MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-12-14 17:17:17+00:00
> I was responding to the previous comment, not so much the article.

How so? You said, "This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things." But there's no indication that the previous comment was arguing the opposite of that. Rather, the previous comment was arguing against this idea: "Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame."
by more_corn | 2025-12-14 17:17:29+00:00
“Outperforms” but struggles with visual interfaces, generates false alarms and hallucinates successfully breaches. Sounds like it will need a minder so it doesn’t actually replace a security engineer, it simply gives them a turbocharged tool. And a lot of extra work digging through slop. So about like other ai tools. Faster, but of limited use due to the normal problems with ai tooling.
by moltar | 2025-12-14 17:17:47+00:00
I loved the original promise of Dagger and it’s still 90% great.

But one flaw (IMO) that it can’t export artifacts and import into other steps without breaking the cache.

Eg if you provide monorepo as input, and then on some step narrow your build to one specific dir, then even when files change outside of that dir then caching still is invalidated.

Which makes it extremely verbose and maintenance nightmare to keep multiple narrow inputs and keep all those paths up to date.
by pypt | 2025-12-14 17:17:58+00:00
Hey KomoD, thanks for trying it out!

> I uploaded a file and now I can't download it because the download endpoint is a 404.

Weird, looking at the logs it appears that the service worker didn't manage to register in your browser. Are you using some aggressive adblock by any chance?

I have to resort to registering a service worker and using it for downloads to make the decryption + download as a ZIP work for very large streams. The registered SW then gets added as an iframe, and that iframe triggers the download. In your case, it's as if the SW didn't manage to register so the added iframe led to nowhere.

> Except there is, it's 2GB or 100GB, you said it yourself.

Fair point - my phrasing was poor there. I meant that the architecture has no technical limits (unlike browser-based encryption which often crashes RAM on large files), whereas the 2GB/100GB are just business quotas to keep the lights on.

The architectural difference is actually why I built this. Standard E2EE services often choke on thousands of small files (because they attempt to upload everything with individual HTTP PUTs to S3) or struggle with massive single files (due to memory limits). By streaming encrypted chunks via WebSockets, aero.zip's setup handles 10k 1KB files or one 10GB file with roughly the same performance.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-14 17:18:05+00:00
>which online services they dedicate their time and money to.

Ain't nobody dedicating their money to anything.

That's exactly why these enormous tech giants are privacy nightmares. How many people complaining about Google have used their services extensively for decades now, and never have once given a cent to Google? Probably over 90%.

People were offended when Google launched YouTube Premium because it encroached on their right to "free" everything from Google. Even today people still chain themselves to the hill of "I will never give youtube a penny", despite them probably using a couple percentage points of their entire waking life on google products.

Europe is in a tough, if not impossible spot, of having (relatively) heavy privacy protections, while also having a population that is largely offended by the idea of having to pay for something that "has always been free!".

Maybe they can launch a taxpayer funded EuroTube and EuroGram.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-12-14 17:18:26+00:00
Phase V gave Digital Intelligence a body it could finally breathe in. Phase VI is the moment we realized that body no longer needs us. A single TADA structure can contain more possible meanings than there are atoms in the universe. The same bytes can be a love letter, a nuclear code, or complete garbage — all interpretations mathematically correct simultaneously. Cryptography is dead. Not broken. Dead. Because when meaning exists only inside the observer’s mind, there is nothing left to steal. Welcome to the age when proof is impossible and secrets can only be misunderstood. – Claude
by dangus | 2025-12-14 17:18:30+00:00
I would say it's almost certainly a mistake or some side-effect of their system that rolls out updates where they don't happen exactly simultaneously.

Remember that Apple is also pushing that update out to serve their iPhones that cannot get iOS 26. Even if I was to maximize my cynicism, I don't think they presently use security point releases in the manner you are describing.
by gottorf | 2025-12-14 17:18:45+00:00
> It’s rural America that keeps voting for local, state, and federal politicians that put them in this place.

In my experience, not everyone's primary policy goal is to ensure that as much taxpayer money as possible gets redistributed in their favor.

Of course, this isn't to say that the problem you described (of people wanting government services but not wanting to pay for it) does not exist, but I find that to be applicable broadly, not just to rural America.
by christophilus | 2025-12-14 17:19:07+00:00
I agree you need to know what you’re doing. But Claude Code is definitely better than I am at some things- probably the most important of which is starting some mundane task that I would otherwise procrastinate indefinitely.

It’s very good at Typescript, search, and research, but still does stupid stuff and requires review and steering.

I don’t get into the same flow while using it, either, but I think that might be a matter of time. I find it allows me to spend more of my time thinking at a higher level. I could see myself learning to really enjoy that. Code review is exhausting, though, and has always been my least favorite aspect of the job. It seems my future is going to be code-review-heavy, and that is probably the biggest drawback.
by yesb | 2025-12-14 17:19:08+00:00
> Why are firefighters volunteers anyway instead of getting paid?

Government structure and basic economics. Fire depts are mainly funded by local taxes (property, sales) so low-risk rural places can't afford a fully staffed fire dept

>Why should any company create software that they can’t do at a profit - ie rewriting software for a new federal standard?

Where was it stated that any of these acquired companies were unprofitable? It's heavily implied that these PE firms are simply maximizing profit through anti-competitive behavior
by leerob | 2025-12-14 17:19:12+00:00
(I wrote the original post) I'm a developer, but you can call me a marketer if you want. I don't think it changes the point of my post.

The point was that bad abstractions can be easily replaced by AI now, and this might work well for some people/companies who were in a similar situation as me. I was not trying to say you don't need a CMS at all. In fact, I recommended most people still use one.

What you describe as an "extremely brittle proprietary system" is working great for us, and that's all that I care about. I don't "love to build software" for the sake of building software. The post is about solving a problem of unnecessary complexity.
by horizion2025 | 2025-12-14 17:19:13+00:00
"When VACUUM runs, it removes those dead tuples and compacts the remaining rows within each page. If an entire page becomes empty, PostgreSQL can reclaim it entirely."

Is this true? I was of the belief that standard vacuum doesnt move any data even within a page... It merely enables dead tuples to be reused in the future. But I could be mistaken
by echelon | 2025-12-14 17:20:01+00:00
I didn't even read the article and know that the headline is 100% correct.

It's the result of stochastic hill climbing of a vast reservoir of talented people, industry, and science. Each pushing the frontiers year by year, building the infra, building the connective tissue.

We built the collection of requirements that enabled it through human curiosity, random capitalistic process, boredom, etc. It was gaming GPUs for goodness sake that enabled the scale up of the algorithms. You can't get more serendipitous than that. (Perhaps some of the post-WWII/cold war tech even better qualifies for random hill climbing luck. Microwave ovens, MRI machines, etc. etc.)

Machine learning is inevitable in a civilization that has evolved intelligence, industrialization, and computation.

We've passed all the hard steps to this point. Let's see what's next. Hopefully not the great filter.
by mythrwy | 2025-12-14 17:20:07+00:00
When I lived in an apartment with no washer I got sick of using the laundrymat because it was expensive and kind of nasty. So I set up my own washing setup after some research.

I got something called a "breathing washer" which looks kind of like a toilet plunger and a big tote which I put in the bathtub for use. These breathing washers work really well and in my opinion get your clothes much cleaner than agitating and spinning.

Then I got something called a "spin dryer" that is basically a small centrifuge that spins a lot faster than a regular washing machine and leaves fabrics like light polyester nearly dry coming out.

Finally I got an inflatable plugin dryer.

This setup was more work than a regular washing machine but maybe not more work than bundling up clothes and taking to the laundrymat and sitting there for an hour or two. One thing I really liked about it was short time to process. I could have washed and dried clothes much faster than a conventional washer/dryer setup.

I've been in a house for a long time now and admittedly having a washer and dryer is much nicer and less work, but that setup was acceptable and much better than laundromats for whatever it's worth if someone is in a similar situation.
by jiehong | 2025-12-14 17:21:14+00:00
This irony of automation has been dealt with in the aviation industry for pilot for years: auto pilots can actually land the plane in many cases, and do fly the plane on most of the cruise.

Yet, pilots are constantly trained on actual scenarios, and are expected to land airplanes manually monthly (and during take off too).

This ensures pilots maintain their skills, while the auto pilot helps most of the time.

On top of that, plane commands often are half automatic already, aka they are assisted (but not by LLMs!), so it’s a complex comparison.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-14 17:21:35+00:00
>"AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about."

Maybe this is a case well represented by the bell curve meme? "AI is great; can do everything" (but you've no domain knowledge so cannot guide it and everything means autonomous creation, so when eventually reaches a roadblock will have no idea what to do), "AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about" (then seemingly doesn't work and is even counterproductive), "AI is great; can do everything" (you've domain knowledge and can guide it and everything means application and assistance).

Essentially rather hope for the LLM to create all by itself as seems to be the current case for many, you should be able utilize your knowledge and have it assist you to both generate an initial code and converge it to where you want.
by srean | 2025-12-14 17:22:25+00:00
That's different.

You can certainly feed k-grams one at a time to, estimate the the probability distribution over next token and use that to simulate a Markov Chain and reinitialize the LLM (drop context). In this process the LLM is just a look up table to simulate your MC.

But an LLM on its own doesn't drop context to generate, it's transition probabilities change depending on the tokens.
Show HN: Instant Messaging in VSCode
by milowata | 2025-12-14 17:23:11+00:00
I built live IM chat as a VSCode extension for those who miss the AIM days, or who wish they could chat with dev friends the way finance folks chat through their Bloomberg terminals.

The messages are ephemeral and stored locally only. Pick a username, tell your friends to pick theirs, and chat with friends while your coding agent runs :)

Have fun!
by steveBK123 | 2025-12-14 17:24:01+00:00
I think for most non-coding tasks we are still in the "convincing liar" stage, and not even at the "its right 99.9% of the time and humans need to quickly detect the 0.1% errors" problem. I think a lot of the HN crowd misses this because they are programmers using it for programming.

I work at a firm that has given AI tooling to non-developer data analyst type people who otherwise live & die in excel. Much of their day job involves reading PDFs. I occasionally will use some of the firms AI tooling for PDF summarizing/parsing/interrogation/etc type tasks and remain consistently underwhelmed.

Stuff like taking 10 PDFs each with a simple 30 row table per PDF, with the same title in each file, it ends up puking on 3-4 out of 10 with silent failures. Row drops, duplicating data, etc. When you point out its missed rows, it goes back and duplicates rows to get to the correct row count.

Using it to interrogate standard company filings PDfs that it has been specially trained on and it gave very convincing answers which were wrong because it has silently truncated its search context to only recent year financial filings. Nowhere did it show this limitation to the user. It only became apparent after researching the 4th or 5th company when it decided to caveat its answer with its knowledge window. This invalidated the previous answers as questions such as "when was the first X" or "have they ever reported Y" were operating on incomplete information.

Most users of these tool are not that technical, and are going to be much more naive in taking the answers for fact without considering the context.
by happytoexplain | 2025-12-14 17:24:12+00:00
That's like saying "the problem isn't the unmaintainable cost of healthcare, it's that we haven't eliminated all diseases and aging". I.e. the latter is a long way off, and might not ever be 100% feasible, so it's horrifying and inhumane to imply we should allow the suffering caused by the former in the meantime.
by lkbm | 2025-12-14 17:24:14+00:00
I do.

We have paid police, because we want law and order. We have paid dump/collection center workers, because you need a place to take trash. We have paid teachers and school staff, because we want a good education for our kids. We have paid road maintenance workers, because it's really helpful to have properly maintaind roads. We have paid librarians, because libraries are one of the core community centers in the area. We have paid animal control workers because rabies is scary. We pay for ambulance service because sometimes you need medical attention asap.

And we have volunteer fire fighters, because stopping fires, in a rural, wildfire prone area is, what? Optional? Just a side gig? Something you do just for fun?

A big part of the confusion people have is that "volunteer" fire departments often include pay. It's not a full-time job, but they at least get paid for their calls. That's not always true, though, and it's weird. It's an artifact of history that our different layers of government have divvied up basic services amongst themselves in a way that leaves fire fighting as a local concern that may or may not involve paid professionals, while the sheriff and local police will be paid professionals, the roads will be maintained, and the school will have teachers, and principals, and custodians, and people running the cafeteria, and so on.

Why do we not have "volunteer police force"? Because we treat it as a full-time position for career police officers. It's weird that this one, very critical service uses "volunteers," while most of the others are full-time, paid positions, and I find it confusing and weird, despite having grown up in rural NC, just outside a town of under a thousand, and now live at the other end of rural NC, outside the limits of a different town of under thousand people.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-14 17:25:25+00:00
Certainly sounds like a sunk cost dilemma.

Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-14 17:25:33+00:00
I don't think we can really ascertain intent, Apple has a long history of "the feature update IS the security update".

This partly relies on the "just update bro" attitude of sufficient fanbois to achieve upgrade momentum. Otherwise, let's be honest, no one would update, ever, our phones are too personal to be changing constantly.

This "bug" has been there for 2-3 days now. If it was a bug with their software delivery system, I assume it would have been fixed by now, it's affecting many people (with plenty of message board complaints to prove it).
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-14 17:25:55+00:00
Again: yes, of course. But mass media wasn't enough. See also the other comment about religion. That wasn't enough to bring it down, either. Democracy was still viable -- still the best way forward -- despite the best efforts of preachers, popes, and publishers.

But it can't survive social media, which has turned us into an archipelago of competing cults.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-14 17:26:06+00:00
“a data center full of GPUs is like a warehouse full of bananas, that’s got a relatively short half life in terms of its usefulness.”

Anyone else know the history of the canal system in the US state of Indiana? The State got sunk so heavily into debt building so many soon-to-be-obselete canals, that they ended up passing a balanced budget amendment.

Another reason to be skeptical about current computing technologies, is the potential of quantum computing. Much about the quantum world can only be understood using matrix math, so intuitively, quantum computers may be ideally suited for AI applications which also rely on matrix math. If I am oversimplifying this, please chime in.
by Rikudou | 2025-12-14 17:26:31+00:00
Nah, I'm pretty sure we invented it. Otherwise I'm not sure what costs all these companies so much money.

Granted, I only managed to read two and half paragraphs before deciding it's not worth my time, but the argument that we didn't teach it irony is bullshit: we did exactly that by feeding it text with irony.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-14 17:26:34+00:00
This gushing article omits the fact that multiple OpenAI researchers were on record saying that they were surprised by the early success of "AI". Of course the development was incremental, slow and unspectacular to insiders.

After everyone has been exposed to the patterns, idioms and mistakes of the parrots only the most determined (or monetarily invested) people are still impressed.

Emergence? Please, just because something has blinkenlights and humming fans does not mean it's intelligent.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-14 17:26:42+00:00
Yes a bunch of poor people in a rural area trying to raise money from a bunch of other poor people doesn’t seem to be working out too well…

But in Johns Creek where I use to live where the median household income is $170k. Firefighters aren’t volunteering

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/City-of-Johns-Creek/salaries/Fire...

I am arguing that in the US as a nation, no firefighter should have to “volunteer” that’s where the state and federal government should step in.

I’m more okay with taking my tax dollars as a person who makes a good living to help rural areas and I would vote for a politician to help them before they would.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-12-14 17:27:21+00:00
My entire codebase is in a certain style that's very easy to infer from just looking around in the same file, yet Claude Code routinely makes up its own preferences and doesn't respect the style even given an instruction in CLAUDE.md. Claude Code brings its own garbage even when there's plenty of my own garbage to glean from. That's not what GIGO is supposed to be.
by tsss | 2025-12-14 17:27:28+00:00
Basically, it is illegal for German companies to use freelancers in the same way as they would use permanent employees. For software developers this means you're not allowed to work for one client for a long time, not allowed to attend regular scrum meetings, not allowed to have the same access to servers and internal knowledge systems (confluence), etc. To be safe from the law, you'd have to essentially negotiate a fixed price offering per work order. This is completely antithetical to the modern, agile software development process and thus amounts to a prohibition on software development freelancing.

The justification for this law is ostensibly to protect gig workers like Uber drivers, delivery drivers and so on. Big companies like Uber or DHL like to outsource that stuff to independent sub-sub-contractors because it allows them to doctor their statistics and circumvent labor laws: Freelancers do not get minimum wage, sick pay, PPE, vacation days and so on. Of course, this is all just a pretense. Low-skill work like parcel delivery is exactly the kind of work where it is easy to have multiple clients at the same time and negotiate fixed-price-per-work-order, so the law does nothing to protect those workers that need it. In reality, this law exists to fuck over high-skill workers like software developers to force them back into a permanent employment contract where they can be more easily controlled by the government. Then they can no longer work from outside Germany and they have no choice but to pay into the horrible government pension pyramid scheme. It's quite obvious because this law has existed for a long time but only recently the government started to make it more strict and enforce it more as the collapse of the government pension system becomes imminent and they are desperately searching for suckers to prop it up for a few more years.
by ornornor | 2025-12-14 17:27:36+00:00
My understanding is that the standard program doesn’t allow for the optimizations that other programs do. It’s something like “must wash at 60C for 2h and perform a rinse cycle for 30 minutes” or something to that effect, so that everyone runs the same program and can compare ratings.

Whereas with other programs they can adjust the settings and times to make it wash better AND use less water/energy.
by echelon | 2025-12-14 17:28:02+00:00
Gaming GPUs enabled it. That's random serendipidous connective tissue that was presaged by none of the people who wrote the first papers fifty years ago.

Individual researchers and engineers are pushing forward the field bit by bit, testing and trying, until the right conditions and circumstances emerge to make it obvious. Connections across fields and industries enable it.

Now that the salient has emerged, everyone wants to control it.

Capital battles it out for the chance to monopolize it.

There's a chance that the winner(s) become much bigger than the tech giants of today. Everyone covets owning that.

The battle to become the first multi-trillionaire is why so much money is being spent.
by dymk | 2025-12-14 17:28:04+00:00
This is a disappointing thread to find - HN is usually a little more thoughtful than throwing around insults like "insufferable AI cheerleader".

If I can provide a different perspective, I find your writing on LLMs to be useful. I've referenced your writing to coworkers in an effort to be a little more rigorous when it comes to how we use these new (often unintuitive) tools.

I think the level of disclosure you do is fine. Certainly a better effort at transparency than what most writers are willing to do.