing about their jobs that makes them impossible to automate given the capabilities of state of the art LLMs. People talk about superintelligence a lot- if you had a superinteligent AGI at your disposal as a CEO, why would you trust your Sr. Execs to make the big important decisions? Lay them off and use AI.

Once you have an AI Sr. Execbot, CEO the board of directors will be thrilled they can save tens of millions per year on those gigantic bonusus - and company performance will increase as well.
by palmotea | 2025-12-08 05:22:56+00:00
> Democratize the machines. Public or cooperative ownership of major AI and robotics infrastructure.

If you haven't socialized the means of production when you could strike and make it stop, there's no way you're going to do so when it doesn't need you anymore.

> We can choose to be the last generation that spent its best hours under fluorescent lights, pretending this was the height of civilization.

> Or we can be the first generation that looked at the robots walking onto the factory floor, looked at the models spinning up in the cloud, and said:

>> “Good. Take the work. We’ll take the world back.”

This article is stupid. How would Mr. Economically Irrelevant Former-worker "take the world back?" He just lost whatever power over that world that he had.

This is 15 pages of trying to put lipstick on a pig.
by wilsmex | 2025-12-08 05:23:11+00:00
You bet, Fun post and writeup, took me a bit down memory lane. I built several sites with nested table-based layouts, 1x1 transparent gif files set to strange widths to get layouts to force certain sizes. Little tricks with repeating gradient backgrounds for fancy 'beveled' effects. Under construction GIFs, page counters, GUESTBOOKS!, Photoshop drop-shadows on everything. All the things, fond-times. One or two I haven't touched in 20 years, but keep online for my own time-capsule memory :)
by ggm | 2025-12-08 05:23:16+00:00
Anyone recall IBM of the mainframe pre-PC days, and how different it was compared to post-redhat acquisition?

If you'd told me in 1987 DEC was going to disappear up it's own fundament and be absorbed by Compaq, and then HP I would have laughed you off the floor.

Or Sun be Oracle. And then Oracle try to morph into hyperscaler, and sort-of.. well existing Oracle customers aside, .. fail?

Companies change. Nintendo was a 19th century playing card manufacturer.

Kodak was a very innovative Photography related enterprise.

Xerox invented the workstation. So tell me where Xerox is now? "Xerox Holdings"
by ideavo | 2025-12-08 05:23:25+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm a solo dev/founder from India. I built Ideavo to solve the "Cold Start" problem for validating early-stage startup concepts.

The Problem: On most platforms (Reddit/Product Hunt), validation is a popularity contest. If you don't bring an existing audience, your idea gets buried immediately. There is no algorithmic fairness for new, raw concepts.

The Solution: I built a swipe-based feed (React + Supabase) that forces a "fairness queue."

Guaranteed Impressions: Every new idea gets a guaranteed "test flight" number of views in the feed before the ranking algorithm takes over.

Anti-Spam: I added a speed limit on the swipe interaction to prevent click-farming; users must pause briefly to read the card.

The Stack: Built with React, Supabase (Auth + RLS), and Edge Functions for the ranking logic.

We currently have ~150 ideas seeded from my local community in Gurgaon. I'm trying to figure out if this mechanics-based approach yields better signal-to-noise than standard upvote lists.

The UI is still in MVP state. Would love feedback on the ranking logic or the interaction model.
by hansvm | 2025-12-08 05:24:03+00:00
Monotonic is what we have, and it allows cliffs.

Suppose, e.g., that you can get $5k/yr in benefits if you make less than $10k/yr in other revenue and $0 otherwise. Unless you have a viable strategy for pushing past $15k/yr it's a strong financial disencentive against actually working, and even then your incremental ROI isn't very good past that cliff (if it takes an extra hundred hours to push to $15.1k/yr, then compared to your $10k/yr option you're only making $1/hr for the extra work).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-08 05:24:52+00:00
The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good.

At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.
by ggm | 2025-12-08 05:25:25+00:00
Ships sail at the cost of static resistance in water. Larger ships are more efficient, once buoyant. There is a New Scientist story about a guy on guard duty moving a moored navy boat by leaning on it, for a long period of time.

TL;DR marine is the one niche where "we had to make it a lot bigger to hold the batteries" isn't actually a big deal. If you do this the right way, you still have heaps of volume for cargo, and solar cells on the hold covers.
by bmandale | 2025-12-08 05:25:26+00:00
This replacement has already happened. Everyone who can has long since replaced their phone support with a set of menus that end in "use the website". When you need to talk to the human you still need to talk to the human.

>One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive.

If you could do it through the website then you would be much happier than having to argue with a chatbot. And if you can't do it through the website, there aren't going to let a robot do it on your behalf.
by frankest | 2025-12-08 05:25:34+00:00
The metaphor makes you break away from existing labels and think of newer approaches, enabled by the faster methods of communication we have available. In the past, the head of was many days or weeks ride away for most citizens. It made sense for people to relocate for 4 years and represent interests. Now that agency is proving very corruptible, especially because the enforcement of the rules is corrupted. What would be a faster, more reliable, less corruptible approach? You still need people to implement the will of the people, but can we come up with better ways to communicate that will to those in power?
by chartered_stack | 2025-12-08 05:26:08+00:00
> Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover.

People say Apple does its best work as a “second mover,” but that misses the actual pattern: Apple builds great products when leadership is solving their own problems.

The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just refinements of existing products. They were devices Steve Jobs personally wanted to use and couldn’t find elsewhere. The man saw the GUI at Xerox and saw how anyone could use a computer without remembering arcane commands. So he drove the development of the Mac. He was using a shitty mobile phone, saw the opportunity and had the iPhone developed. Same with the early Apple Watch (first post-Jobs new product line), which reflected Jony Ive’s fashion ambitions; once he left, it evolved into what current leadership actually uses: a high-end fitness tracker.

The stagnation we're seeing now isn’t about Apple losing its “second-mover magic.” It’s that leadership doesn’t feel an unmet need that demands a new device. None of Vision Pro, Siri, Apple Intelligence or even macOS itself anymore appear to be products the execs themselves rely on deeply, and it shows. Apple excels when it scratches its own itch and right now, it doesn’t seem to have one.
by joecool1029 | 2025-12-08 05:26:09+00:00
So yeah it’s shit they are requesting that, but I take issue with author conflating A-GPS with something it isn’t.

> By enabling A-GPS, the locations would be narrowed down from a radius of several meters to a far more accurate level.

This is NOT what A-GPS does, the author has no idea what the hell he’s talking about here. A-GPS uses ephemeris data fetched from a server to decrease the time to first fix. If the phone doesn’t do this it relies on tracking satellites and waiting for the same information to download over a much longer time.

What they are describing is more like fusedlocationprovider where android mixes in wifi timing information with the multiple GNSS systems to increase the accuracy. Neither case are specifically tracking, the gov want software instead to send coordinates back to them somehow (a tracking app/api would do this).
by zffr | 2025-12-08 05:27:06+00:00
I was with you until this part:

> Thus any attempt at estimates is as futile as gambling to win, tasks are only ever done when they're done, and "successful estimators" are kings of retconning.

> It's all make-believe.

Software estimates are not futile or make believe. They are useful even if they are not always precise. That’s why the industry continues to use them.
by tibbar | 2025-12-08 05:27:07+00:00
I see a lot of people in tech claiming to "understand" what an LLM "really is" unlike all the gullible non-technical people out there. And, as one of those technical people who works in the LLM industry, I feel like I need call B.S. on us.

A. We don't really understand what's going on in LLMs. Mechanical interpretability is like a nascent field and the best results have come on dramatically smaller models. Understanding the surface-level mechanic of an LLM (an autoregressive transformer) should perhaps instill more wonder than confidence.

B. The field is changing quickly and is not limited to the literal mechanic of an LLM. Tool calls, reasoning models, parallel compute, and agentic loops add all kinds of new emergent effects. There are teams of geniuses with billion-dollar research budgets hunting for the next big trick.

C. Even if we were limited to baseline LLMs, they had very surprising properties as they scaled up and the scaling isn't done yet. GPT5 was based on the GPT4 pretraining. We might start seeing (actual) next-level LLMs next year. Who actually knows how that might go? <<yes, yes, I know Orion didn't go so well. But that was far from the last word on the subject.>>
by vrighter | 2025-12-08 05:27:52+00:00
"there is no other way to preserve it"

Bullshit. Right click -> view source

Or just press ctrl+s and the browser will also gather all the assets into a folder for you.

The arrogance of thinking that the only way you know how is the only way....

You literally forgot the save feature all browsers have just because you set out to "solve" this using "ai"
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-08 05:29:28+00:00
LLMs and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others?

If it turns out that LLMs don't model human brains well enough to qualify as "learning abstract thought" the way humans do, some future technology will do so. Human brains aren't magic, special or different.
by terminalshort | 2025-12-08 05:29:36+00:00
There is no propaganda campaign needed to tell people that free things are bad. Nobody likes a freeloader. Western nations are ungovernable because they have universal suffrage, not because of some conspiracy. The fact is that a sizeable majority of people just don't have the intelligence to wield the political power given to them. A quick look at our present government is all that you need to tell that we are ruled by the stupidity of the common man, not some shadowy billionaires.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-08 05:29:50+00:00
Batteries have low internal impedance.

A grid can do it too, but spiky 400MW loads are difficult and annoying for a utility. And the port, who would probably have to call in to schedule charging.

It's much easier to "trickle" charge a grid scale battery bank, which can then be used however the port wants whenever they want without upsetting the grid.
by beloch | 2025-12-08 05:30:54+00:00
>The changes come as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence.

It might pay off to be a contrarian on AI or, at least, to appear that way.

MS is currently facing significant user backlash against the AI components of Windows 11. Some of their own engineers have ripped management for forcing AI that's in a very poor state into every pore of the company's products while fixing that AI is verboten to all MS employees but the AI dept.[1]. Google is featuring frequently wrong AI summaries at the top of every search result. Elon Musk is using Grok to create his own version of reality in the form of Grokipedia, making billionaires everywhere look that much more like moustache-twirling villains.

Even if you think LLM's have some solid applications and potential for growth, the way it's being pushed on average users is truly cringe-worthy. To make matters worse, there is broad public perception that AI is putting people out of work, ripping off artists, etc.. It might actually benefit a company like Apple to not feature AI prominently in their products, even if they do spend the resources to catch up.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an Apple fanboy trying to recast Apple being behind in AI into genius. I parted ways with Apple products over a decade ago due to bad experiences that I don't care to repeat. I'm just saying there could be an emerging niche for them to exploit. Being the one and only mainstream PC company that doesn't shove AI down people's throats could be a real competitive edge in 2026 and beyond.

[1]https://jonready.com/blog/posts/everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai...
by fzeroracer | 2025-12-08 05:31:36+00:00
I don't know about you, but shopping at major grocery stores I have rarely been mischarged and I check my receipts/final price pretty religiously. If Dollar Tree consistently overcharges people then there should be an investigation, discovery and jail time if they willingly enable fraud. And given that this entire thread is about how they frequently overcharge people I think it matters.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-12-08 05:31:48+00:00
Why, yes, I actually do. Just like BMW execs specifically instructed engineers to cheat at emissions testing.

And last time I checked, you don't get to just say "oopsie woopsies, I only accidentally committed fraud of a mass scale exclusively in a way that benefits me for a prolonged period of time that would obviously show up on books and intentionally hid it until caught" and get out of punishment.

If I break the law, I get arrested. Or am I allowed to "accidentally" try to carry out a new PC from Best Buy several times in a row?
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-08 05:31:51+00:00
Chinese room has been discussed to death of course.

Here's one fun approach (out of 100s) :

What if we answer the Chinese room with the Systems Reply [1]?

Searle countered the systems reply by saying he would internalize the Chinese room.

But at that point it's pretty much exactly the Cartesian theater[2] : with room, homunculus, implement.

But the Cartesian theater is disproven, because we've cut open brains and there's no room in there to fit a popcorn concession.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
by FridgeSeal | 2025-12-08 05:31:59+00:00
I can count on one hand, the number of times where I have gone “gosh, I so wish my voice assistant was better”.

It queues up music correctly, and picks the right destination on maps in my car. 98% use case satisfied. Would I like it to be better? Don’t really care. Is it a purchasing point? Nope. Would I miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? Also nope.
by stephenr | 2025-12-08 05:32:02+00:00
I use Siri for about four or five things:

- setting a timer; - sending a text; - starting a call; - adding an item to a shopping list; - playing/controlling music (very occasionally);

Siri does all of these with 95% accuracy. Occasionally it mishears "15 minutes" as "50 minutes" if I'm rushed or something.

You use the device however it works for you, but I truly cannot comprehend the use case of a voice assistant beyond these type of tasks.

More complex tasks would likely require more concentration on the response/result, at which point I shouldn't need to do it hands free.
by westurner | 2025-12-08 05:32:59+00:00
The FrontierMath benchmark ranks models on math problem performance.

How can other leading math and coding models test your solution?

Write unit tests [with pytest] which assert that the predictive error is within a reasonable tolerance

Notes re: Navier-Stokes from "Google DeepMind team up to solve the Navier-Stokes million-dollar problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44383829 :

> Shouldn't solving NS also solve for n-body gravity?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017130 :

>>> "Perihelion precession of planetary orbits solved from quantum field theory" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14447 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45220460

>> Planetary orbits are an n-body problem. GR, SQG [GR, Gross-Pitaevskii, Navier-Stokes,], and Gravity from QFT solve for planetary orbits
by m463 | 2025-12-08 05:34:05+00:00
When I learned perl, I encountered a way to express myself more easily than any other language. For example, being able to say not only "if foo" but "unless bar" gave me a more fluid vocabulary to get things out of my head and into code.

Thing is, it worked great for ME but when I started interacting with other people's perl code, it all broke down.

One person would write it all on one line. Another would be extra verbose. Some would use all the idioms, others would be 10 levels of nested braces.

Every person's brain expressed itself differently and it was much harder to find common ground.

Eventually I left perl for python, which seemed to be more sane. It seemed pythonic was more of a thing and the code was more readable. Also, it had a large standard library and you didn't have to leave the language to solve just about any problem. It did require extra effort to write code, but the benefits were pretty obvious.

A couple other sort of random points - perl 6 was delayed and that might have hurt the language. Just the same python 3 did come out, but the 2 to 3 changeover was a huge negative to the language.