MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-15 14:11:50+00:00
What do you mean by "worry a lot about privacy"?

If it is a practical view of privacy, like the "I don't want others to know I have foot fetish" kind, or even typical operational security like not letting others know you own something valuable, then the concern is most likely minor. In fact, it may be a good thing that the data goes to China instead of in your own country, because there is a border somewhat protecting you.

If you take a more general approach of just making less data available about you on the internet, for things like targeted ads, AI, etc... Then US or China shouldn't change much and you should avoid connecting your robot to the internet in the first place, most work without it for the simple "clean" function.

Now if you are a US citizen and a patriot, then yeah, it matters.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-15 14:12:00+00:00
It's pretty rude to "accuse" someone of using AI. Would you yell "Dictionary!", "Grammarly!", "Reference manual!", "Newspaper quote!" at them? Maybe "Harvard!" or "Tutored!" ? You don't know who they are or what their life is like. Maybe they're blind and using it as an assisted device. Maybe their hand is injured and they use it to output information faster. Maybe they're old, infirm, a non-native English speaker, etc. Maybe they're just a regular person who feels insecure writing, and wants to use new technology to give them the confidence to write/comment more. Or, maybe they just talk like that.

Let's say you happen to be lucky, don't accuse someone unfairly, and they are using ChatGPT to write what they said. Who cares?! What is it you're doing by "calling them out" ? Winning internet points? Feeling superior? Fixing the world?
by pmarreck | 2025-12-15 14:12:03+00:00
I don't contest these examples, but that's exactly why I call what it does "thunking" (think: "clumsy thinking") instead of "thinking" (in order to get around the epistemological/philosophical problems of "is it conscious?" or "does it understand?"), and since it doesn't "understand," it "undersits", and it doesn't "comprehend", it "prehends" or "ingests".
by taylodl | 2025-12-15 14:12:14+00:00
Kodak was founded in 1892. I think Oracle is going to go the way of HP. Look at HP over the past 10 years and what it had been in the 10 year period leading up to that. Sure, HP is still a company with $50+ billion in revenue, which actually matches where Oracle is today, but they had been a company with $100+ billion in revenue - and that's before adjusting for inflation.

So while it's hard to call a company with $50+ billion in revenue a failure, they're not nearly what they once were. That's the direction I see Oracle going.

https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hpq/revenue/
by pknerd | 2025-12-15 14:12:17+00:00
Location: Remote

Remote: Yes

Technologies: Python, PHP (Symfony), MySQL, APIs, Automation, Scraping, AI/LLMs (OpenAI, Gemini, LLama, n8n)

GitHub: https://github.com/kadnan

Email: kadnan@gmail.com

Résumé/CV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HpDELb-6Q8

About Me:

Backend dev + AI/Automation engineer with 9+ years’ experience. Built scrapers, ETL pipelines, chatbots (Slack, WhatsApp, Voiceflow), and RAG-based AI apps. Ex-Data Engineer at TellUs (real estate pipelines). Currently AI/Automation Manager at a US agency, automating workflows and building customer-facing bots.

Looking for: Remote roles in Backend, Data, or AI/Automation engineering.
by csense | 2025-12-15 14:12:18+00:00
10↑↑4 is Knuth's arrow notation, it means 10^(10^(10^10)). Which is really big. The inner exponent 10^10000000 is already way, way over the limit of computational steps you have any hope of physically computing [2] without some kind of algorithmic shortcut.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation

[2] I wave my hands and put this limit at about 10^70. The universe has ~10^40 atoms and a trillion years is ~10^30 nanoseconds. So 10^70 is approximately "How many computations you could do if you turned every atom in the universe into a 1 GHz CPU and ran them for a trillion years." (Assuming magical technology that doesn't need power / cooling / communications and parallelizes perfectly.)
by everdrive | 2025-12-15 14:12:35+00:00
Plastic recycling is worse than useless: due to the filtration needs it's one of the larger contributors towards microplastics in the water supply. This is on top of all the other factors: any recycle-able plastics go in for another 1-2 rounds at most, and given the pace of plastic usage it means the recycling did not accomplish anything. Further, most plastic cannot be recycled, some 3rd party countries just dump it into the ocean, others just ship it to a landfill.
by lapcat | 2025-12-15 14:12:37+00:00
> My friend

We're not friends.

> the article whose provenance you are defending is clearly LLM-“punched up” at a minimum.

I'm not even going to ask for your evidence, because the previous argument I had was a frustrating waste of time that ended with insane reality denial by the other party: "Textbooks don't contain section headers every few paragraphs." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256470

I encourage you to read through the entire argument, though, and see how the AI accuser makes false empirical claims and generalizations at every step, constantly moving the goalposts whenever I presented disproof.
by _wire_ | 2025-12-15 14:12:40+00:00
"Still not quite there"?

Imagine common operation of vehicles without windshield wipers!

"you get strikes for not watching the road"

What does Doctorow call this risk: where you confuse a requirement for your vigilance to a machine with liberation?

Another risk looms as vehicle occupants are officially required to be back-seat drivers for a system that allows no driving experience...

Everywhere you look at AI applications you see the hazard of mechanical mad-cow disease.

"Kenyans don't talk like AI!"
by twodave | 2025-12-15 14:12:46+00:00
People keep trying to tie these two things together, forgetting the fact that ZIRP also ended 3 years ago, and that combined with the end of the COVID-era employer credits are when the layoffs really began. I won't say LLMs are having no impact at all on employment, but not to the degree where the job pool has dried up. Companies were encouraged to over-hire for years, and now that the free money is gone, they're acting logically. I believe if ZIRP came back we'd see workforces expand again and AI would just be seen as another useful tool.
by duttish | 2025-12-15 14:12:50+00:00
Two things currently:

1) TrickTrapper.

Backwards compatible verified phone calls. Android version is in testing with friends.

2) Katalib.

We have about 1600 books or so at home, there's no chance I'm going to scan ISBN codes of all of these. I've tried four times and got way too bored after the first 100-200. The solution? Take a photo of the bookshelf, send to Claude for text parsing and series information. Then some UI etc around that.

It's working, I just need to start testing it myself and a few friends have also asked for access.
by LunaSea | 2025-12-15 14:12:52+00:00
> At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies

Funny how that works.

> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions

Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.

> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.

Thanks for the book recommendation!
by c-cube | 2025-12-15 14:13:01+00:00
It's a bit unfortunate that [1] doesn't seem to mention Fleece[2], since Fleece is an already existing, solid format with very similar properties (JSON-compatible data format, uses offsets for sharing, allows for cheap updates, and uses binary search on arrays to achieve O(ln n) lookups in large tables or arrays, etc.)

[1]: https://lite3.io/design_and_limitations.html#autotoc_md31 [2]: https://github.com/couchbase/fleece/
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-15 14:13:18+00:00
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.

It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes.

Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem.

Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
by Schlagbohrer | 2025-12-15 14:13:19+00:00
Engineers (both HW and SW) are often fantastically bad at understanding how business works, including where their salary comes from and how much value they are producing, versus how small the % of the value they produced is which gets returned to them as their salary.

This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
by sgarland | 2025-12-15 14:13:24+00:00
Assuming the integer value is the PK, it can in fact be much faster for MySQL / MariaDB due to InnoDB’s clustering index. If it can do a range scan over the PK, and that’s also the ORDER BY (with matching direction), congratulations, the rows are already ordered, no sort required. If it has to do a secondary index lookup to find the rows, this is not guaranteed.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-15 14:13:33+00:00
I think the problem is that people will never agree about the same definitions when discussing complex topics. For example, even when it comes to testing, I find that developers tend to disagree about definitions of 'Unit tests' vs 'Integration tests' vs 'End to end tests'. Some people will insist that a unit test should stub out all the dependencies and if you're testing a module and it invokes some internal sub-module (not mocked), they will insist that it's an integration test... Some people will say it's only an end-to-end test if it includes the front-end as well; other will say that if the test involves interaction with the database or other IO operations; then it can be called e2e.

There are a surprising number of topics; not only in engineering, but in day-to-day life as well, that we tend to think we all understand and have consensus about, but in reality nobody agrees on the same thing and there is no real consensus.

People tend to form consensus over labels; not over concepts. They may fully agree over labels but actually fundamentally disagree over the underlying concepts; they only realize this once they start defining their interpretation of the terms.
by peppernub | 2025-12-15 14:14:19+00:00
In regulated health software (EU MDR IIa), teams often need clinical alerting: thresholds, audit logs, patient prioritisation, etc.

Some teams build everything in-house, others integrate pre-certified components or platforms. From your experience:

When does building in-house make sense?

When does buying or integrating save real time (not just move work elsewhere)?

Any unexpected trade-offs?

Would love to hear real-world lessons, especially from teams shipping in 2024–2026.
by baggachipz | 2025-12-15 14:14:41+00:00
Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-12-15 14:15:03+00:00
In my experience (dramatized):

Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout".

Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
by jmyeet | 2025-12-15 14:15:06+00:00
At this point I trust the Chinese government way more than almost every US tech giant.

I don't own a "smart" speaker. I've never liked the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Like, it's just asking for trouble. I don't necessarily assign malicious intent here. It's just a recipe for disaster.

But if you made me choose between an Amazon or Meta "smart" speaker and a Huawei speaker, I'm choosing Huawei.

As for robot vacuums, I don't see a reason they need to have a microphone. I wouldn't want one that did. I think I'd also prefer they had a LIDAR rather than a camera too but I can see that cameras can do things that LIDAR can't.

Anyway, I find these deep distrust of the Chinese government to be very... selective, given what our own governments are doing and I'm sorry but our tech giants are out of control.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-15 14:15:07+00:00
> which will warn you with all the locations you’ll need to edit

This is true, but with a program built with a dynamic language, taking advantage of the fact that it's written in a dynamic language, doesn't need to make those changes at all.

I'm fan of static typing in many situations, but it's hard to deny it doesn't lead to more changes as you need to properly propagate changes.
by testbjjl | 2025-12-15 14:15:17+00:00
The Excel holy grail. Dashboard are an abstraction, SaaS is an abstraction of an abstraction from the pov of customers suffering from a one size fits all. Shell scripts generated by LLMs that send automated a customized reports via email will make a lot of corporate heros. No need to login, learn and use the SaaS in many instances for decisions makers.
by vladms | 2025-12-15 14:15:40+00:00
Are they though? At least for AI/software the last 30 years were fantastic to have universal access to means of production (compilers, tools, operating systems, models, you name it).

I am more worried about the capability of people to use the free means of production (more precisely improve education) rather than the concentration.

Edit: and to remove any doubt, I do agree that taxation of capital is completely badly done now, but I do not think the capital is about owning the means of production but about the capital (effort) required to organize people to use the (mostly) free means of production.
by gipp | 2025-12-15 14:15:57+00:00
I think we're using very different senses of "deterministic," and I'm not sure the one you're using is relevant to the discussion.

Those proprietary blobs are either correct or not. If there are bugs, they fail in the same way for the same input every time. There's still no sense in which ongoing human verification of routine usage is a requirement for operating the thing.
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-15 14:16:13+00:00
This will also cause problems with anyone that happens to (even accidentally/unknowingly) use apps that integrate services from companies such as BrightData/Luminati/HolaVPN/etc. where they sell idle time on your device/connection to their VPN/proxy customers.

The legitimate end-user will then no longer be able to use e.g. SoundCloud.
by rcarmo | 2025-12-15 14:16:21+00:00
I actually think that's a great endorsement of Kenyan education. I don't deal with English-speaking African countries that often (I'm Portuguese, so naturally we have ties to other bits of the continent), but I've often been impressed by how well they communicate regardless of the profession they're in--I don't mean that as a bias, but rather as it befitting the kind of conversation you'd have with an English major in the UK (to which I have a lot of exposure).

Perhaps the US-centric "optimization" of English is to blame here, since it is so obvious in regular US media we all consume across the planet, and is likely the contrasting style.
by madbiz | 2025-12-15 14:16:26+00:00
In German, this concept is called "Maschinensteuer" (machine tax) or "Wertschöpfungsabgabe" (value-added levy). Interestingly, there's no English version of this Wikipedia article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertsch%C3%B6pfungsabgabe
by KurSix | 2025-12-15 14:16:39+00:00
I found a project that looks at how machine learning shows up in scientific papers. It covers about 5000 ML related articles from the Nature family of journals and tries to map out trends across countries, institutions, and research areas. Link: https://airesearchtrends.com

Some of the early takeaways are interesting, like how different countries approach ML driven research and how often papers end up being multi org collaborations. Also classical ML still seems to be used a lot more than I expected.
by Schlagbohrer | 2025-12-15 14:16:44+00:00
I find myself hoping that my sector is one of the last to be destroyed and that before I personally get laid off, the masses will have fought for and won some kind of UBI or assistance or jobs program or something. Just hope this situation resolves itself before it comes for me.

I also had this feeling during the 2020 crash... and during the 2008-2012 crash...
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-15 14:16:49+00:00
I work on an application where we encrypt the integer primary key and then use the bytes to generate something that looks like a UUID.

In our case, we don't want database IDs in an API and in URLs. When IDs are sequential, it enables things like dictionary attacks and provides estimates about how many customers we have.

Encrypting a database ID makes it very obvious when someone is trying to scan, because the UUID won't decrypt. We don't even need a database round trip.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-15 14:16:59+00:00
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.

There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.

Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.
by guerrilla | 2025-12-15 14:17:07+00:00
That's not a very good argument, because then you could say the same for American, Canada, South Africa, Australia and so on. If recency is an issue, then here's a list of colonies that got their freedom around the same time:

Cyprus, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Malta, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius, Eswatini (Swaziland).

If what you're saying is right then you'd have to admit Jamaican and Barbados English are just the same as Kenyan or Nigerian... but they're not. They're radically different because they're radically different regions. Uganda and Kenya being similar is what I would expect, but not necessarily Nigeria...
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-15 14:17:07+00:00
the US does not mandate spying with roombas -- wtf are you smoking?

China absolutely shares info with all of its national police services, intelligence services, and military. Depending on the company these PLA may literally own some / most / all of the organization.

I am not in the US or China, and on balance I am less worried about the Chinese blowing my house up, but don't pretend they're nice, or that they're your friend. I don't want them having my data any more than I want the NSA, Research & Analysis Wing, or the NK Reconnaissance General Bureau.
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-15 14:17:10+00:00
What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone?

You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-15 14:18:07+00:00
> There is no "True Education" anymore, only the appearance of one with the sole aim of churning out a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) for a Economy; no understanding required.

If I understand correctly, this is not the same problem. The problem Feynman was facing was education where the point was to get a credential, not to become useful. (I agree that neither is the same as to actually learn...)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-15 14:18:30+00:00
Does automation use generally pay taxes?

Should Amazon pay taxes for using factory robots in lieu of people?

Should fabric manufacturers pays taxes for using automated looms instead of hand weaving ?

Even if lawmakers wanted to tax AI, how would they do it? How do you measure the AI usage level at a company, or the number of workers it has displaced?
by ekidd | 2025-12-15 14:18:32+00:00
> Programmers suddenly need backup plans.

Yup, Claude Opus 4.5 + Claude Code feels like its teetering right on the edge of Jevon's Paradox. It can't work alone, and it needs human design and code review, if only to ensure it understands the problem and produces maintainable code. But it can build very credible drafts of entire features based on a couple of hours of planning, then I can spend a day reading closely and tweaking for quality. But the code? It's professional work, and I've worked with contractors who did a lot worse.

So right now? Opus 4.5 feels like an enormous productivity booster for existing developers (which may indirectly create unemployment or increase the demand for software enough to create jobs), but it can't work on large projects on an ongoing basis without a knowledgeable human. So it's more like a tractor than anything else: It might cause programmer unemployment, but eh, life happens.

But I can increasingly see that it would only take about one more breakthrough, and next gen AI models might make enormous categories of human intellectual labor about as obsolete as the buggy whip. If you could get a Stanford grad for a couple of dollars an hour, what would the humans actually do? (Manual labor will be replaced slower. Rod Brooks from the MIT AI Lab had a long article recently on state of robotics, and it sounds like they are still heavily handicapped by inadequate hardware: https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... )

Jevon's Paradox and comparative advantage won't protect you forever if you effectively create a "competitor species" with better price-performance across the board. That's what happened to the chimps and Homo neanderthalensis. And they didn't exactly see a lot of economic benefits from the rise of Homo sapiens, you know?