MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mystraline | 2025-12-08 18:19:04+00:00
> Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?

Because the current country's idea of fines against egregious business practices mainly amounts to a 5% fine of the profit they defrauded those against.

It turns a punatative action into a "cost of doing business". Look at right now with Dollar General - 25% of their goods are priced higher at register, defrauding people. And what can be done? Leave. Because many states are completely ineffectual in strongly attacking this.

And although North Carolina caps inspection fines to $5k, how many times were they even inspected? And were any fines even submitted?

My guess is no.
Pyversity with Thomas van Dongen (Springer Nature)
by CShorten | 2025-12-08 18:19:13+00:00
I am SUPER EXCITED to publish the 132nd episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Thomas van Dongen, head of AI engineering at Springer Nature!

Thomas is the creator of Pyversity, a fast, lightweight open-source python library for diversifying retrieval results!

Diversity is such an underrated topic in AI and Vector Databases. Whether searching through e-Commerce products or Scientific papers, we often want serendipity from our search engine, results that we were not expecting to find!

For example, say you ask "Who has accomplish the most in professional sports?". A relevance optimized search system might return 10 results all about Michale Jordan... whereas a diversity enhanced system would produce information about Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, ...

Rather than just return the relevance ranked search results, Pyversity uses methods such as Maximal Marginal Relevnace (MMR) or Determinantal Point Process (DPP) to achieve diverse results.

I learned a lot from this conversation exploring the general topic of diversity in vector spaces, diversification strategies from Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to Determinantal point process (DPP), and more, as well as Thomas' work and thoughts on AI in Scientific Literature!

I hope you find it interesting!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2N1qvfP7tg

Spotify: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/FBaEZ9b5UYb
Thoughts of a Neopagan / the Reconstruction of Neolithic Religion
by 5wizard5 | 2025-12-08 18:19:19+00:00
Many books have been written about Neolithic religion, a time when a Goddess was worshipped along with a multitude of male Gods, seen as her consorts or sons; but how is it possible today, in such a distant and different era, to reconstruct the contours of an ancient spirituality without having sacred texts or scriptures? How can we hear the voices of a people who left no written words? The answer does not lie in a simple archaeological equation but in an act of profound spiritual intuition and listening; we are not simply solving a puzzle with missing pieces, we are practicing a form of sacred remembrance, a re-knitting of the threads of instinctual knowledge that lies dormant within us; Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of religion are, in a sense, our modern shamans. Through sophisticated methodologies, they interpret patterns of ancient settlements, terracotta finds, and engravings on animal bones, deciphering a universal symbolic language left by our ancestors on rocks. What emerges is the revelation of an immanent spirituality, a spirituality in which the gods were not confined to a distant heaven but pulsated in the earth, flowed in rivers, sprouted in seeds, and shone in the sun and moon; the divine was the very breath of the world. Reconstructing the religion of the Neolithic period is not just a matter of writing a few pages in history books; for neo-pagans, it is an act of reconnection; it means remembering that our ancestors did not pray to a God separate from creation but lived within a living and sacred cosmos, immersed in the gods; it is an invitation to look at the full moon and see the face of the Goddess, to touch a tree and feel the power of the God, to feel them in the air around us and within us, it is an invitation to understand that spirituality is not written in a book but must be lived.
by zem | 2025-12-08 18:19:48+00:00
I don't see how free market capitalism fixes that. I looked up a definition to make sure I wasn't missing something and as per investopedia:

"The term “free market capitalism” refers to an economy that puts no or minimal barriers in the way of privately owned businesses. Matters such as worker rights, environmental protection, and product safety will be addressed by businesses as the marketplace demands."

it's basically worship of owning the means of production and not being regulated in its use, e.g. if you own a company you get to dictate all sorts of unreasonable things to your employees, and any benefits gained from automation accrue to whoever can afford the up front money to own the machines.
by yannyu | 2025-12-08 18:19:56+00:00
I think there's a lot of utility to current AI tools, but it's also clear we're in a very unsettled phase of this technology. We likely won't see for years where the technology lands in terms of capability or the changes that will be made to society and industry to accommodate.

Somewhat unfortunately, the sheer amount of money being poured into AI means that it's being forced upon many of us, even if we didn't want it. Which results in a stark, vast gap like the author is describing, where things are moving so fast that it can feel like we may never have time to catch up.

And what's even worse, because of this industry and individuals are now trying to have the tool correct and moderate itself, which intuitively seems wrong from both a technical and societal standpoint.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-08 18:20:06+00:00
I disagree. I think we're testing it, and we haven't seen the worst of it yet.

And I think it's less about non-deterministic code (the code is actually still deterministic) but more about this new-fangled tool out there that finally allows non-coders to generate something that looks like it works. And in many cases it does.

Like a movie set. Viewed from the right angle it looks just right. Peek behind the curtain and it's all wood, thinly painted, and it's usually easier to rebuild from scratch than to add a layer on top.
by btbuildem | 2025-12-08 18:20:18+00:00
> FirstPageSage AI Chatbot Usage Chart (December 3, 2025)

What a bizarre way to organize the chart. Clearly Anthropic is leading -- their early bet on "programming" as the main use case is paying off.

The recent report from Openrouter [1] confirms as much: coding is the number one use case, with role playing / fantasy writing in second place.

I have a feeling the remaining use cases will never dominate, instead they will slowly mature into acceptable practices across the various industries. That will probably take longer than the investment bubble can hold though.

1: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai
by cons0le | 2025-12-08 18:20:25+00:00
I directly asked gemini how to get world peace. It said the world should prioritize addressing climate change, inequality, and discrimination. Yeah - we're not gonna do any of that shit. So I don't know what the point of "superintelligent" AI is if we aren't going to even listen to it for the basic big picture stuff. Any sort of "utopia" that people imagine AI bringing is doomed to fail because we already can't cooperate without AI
by ceravis | 2025-12-08 18:20:40+00:00
Perhaps a total solar eclipse? Especially so when seeing half the solar system lined up neatly in a row with the sun and moon (and a comet in case of the recent April 2024 eclipse in the US), and truly feeling that one is riding on a chunk of rock hurtling through space, tethered invisibly to that impossibly distant mass of gas and plasma like a ball at the end of a rope...

Still get frisson every time I think about it ;)
by danuker | 2025-12-08 18:21:21+00:00
> I should be running my own LLM

I approve of this, but in your place I'd wait for hardware to become cheaper when the bubble blows over. I have a i9-10900, and bought an M.2 SSD and 64GB of RAM in july for it, and get useful results with Qwen3-30B-A3B (some 4-bit quant from unsloth running on llama.cpp).

It's much slower than an online service (~5-10 t/s), and lower quality, but it still offers me value for my use cases (many small prototypes and tests).

In the mean time, check out LLM service prices on https://artificialanalysis.ai/ Open source ones are cheap! Lower on the homepage there's a Cost Efficiency section with a Cost vs Intelligence chart.
by alphazard | 2025-12-08 18:21:43+00:00
IMO the hard problem here is PoS consensus with the private transactions. It seems like the stakers have to come up from the depths of privacy to participate in consensus. Maybe there is a way to do private staking, but that makes the network very difficult to understand and build confidence in. So I don't see upgrading to faster consensus to be a small incremental improvement, it's fundamental.

A separate issue is that both Monero and ZCash are not post-quantum secure, while many of the new zkSTARK VMs are. The ledger lives forever, and state actors will eventually decrypt the transactions if the cryptography can be broken. At that point it seems like it's better just to build the currency product in one of the zk VMs.
by srean | 2025-12-08 18:21:50+00:00
I might be unusual in the sense that in my teens I absolutely adored Asimov as a writer of non-fiction rather than as a sci-fi author.

For the current generation, I never miss a chance to mention Gamow's non-fiction.

It's unfortunate that works of great non-fiction writers evaporate away from our cultural consciousness after their death.

It makes me sad that there will be a generation, or maybe it's already upon us, one that has not delighted in Martin Gardner.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 18:22:57+00:00
It's only real if you assume top earners have monetary incentives to work more, which is a very bold assumption in a world where the top earners don't even earn money through their work in the first place.

And again, the utility of income for an individual is logarithmic with regard to their income, which means the marginal utility is the inverse function and that never stopped the top earners to want more.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-08 18:23:01+00:00
> What happens if I receive money from the Government but in the same time I'm also actively opposed to said Government's actions?

Nothing? That's how it's worked in literally all functioning democracies. The purpose of any government, democratic or not, is to benefit its constituents. If it doesn't do that, we have a moral obligation to destroy the tyrants. Those benefits range in their tangible value, from hard to quantify things, like establishing public expectations of behavior (laws), to easy to quantify (subsidies like wellfare, farming subsidies, etc).

I'm truly baffled by your take that seems to insist that helping the needy somehow makes you moreso a slave to the government than the whole monopoly on legitimate use of force thing.
by graypegg | 2025-12-08 18:23:23+00:00
June's (developer from the team page on Nova's site) personal website [0] points to this other interesting looking pattern-matching-based language she made called Modal [1] which seems to work on a tree rather than named LIFO stacks

[0] https://june.codes/

[1] https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/modal
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-08 18:23:45+00:00
Offtopic but zerotier is really good software that I used but I am in India and its pings were high which is when I started to look around at free vps's in the form of jupyter notebooks like intel tiber and others using things like pinggy and trying to find a non rooted version of ssh (dropbear) etc.

Technically it was one of my "first" achievements that I can do a lot of things if I devote the time to tinkering.

I think a lot of zerotier customers atleast free users just want to host minecraft ngl, I think after trying out lots of custom solutions, I found a custom solution which I stuck with it for a long time: https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...

I didn't know why I shared this but just wanted to share I guess that human spirit can try to find ways around and tinkering and how its an indominatable spirit I guess (ps hackernews "hacking" community glorified it a lot to me as well and gave me confidence that I am sure I can find ways to do this so thanks to hackernews as well)

It uses (https://e4mc.link/), I have no skin in the game but its open source and maybe just wanted to give another open source software and its team if possible some leads on improvement

maybe you guys can look into hosting e4mc software on your infrastructure or similar. Minecraft hosting is one of the largest markets, maybe zerotier can look into it

I know my blog was really messy but if zerotier really does implement my idea, the only thing I wish if is if the team ever create a blog post about it, maybe I can be given the opportunity to write it if possible but even if you do not, I would respect it and I just wanted to give some leads because I "wished" to create a product in this market but I don't have the funds and/or I wouldn't have the proper ability to monetize it in my opinion.

Also, what are your thoughts on creating a zerotier alternative to pinggy, recently shown on hn (pinggy.io), Heck I have created a custom huggingface space + websockify/ssh solution in house (vibe coded) too and I would love to discuss more about it as I am truly passionate about these things and if it might align with zerotier (sorry if I am yapping and the overlap is none)

have a nice day and sorry for catching you off-guard I guess.

Also must admit, you have a really catchy name on hackernews and that was why I decided to click and found you made zerotier (and its infrastructure, I decided that the biggest hurdle for me was the infrastructure aspect of things and I am also curious how zerotier started its infrastructure and journey, I feel overwhelmed by these infrastructure side of things basically and like to focus on trying to create crafty solutions around them) :p
by crazygringo | 2025-12-08 18:23:45+00:00
I vote to just change the spelling to what almost everyone already thinks it is anyways.

It'll still be just as weird. But "chs" is just nonsensical. The idea that it would sound like "sh" is baffling. I mean, I know this is English spelling which is not known for its regularity, but this is just too much.
by Loughla | 2025-12-08 18:24:15+00:00
That's the nice thing about completely unsubstantiated, baseless claims on the Internet, if it ever happens, you can always point at it like you're Nostradamus.

My predictions:

Actual zombie president in 2044.

New COVID in 2061.

Dinosaurs come back in 2123, reveal they've been steadily populating hidden Nazi underground bunkers and have declared peace with the yeti.
by uplifter | 2025-12-08 18:24:26+00:00
I like this idea of an objective morality that can be rationally pursued by all agents. David Deutsch argues for such objectivity in morality, as well as for those other philosophical truths you mentioned, in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

But I'm just not sure they are in the same category. I have yet to see a convincing framework that can prove one moral code being better than another, and it seems like such a framework would itself be the moral code, so just trying to justify faith in itself. How does one avoid that sort of self-justifying regression?
by _rpxpx | 2025-12-08 18:24:30+00:00
Disingenuous is making a bald statement like that about a very long and involved debate in philosophy. Suggest you read around the subject a bit first before making such haughty comments... Could start here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/

https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/a/3282/file...
by adventured | 2025-12-08 18:24:32+00:00
You're rather dramatically demonstrating how remarkable the progress has been: GPT-3 was horrible at coding. Claude Opus 4.5 is good at it.

They're already far faster than anybody on HN could ever be. Whether it takes another five years or ten, in that span of time nobody on HN will be able to keep up with the top tier models. It's not irrational, it's guaranteed. The progress has been extraordinary and obvious, the direction is certain, the outcome is certain. All that is left is to debate whether it's a couple of years or closer to a decade.
by theamk | 2025-12-08 18:24:41+00:00
Deprecations via warnings don't reliably work anywhere, in general.

If you are a good developer, you'll have extensive unit test coverage and CI. You never see the unit test output (unless they fail) - so warnings go unnoticed.

If you are a bad developer, you have no idea what you are doing and you ignore all warnings unless program crashes.
by vidarh | 2025-12-08 18:24:59+00:00
A lot of this, I suspect, on the basis of having worked on a supervised fine-tuning project for one of the largest companies in this space, is that providers have invested a lot of money in fine-tuning datasets that sound this way.

On the project I did work on, reviewers were not allowed to e.g. answer that they didn't know - they had to provide an answer to every prompt provided. And so when auditing responses, a lot of difficult questions had "confidently wrong" answers because the reviewer tried and failed, or all kinds of evasive workarounds because they knew they couldn't answer.

Presumbly these providers will eventually understand (hopefully already has - this was a year ago) that they also need to train the models to understand when the correct answer is "I don't know", or "I'm not sure. I think maybe X, but ..."
by Sanzig | 2025-12-08 18:25:23+00:00
I have Copilot at work, it feels so useless sometimes. As an example, I had a report which I needed to make some batch edits to. I figured why not let the robot take a crack at it, so I clicked the Copilot button and spent a couple minutes describing what I needed changed.

Copilot tells me it can't edit my current document, but it can create a new one. I figured okay, Microsoft doesn't want to set it loose on the original, guess it makes sense that it requires a copy. So I said yes.

Nope. Instead of creating a copy of my document and editing it, it created an entirely new document which excised basically everything in the original report and replaced it with a very short summary - I'm talking 5000 words down to 500. All my tables and figures were gone, as was the standard report template my employer uses.

What utter garbage. Office productivity is a major use case for LLMs, and here the largest vendor of productivity software on the planet is happy to fuck it up.
by blauditore | 2025-12-08 18:26:11+00:00
All these engineers who claim to write most code through AI - I wonder what kind of codebase that is. I keep on trying, but it always ends up producing superficially okay-looking code, but getting nuances wrong. Also fails to fix them (just changes random stuff) if pointed to said nuances.

I work on a large product with two decades of accumulated legacy, maybe that's the problem. I can see though how generating and editing a simple greenfield web frontend project could work much better, as long as actual complexity is low.
by codazoda | 2025-12-08 18:26:37+00:00
I had a similar result trying to create 16 similarly styled images. After half a dozen it just started kicking out the same image over and over again no matter what the prompt said. Even the “thinking” looked right, but the image was just a repeat. I don’t know if this is some type of context limitation or what.

I got around it by using a new prompt/context for each image. This required some rethinking about how to make them match. What I did was create a sprite sheet with the first prompt and then only replaced (edited) the second prompt.

I still got some consistency problems because there were a few important details left out of my sprite sheet. Next time I think I’ll create those individually and then attach them as context for additional prompts.
by bilbo0s | 2025-12-08 18:27:17+00:00
Because AI, or rather, an LLM, is the consensus of many human experts as encoded in its embedding. So it is better, but only for those who are already expert in what they're asking.

The problem is, you have to know enough about the subject on which you're asking a question to land in the right place in the embedding. If you don't, you'll just get bunk. (I know it's popular to call AI bunk "hallucinations" these days, but really if it was being spouted by a half wit human we'd just call it "bunk".)

So you really have to be an expert in order to maximize your use of an LLM. And even then, you'll only be able to maximize your use of that LLM in the field in which your expertise lies.

A programmer, for instance, will likely never be able to ask a coherent enough question about economics or oncology for an LLM to give a reliable answer. Similarly, an oncologist will never be able to give a coherent enough software specification for an LLM to write an application for him or her.

That's the achilles heel of AI today as implemented by LLMs.
by Maxatar | 2025-12-08 18:27:19+00:00
If you're someone who owns Microsoft, what option would you prefer?

1. Stock price remains the same but revenue doubles.

2. Revenue stays the same, but stock price doubles.

Assuming all else equal, and recognizing that this is absolutely a simplification, but if these were the two choices then it seems a no brainer that you'd go with option 2. Revenue is a means of increasing stock price.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-08 18:27:38+00:00
Yes, but not like what you think. Programmers are going to look more like product managers with extra technical context.

AI is also great at looking for its own quality problems.

Yesterday on an entirely LLM generated codebase

Prompt: > SEARCH FOR ANTIPATTERNS

Found 17 antipatterns across the codebase:

And then what followed was a detailed list, about a third of them I thought were pretty important, a third of them were arguably issues or not, and the rest were either not important or effectively "this project isn't fully functional"

As an engineer, I didn't have to find code errors or fix code errors, I had to pick which errors were important and then give instructions to have them fixed.
by adventured | 2025-12-08 18:27:48+00:00
You're all arguing over how many single digit years it'll take at this point.

It doesn't matter if it takes another 12 or 36 months to make that claim true. It doesn't matter if it takes five years.

Is AI coming for most of the software jobs? Yes it is. It's moving very quickly, and nothing can stop it. The progress has been particularly exceptionally clear (early GPT to Gemini 3 / Opus 4.5 / Codex).
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-08 18:28:59+00:00
> Europe, the document warns, faces “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” Why? Because “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: “non-European” clearly means “nonwhite.”

Nonwhite is one way to put it, and it's significant enough, but more profoundly they also mean muslim. This has real and extremely far-reaching implications. Possibly the end of the West in the sense of European Christian civilisation. This has significant ramifications for the US, too.

Interesting that this is dismissed and not discussed when this is really the most profound trend on historical scale.

As for the EU, well the US have always been wary of it as a political force so this is nothing new, just more blunt.

IMHO, the assessment of Europe's situation in this National Security Strategy is quite accurate, overall. Perhaps that's why it hurts.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-12-08 18:29:14+00:00
Yes, personally I'm completely fine with the fact that LLMs don't actually think. I don't care that they're not AGI, though the hysterics about "AGI is so close now" seems silly to me. Fusion reactors and self-driving cars are just around the same corner.

They prove to have some useful utility to me regardless.