MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikewarot | 2026-03-11 23:02:08+00:00
As for the presentation of the idea, who in their right mind is going to blindly trust an AI like that? There wasn't any review of the numbers, or even a hint of a "sniff test" on the output of the AI?

--

PS: That's so Fetch![1]

To me it seems like Gretchen, from the Mean Girls, is working at an AI company now.

I'm with Regina, it's just not going to happen!

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377092/quotes/
by Avicebron | 2026-03-11 23:02:24+00:00
> What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.

I think we might be seeing what happens when people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other and jockeying excel/gantt charts/org charts. Yeah for some definition of "work" I guarantee that a LLM could perform 3.25 years worth in four weeks.
by floo | 2026-03-11 23:03:16+00:00
glad to hear it!

went through quite a few iterations of aligning text to speech.
found that ai transcription was really good most of the time but would hallucinate quite a bit towards the start and end of books. which I think might be related to those models being partially trained on audiobooks, and only having the book text itself, without any of the intro or credits.

in the end I landed on extracting text from ebooks, using rule based and language specific segmentation, and espeak based alignment. pretty basic, but it worked wonders in terms of reliability and accuracy.

if you are looking to generate audio from ebooks this is probably not too helpful. it is something I tried to avoid. something about learning a languages from generated audio didn't sit right with me haha.
by pmontra | 2026-03-11 23:03:17+00:00
The Italian way looks similar to the Swiss way. In detail:

When I go to cast a vote in Italy I bring with me my state issued photo ID (everybody has one, I mean: must have one) and a state issued sheet of paper with the address of the place I must go to vote and a grid of empty spaces. I don't have to register to vote, basically I'm registered at birth. The people at the polling station take my two cards and look for me in their registry. They mark that I came to vote, stamp an empty space on the second card and handle me the paper ballots. I think that in this way it's both anonymous and verifiable. When the card with the stamps is full, they mail me a new one.

The state definitely know where people live. Babies are registered when they are born and people have to register any change of their address of residence. It's been like that at least since Italy became a country in the 1860s.

By the way, how do I know that they counted my vote as I cast it? I can't know it. I must trust that they did not open the box and replaced the ballots, but people from the several competing parties visit the polling station and can attend the counting. I trust that process much more than something happening inside a computer program.
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-03-11 23:03:42+00:00
My bar for "extremely significant" is much higher than it appears to be here. Apparently most events in the US/Iran involvement is "extremely significant" if we judge the votes on this site to offer guidance on how this rule is interpreted.

This forum was founded in 2007. The US was very much involved in Iraq and Afghanistan at that time. If the same bar for coverage was in place at the time, HN would have been flooded with US Military content the way it is now. So yeah, obviously the bar has moved lower for this particular matter and it's because the current community on the site wants it to. Likewise the "generated/AI-edited comments" guideline seems equally squishy to me. And despite a rule about being "curmudgeonly", I'm pretty sure 80% of this site's content is curmudgeonly rants.

IMO at this scale dang, tomhow, and other mods need to be much stricter. When HN was 1/10 the size a shaming comment would often set a poster in place. Now they just sneer back in another comment and post 20 other guideline breaking things.
by titzer | 2026-03-11 23:03:46+00:00
> Language portability is a big feature. There's a lot of code that's not JS out there. And JS isn't a great compilation target for a lot of languages. Google switched to compiling Java to Wasm-GC instead of JS and got a lot of memory/speed improvements.

It's also worth noting that Wasm wasn't born into a vacuum like JS was (and Java for that matter), so it is competing[1] in a crowded space. Wasm is making inroads into languages that already have well-developed toolchains and ecosystems like Java, Kotlin, Rust, Scala, and Go. I think the Wasm network effect is happening, it is just very slow because it's primarily been a deployment platform and not a development platform.

It's also worth noting that Wasm advancement is pretty decentralized and there are a lot of competing interests, particularly outside the web. Basically every other language had at least one massive investment in both language development and tooling from the get-go. Java=sun, C#=Microsoft, Go=Google, JavaScript=browsers, Scala=foundation, etc.

[1] "competing" only in the sense of adding value over the mainstream or mainline implementations of these languages.

> Wasm is way too complicated to use today. So users of wasm today are experts who either (a) really need the performance or (b) really need cross platform code. So much that they're willing to put up with the rough edges.

I believe we can do better; we've been counting on languages that come to Wasm as a secondary deployment strategy and have their primary devex focused on another platform where then can debug better and offer better tooling.
by Atlas667 | 2026-03-11 23:04:08+00:00
The only way to curb something like that is more democratization. Fraud is a common problem in any system anywhere. A reputation score on top would help, only if it can be kept democratically controlled.

There is no single solution, but public fund usurping is basically a law of capitalism, which is why I critique it in this context. Public money laundering is a developed industry in capitalism.
by rexpop | 2026-03-11 23:04:24+00:00
You're all a bunch of tedious ignoramuses, your own fields of studying notwithstanding. I'm out here face-to-face with the Bullshit Asymmetry Principles. I'm not about to give up the only leverage I have!

The fact of the matter is that there're not hours enough in the day to read, in realtime, to each and every one of you the reams they've written on why you're wrong. Do I have to establish a tag-team?

The fact is that I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours painstakingly collating the perspectives that I'm now delivering to you—I am a river to my people. And it's only because they pass under the bridge of an LLM that they're objectionable?

This is a bit like challenging your plumber for charging you over a minute's fix, when they've spent 20 years getting it down to that minute.

The work's been done. You're paying for the outcome.

Edit: All fresh off the top of my head, folks.

Ah, that reminds me: I wouldn't feel compelled to do all this refutation if radical reactionary political extremism was properly moderated.
by altairprime | 2026-03-11 23:04:24+00:00
That one, yes. “Insinuations” is a less conditional form of “Accusations”, connected by the concept of “Claims”; they’re all synonymous from a general perspective:

- I insinuate that you are a bot (often shortened to “Is this a bot?”)

- I claim that you are a bot. (often shortened to “This is a bot.”)

- I accuse you of being a bot l. (often shortened to “Are you a bot?”)

The part where I’m interpreting to include accusations of bottery and slop is “and the like. It”; the first clause, ‘the like’ refers to the generic category of accusations against posted comments, which historically were the listed examples, but is also defined to include others not listed, such as today’s popular accusations of bot or AI; the second clause, ‘It’, refers to all insinuations-class content. Without the list of examples, this reads:

’Please don’t post insinuations. It degrades discussion

Yep, this is true. Accusations, Insinuations, Claims, of bot or AI or astroturf; they all wreck discussions and I end up having to email the mods to deal with them. A lot of people use the rhetorical device of Discredit The Opposition by invoking this sort of thing, and while that’s less prevalent in ‘reads like AI’ insinuations, they still degrade the site.

With AI-assisted writing is a violation of site guidelines, and even before it was, posting of AI-assisted writing was a clear ‘abuse’ of the community’s expectations of unassisted-human discussions. Aside from expectations, I can also classically understand in Internet history that ‘violating the guidelines’ is the phrase formerly known as ‘abuse of service’, by which I interpret the above reference to abuse to refer to breaking the guideline about posting accusations.

The guidelines are not a legal contract as program code, and perhaps this one is clunky enough that it needs to be reworded slightly; thus my intent, once the flames die down here, to let the mods know about the confusion. As I’m not a mod, this is my interpretation alone; you might have to email the mods and ask them to reply here if you want a formal statement on the matter, given how many comments this thread got in a couple hours.

ps. On ’and is usually mistaken’: I’m not a mod, so I can’t judge how often accusations of AI/bot are mistaken, but I’m also an old human who learned em-dashes in composition class, so I tend to view the modern pitchfork mobs out to get anyone who can compose English as being less accurate in their judgments than they believe they are.
by tombert | 2026-03-11 23:04:38+00:00
There's always bugs that can be fixed, there's always optimizations that can be done, there's always a feature that someone wants to build but hasn't had budget to do. There's always improvements that can be done for deployment. There's always ways of reducing memory. There's always ways of reducing ongoing expenses etc.

I have worked for a bunch of companies, and even relatively new and young companies have all these things pile up pretty quickly.
by pdonis | 2026-03-11 23:04:42+00:00
How is someone living a hunter-gatherer subsistence life going to get Internet access? That requires a technological society, which requires a lot of wealth creation way above a subsistence level.

If you're saying that someone might claim they're living a hunter-gatherer subsistence life except when they're not, well, that's just hypocrisy. If you're going to make use of things that require a modern technological society, then you're saying life in a modern technological society is preferable to a hunter-gatherer subsistence life, whether you like it or not. You can't have it both ways.
by thr1owaway9621 | 2026-03-11 23:04:44+00:00
What are these Chromebooks?

The battery on my Macbook Pro, that I've owned since 2013, has finally gave out and I am looking for a new laptop. I considered buying an entry-level Air or a used Pro (<$1000 budget), but then Neo came out. I am now considering just getting the Neo. All I need is internet browsing, some very light coding maybe.

But if there are $200-300 Chromebooks just as good, I want to know. What are they?
by bsder | 2026-03-11 23:04:56+00:00
> Direct responses, with care given, are also in a better position to alter working theories as any other evidence emerges.

The problem is that "mental illness" is a career limiting diagnosis.

Security clearance personnel have the same problem as airplane pilots. They can't get treatment for mental illness because it would cut off their career.

Consequently, while "Havana Syndrome" may be real, there are large confounding problems in sorting it out.

I mean, look at how long it has taken to lock in on Gulf War Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome

And the evidence for that is way stronger and doesn't have all the cloak and dagger implications.
by alexpotato | 2026-03-11 23:05:01+00:00
Chartr Daily had this chart [0] back in 2023 and it shows how much the big tech firms grew from 2016 to 2022.

Some of the firms, Apple being the exception, doubled or even almost tripled in size.

I'm sure AI is partly to blame here but I think a lot of it is over hiring and firms just getting bogged down in bureaucracy and trying to clear things out.

0 - https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/
by anonMcKinsey | 2026-03-11 23:05:02+00:00
Not really when you normalize by hours you are expected to work. You're also surrounded by spineless sycophantic keeners without an original thought in their heads who would throw you off the building for a good review.

It reminds me of Lewis' "National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments"

The health care is amazing, though. $30/mo for a family $900 deductible? Something like that. If you have a sick family member it's a no brainer.
by bonoboTP | 2026-03-11 23:05:04+00:00
> That's why replication has to be required and standard.

"has to be required"... This is a passive construct. Who will do the requiring and what precisely will motivate them to such a change and what will get them the buy-in from the other players in this whole ecosystem, especially the ones who provide the money? What if it turns out that those people who do the funding actually in the deepest of their deepest are fine with "groundbreaking" research results that simply sound like being "groundbreaking" research results to such an extent that their prestige and social status rises enough and are seen as someone who funds such research, instead of truly caring about the actual contents of said research? There is much more demand (backed with money) for (plausibly-claimable) innovation and breakthroughs than supply of real novel thought. It's a bit like the anecdote that all the True Cross relics across Catholic churches weigh more than the cross Jesus carried (not really true as a fact though). As long as there is such strong demand, the system will adapt to allow for the supply finding its way.
by mjfisher | 2026-03-11 23:05:06+00:00
Can anyone recommend good alternatives to Jira? Things that keep me defaulting to it:

- Scales well from simple configuration and workflows to more complex multiboard views/custom fields/layouts per issue type etc

- Good OOTB integration with common CI/CD - see PRs, deploys etc from each ticket

- Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence

- JQL for being able to do custom reporting tooling (get me all issues transitioned to X status in this time period)

Things that frustrate me:

- Complexity/UI around configuration

- Very poor kanban metrics reporting
by fragmede | 2026-03-11 23:05:37+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

ICE asking for a list of social media profiles of its detractors doesn't sound like "without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that." to me. Through data mining and 3rd parties, the local PD has a dossier on me based on what I write here that would come up if I did something to get their attention. That has a chilling effect on what say on here in public.
by 317070 | 2026-03-11 23:05:51+00:00
> We, westerner, want our values to prevail.

This comes to the core of the issue, and is where I think the disagreement comes from. Many Westerners in fact do not want "Western" values to prevail.

Why? For me those values have led to outcomes so horrendously antithetical to _my_ values, that I would not wish them for the rest of the world. Even worse, this Western centrism has led to jingoist conclusions for at least 400 years.
by _se | 2026-03-11 23:05:59+00:00
Just like most nonfiction books, this post is a lot longer than it has to be. I think the core idea here is good, but it's pretty ironic that I wanted to stop halfway through.

When writing is good, succinct, and to the point, people will finish reading if they're interested in the material. If it's too long, fluffy, repetitive, annoying... people won't. I don't think it's a huge surprise.
by einpoklum | 2026-03-11 23:06:07+00:00
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.

Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.

> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources

Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.
by alexpotato | 2026-03-11 23:06:46+00:00
To play devil's advocate:

Some people argue that the difficulty of passing laws in the United States is "a feature not a bug" b/c it prevents the US from creating laws too quickly.

You could argue the House of Lords did the same: by vetoing bills, it acted as a "speed bump" to laws that might cause too much change too quickly.
by julius_eth_dev | 2026-03-11 23:07:04+00:00
The asymmetry here is what gets me: candidates are expected to be authentic and vulnerable during interviews, while the company deploys an AI to mask their own evaluation process behind a synthetic persona. If I'm being assessed on "culture fit," I'd argue I have a right to know whether I'm talking to someone who actually works there. The more interesting question for hiring managers is whether AI-screened candidates who make it through are actually better hires, or if they're just better at performing for AI — which might be a completely different skill set than the job requires.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-03-11 23:07:14+00:00
So the administration lied and Iran‘s nuclear capabilities weren’t “completely obliterated” back in June, and saying otherwise isn’t “fake news”?

It can’t be both ways. Either way the administration is lying, so I just don’t trust any of the reasons given for the current conflict.

The sad part is this is exactly what Trump and his administration, as well as the larger Republican Party, have wanted for years. My inherent distrust of every government action until I see overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
by pdonis | 2026-03-11 23:07:50+00:00
Fine. And whatever device you're using to post here just happened to emerge spontaneously from the dirt, instead of being built by the efforts of thousands of people spread all over the world as part of a modern technological society.

Also: where do you get your food? Do you grow it? Or hunt for it in a natural wilderness, untouched by technology, using tools you made yourself, without the benefit of modern technology?

Where do you get your clothes? Do you make them yourself? Out of natural materials that would be there if our modern, technological society did not exist?

I'm going to make a wild guess that the answers to those questions are "no"--that you are relying on sources of food and clothes that also require a modern technological society. Not to mention transportation and whatever else you need to do the things that occupy your day.

So no, you are not living a hunter-gatherer subsistence life. You are taking advantage of the fact that it is possible in a modern technological society to be a homeless bum living under a bridge, without having to do all the things that actual hunter-gatherers living a subsistence life have had to do all through human history to survive.
by bartread | 2026-03-11 23:07:59+00:00
> Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.

Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place.

I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.
by skissane | 2026-03-11 23:08:01+00:00
> The australian senate, before 2015 or so, used to contain enough fun cooks that legislation had to get broad support to make it through. It was a pretty decent check against the beige dictatorship. But since they updated the voting rules to prevent the cool minor parties from holding the balance, its just been a massive rubber stamp

Current numbers in Australian Senate: Government 29, Opposition 27, Crossbench 20, 39 needed for majority. So if the opposition opposes a government bill, the government needs 10 crossbench senators to vote for it - if the Greens support it, that’s enough; if they oppose it, the government can still pass the bill if they get the votes of the 10 non-Green crossbench senators (4 One Nation; 3 independents; 3 single senator minor parties)

I can’t see how this is by any reasonable definition a “rubber stamp”
by ASalazarMX | 2026-03-11 23:08:26+00:00
I've done research using AI, it does work better than a search engine (when it doesn't hallucinate); but I find copy-pasting verbatim distasteful, and disrespectful of the time of others.

What I do is copy the URLs for reference, and summarize the issue myself in as few sentences as possible. Anyone who wants to learn more can follow the reference.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-03-11 23:09:03+00:00
> You're right, but neglect to mention that infrastructure necessary to enrich uranium is not something so easily squirrled away and hidden while also dealing with radioactive isotopes.

But Iran did violate the agreement. The agreement was not just between the US and Iran, it had other parties as well. Yet, when US withdrew, Iran immediately violated it. Why? If they had no goal to pursue military-grade enrichment, why violate the agreement?

Biden's admin did not resume the agreement as well due to those violations by Iran.

I see this agreement as failure for the reason that it did not prevent in a structural way Iran from acquiring enriched material, with or without violations.

> Iran's existance is perpetually an existential threat when the only alternative to diplomacy is its total destruction at the expense of American and Iranian lives.

I do not believe that Iran is interested in diplomacy at all. They were never interested in diplomacy. Why did they fund all these groups around the Middle East if IR is so peaceful?
by collabs | 2026-03-11 23:09:08+00:00
I feel like I don't have the context for this conversation. If slop is obvious as slop, I feel like we should block it.

If you look at the comment it says what the code following the comment does. It doesn't matter whether it is a human or a machine that wrote it. It is useless. It is actually worse than useless because if someone needs to change the code, now they need to change two things. So in that sense, you just made twice the work for anyone who touches the code after you and for what benefit?
by brucehoult | 2026-03-11 23:10:14+00:00
> VisionFive 2

It's a good solid reliable board, but over three years old at this point (in a fast-moving industry) and the maximum 8 GB RAM is quite challenging for some builds.

Binutils is fine, but on recent versions of gcc it wants to link four binaries at the same time, with each link using 4 GB RAM. I've found this fails on my 16 GB P550 Megrez with swap disabled, but works quickly and uses maybe 50 or 100 MB of swap if I enable it.

On the VisionFive 2 you'd need to use `-j1` (or `-j2` with swap enabled) which will nearly double or quadruple the build time.

Or use a better linker than `ld`.

At least the LLVM build system lets you set the number of parallel link jobs separately to the number of C/C++ jobs.