MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninkendo | 2025-12-09 01:52:59+00:00
> >The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account"

> I see this as a very naive statement. [words]

Ok, you clearly have a lower opinion on the ability of your government to help than I do, but it doesn’t matter one bit: credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that there exists cases of government abuse.

What does matter, is that crypto was designed to avoid needing any of the above, and with it, you have absolutely no recourse whatsoever if things go wrong. The only recourse you have is the government you’re supposedly trying to distance yourself from.

Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them.

I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.
by technothrasher | 2025-12-09 01:53:54+00:00
> My sister remembered the glowing handrails (radium?)

That reminded me of the "glowy tape" my brother and I used to play with when we were kids. It had come from my grandparents' estate, and we had no idea what it was for, but it was fun. My father thought it was from WWII, as he had vague memories of it being used to mark the corners of furniture during 'lights out' air raid drills. I now assume it was radium, and am not overly happy with my childhood self playing with it.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-09 01:53:55+00:00
I've done it, I think more than once.

I was getting to a point in the code. I could tell by a log statement or some such. But I didn't know in what circumstances I was getting there - what path through the code. So I put in something like

char *p = 0; *p = 1;

in order to cause a core dump. That core dump gave me the stack trace, which let me see how I got there.

But I never checked that in. If I did, I would expect a severe verbal beating at the code review. Even more, it never made it into release.
by ta9000 | 2025-12-09 01:54:22+00:00
> Get rid of the SS tax cap. You don't pay any SS tax above 180k ish, which seems silly. Get rid of the cap and let every earned dollar participate in the program. It doesn't feel like that hard of a sell.

No. Frankly getting a bit of a boost to my income at the end of the year is one of the few things I have left to look forward to. The program at best will pay out $0.75 on the dollar of benefits. How much is enough? Do more with less.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-09 01:55:17+00:00
I wasn't saying you implied anything. I was saying rolandog seemed to go beyond general cynicism about corporations to an unreasonable complaint.

Looking at the details, I could say Kroger shouldn't have hired her but I'd rather say that if she was dangerous enough to not hire as a driver then her license shouldn't have been reinstated in the first place. (Though that's if "couldn’t recall if her driver’s license was suspended just months before he hired her" means it actually was suspended, and Bike Law isn't doing some trickery with wording.)

Either way good they paid out.

For the shutdown, I do think it's a coincidence. They're shutting down facilities in multiple states and that lawsuit isn't even a tenth of a percent of the relevant costs.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 01:55:28+00:00
I don't think is the case; I think what's actually going on is that the HN crowd are the people who are stuck actually trying to use AI tools and aware of their limitations.

I have noticed, however, that people who are either not programmers or who are not very good programmers report that they can derive a lot of benefit from AI tools, since now they can make simple programs and get them to work. The most common use case seems to be some kind of CRUD app. It's very understandable this seems revolutionary for people who formerly couldn't make programs at all.

For those of us who are busy trying to deliver what we've promised customers we can do, I find I get far less use out of AI tools than I wish I did. In our business we really do not have the budget to add another senior software engineer, and we don't the spare management/mentor/team lead capacity to take on another intern or junior. So we're really positioned to be taking advantage of all these promises I keep hearing about AI, but in practical terms, it saves me at an architect or staff level maybe 10% of my time and for one of our seniors maybe 5%.

So I end up being a little dismissive when I hear that AI is going to become 80% of GDP and will be completely automating absolutely everything, when what I actually spend my day on is the same-old same-old of trying to get some vendor framework to do what I want to get some sensor data out of their equipment and deliver apps to end customers that use enough of my own infrastructure that they don't require $2,000 a month of cloud hosting services per user. (I picked that example since at one customer, that's what we were brought in to replace: that kind of cost simply doesn't scale.)
by array_key_first | 2025-12-09 01:55:56+00:00
The main benefit of Google Docs is that, at least, Google is a better steward. Not good, but better.

And also, their software is exceedingly simple, which is great for breaking vendor lock-in. Microsoft got away with murder because none of their shit works like it should and every single product they make is the "black sheep" in the category it's in.
by jacobedawson | 2025-12-09 01:56:04+00:00
From 10 December 2025, anyone under 16 in Australia won’t be able to keep or make accounts on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, X, Facebook and more. The rule doesn’t punish young people or their families, instead, social media companies have to stop under-16s from having accounts or risk serious fines (up to about $50 million).
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 01:56:27+00:00
That's what I've observed. I currently have more work booked than I can reasonably get done in the next year, and my customers would be really delighted if I could deliver it to them sooner, and take on even more projects. But I have yet to find any way that just adding AI tools to the mix makes us orders-of-magnitude better. The most I've been able to squeeze out is a 5% to 10% increase.
by altairprime | 2025-12-09 01:57:36+00:00
For those trying to understand the most important parts of the paper, here's what I think is the most significant two statements, subquoted out of two (consecutive) paragraphs midway through the paper:

> we selected five additional, previously unseen pretrained ViT models for which we had access to evaluation data. These models, considered out-of-domain relative to the initial set, had all their weights reconstructed by projecting onto the identified 16-dimensional universal subspace. We then assessed their classification accuracy and found no significant drop in performance

> we can replace these 500 ViT models with a single Universal Subspace model. Ignoring the task-variable first and last layer [...] we observe a requirement of 100 × less memory, and these savings are prone to increase as the number of trained models increases. We note that we are, to the best of our knowledge, the first work, to be able to merge 500 (and theoretically more) Vision Transformer into a single universal subspace model. This result implies that hundreds of ViTs can be represented using a single subspace model

So, they found an underlying commonality among the post-training structures in 50 LLaMA3-8B models, 177 GPT-2 models, and 8 Flan-T5 models; and, they demonstrated that the commonality could in every case be substituted for those in the original models with no loss of function; and noted that they seem to be the first to discover this.

For a tech analogy, imagine if you found a bzip2 dictionary that reduced the size of every file compressed by 99%, because that dictionary turns out to be uniformly helpful for all files. You would immediately open a pull request to bzip2 to have the dictionary built-in, because it would save everyone billions of CPU hours. [*]

[*] Except instead of 'bzip2 dictionary' (strings of bytes), they use the term 'weight subspace' (analogy not included here[**]) — and, 'file compression' hours becomes 'model training' hours. It's just an analogy.

[**] 'Hilbert subspaces' is just incorrect enough to be worth appending as a footnote[***].

[***] As a second footnote.
by shiroiuma | 2025-12-09 01:58:59+00:00
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope.

Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 02:00:06+00:00
At this point "we're going to make all office work obsolete" feels more like a marketing technique than anything actually connected to reality. It's sort of like how Coca-Cola implies that drinking their stuff will make you popular and well-liked by other attractive, popular people.

Meanwhile, my own office is buried in busywork that there are currently no AI tools on the market that will do the work for us, and AI entering a space sometimes increases busywork workloads. For example, when writing descriptions of publications or listings for online sales, we have to put more effort now into not sounding like it was AI-generated or we will lose sales. The AI tools for writing descriptions / generating listings are not very helpful either. (An inaccurate listing/description is a nightmare.)

I was able to help set up a client with AI tools to help him generate basically a faux website in a few hours that has lots of nice graphic design, images, etc. so that his new venture looks like a real company. Well, except for the "About Us" page that hallucinated an executive team plus a staff of half a dozen employees. So I guess work like that does get done faster now.
by thiht | 2025-12-09 02:02:00+00:00
One thing to consider is that the way registrars work is fundamentally different of other businesses (since you mention Cloudflare incidents), because of their obligations to registries and the ICANN. A registrar cannot simply disappear, and your domains with it, that’s not possible. Domains are actually registered to a registry, and registrars have an obligation to submit their domain portfolio to a data escrow[1] to allow for handover to another registrar in case of bankruptcy.

Domain names can also be transferred to another registrar at any time[2] for the cost of a renewal. I’m not sure what your beef is with Gandi but you can transfer at any time if you’re not satisfied with their service.

My advice: rent reputable gTLDs (com, net, org, info, dev for instance), avoid ccTLDs from countries you’re not a resident of (ccTLDs are the 2 characters TLDs), use a big name registrar (I would recommend Namecheap), and keep your domain registrations separate from your hosting (you don’t want to mix up domain name disputes with anything else if it happens)

[1]: for gTLDs since it’s part of ICANN rules, which ccTLDs are not a part of, but reliable ccTLDs offer the same guarantees

[2]: unless you maxed out the renewal period (usually 10 years). A transfer triggers a renewal, so if your domain name is already registered for 10 years, you must wait a year before transferring. That’s why I always recommend to not renew for the max period and to always keep 2 years as buffer (ie. renew for 8 years at most)
by Lerc | 2025-12-09 02:02:13+00:00
>It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.

I don't think you can characterise it as a sentiment of the community as a whole. While every AI thread seems to have it's share of AI detractors, the usernames of the posters are becoming familiar. I think it might be more accurate to say that there is a very active subset of users with that opinion.

This might hold true for the discourse in the wider community. You see a lot of coverage about artists outraged by AI, but when I speak to artists they have a much more moderate opinion. Cautious, but intrigued. A good number of them are looking forward to a world that embraces more ambitious creativity. If AI can replicate things within a standard deviation of the mean, the abundance of that content there will create an appetite for something further out.
by whycombinetor | 2025-12-09 02:03:16+00:00
Third party benchmarks like terminalbench exist.

W.r.t code changes especially small ones (say 50 lines spread across 5 files), if you can't get an agent to make nearly exactly the code changes you want, just faster than you, that's a you problem at this point. If it maybe would take you 15 minutes, grok-code-fast-1 can do it in 2.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 02:03:23+00:00
Right. With careful use of AIs, I can use it to gather information to help me make better designs (like giving me summaries of the current best available frameworks or libraries to choose for a given project), but as far as just generating an architecture and then generating the code and devops and so on for that? It's just not there, unless you're creating an app that effectively already exists, like some basic CRUD app.

If you're creating basic CRUDs, what on earth are you doing? That kind of thing should have been automated a long time ago.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-09 02:03:26+00:00
This is the correct take. We all have that "Come to Jesus" moment eventually, where something blows our minds so profoundly that we believe anything is possible in the immediate future. I respect that, it's a great take to have and promotes a lot of discussion, but now more than ever we need concretes and definitives instead of hype machines and their adjacent counterparts.

Too much is on the line here regardless of what ultimately ends up being true or just hype.
by DavidPiper | 2025-12-09 02:04:13+00:00
As someone who has begun to fall into the "Machine Zone"[1] with gaming and stream watching (and trying to get back out) I'm feeling many of the things you're describing.

I struggle with defining the line for myself because a lot of my own hobbies and goals are creative - making music, building a video game, performing improv comedy. And those things are naturally in want of an audience.

Does it mean that I'm part of the problem in wanting to create entertainment, because I'm essentially asking an audience to indulge in the "junk food" that I create? I don't know.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on that question because your ideas seem to be well-articulated. My current thinking is that there is a distinction between:

- "So good" and "So good I could watch it for hours"

- "The artistic content" and "The platform moderating your access to it"

- "Pro-social" and "Anti-social" encouragement / culture of various media (the medium is the message, etc).

Making good quality, non-addictive, pro-social art, independently seems to be an ideal outcome, but then your art - while also being extremely expensive to create and distribute - is in competition with highly visible, well-established, strongly addictive... McDonald's franchises.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design
by ipdashc | 2025-12-09 02:04:49+00:00
This is my assumption as well. In general it seems like hacking becomes a lot easier (still not easy of course, just easier) when you have no fear of getting caught or going to jail.

Does anyone remember LAPSUS$ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsus$ from a while back? It was reported for a while that it was largely made up of teenagers, and it seems two did get caught. I recall their whole MO being brazen social engineering/using stolen credentials in a way that got them caught pretty quickly, but also got results fast.
by loandbehold | 2025-12-09 02:05:13+00:00
Senior Software Engineer. The system is a niche business software software for a specific industry. It doesn't do any fancy math, all straightforward business logic.

> Trying to get clean code erases all/most of my productivity gains, and doesn't spark joy. I find having a back-end-forth with an agent exhausting, probably because I have to build and discard multiple mental models of the proposed solution, since the approach can vary wildly between prompts

You probably work on something that requires very unique and creative solutions. I work on dumb business software. Claude Code is generally good at following existing code patterns. As far as back-and-forth with Claude Code being exhausting, I have few tips how how to minimize number or shots required to get good solution from CC: 1. Start by exploring relevant code by asking CC questions. 2. Then use Plan Mode for anything more than trivial change. Using Plan Mode is essential. You need to make sure you and CC are on the same page BEFORE it starts writing code 3. If you see CC making same mistake over and over, add instructions to your CLAUDE.md to avoid it in the future. This way your CC setup improves over time, like a coworker who learns over time.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-09 02:06:01+00:00
Good doesn't mean moral in this case, it means valuable. Capitalism, or whatever the fuck we have right now, doesn't create much real value, but instead it creates a lot of fake value that we just proxy.

And I say "or whatever the fuck" because, as you point out, it's not really capitalism. And maybe it never was - after all, the US Golden Era was when we had the most central planning, the most social services, and the highest taxes.

But everybody right now is exploiting one teensy little flaw of the economy - humans don't live very long. There's no reason to make stuff good for later when you can take a cash advance and get rich now. Everything is always someone else's problem.

I think one fun case study is superstar CEOs. They're so highly desirable, and they work 5 years at a company and "turn it around" before moving onto the next. But if you look at the company after they leave, it's in shambles. And yet, they are the most sought after CEOs. You don't want the Arizona Green Tea guy, no, you want the guy who ran Chipotle into the ground. But hey, at least he increased their stock price for, like, a little bit.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-09 02:06:08+00:00
GP might be saying that analyzing _differences_ in how perf targets are met in say, VN&CL (or SG&CH IE&HK TW&SI KR&DK) might be most productive. As you mention, in particular, how are their sad paths ("problems") different? Or the same?

Now there are subdepartments of study devoted to this very question (empirical study of the legislative-administrative divide) , but in the US I'm hard-pressed to list the corresponding think-tanks :) I suppose some MBA level depts in the US will have to suffice
by echelon | 2025-12-09 02:06:34+00:00
Atlanta has been an early market for both scooters and various food delivery robots. Both have been a boon for the city.

We've had these delivery robots for about six months now, and they've grown to the point where I see hundreds of delivery robots on the sidewalks each week. Scores of them daily. They're flooding our city, making the long commutes people don't want to.

The reason this is great is that Atlanta's infrastructure is car-centric and spread too far apart to make walking or even biking make sense.

The biking infrastructure we have does no good when it rains and you're twenty minutes from your destination. That same infrastructure also doesn't serve our children or our elderly. Or help when you're sick or tired and need a pick me up.

It's easy to order for a group of people from one of these. To imagine the same group of four people hopping on bikes together to travel twenty minutes to food - that's never once happened in my life. Only certain types of people bike, and you'll invariably find yourself in groups with lots of non-cyclists.

I feel that cyclist culture is bright eyed and idealistic, but not practical. You need a city designed around it, and all the people need to grow up loving it. These delivery robots, Waymo, Lime bikes - they're much more sensible middle grounds for cities like ours. Where people can't bike, or simply don't want to.
by billisonline | 2025-12-09 02:07:11+00:00
An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exciting exponentials started to look more like plateauing S-curves, executives conveniently stopped using the term "AGI," preferring weasel-words like "transformative AI" instead.

I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can, and something that can reason symbolically about novel domains as well as we can. I've seen about enough from LLMs, and I agree with the critique that som type of breakthrough neuro-symbolic reasoning architecture will be needed. The article is right about one thing: in that moment AI will overtake us suddenly! But I doubt we will make linear progress toward that goal. It could happen in one year, five, ten, fifty, or never. In 2023 I was deeply concerned about being made obsolete by AI, but now I sleep pretty soundly knowing the status quo will more or less continue until Judgment Day, which I can't influence anyway.
by notrustincloud | 2025-12-09 02:07:16+00:00
Ya'll need a trip to Japan. So many versions of the automat approach. One favorite is ガスト (Gusto). Self seat, Order from the tablet at your table, food delivered by a rolling robot with "Kitty" theme, and self checkout with the reciept/ticket at an unstaffed kiosk. They put all of the human labor effort into kitchen staff and great ingredients. Better food than the best Denny's or IHOP in the heyday of the late 80s or early 90s, and breakfast for two totaling under 12 dollars. Its a winning twist on Automat, and other examples of this are around the corner in almost every town. Its the future we were promised in the 50s that never got delivered beyond some Art Deco public works buildings.
by jondwillis | 2025-12-09 02:07:20+00:00
Workshopping this tortured metaphor:

AI, at the limit, is a vampiric technology, sucking the differentiated economic value from those that can train it. What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood? This, to me, is a big problem, because a model will tend to drift from reality without more training-blood.

The owners of the tech need to reinvest in the hosts.