MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simianwords | 2025-12-01 08:09:57+00:00
>So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones.

You are misconstruing the original point. They are simply suggesting that the moral qualms of using AI are simply not that high - neither to vast majority of consumers, neither to the government. There are a few people who might exaggerate these moral issues for self service but they wouldn't matter in the long term.

That is not to suggest there are absolutely no legitimate moral problems with AI but they will pale in comparison to what the market needs.

If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, humanity will collectively agree in one way or the other to ignore or work around the "moral hazards" for the greater good.

You can start by explaining what your specific moral value is that goes against AI use? It might bring to clarity whether these values are that important at all to begin with.
by matwood | 2025-12-01 08:11:43+00:00
In GA, after taxes your take home would be ~125k. So you think someone can live in a big city like ATL for 25k/year? What if they have a family? Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar? The 125k also doesn't have healthcare deducted yet.

Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.
by fragmede | 2025-12-01 08:12:10+00:00
Philosophers can spill all the ink they want to define "think" and whether machines can do it or not. Given some input, the machine takes some time, and then comes up with some output. Coloquially, the machine is thinking during that time. This has been true since there have been computers and long before LLMs. Now that computers can generate essays about anything, maybe it becomes a question that people feel is important to answer for their day to day life, but I doubt it.
Show HN: A photo colorizer I built after revisiting old family photos
by sonny177 | 2025-12-01 08:13:52+00:00
I’ve been working on a small project that started after my grandma showed me some old black and white photos of my grandpa over Thanksgiving. I already had an older AI project with most of the pieces built, so I reworked it into a simple web app that colorizes old photos.

It’s not a commercial product in any serious sense. I cleaned it up enough to make it usable, and it’s now a small SaaS with accounts, Firebase on the backend, and Stripe for credits. The processing is pretty fast and works reasonably well on most scans.

Would be glad to hear about any issues you run into or ideas for where the model or pipeline could be improved as I keep working on it.
by supermatt | 2025-12-01 08:14:17+00:00
You must be mistaken…

The maximum personal contribution to public health insurance (GKV) is capped at around 400/m for healthcare (and an additional 200 towards long-term/elderly care). Spouse and children are free if they are unemployed.

https://www.tk.de/resource/blob/2189790/9321e565c304a9cc33bb...

If you are paying more than that then you are already paying for private health insurance (PKV) or private supplementation on top of GKV for some premium coverage.
by altairprime | 2025-12-01 08:16:04+00:00
Year-over-year increase in GDP in the U.S. right now is almost exclusively “production” output from the healthcare industry, whose profits are stratospheric and rising. So there’s two useful datapoints here: first, the bill must be paid, or U.S. GDP growth year-over-year falters, not because healthcare costs this much; and second, household debt continues to increase year-over-year to permit continued wage stagnation. Whether insurers end up lowering their profits (and thus prices) as the subsidy expires centers around whether banks extend further debt as a household wages subsidy. As of right now, that seems to be continuing, even though some of that debt market is in the midst of a small crash, so insurers (who have no regulatory limits on profit levels) are unlikely to lower their profit targets as subsidies end.

So long as the political will of U.S. leadership supports that continued profit, and either government and/or banks subsidize worker wages to cover the increased profits, then we’ll continue seeing growth in costs on paper before subsidies. This growth in profits/prices could not be sustained on wages alone, given the continuing decline of inflation-adjusted worker earnings; and so to answer your question, yes: the act of subsidizing is what’s enabling the prices being charged; but, no: the costs of providing healthcare to any one person of a given age are not increasing due to subsidies; just the profits.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 08:16:07+00:00
>If you have some source to make the case that layoff-stock price change is correlated for a different reason these days, it would be interesting to read it.

The phenomenon is pretty recent so there won't truly be any studies on it in a while. But look up "Jobless Boom". Here's a piece of what I'm talking about:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-m...

>For much of 2025, the job market was described by economists as "no hire, no fire," meaning an environment where workers could count on job security even as hiring around the U.S. cooled. But conditions have changed, and the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate in both September and October, citing increasing risks to employment growth and with Fed Chair Jerome Powell noting that policymakers are closely watching layoff announcements by big employers.

personally, I think the AI efficiencies are a smokescreen, but the point of how this job contraction is forcing he fed's hands is hard to ignore after some 2 years of holding rates steady.
by matwood | 2025-12-01 08:16:34+00:00
45 minutes is crazy. I have a chicken and rice dish I can make in 20 minutes (yes, I've timed myself because I'm weirdo and enjoy those chef shows). It takes 20 minutes because that's how long the rice takes. It can be faster if I use shrimp instead of chicken (more expensive though) and noodles instead of rice. It also makes ~3 servings.
by menaerus | 2025-12-01 08:16:47+00:00
Yeah, ok, but this doesn't invalidate what I said above. Completing the degree with MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and such will cost you ~$100k per year (give or take) but they will also open you a door of landing a prestigious job more easily than with the other colleges.

Entry level salaries for most of these folks are ~$200k/yr so having a ~$400k total cost for education, even though I agree it looks totally crazy when given without the context, isn't really _that_ crazy when you put it into a perspective of total expected income.

I think that if this hasn't been even remotely true, there would be no people taking the degrees there, no?
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-01 08:17:20+00:00
> I think the ideal compiler for 6502, and maybe any of the memory-poor 8-bit systems would be one that supported both native code generation where speed is needed as well as virtual machine code for compactness.

Threaded code might be a worthwhile middle-of-the-way approach that spans freely across the "native" and "pure VM interpreter" extremes.
by elric | 2025-12-01 08:18:20+00:00
Some anecdata from Belgium: the software market is dead. Hardly anyone is hiring. Rates have plummetted. There are (virtually) no startups. Big corpos are hiring in Southern and Eastern Europe instead, when they're not outsourcing to India.

Unlike some of the US commenters, our high tax rates and lack of stock-options driven reward schemes means that most of us don't have enough money in the bank to casually found a startup.
by fooker | 2025-12-01 08:19:08+00:00
If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.

> Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar?

Yes, suppose spouse contributes to household expenses, but assume separate savings and investments for this calculation. Do you see you'd easily get to 100k saved?

The difference between having a large fraction of your savings in your bank account versus invested for the last 10 years can be quite a few millions, which is what most commenters here are failing to see. I'm sure the story was different between 2002 and 2012, but that was not what I talking about.
by popalchemist | 2025-12-01 08:19:11+00:00
Fellow solo dev here. I am happy for you that you saw this through.

I can not imagine spending so much time for so little return though. How many hours do you think you put into this altogether (not just including coding?)

It looks to me like if you were to do the math, you'd find that you were probably working for wages so low they'd be illegal.
by kirimita | 2025-12-01 08:20:08+00:00
This is also what UnifiedPush lib to use FCM does (https://codeberg.org/UnifiedPush/android-embedded_fcm_distri...)

Which is documented in this gist: https://gist.github.com/mar-v-in/2a054e3a4c0a508656549fc7d0a...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 08:20:09+00:00
>Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries.

Nope, but that's what trends show us from the decades between its ban and bans being lifted. All I know is that companies flowing money back into itself and having executives shift in and out every few years clearly hasn't worked.

It's just one stepping stone to make sure companies have skin in the game again.

You can argue dividends but that means the money gets taxed quicker, so that also helps the people.

>AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns

Sure, for now. I think that problem will fix itself sooner than later, so I'm not too concerned about that. Trends come and go.
by Eisenstein | 2025-12-01 08:20:17+00:00
> How many models are only trained on legal[0] data?

None, since 'legal' for AI training is not yet defined, but Olma is trained on the Dolma 3 dataset, which is

1. Common crawl

2. Github

3. Wikipedia, Wikibooks

4. Reddit (pre-2023)

5. Semantic Scholar

6. Project Gutenberg

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00159
by Marsymars | 2025-12-01 08:20:37+00:00
> Yes, that is how the world works. Anything that makes you successful would not work for everyone at the same time.

To me this reads as a particularly misanthropic view of the world that only considers zero-sum (or less than zero sum) actions.

Any investments in yourself that aren’t at the expense of others (education, exercise, diet, therapy, living space improvements, etc., etc.) or investments in family and community, benefit both you and others and would work for everybody; indeed, many such investments would work better the more people undertook them, rather than the fewer.
by GaryBluto | 2025-12-01 08:21:15+00:00
Do you really think a teenage internet troll who wants to offend as many people as possible would stop and think "You know what, I sure do love pissing people off but I draw the line at 'NIGGER BALLS'"?

> If a project taking a stance against people spamming the n-word makes you lose respect for them, that says a lot more about you than the project.

They weren't "taking a stance" against spam, they were claiming that FOSS itself was in danger due to a non-existent far-right campaign against them.
by tovej | 2025-12-01 08:21:36+00:00
On that same wikipedia page you cite, we have the following on the EU: "The European Union (EU), created in 1992, is sometimes considered a neoliberal organization, as it facilitates free trade and freedom of movement, erodes national protectionism and limits national subsidies."

Ideological rhetoric doesn't change the fact that neoliberalism has taken an even stronger hold in the EU since it's inception. The market is being deregularized, and austerity measures are being implemented.

Reporting a single public spending ratio figure like your source does says nothing. I'll note that Finland is at the top. I'm Finnish, and Finland has been suffering through two right wing austerity governments during the last three election periods. Austerity brings the public spending numbers up, because it stifles growth. Finland has sold off many of it's public monopolies, including the electric grid, the phone network, and energy companies. The current government even tried to sell the waterworks.

Austerity is visible in fewer public support programs, cuts to unemployment benefits, student benefits, etc. This government even went so far as to give the richest Finns a tax break, further deepening the crisis.

You claim that green parties are left. This is sometimes true, sometimes not. In general, green parties in the EU lean liberal (right wing), as is the case in Finland. Maybe you're confusing left wing politics with liberalism again, which is what the previous poster did. This is an american view of politics. Immigration and social values are not left-right problems. These are culture war issues that the conservatives in the US have drummed up.
by kondro | 2025-12-01 08:22:25+00:00
Still $0.20/million requests, but all Lambda functions run on provisioned EC2 instances (taking into account savings plans & reservations) with a 15% premium.

You can dial up/down the vCPU:RAM ratio so that if you have a lot of functions that just, for example, wait on IO, you can use a very high ratio to run many more functions in parallel on a single instance.

This looks like it will provide an interesting middle-cost option for services at scale with a more predictable load or usage pattern better suited to higher (or lower I guess) ratios without having to sacrifice any effort already put into Lambda and lets you still use it with other AWS services (Cognito auth, IoT Events, simplified Kinesis/DynamoDB Streams client that doesn't require Java, etc).

It will be interesting to experiment with.
by penteract | 2025-12-01 08:22:40+00:00
> Why would anyone pick the flexible/potentially-insecure option?

Because having a connection that's encrypted between a user and Cloudflare, then unencrypted between Cloudflare and your server is often better than unencrypted all the way. Sketchy ISPs could insert/replace ads, and anyone hosting a free wifi hotspot could learn things your users wouldn't want them to know (e.g. their address if they order a delivery).

Setting up TLS properly on your server is harder than using Cloudflare (disclaimer: I have not used Cloudflare, though I have sorted out a certificate for an https server).

The problem is that users can't tell if their connection is encrypted all the way to your server. Visiting an https url might lead someone to assume that no-one can eavesdrop on their connection by tapping a cross-ocean cable (TLS can deliver this property). Cloudflare breaks that assumption.

Cloudflare's marketing on this is deceptive: https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/ssl... says "TLS ensures data passing between users and servers is encrypted". This is true, but the servers it's talking about are Cloudflare's, not the website owner's.

Going through to "compare plans", the description of "Universal SSL Certificate" says "If you do not currently use SSL, Cloudflare can provide you with SSL capabilities — no configuration required." This could mislead users and server operators into thinking that they are more secure than they actually are. You cannot get the full benefits of TLS without a private key on your web server.

Despite this, I would guess that Cloudflare's "encryption remover" improves security compared to a world where Cloudflare did not offer this. I might feel differently about this if I knew more about people who interact with traffic between Cloudflare's servers and the servers of Cloudflare's customers.
by rekabis | 2025-12-01 08:22:59+00:00
> I had a lot of interaction with a startup incubator you know well, and ended up sitting in the discussions and planning around banning and erasing a young programmer we considered a threat to our financial interests, due to his concerns about authoritarianism in technology.

And… this wasn’t immediately seen as being deeply unethical and downright evil? Most of the western world punched Nazis on purpose 80 years ago… that doesn’t get to stop, because authoritarianism never goes away.

>In retrospect, he was harmless, but an example had to be made.

Wow. Just… wow. To destroy a life simply because of greed and because a person’s passion of fighting evil made you uncomfortable.

You need to understand you are very much the bad guy, here.
by josephg | 2025-12-01 08:23:00+00:00
This is also true of a lot of other disciplines. I’ve been learning filmmaking lately (and editing, colour science, etc). There’s functionally infinite beginner friendly videos online on anything you can imagine. But very little content that slowly teaches the fundamentals, or presents intermediate skills. It’s all “Here’s 5 pieces of gear you need!” “One trick that will make your lighting better”. But that’s mostly it. There’s almost no intermediate stuff. No 3 hour videos explaining in detail how to set up an interview properly. Stuff like that.
by cortesoft | 2025-12-01 08:23:07+00:00
Hmm, I don't know if the example really shows what the article argues it does.

If someone came up to me and told me the altered version of the joke I have heard many times, I might answer exactly like Chat GPT did. I would hear the beginning of the story, say "wait, i know this one", and not really pay attention to the rest because I would be all ready to respond with what I think is the right answer.

I bet if you point out the mistake, the LLM will say "oh you are right, this story actually does specify the gender of the doctor" or something to that effect... just like you or I would.

Now, I am not arguing that LLMs are really 'thinking' like humans, but I also find the second argument a bit tenuous. The article conjectures that humans reason from ideas to symbols while LLMs go from symbols to ideas, but couldn't that just be a post hoc interpretation we have for how our ideas come to our brain? We think we have ideas first, but an idea is just the result of neurons firing in our brains... and neurons are really just a probability function connected to other probability functions, just like an LLM... we give it symbols we understand to represent those probabilities, but that is just for our benefit so we can understand it.

It could be that the only difference between us and an LLM is processing power and the training data generated over billions of years of evolution.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-01 08:24:25+00:00
I was already in the habit of copy pasting relevent code sections to maximize reasoning performance to squeeze earlier weaker models performance on stubborn problems. (Still do this on really nasty ones)

It's also easy to notice LLMs create garbage comments that get worse over time. I started deleting all comments manually alongside manual snippet selection to get max performance.

Then started just routinely deleting all comments pre big problem solving session. Was doing it enough to build some automation.

Maybe high quality human comments improve ability? Hard to test in a hybrid code base.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-01 08:25:23+00:00
> If the market is all AI, and you are a service provider that does not want to work with AI at all then get out of the business.

Maybe they will, and I bet they'll be content doing that. I personally don't work with AI and try my best to not to train it. I left GitHub & Reddit because of this, and not uploading new photos to Instagram. The jury is still out on how I'm gonna share my photography, and not sharing it is on the table, as well.

I may even move to a cathedral model or just stop sharing the software I write with the general world, too.

Nobody has to bend and act against their values and conscience just because others are doing it, and the system is demanding to betray ourselves for its own benefit.

Life is more nuanced than that.
by ben_w | 2025-12-01 08:25:41+00:00
> If you are a very good developer, you will always be in demand.

"Always", in the same way that five years ago we'd "never" have an AI that can do a code review.

Don't get me wrong: I've watched a decade of promises that "self driving cars are coming real soon now honest", latest news about Tesla's is that it can't cope with leaves; I certainly *hope* that a decade from now will still be having much the same conversation about AI taking senior programmer jobs, but "always" is a long time.
by mopsi | 2025-12-01 08:25:41+00:00
That is indeed the case. It becomes very obvious with lesser-known vendor-specific scripting languages that don't have much training data available. LLMs try to map them onto the training data they do have and start hallucinating functions and other language constructs that exist in other languages.

When I tried to use LLMs to create Zabbix templates to monitor network devices, LLMs were utterly useless and made things up all the time. The illusion of thinking lasts only as long as you stay on the happy path of major languages like C, JS or Python.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-01 08:25:43+00:00
Some people will lose their homes. Some marriages will fail from the stress. Some people will chose to exit life because of it all.

It's happened before and there's no way we could have learned from that and improved things. It has to be just life changing, life ruining, career crippling. Absolutely no other way for a society to function than this.
by tovej | 2025-12-01 08:25:48+00:00
Ok, you seem to be some type of conspiracy theorist.

I have lived in the EU my whole life, and have always followed politics with an analytical eye. I'm not a Marxist, I just follow politics closely because it is important for my job.

I wish you all the best, but I think you need to get out of whatever social.media sinkhole you got these opinions from first.
by simianwords | 2025-12-01 08:26:05+00:00
I like the central point of this article which is top to bottom vs bottom to top thinking.

But I wonder if there is a falsifiable, formal definition to suggest that models (or anything for that matter) _do_ think.

The normal reply to chatgpt getting a question right is that it simply extrapolated what was already in the training data set. But I feel like the degree to which something "thinks" is the ability to generalise what it already knows.

This generalisation needs some formality - maybe some mathematical notation (like the opposite of overfitting). By generalisation I mean the ability to get something correct that exists pretty far from the training data.

The reason I suggest this is because GPT can solve pretty much any high school math problem you throw at it and it can do it better than 99% of humans. This is clearly not just memorising training data but doing something more. If it were not generalising, it couldn't possibly solve all new high school level mathematics.

But the extent decreases as you go higher level into undergraduate mathematics where it can still solve most problems you throw at it but not all. And still lower in PhD level mathematics. So the "thinking" ability of GPT exists somewhere in between - in some spectrum. But I don't think you can directly say that it can never generalise PhD level mathematics.. it could do it for high school so why not PhD?

If hypothetically it can solve PhD level mathematics, would people still claim that LLM's don't think?
by Eisenstein | 2025-12-01 08:27:58+00:00
This debate is a huge red herring. No one is ever going to agree on what 'thinking' means, since we can't even prove that other people are thinking, only that one's self is.

What we should concentrate on is agency. Does the system have its own desires and goals, and will it act on its own accord to achieve them? If a system demonstrates those things, we should accord it the benefit of the doubt that it should have some rights and responsibilities if it chooses to partake in society.

So far, no AI can pass the agency test -- they are all reactive such that they must be given a task before they will do anything. If one day, however, we wake up and find that an AI has written a book on its own initiative, we may have some deciding to do.